Your watch knows how ready you are to train. Your phone apparently does not.
Since the start of November, a growing pile of Garmin owners have been waking up to a Training Readiness score on their wrist and nothing in Garmin Connect. Open the app and the card either reports "not enough data" or fails to appear at all, while sleep, HRV, Body Battery and the night's activities keep syncing like nothing happened.
The reports are spread across a single long thread in the Garmin Connect Android forum, and the devices named in it cover most of the modern lineup: Forerunner 955, Fenix 8, Enduro 3 and Forerunner 970. Both the Android and iOS builds of the app show up as suspects, along with the same version number.
What owners are actually seeing
The original poster, who goes by Brisk Walker, described the first morning it happened on a Forerunner 955: Training Readiness appeared on the watch, then Garmin Connect on Android and the web showed "Not enough data" despite a full night of wear and every other metric intact.
By midday, after recording and saving an activity, the score showed up. Two days later it was back to normal in the morning.
That pattern repeats through the thread. One Enduro 3 owner says the data syncs to the watch but Training Readiness does not show in the app no matter how many times he force closes it or clears the cache. A Forerunner 970 user on iOS reports the same thing and points at the app update. Another owner describes it lasting two days, then working again this morning.
The telling detail is what keeps staying healthy. Sleep, HRV, steps, Body Battery and activities all land. Only Training Readiness goes missing, which suggests the problem sits in how the score is turned into an entry rather than in the sync itself.
The workaround nobody should need
Every account of the bug includes the same strange fix: go for a run.
Multiple owners report the score appearing as soon as they record and save an activity, even though it had been missing all morning. One owner put it as everything working again until the next day, when the same thing happens.
That behavior is odd enough to be useful. If the score is calculated correctly on the watch and simply not surfaced until a new activity forces the app to refresh, the bug lives in the app's presentation layer, not in the sensor data or the cloud pipeline.
A separate thread on the Fenix 8 forum makes a similar argument in its own title, describing the metrics file reaching Garmin's servers without being processed into a score. A duplicate-file response from Garmin Express, which one owner used to push the file manually, points the same direction: the raw data arrived and was accepted.
Why 5.31 keeps coming up
Garmin Connect 5.31 arrived earlier this month, and it is the common denominator in most of the reports. The Enduro 3 owner is explicit that everything worked on the previous version, and the Forerunner 970 user names the iOS 5.31 build directly.
It is worth being careful here. Correlation in a forum thread is not proof, and 5.31 also carries the code that our Garmin Connect Waze report covered, so the update had real changes under the hood. Nobody in the thread has a reproduction on a clean install of the prior version, and the fact that scores have started returning for some owners without another update suggests the backend may be involved too.
Still, the version lines up across platforms and across four watch families, which is the sort of spread that makes a single watch firmware bug unlikely.
What Garmin has said so far
Not much, and what it has said is not encouraging.
One Enduro 3 owner reports spending 45 minutes on a Garmin support live chat and being told to try again tomorrow, with the agent stating the company is not considering it a bug at this time. That is one agent on one call, so treat it as an anecdote rather than a policy.
Garmin has not published any public note on the issue that we could find. Nothing on the Connect support pages explains a Training Readiness gap in the app, and no release notes address it. The community threads are currently the only detailed record.
If it does turn into a fix, it will likely follow the pattern of the Fenix 8 firmware repair earlier this week, where Garmin shipped corrected builds within days of a wave of complaints.
What to try while you wait
- Trust the score on the watch. It is being calculated, and the missing piece is the app entry.
- Force close Garmin Connect, then reopen it. Some owners see the card briefly before it disappears again, which is another sign the data exists.
- Check Garmin Connect Web. It is the same account and the same missing entry, but it rules out the phone app as the cause.
- Record and save a short activity. It is the one workaround that reliably makes the score appear.
- Skip the reinstall. Owners who tried it describe mixed results at best, and it costs you your paired-device settings.
If you are shopping for one of the affected watches, the Fenix 8 and the Forerunner 970 are the two most affected models in the thread. Neither is a reason to skip them, since a software bug like this usually gets fixed inside a release cycle, but it is worth knowing what you are walking into.
The bottom line
Training Readiness is one of the few Garmin metrics people actually make decisions with, and having it vanish from the app while the watch keeps showing it undermines the whole feature. The good news is that the underlying data is intact, the workaround is a 20 minute jog, and the reports already look like they are thinning out.
The bad news is that Garmin has not said anything public, which leaves owners guessing at whether this is a 5.31 problem or a server-side one. Watch this one for the next app update. If it is a 5.31 regression, a point release should end it, and if it is not, the Body Battery numbers in the app are still the fastest sanity check that your watch and phone are talking to each other.
Sources: Garmin Forums, Garmin Connect Mobile Android thread 447491 opened November 4, 2026 with owner replies through November 7; the separate Fenix 8 forum thread on the November Training Readiness gap; Garmin Connect 5.31 build listings and app changelog pages; Amazon listings checked November 7, 2026.
