Heart Rate monitors

4 watchers

Ashburn Jun 2020 11:57am, 9 Jun 2020 First-time poster!!	0 Ashburn I currently have an old Garmin watch (Forerunner 10) which does not monitor heart rate. I am beginning to think this is something I should do so do I get an independent monitor such as Polar H10 or upgrade my sports watch with, say, a Forerunner 45. If I stick with my current watch and get an independent monitor how do I relate HR to a run?
EvilPixie Jun 2020 12:03pm, 9 Jun 2020 17,667 posts	0 EvilPixie Hi! Well come to fetch The cheap solution is to get a bluetooth HR strap such as Wahoo for about £25 and link that to your smart phone as Wahoo have an app Depends on your budget and overall goals.
Kieren Jun 2020 12:16pm, 9 Jun 2020 3,945 posts	0 Kieren Personally, I don't like the chest strap type. There are arm based ones reviewed on the very useful DC Rainmaker website here: dcrainmaker.com optical heart rate can be a bit patchy and is not as good as a chest / arm strap but honestly, once using it I don't think I will ever go back. It's one less thing to faff about with or keep an eye on the battery, or pack etc or pull up when it slips down. The garmin 45 is double the price of the wahoo armband, so depends on your budget / needs.
K5 Gus Jun 2020 12:41pm, 9 Jun 2020 3,573 posts	0 K5 Gus Hi Ashburn, welcome to fetch Your watch doesn't have built-in optical heart rate, and it also cannot receive and record a heart rate signal from a chest/arm strap. Therefore you cannot have an integrated "activity" view with GPS data ( giving pace/distance/etc) PLUS heart rate data. Most chest/arm straps are not stand-alone units that can record hr data, they just transmit it over bluetooth or ant+ to a device ( watch, bike computer, etc ), but there are a few that can record and the data can be viewed on an app, eg the Polar OH1 arm strap. Therefore to keep with your current watch the best you could get is to have to look at two separate "activities" side by side on separate websites/apps, ie the GPS data on Fetch/Garmin/Strava and the HR data on a separate site. Very clunky to use meaningfully. The only way to see an integrated view, which would make it much much easier to spot where faster pace, or going up a hill, etc results in a corresponding HR change, would be to buy a new watch, then in the Fetch training log view you can see pace/eleveation/HR/etc graphs all one above the other. You then have to decide if you trust optical ( it seems to work pretty good for some, but terribly for others ) or go for more faffing but better accuracy of a chest/arm strap.
PAJ89 Jun 2020 12:57pm, 9 Jun 2020 37 posts	0 PAJ89 Hey there Ashburn. Like previous people have advised, there can be a lot of variance between the different types. For me, I find that chest is way more accurate but it goes back to the 'why' of wanting to track your heart rate. If you're looking to start running and training guided by HR as your primary metric (such as approaches advocated by Phil Maffetone or the book Training for the Uphill Athlete), my opinion is to go for a chest strap as anecdotally they tend to be more consistent for a greater percentage of runners. There is a bit of faff but I don't find it to be too much after getting used to it. I've ran with a chest strap for almost every run for the last 5 years or so (literally more than 95% of my runs) and its second nature now. In that time I've replaced the batteries 3 or 4 times and the chest strap three times, those years have ranged anywhere from 1000 to 2000 miles. If you're looking to track your HR more generally and see how your fitness is improving on a more general scale, then I'd say optical becomes a bit more appealing. You will lose some accuracy (unless you're one of the lucky ones who gets optical readings comparable to chest strap) but it doesn't matter quite so much if you're need training to certain heart rate zones or boundaries. My watch has optical HR and I found it works great for day to day non activity tracking, where movement is not so intense. The DCRainmaker link Kieren posted is a fantastic website. I also found this old Fetch thread which helped me in the past, though it does have a whole lot of posts so a bit more difficult to navigate. fetcheveryone.com/forum/heart-rate-3882/2011
larkim Jun 2020 3:34pm, 9 Jun 2020 11,228 posts	0 larkim Having tried various ones - Polar chest strap (about 8 years ago), cheap "Coospo" bluetooth chest strap, Wahoo chest strap, Garmin chest strap and now a Polar OH1+ forearm / upper arm optical one, I can heartily recommend the Polar OH1+. For me it has given the most consistenly reliable readings (i.e. no spikes all over the place, or first mile ridiculous HRs, or picking up my cadence instead of my HR). It cna bluetooth to a smartphone app, record independently of any apps (e.g. just record and then you sync it up later) or pair via Ant+ with my Garmin. The only small downside is the fact that I need to charge it after every 10 or so uses, and it's really small so I think at some point I might be careless and lose either the charger or device itself. But other than that I love it. Comfortable, reliable, accurate (as far as I can tell). I had such problems with chest straps getting confused by static on my t-shirt that I fell out of love with them, even though when they worked they were super comfortable and had battery lives measured in months or years, rather than days. Wrist mounted readers on the backs of watches can be the perfect answer, but not everyone seems to get on with them. e.g. my wife's watch often reads fairly daft numbers, but when I've used her watch it is bang on in line with my arm strap, so I suspect there is some nuance of shape of wrist / tightness that means I can get on fine with it, but she can't. As to how they guide training etc - I'll leave that up to others to describe as the are far better informed than I am, I'll only say that when I do have good data the HR data is the stuff I look at to measure improvements etc so I wouldn't want to be without it.
larkim Jun 2020 4:31pm, 9 Jun 2020 11,229 posts	0 larkim To answer your specific question - if you can't pair a HRM to your existing Fr10, then you could switch to using your phone as your running recorder, and pair a bluetooth HRM with that? Or the other option is to buy a different watch (need not be too expensive, ebay has good stocks of refurbs etc which provide excellent VFM).
PAJ89 Jun 2020 4:59pm, 9 Jun 2020 38 posts	0 PAJ89 Good point on the static larkim, I've actually had that happen with one or two clothing items. And yes I think wrist dimension probably plays a big part. I've got quite small wrists so I think there's more movement and contact breaking when I'm doing anything more intense than walking for a sustained amount of time, probably why wrist based has never been as accurate for me.
Ashburn Jun 2020 8:35pm, 9 Jun 2020 2 posts	0 Ashburn Thank you for those very useful comments. My current inclination is to upgrade my watch (Maybe forerunner 45 or 245) in which case it will have built in optical heart rate monitor. I can then see how that works for me and if it doesn't maybe go for the Polar OH1 or H10
Shades Jun 2020 7:52am, 10 Jun 2020 251 posts	0 Shades Ashburn - I bought a Forerunner 45 last autumn and very pleased with it. I've trained with an HRM for years and asked to see what models Garmin had with a chest HRM. None of their models now come with a chest HRM but they immediately offered to give me the HRM FOC. An offer I accepted.