Garmin Connect Badges: We list the toughest and how to earn them
Garmin Connect Badges are a fun way of keeping track of your big health and fitness accomplishments. Whether that’s completing your first 5K or consistently hitting your step goal over a month, there’s likely to be a hexagon-shaped virtual badge waiting for you on Garmin’s app.
If it sounds a lot like Fitbit badges, that’s because it works in a similar way.
If you have a Garmin fitness tracker or sporty watch and you use Garmin’s Connect app (web or smartphone), then you should be able to get in on the badge action.
Essential reading: Buying the best Garmin watch for you
If you want to know where you can find those Garmin badges, or you’re eager to go after the most difficult badges available, we’ve covered it all below. Got any questions? Let us know in the comments section.
How to earn Garmin badges
If you want to pick up a badge, there’s a number of ways you can do that. For starters, you don’t have to be super sporty if that’s something you’re worried about. Garmin currently offers badges for running, cycling, steps, activity, health and simply using certain Garmin Connect features.
Most of these badges can be earned any time and there are badges that are repeatable too. So if you nabbed the marathon one, doing another 26.2 miler should get you some more points (more on that in a moment). Garmin has also introduced badges that can only be earned at a limited time, like logging an activity on New Year’s Eve.
With these badges you can earn points that help you level up in Garmin Connect. What do those points earn you? Ultimate bragging rights with your fellow Garmin users, but they also should serve to give you another motivational push to stay active and healthy.
Number of Garmin badges to unlock
So how many badges are there? Garmin hasn’t officially stated this but on our count it’s around the 80 mark. Garmin has been adding new badges to the list too, so don’t be surprised to see that number grow in the future.
How to find Garmin badges
As mentioned, there are two ways to view Garmin Connect Badges. That’s either in the smartphone version of the app or the web app. Unfortunately, you can’t view these badges on any Garmin wearables themselves, but maybe that’ll change in the future.
If you use the Garmin Connect smartphone app, the quickest way to find them is to do the following:
1. Open the Garmin Connect app on your phone and tap My Day (bottom left hand of screen)
2. Once in the My Day screen, look for your avatar at the top of the screen (it might be an icon with three rings if you haven’t added a picture) and tap to open up your profile.
3. Under Activity you’ll be to tap on All Badges to get to the list.
For Garmin Connect web users, here’s what you need to do to get to those badges:
1. Go to connect.garmin.com and sign in with your login details.
2. In the menu bar on the left hand side of the screen, you’ll see a tab for Badges. Click it to see a list of your badges earned and the ones that are still available, which we will get into next.
Garmin Badges earned
This one is pretty self explanatory. The badges that are illuminated in Connect are the ones you’ve managed to unlock. If you click on these badges you can reveal more details about what you did to get the badge, when it happened and related badges you may also be interested in. You can see whether your Garmin connections have unlocked the badge too.
Garmin Badges available
If you want to know what badges are still up for grabs, look for the black and white ones. Each badge will tell you what you need to do to unlock them, how long you have to earn them and you can even see if any of your connections have earned the badge already.
Read this: Understanding your running watch stats
Toughest Garmin badges to earn
We know there are competitive people out there that are only interested in getting hold of the most difficult badges. The best way to find out what these are is to use the badge search filter.
In the Garmin Connect phone app, you need to look for the icon in the top right hand corner of your profile page. On the web app, those filters are just above the list of badges.
Here you can filter by badge type (activities, running, cycling, challenges, steps, Garmin Connect features and health). You can also filter by badge points. It’s 1 point for an easy badge and 8 points for the hardest. Here’s a list of some of the 8 pointers:
- Hit your daily step goals 60 days in a row
- Ride 100 miles in a single activity
- Run 100km in a single activity
- Run 50 miles in a single activity
- Run 100 miles in a single activity
- Run a marathon in a single activity
- Log 300 intensity minutes in a single activity
- Run 50km in a single activity
The Connections Leaderboard
We’ve spoken about how these badges will earn you points and these ultimately contribute towards a score that is displayed in your Connections Leaderboard. This leaderboard includes all Garmin users that you are friends with. If you click on their names, you’ll be able to view the badges they’ve earned and find out which ones you need to get to catch up.
