Garmin Connect 2025 Report: Global Training Up 8%, Racket Sports Surge 67%

Garmin just dropped its 2025 Connect Data Report, and the headline number is an 8% rise in logged activities across its entire user base. That's hundreds of millions of sessions tracked via Forerunner, Fenix, Epix, and Venu devices worldwide, making this one of the most statistically significant training datasets in sport.

The sharpest growth category is racket sports, up 67% year over year. Pickleball is the obvious driver in North America, but padel is pulling serious numbers in Europe and Latin America. Garmin added dedicated activity profiles for both sports in recent firmware updates, which almost certainly inflated tracked sessions compared to previous years when users were logging them as generic cardio.

Strength training continues its upward trend inside the Garmin ecosystem, consistent with what Whoop and Apple Watch are also reporting in their own annual reviews. Garmin's strength tracking still lags Whoop on recovery metrics and Apple Watch on rep counting accuracy, but the sheer volume of users logging resistance work signals a clear shift away from pure cardio dominance in endurance communities.

The national leaderboard standout is Hong Kong, ranking first globally in average daily steps. That kind of population-level data is genuinely useful context for athletes calibrating their own NEAT targets, especially those using daily step count as a recovery and load management tool alongside HRV scores.

Solid data. Worth benchmarking your own Garmin Connect stats against these numbers to see where you sit relative to the global training population.