Got a new Garmin watch? One hidden gesture control can return you to home and even lock your touchscreen

Garmin devices have a ton of activity and watch settings to go through and tweak, even when you’re not actually exercising. From building new workouts to choosing new watch faces, checking your Body Battery and Readiness scores to looking at live progress of your stock market options, there are all sorts of things you can do on the best Garmin watches.

Sometimes, when you’re deep in your settings, you need to push the ‘back’ button about half a dozen times to return back to your watch face through the labyrinth of menus one by one, which can be irritating. Technology should be easy, seamless, with a single gesture allowing you to return to the home screen with minimal fuss.

I’ve tested tons of Garmin watches over the years, from the cheapest Vivoactive to the top-flight Garmin Fenix 8, and in the middle of testing GPS accuracy and finding scuba divers to check the dive computer features, and all the rest of it, you occasionally just forget some features are there at all. I wrote about this a couple of days ago with the Gear Tracking feature in Garmin Connect, and a recent conversation reminded me about yet another less well-known Garmin watch trick.

When chatting to TechRadar’s Homes Editor (and former Fitness Editor) Cat Ellis about her new Garmin, she bemoaned the fact that the Lily 2 Active couldn’t perform the classic Garmin touchscreen gesture, which involves a tapping the screen of the watch with your palm, covering the watch face to return it to the home screen. It’s a neat hidden feature on most Garmin watches, not shouted about at all (again, just like Gear Tracking) but a useful timesaver. Garmin calls it the ‘palm gesture’.