Garmin Adds Training Readiness & Morning Report to Instinct 2 in New Beta!

See, Garmin does listen when enough people get upset about something.

Back a few months ago Garmin released the Instinct 2X, which is essentially a bigger Instinct 2 device with a flashlight and multiband GNSS. But on the software side, most notably, it included not only the Morning Report feature, but also Training Readiness. The morning report had been beta tested on the regular Instinct 2 units last December, but was pulled due to issues with it. Training Readiness had not previously been on the Instinct lineup, but was reserved for higher-end units.

However, with the Instinct 2X releasing at the same price-point as the regular Instinct 2 units, it became a weird disparity to have one unit with Training Readiness, and one without. I made a note of that in my review, and many others agreed.

Well, it looks like Garmin heard your whimpering, and has added Training Readiness as well as Morning Report to the latest public beta builds. In fact, not only that, but you also get the Tides app, the new Workouts app, and a new Gaming activity profile. Plus a handful of other fixes. Here’s what’s in version 13.10 (public beta) for both the Instinct 2 and Instinct 2S:

Added Morning Report.
Added Training Readiness support.
Added Gaming activity.
Added Tides Glance.
Added Workouts app.
Fixed saved location names not displaying on map.
Improved compass smoothness on the compass page.
Fixed recovery time discrepancy between glance and widget.
Fixed CIQ watch face crash when using Sleep Mode hot key.

Note that because the Instinct series doesn’t have WiFi, these presently require side-load during the beta process. That means that you’ll need to go to the beta release page, and then manually download it to your watch with a physical cable. Such a cable is like a string that connects your computer to the watch. What’s a computer? It’s like a really big phone.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll get prompted to install it:

Then, you’ll want to add the Training Readiness widget to your widget roll by tweaking the list of widgets, as it won’t show up automagically. From there, you can see Training Readiness:

Now keep in mind that Training Readiness has a bunch of components that require multiple days to instantiate. Generally speaking it’s been 2-3 days of data before it starts showing some pieces, if you were a brand-new customer (and ideally 19 full days for HRV status, or rather, full nights). However, in this case it’ll pull from Unified Training Status and my other devices. So, magic:

Meanwhile, for Morning Report, I could wait till tomorrow, but we already know what that looks like from the beta last winter. However, remember that you can tweak which pages show up within the settings if you want:

Next is the new Workouts app. I showed this just two days ago when it launched on the Forerunner 255/955, and soon the Fenix 7/Epix/265/965. Basically, this is a nice consolidated place to quickly look at all your structured workouts – both planned from training plans or daily suggested workouts, and previously saved ones.

Beyond that, they added the Tides app. This lets you see the tidal information at your current location or saved locations, as well as specifying a GPS coordinate. Note that you do have to have Garmin Connect Mobile access to get the data.

Lastly, Garmin added the Gaming sport profile. This appears to be a resurgence of the Garmin Instinct Esports edition functionality from a few years back, which connects to their desktop software to allow for live data overlays of various metrics like heart rate or stress.

With that, that’s everything you need to know about the update. It’s cool to see Garmin clearly listening to the feedback they got after the Instinct 2X release, and now rolling it out across the entire series. Even more notable since I just noticed before I hit publish that the Instinct 2 device is now down to $299 right now on sale. I certainly wouldn’t be expecting a new variant immediately or anything, so it’s good to see them adding major features to it.

With that – thanks for reading!