Garmin Cirqa Smart Band Review: Get Garmin’s Best Health Features Without Wearing a Watch

The Garmin Cirqa Smart Band is the screenless fitness tracker I’ve been most looking forward to. As a loyal Forerunner user, I’ve never enjoyed having to navigate a separate tech ecosystem from Garmin Connect whenever I’ve wanted to track my sleep, steps and workouts without wearing a watch. I suspect that’s a frustration shared by plenty of Garmin owners.

So what exactly is the Cirqa Smart Band? Essentially, it’s a Garmin watch without the display and minus a few key features, such as built-in GPS and smartphone notifications. It automatically detects and tracks your workouts, while also passively monitoring metrics like your sleep, stress and heart rate in the background, giving you a daily breakdown of your fitness and recovery.

After a month of wearing the Garmin Cirqa Smart Band, here are the things I think it does brilliantly, the areas I’m still undecided about, and who I think this wearable is ultimately for.

The Cirqa Band follows the familiar design language of other screenless fitness trackers. A compact sensor unit attaches to a woven wristband, which is available in S-M and M-L sizes across seven colourways. (I tested the S-M, but I’d probably size up when I eventually buy a second band.) Garmin also offers a dedicated bicep band accessory, which is a worthwhile addition for cyclists, as wearing the sensor on your upper arm generally provides more accurate heart rate readings than wearing it on your wrist – although it’ll set you back another £44.99.

The sensor unit is slightly longer and bulkier than Whoop’s, and noticeably larger than the Google Fitbit Air’s, which remains the slimmest tracker in this category. Despite that extra size, it doesn’t feel or look any larger than Whoop once it’s on your wrist. I happily wore it all day and overnight throughout the testing period without it ever feeling oversized or uncomfortable.

A textured button on the side of the sensor starts and stops workouts, and controls the built-in alarm

The Velcro fastening is more intuitive and far less fiddly than the clasp mechanism used by Whoop. I also found the nylon knit material comfortable both during workouts and everyday wear, although I’d like to see a future version with a fabric that doesn’t retain quite so much moisture – whether that’s from swimming or sweat.

Battery life is rated at up to 10 days, and the Cirqa uses the same charging cable as most Garmin watches, meaning you can charge multiple Garmin devices with a single cable. It’s also worth manually enabling skin temperature tracking in the settings – particularly for overnight wear – although doing so does have a small impact on battery life.

Like I said, the Cirqa Band automatically detects and tracks your workouts. Personally, I don’t tend to rely on automatic workout detection on any wearable (other than for walks), simply because I don’t want to risk finishing a session only to discover it never recorded – nobody enjoys a suspiciously flat Strava graph.

I trusted the Cirqa during testing on a handful of occasions and the results were a little mixed. It occasionally failed to detect the start of my cycle commute home, so for now it’s not a feature I’d rely on every time.

The good news is that automatic detection isn’t your only option. Cirqa has a physical button built into the sensor – a genuinely useful feature among screenless fitness trackers – which you tap to start and stop workouts manually. That’s particularly handy for strength training and yoga, where you don’t always get an immediate spike in heart rate or much wrist movement, making automatic detection more likely to miss the session.

The third option is to start a workout through the Garmin Connect app, where you can choose from more than 80 activity profiles. Doing so also gives you a live – albeit very basic – workout screen, displaying a timer and heart rate for indoor sessions, or pace and distance for outdoor activities.

The Cirqa Smart Band is available in S-M and M-L sizes in four colourways, as well as a black armband option

Unlike Garmin’s watches, the Cirqa Band doesn’t have built-in GPS. Instead, outdoor activities piggyback off your phone’s GPS through the Garmin Connect app. You sacrifice a little accuracy compared with a GPS-enabled watch, but unless you’re obsessed with perfectly mapped routes, it’s unlikely to be a deal-breaker.

To make sure GPS tracking works properly, you’ll need to enable location permissions for the Garmin Connect app in your phone’s settings. You’ll also need to head into Activity Options within the Cirqa settings and enable Phone GPS for each activity type you want to record outdoors.

The success of any screenless fitness tracker ultimately comes down to its app, and in Cirqa’s case it has Garmin Connect in its corner. It captures all the core health and fitness metrics you’d expect, including your step count, sleep quality, calories burned and stress levels throughout the day.

I’ve been using Garmin Connect for more than six years, and one of the things I like most is that it doesn’t bombard you with endless, unexplained data. Instead, everything is presented as simple, easy-to-understand scores, with the option to dig deeper if you want more detail.

The customisable Essentials tab shows an at-a-glance view of four key health metrics

At the top of the homepage sits the new Essentials tab, which you can customise to display the metrics that matter most to you. Mine includes Sleep, Training Readiness and Body Battery, which fluctuates throughout the day depending on your stress levels, activity and recovery. Beneath that you’ll find your workout diary, followed by the In Focus and At a Glance sections, which break each score down in more detail.

Health Status is one of my favourite Garmin features, and one of the Cirqa Band’s biggest selling points. Similar to Whoop’s Health Monitor, it measures five overnight health metrics – heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, skin temperature and blood oxygen saturation (which you’ll need to enable manually) – before comparing them against your personal baseline. If anything falls outside your normal range, it’ll flag it.

The Cirqa Smart Band uses Garmin’s Gen4 optical heart rate sensor, which has since been superseded by the Gen5 sensor found in many of the brand’s premium watches. On paper it’s slightly less accurate, but in day-to-day use I suspect very few Cirqa users will notice the difference. Unlike many other devices that use the Gen4 sensor, however, the Cirqa also includes skin temperature tracking, making its sleep tracking package even more comprehensive.

The Garmin Cirqa Smart Band is priced at £179.99

For me, one of the biggest selling points of the Cirqa Band is that it brings you into Garmin’s ecosystem. If it’s your first wearable – or even if you already own another brand of sports watch – it gives you the freedom to expand into Garmin’s wider range of products over time, from cycling computers and smart scales to turbo trainers and power pedals.

More importantly, it leverages the Garmin Connect platform and the training metrics Garmin has spent years refining. It’s remarkable how similar the experience feels to using one of Garmin’s flagship watches, giving you access to virtually the same sleep, recovery, stress and heart rate insights.

In terms of value, there’s a fair argument that Garmin’s entry-level GPS watches – such as the Vivoactive 5 (£209.99) and the new Forerunner 70 (£219.99) – offer more functionality for only a little extra money.

But if you’re specifically looking for a screenless wearable because you value simplicity, comfort and fewer distractions, and you don’t want to commit to Whoop’s annual subscription model, then I think the Garmin Cirqa Smart Band is currently the best option available.

Luke Chamberlain is the ecommerce editor for Men’s Health UK where he compiles expert-led buying guides and in-depth product reviews across gym wear, fitness tech, supplements, and grooming. Responsible for testing everything from the latest gym headphones to the best beard trimmers, Luke also enlists the help of leading health and wellness experts to help readers make informed choices when shopping online. He also covers major sales events for Men’s Health, including Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day, scouting and verifying hundreds of discounts in order to recommend only the most genuine deals on offer. A magazine journalism graduate from the University of Sheffield in 2018, Luke has also worked as assistant editor for Outdoor Swimmer magazine and as an ecommerce writer for The Recommended. When he’s not testing the latest health and fitness products, he’s busy plotting routes for his next trail run or gravel ride out of London. Follow Luke on Instagram at @lukeochamb