Suunto 9 Peak Review: A balanced approach to fitness tracking

Most fitness trackers focus on output - your steps, calories burned, and minutes exerted, but the Suunto 9 Peak isn’t most fitness trackers.

The smartwatch takes a refreshingly balanced approach to exercise, weighing your rest and recovery alongside physical activity to give you a better idea of how your body is working holistically. As with exercise itself, the Suunto demands consistency before you see tangible results. You’ll need to really commit to the grind. This isn’t a fitness tracker for fad diets, it’s a lifestyle.

Rest day (and night)

Sleep and rest are imperative for our bodies to function properly, but a large range of fitness trackers don’t take recovery into account. Your Apple and Samsung watches, among others, will let you set repetitive exertion goals like 10,000 steps, or 600 active calories per day, yet there is almost no focus on letting the body rest and recover. Yes, plenty of them track sleep, but that tracking doesn't lead to any guided insight to help with your training.

Of the trackers I've reviewed, I’m yet to come across one that lets you track a rest day, or set varied goals depending on the day of the week. If you have a day off then you lose your streak and you’re back to square one. It’s a very “No excuses!” kind of mentality, that I for one do not gel with.

Suunto, and in particular the Suunto 9 Peak take a more holistic approach to moving your body, measuring your fitness, fatigue and form to help you make better training decisions based on the day. It does still let you set steps, calories, and training goals, and track them through the app but the main focus across all metrics is qualitative rather than quantitative.

Pretty much since I strapped the 9 Peak to my wrist, I’ve been in Productive Training - which for me is great because my current goal is to be less unfit before I turn 30. The three other training zones that Suunto recognises are; Losing fitness or recovering, Keeping fit, or Going too hard. Alongside each of these training zones are notes that also help you make more balanced choices about training. Right now I’m being told that;

“Your training volume or intensity has been higher than previous week. Keep up the good work! Remember to recover after heavy training days.”

Validating and helpful.

But I have also had times where the app warned me that I had been pushing myself more than expected, for too long, and that I may be at greater risk of injury or illness. It was wild to see a fitness tracker telling me to calm down, when my past experience has been push notifications reminding me to move my lazy ass every hour, even if I had already accomplished all my goals for the day.

Every day Suunto tracks exercise duration and intensity, and calculates whether this day made you more fit, less fit, or if you stayed at the same level. Rest and recovery are tracked the same way. The harder you exercise, the higher the Fitness line climbs on the line graph, and if you sleep well and rest adequately, your Fatigue line will stay under control. Looking at how your fitness and fatigue level out can help you make informed decisions about how much energy you might be capable of exerting at the gym on any given day.

Pictured: My Fatigue line, clearly not under control, mostly because I don’t like sleeping in smartwatches. Sleep is the time we recover the most, so if you’re not willing to fully commit to wearing your Suunto 9 Peak to bed then your data will always be skewed. The nights that I actually managed to get through the night with the watch strapped to my wrist, I saw massive fatigue improvements, but because I sleep better sans-watch I will always be trying to even out my sleep deficit. I would love to see future Suuntos use previous sleep data to at least estimate recovery. Of course, it isn’t a perfect solution, but in order to reap all the benefits from the Suunto right now then you have to be perfectly content to have the watch on 24/7.

Endurance

Although I am a fan of the Suunto 9 Peak training philosophy, the actual tech of the watch is a bit of a let down. You’re looking at a recommended retail price of $1,200, which is on the upper premium end for smartwatches and fitness trackers. Unfortunately, the performance of the watch itself does not live up to this price tag.

The screen has a low resolution and is missing some of the flare you’ll get from other manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, and Huawei. The graphics are basic and the animations are a bit slow. It is all a bit lacklustre for a watch that will set you back over $1,000. 

There are also some issues with touch screen sensitivity. I always encounter quite a substantial delay while flicking through the screens, and it can take a few swipes for the action to actually register. Suunto does counter this by allowing navigation through the three buttons on the side instead, which I found myself defaulting to more often than not. It is a fix, but I wish the problem itself didn’t exist.

Suunto almost makes up for these indiscretions with the sheer power of the battery. I found that I could go between four and five days before needing to pop the 9 Peak on charge. Considering that you’ll need to commit to having the watch on you almost 24/7 in order to get the best tracking, the huge battery life makes it significantly easier. I can assume that some of the lower quality screen decisions were made to allow for this stellar battery life.

The Peak 9 is the antithesis of the last Suunto I reviewed - The Suunto 7. The 7 struggled to hold its battery through the day, but the display was breathtaking. I know that Suunto has a middle ground in there somewhere that has the best of both worlds, and I’m looking forward to encountering that.

Cool down

The Suunto 9 Peak offers a refreshing comprehension of how human beings actually function, giving you the tools to tailor your exercise each day rather than just concentrating on the same goals over and over again. The philosophy behind the tracking is well researched, and presents a balanced alternative to the “all or nothing” mentality behind other fitness trackers.

However, the tech side of things is less impressive. For a smartwatch that costs over $1,000, I wouldn’t expect to have issues with touch sensitivity, or be tracking my workouts on a super low-res screen. While concessions clearly had to be made in order to get the massive four-day battery life, it makes an expensive watch feel cheap, and ultimately lets down the experience.

If you’re in it for the tech, this probably isn’t for you, but if you’re looking for a device that might help you change the way you approach fitness and exercise then this very well could be it.

Anula Wiwatowska

Offsite Editorial Lead | Instagram

Anula is the Off-Site Editorial Lead for WhistleOut Australia, and an award winning tech journalist. She has been writing about the Australian telco industry, and consumer technology for over five years, and has been known to tell her Uber driver which phone they should upgrade to next.

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