Garmin Forerunner 945 gets a bunch of Fenix 7 features

A Beta software update has just landed for the Garmin Forerunner 945 which add a bunch of useful features. A public release should follow in a couple of weeks time.

We wrote a couple of days ago about a software update which adds a bunch of Fenix 7 features to the Fenix 6 watch. Now these are also comming to owners of the Forerunner 945.

Essential reading: Best fitness trackers and health gadgets

To emphasise, the software version dubbed 9.56 is still in Beta form. Anyone can install it on their watch with the knowledge that this is not a final public release so may contain some bugs. If you’d like to take the risk, we’ve done a separate article detailing how to install Garmin Beta software.

What’s new?

The update brings a bunch of new features. It doesn’t include Connect IQ system 5 support which came as part of the recent Fenix 6 update. But that’s because that functionality arrived to the Forerunner 945 as part of an earlier update.

Version 9.56 adds enhanced strength functionality. Garmin says that this includes “an improved workout preview with a map of muscles that will be used, improved UI in free mode and workouts, and improvements to the rep and weight editing experience.”

Another improvement comes in the form of enhanced sleep detection and sleep stage information. Garmin is not that great when it comes to capturing acurately sleep information so these types of enhancements are always welcome.

The update also brings improvements to the Run/Idle detection algorithm. So your watch should be better at figuring out when you have stopped running – useful when forced to stop during your run to cross the road.

Beyond that Garmin has added a Resting Heartrate True-up feature. This simply means that your resting heart rate value will be synced to all devices tied to your Garmin account.

The other updates as part of version 9.56 are as follows:

• Added new alert to display after this SW update to inform user that wifi networks configured to WEP security are no longer supported.
• Updates for Shimano Di2 support
• Other minor improvements and bug fixes.

You can view the full change-log and down the software on this link. The other option is to wait 2-3 weeks until the update becomes available as a regular release.

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