Unlock the Full Potential of Your Coros Running Watch
Coros makes great running watches that are seriously underrated. Their watches do the basics quite well, but they also have a surprising number of useful yet often hidden features. Here are 10 essential Coros watch hacks for every runner to get the most out of their device.
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1. Use the Extender for Detailed Maps
While running, you can use your phone to view a detailed map with satellite view, right on your phone. This feature is especially useful if your watch doesn’t have maps built-in. To access it, open the Coros app on your phone, tap on the live activity card at the top of the main screen, and you’ll be in the Extender. Here, you can view data from the activity, update some information directly to the watch, and even access a higher-resolution map with easier-to-operate controls.
Source: lifehacker.com
This feature essentially gives you maps for free if your watch doesn’t have them, or provides a more convenient way to view maps if it does. It’s a game-changer for runners who want to navigate their routes with ease.
Source: lifehacker.com
2. Get Your Stats Every Mile without Creating a New Lap
By default, Coros watches will mark a lap for you every mile if you’re not doing a specific workout. This is a standard feature, but it can also mean that you’ll see each mile as its own lap when you look at the activity later. If you want to track different laps, such as the first versus the second loop around your neighborhood, you can now program automatic laps separately from distance alerts.
To do this, go to the Run mode on your watch, change Auto Lap to OFF, and then make sure Distance Alert is set to ON. You can set a distance here, which you probably want as 1.00 mile. If you want to hear your time and pace out loud when the alert arrives, change Voice Alert to ON. This way, you can do two loops of a two-mile trail and end up with two laps, one for each loop, while also getting a reminder every mile of your pace.
3. Load a Route to Get Hill Alerts
Coros has Hill Alerts that will tell you when you’re starting a major uphill section, and it will let you know how many more hills you have waiting for you. To use this feature, create a route from the Explore tab on your watch or download one you created in another app like Strava. Then, tap Sync with your watch. I have a library of routes saved for my favorite trails, so using this feature is as simple as choosing a route from the same screen where I start my run.
With Hill Alerts, you’ll know exactly how long of a hill you have coming up and can pace yourself accordingly. It’s a great feature for runners who tackle hilly trails regularly.
4. Fix Your Voice Training Notes in Two Ways
After you finish an activity on the Pace 4, you can record a little voice note with anything you’d like to remember about the activity. I find this incredibly useful for strength training, where I read in the highlights of my workout log. But sometimes you miss something you wanted to include, or you otherwise screw up the recording. If you don’t notice this until later, you have two options to fix it.
One way is to fix it from the watch. From the watch face, scroll or swipe up to see your widgets, select the activity, scroll down to the voice note, and re-record it. This overwrites the old recording, and if you wait a few minutes, the transcription in the app will be redone as well. Alternatively, you can edit it as text from your phone. The original voice note gets transcribed into text, but if you hit the garbage can icon next to the note on your phone, the voice recording disappears and you now just have a text box where you can edit the text (or add to it) as much as you’d like.
5. Scroll the Digital Dial to Make the Lap Screen Go Away
This is a tiny hidden feature that I only just learned about, and I love it. Whenever you mark a lap (or the auto-lap feature marks a lap for you), a screen with that lap’s statistics stays on your watch for what seems like forever – eight seconds, I believe. But if you’d like to get back to your regular screen, there’s a simple way: Just turn the dial a click or two. The lap is still marked, but the screen goes away.
6. Set Up a Running Routine with the Coros Training Hub
You probably knew you could download a training schedule to the Coros app and thus to your watch. But there’s another way to get runs showing up as scheduled: Add them yourself on your calendar on the Coros Training Hub. The Coros Training Hub is a website that provides a much easier interface for planning than the phone app does.
To use it, go here (the link will only work if you’re logged in to your Coros account). Click the calendar icon on the middle right side of the screen, and then select or create a training plan. Here’s how I used it to create a basic schedule for myself in minutes. Click a day, then hit “Quick Workout” and fill in the essentials. For example: Run, 3 miles, no pace target. Once you’ve created that workout, you can copy and paste it to other days. Right now I’m doing short easy runs on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and a longer run on Sundays. I got a month’s worth of that schedule set up quickly (changing some of the details each week, like making the long run longer) and then I saved the training plan.
7. Find the Hidden Screens on the Pace 4
This is a simple hack that evaded me for the longest time. If you ever find yourself on a strange screen while you’re running, and don’t know how to get back to the screen you were on, that’s because Coros changed the screen layout. (If I’m remembering right, they changed it twice. Just when I figured out the old way, it stopped working.)
On the Pace 4, the action button on the lower left side of the watch switches between navigation, music controls, and your regular activity data screens. When you’re on a data screen, scrolling or swiping up and down cycles through the different data screens. You can think of it as three different columns; scroll up and down within the column of data screens to see all of those variations, or use the action button to move sideways.
