Five years later, this underrated Galaxy Watch feature is still Samsung’s best

I own a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, and bar a brief hiatus from my wrist late last year, I’ve been using it since its launch in 2021. While it’s starting to show its age and newer Galaxy Watches have certainly surpassed it in terms of specifications, the newer health-focused features of its successors haven’t tempted me to upgrade. In fact, despite it being five years old and four generations behind, there’s one Galaxy Watch 4 feature that still hasn’t been topped: the body composition monitor.

Introduced with the Galaxy Watch 4, the body composition feature is completely unique in the smartwatch world and is available on every Galaxy Watch launched since. It uses the Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA) sensor to estimate the amount of body fat, muscle, and water in your body. It does this by sending a weak electrical signal through the wearer, who completes the circuit by resting two fingers on the watch’s two buttons. The watch then reads the resistance caused by the bones, muscles, and fat in the body to calculate the overall composition.

While this method is used by many other products, including smart scales, it’s not a 100% accurate way of understanding one’s actual physical makeup. This is true for every metric monitored by a wearable. However, this doesn’t mean the feature isn’t useful; it certainly has been for me.

I haven’t been particularly kind to my body in recent months. I haven’t had a great night’s sleep in ages, and I’ve gained some unwanted weight and dropped several levels of fitness as a result. It’s not a place I enjoy being, so I’ve decided to focus on my fitness once again.

That’s a pretty nebulous statement, so let me detail my two main goals: I want to build muscle while decreasing my body fat percentage. Many wearables can now monitor various aspects of fitness, but tracking muscle and fat percentages is more challenging. This is where the Galaxy Watch comes into play.

Without the wearable, I’d have to rely on tracking weight changes, but those numbers are often misleading. While training, weight gain can mean that I’ve gained muscle mass and decreased body fat, and therefore isn’t necessarily indicative of improved fitness. However, with the BIA sensor, I can track and compare each of these values individually. The need for genuine accuracy isn’t what I value; rather, it’s the trends I’ve witnessed over time.

No other sensor or feature has offered me such useful information since the body composition feature launched on the Galaxy Watch 4, and Samsung has genuinely struggled to offer anything quite like it. The newer features added to the watch, while perhaps useful to some users, simply aren’t to me.

The Energy Score, a metric that would dovetail perfectly with my current health goals, leaves me constantly confused. You’d think that a calculation factoring in yesterday’s activity and last night’s sleep into an energy forecast for the day ahead would be useful, but it’s far too unreliable and contradictory. It gives me a high score, suggesting I have plenty of energy to train, but it also tells me to take it easy. What’s the point?

Then there are the newer Galaxy Watch series’ features, most of which are exclusive to newer watches. The AGEs index, which purports to monitor metabolic health, appears to be the most useful for my needs, but users online have highlighted its problems. Some suggest that the metric only works if you religiously enter food and water details in the Health app, which already makes it far more intricate and time-consuming.

Vascular Load sounds brilliant for preventative heart health care, but it’s not a metric that would ultimately help me achieve my fitness goals.

The body composition monitor just works. Sure, it may take a few retries to position my fingers on the watch’s buttons perfectly, but the information it provides I can genuinely use to improve my lifestyle. I can adjust cardio or strength training if I see muscle mass spike and body fat remain static, or vice versa. It genuinely prompts me to make changes to my regime, but I can’t say the same for any of Samsung’s newer health metrics.

Still having access to this feature is one of the many reasons why I haven’t yet upgraded my Galaxy Watch 4. Newer watches undoubtedly offer more improvements and features, like better screens and bigger batteries, but beyond these upgrades, no new sensor or metric has tempted me to upgrade.

Until Samsung offers a feature that provides me with similar or even greater value, the 2021 watch, with its excellent body composition capabilities, will remain my wearable of choice.