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The Garmin Cirqa is the company’s first screen-free smart band, built to track fitness and wellness features around the clock, without needing a subscription. For existing Garmin fans who want 24/7 data without wearing a bulky sports watch to bed, this $199 smart band is a welcome addition. If you just unboxed one, here’s how to get it set up right and start making the most of it.
Assign the Cirqa as your primary wearable
If you already own a Garmin watch like a Fenix or Forerunner, you can still keep your watch as your “Primary Training Device.” But for round-the-clock daily health metrics, assign the Cirqa your “Primary Wearable.” If you missed this during your initial set-up, here’s how to manage your devices in the Garmin Connect app:
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Select More (bottom right).
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Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Settings.
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Under Device Priority, select the Cirqa for Primary Wearable, and a different watch for Primary Training Device.
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Sync your devices.
This setup makes sure your Cirqa’s continuous collection of recovery metrics, step counts, and sleep data flow into your profile, while preventing the smart band from conflicting with your primary sports watch during hard workouts.
Make sure you get the right fit on your Cirqa wristband
The Cirqa’s fabric wristband comes in two sizes. The small/medium fits wrist circumferences of about 120–200 mm, while the large/extra-large fits roughly 145–240 mm. A snug-but-comfortable fit matters for accurate optical heart rate readings, so take a minute to adjust the strap before you start relying on the numbers.
Garmin sells an upper-arm band separately for $49.99, so if you’d rather track from your bicep than your wrist, that’s an option worth exploring—especially if you do activities where a wrist-worn band gets in the way. Plus, upper arm placement might improve your heart rate accuracy overall, since it gives the sensor better contact with a meatier part of the body with less wrist-movement noise.
Use the Cirqa to check your baseline health metrics
The Connect app’s insights can seem a bit scattered and overwhelming at first, so don’t feel like you need to absorb everything on day one. The Cirqa can track training readiness, HRV status, VO2 max, heart rate, Pulse Ox, stress, sleep tracking, and more. Within sleep tracking, you can track sleep stages (although those are dubious), naps, and personalized coaching layered on top of your basic sleep score.
Your watch comes preloaded with glances, but you can customize these based on your goals. For instance, I find Garmin’s Body Battery to be an overly simplified and ultimately unhelpful score. Since I’m training for a marathon, I replaced that glance with my Running Economy score, so I can readily track how I’m improving as I increase my running volume and intensity.
If it’s relevant to you, this is also the moment to set up women’s health tracking. The Cirqa estimates period predictions and past ovulation windows using skin temperature data gathered while you sleep, and it can sync that data to the Natural Cycles birth control app (which requires its own separate subscription).
Something to keep in mind: Some of the richer insights (like training readiness trends or sleep coaching) take several days or weeks of data to become meaningful. Give it a week or two of normal wear before you judge what it’s telling you.
Change your default activity assigned to the button
Compared to other smart bands, the Cirqa’s on-device button really sets it apart. The Cirqa can track more than 80 activities—running, yoga, cycling and more—either by pressing the button or through the Garmin Connect app. It allegedly detects workouts automatically, but I’ve found that to be pretty unreliable.
To make the most of this feature, you want to assign which activity type you want to start and stop with a quick press of the button. Head to your Garmin Connect app and select the Cirqa in the top right corner. Then select Activity Options > Edit (in the top right corner) > Select your favorite activity. Now, when you press the button on your Cirqa, it’ll start your favorite activity type.
And if you’re heading outside, remember the band pairs with your phone’s GPS for accurate location tracking during outdoor activities, since the Cirqa itself (like most smart bands) has no onboard GPS receiver—so bring your phone along if logging your route matters to you.
Explore different lifestyle notifications on your Cirqa
Beyond the headline fitness and sleep features, the Cirqa packs in a handful of lifestyle tools worth checking out. The app includes a Jet Lag Adviser, lifestyle logging and journaling, hydration and calorie tracking, daily step counts, and intensity minutes. There’s also a wheelchair mode for wrist-based push tracking, if that fits your activity style.
In general, it’s worth taking the time to really familiarize yourself with the Garmin Connect app. Remember, the Cirqa has no screen, so for every insight you want to see, you’ll need to know where to find it in the app. And since we’re in the early days of this smart band’s launch, the app is where you’ll want to regularly check for firmware updates.
