[Review] Samsung Galaxy Watch5 Pro fitness & sports tracking

Let me start by saying I’m not a sporty person. At all.

However, in order to properly test the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro’s features (which I’ve already explored quite a bit previously), I decided it was necessary for me to get active for once.

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So, I brought the watch with me on our company cruise trip, Royal Caribbean’s Spectrum of the Seas (not sponsored), and pushed myself to join various physical activities. Here’s what happened.

Kicking it off

I started off my day strong by attending a morning exercise session, which turned out to be a Zumba-esque dance class.

Led by our handsome Brazilian dance instructor, Leandro, I learnt a 32-count phrase of choreography and ended up sweating a lot more than I anticipated.

For the first 24 minutes, the watch automatically tracked my activity as walking. In the last 12 minutes, it started tracking it as “Other workout”.

If you’d like, though, you can actually manually track dancing on the watch.

While the activity tracking on the watch is better than its predecessor, with the ability to automatically detect popular activities like cycling, running, and outdoor walking, it wasn’t able to recognise my sick moves.

The cruise was huge (the biggest one in Asia, in fact), so much so that I easily walked over 10K steps just getting around.

Diving in

My first immersion into water on the cruise was actually while trying out the FlowRider—a stationery surfing machine. However, the manmade waves seemed a bit too strong, so I took the watch off.

This proved to be a good idea, because the water tasted a little salty (mind you, I wasn’t actively drinking it, it just happened to splash into my mouth). I say it was a good idea, because the water resistance ratings are typically applicable to freshwater only, not salt water.

With that said, the watch does come with a Scuba Diving workout. Weirdly, this option doesn’t turn on the water lock automatically.

After the FlowRider experience, though, I took the watch to the outdoor pool for a dip. The pools on the cruise ended up being deeper than I anticipated. It felt more like 5’4’’, even though the signage said 5’1’’. Regardless, the watch comes with 50 meters of water resistance, so I wasn’t worried.

Before jumping into the pool, I made sure to turn on the water mode lock. What this does is deactivate your touchscreen, wake-up gestures, and always-on display.

The watch almost immediately started recognising that I was swimming. It ended up tracking 49 minutes of swimming, which sounds about right.

Other than tracking the distance swam and my heart rate, I was surprised to find that the watch also tracked things such as the types of swimming I did. It calculated a minute of backstroke, six minutes of breaststroke, and the rest was mixed.

There was also a number called “SWOLF”, which I didn’t even know about until looking at my stats. Coming from the words swimming and golf, SWOLF is a score that measures swimming efficiency.

A lower score is better, so I’m assuming my score of 385 for breaststroke is a horrendous one. (For the record, I wasn’t trying to swim seriously).

After getting out of the water, I turned off the water lock. Doing so makes the watch emit a beeping sound. The vibration from it is supposed to clear the watch of water.

Ending the day

After a day of more outdoor activity than I’ve done in… a long time, I was ready to knock out. With how tired I felt, I was expecting a good sleep score, but it only came out to be 69—below average for my age group.

However, I did get a healthy 21% of deep sleep (one hour and 15 minutes), so I think that counts as a win.

Apparently, the watch needs one more day of sleep tracking before it can start coaching me on my sleep habits. Much like my exercising, one day just won’t cut it when it comes to health.

Overall, I really enjoyed wearing the watch, save for some minor issues such as the constant accidental touches that registered whenever I angled my wrist weirdly.

Regardless, having the watch on my wrist did make me feel more motivated to get active. The detailed records of the physical activities were a tangible representation of my efforts, and I liked that.

Of course, this sense of motivation might be true for any sports smartwatch, but I liked how the Watch 5 Pro also has a classy and sleek aesthetic that makes it appropriate to wear to a fancy dinner afterward too.

Might I say, I had more fun on the cruise than I would’ve without the Galaxy Watch5 Pro on my wrist.