Do you have a new Garmin watch? A hidden gesture control can bring you home and even lock your touchscreen

Garmin devices have plenty of activity and watch settings to review and modify, even when you're not exercising. From creating new workouts to choosing new watch faces, checking Body Battery and Readiness scores, and watching the live progress of your stock market picks, there are all kinds of things you can do on the best Garmin watches.

Sometimes when you're immersed in your settings, you need to press the “back” button about half a dozen times to return to the watch face through the maze of menus one by one, which can be irritating. The technology should be simple, fluid and with a single gesture that allows you to return to the home screen with minimal effort.

I've tested tons of Garmin watches over the years, from the cheapest Vivoactive to the top-tier Garmin Fenix ​​8, and in the midst of testing GPS accuracy and finding divers to check out dive computer features and everything else, from time to time you just forget that some features are there. I wrote about this a couple of days ago with the Gear Tracking feature in Garmin Connect, and a recent conversation reminded me of another lesser-known Garmin watch trick.

Chatting with TechRadar's Homes editor (and former fitness editor) Cat Ellis about her new Garmin, she lamented the fact that the Lily 2 Active couldn't perform Garmin's classic touchscreen gesture, which involves tapping the watch screen with your palm, covering the watch face to return you to the home screen. It's a cool hidden feature on most Garmin watches, not talked about at all (again, just like Gear Tracking) but a time saver. Garmin calls it the “palm gesture.”