Michael is a keen swimmer, a runner with a number of marathons under his belt, and is also the co-founder of YouTube channel The Run Testers. Garmin Pay is also on board, but the supported banks across the UK, US and Australia certainly varies.

On the sensor front, you’re getting built-in GPS and support for Galileo and Beidou satellite systems to give you better mapping coverage around the world. That should be a cause for celebration, but the latter remains largely useless thanks to the lack of UK banks signed up to the service; at present, Santander is the only high street bank it’ll work with. For the money, the Venu Sq gives you all the key tools to make it a solid, affordable option to track runs, rides and offer a good fitness tracking experience too. Garmin does a pretty good job of getting the best of its smartwatch features into its smaller Venu watch.

That not only saves precious battery but also means there isn’t any unwanted light being emitted when you’re trying to sleep. Both the Garmin Venu and Garmin Venu 2 have AMOLED displays, which are bright and vivid in all lighting conditions, but only the Venu 2 has an always-on function that makes it easier to view stats at a glance (at the expense of a little battery life).

The watch offers guided animated workouts for strength, yoga and Pilates workouts, which is great for beginners who don’t want to fork out on expensive personal trainers or classes. The Venu has GPS and optical heart-rate monitoring built-in, too, and if you’re a fitness newbie, you’ll benefit from its animated guided workouts and Garmin Coach.An attractive feature is that it also supports the ability to pair up additional sensors including external chest strap monitors if you’re not satisfied with the heart rate accuracy. Just select the option on the watch screen, then hold still for two minutes and the device will capture stats including your average heart rate, stress level, and respiration rate. The different bezel colours are attractive, with silver, gold, black and rose gold models all available, but the watch itself is rather chunky at 12. Despite moving away from the very practical transflective displays of the most Garmin watches, though, I found the Venu’s screen easy to read in all conditions, which isn’t always the case with this type of smartwatch display. My only gripe with Body Battery is that its figures appear easily skewed by inaccuracies in Garmin’s sleep tracking.