However accurate (or not) the wrist-based HRM on my Forerunner 735 might be for other activities, it doesn’t work at all for rowing.
With no turbo trainer, I’ve dug my old Concept 2 rower out of the garage for training on the weeks when I’m WFH. The 735 has a “rowing” mode, which would make use of GPS to measure speed and distance if you were using it on the water. With GPS turned off it still measures stroke rate reasonably accurately, but the heart rate data is nonsense.
It’s 15 years since I last rowed properly, so my HR is likely to have dropped a bit as I’ve aged, but back in the day if I was doing a long, steady session (30+ minutes, rating 19-20, 2:00 split) my HR would tend to be 150+ by the end.
Even if I do some warm-up exercises to lift the HR before I start rowing, the HR on the watch quickly settles to around 40bpm.
The wrist is a really bad place for optical HR for things like rowing (or any activity that involves tensing the muscles in that area such as xcountry skiing, weight training). The HR signal just gets drowned out by the noise of all that movement, it is probably picking up stroke rate instead of HR.
Fit makes a bit of difference and wearing the watch further up the arm (towards the forearm) may help. Newer sensors do a better job, but still not great.
If you can wear the watch around your bicep, that is actually quite a good place for collecting clean data (more flesh, less tendons and movement).
When I was on the watch team at TomTom we collected a bunch of data and just couldn’t get rowing reliable enough to put a rowing mode on the watch. Just looking at some of the spectograms of the data makes your eyes hurt…
Not a chance of that - I’ve got tiny wrists, but the rest of my arm is still pretty chunky from lots of years of rowing and the related weight training. If lockdown continues for any length of time, my arms and shoulders are going to be huge
edge 1030 problem (firmware up to date) - it pairs ok with my trainer (bkool go, firmware up to date) and if I look at a route to re-ride the elevation profile looks as it should. But as soon as I press the start timer button to start the route the elevation profile goes flat line which I am sure is just the current elevation (the number looks about right) and so I don’t ride the route. I get a mileage but no hill variation because its flat line. I have looked at the indoor profile and can’t see anything obviously wrong. Any suggestions would be appreciated as I’ve run out of ideas to make it work. I can live without it but it bugs me why I can’t get it to work and found nothing helpful online
I was riding on a bumpy patch of road and the face and half the insides of my 735 popped out. It’s still working and out of warranty, so I’m tempted to just try gluing it back in. I don’t think I’d trust it in water again though.
Anyone able to shed any light on this?
Did a fairly hard over/under session tonight and Garmin is showing 1 for training effect when similar sessions are usually around 3.
I also noticed that the performance condition graph is missing from this activity too.
The optical heart rate monitor on my Fenix 6 is awful. On a typical run or turbo session it’s vaguely accurate around 30% of the workout. There’s a huge thread on the Garmin forum of people complaining about it.
Any hacks for getting the final two out? first two pretty straightforward, last two are stuck nicely, tried wd40, tried a bit of wet lube, getting towards turning the crosshead into a circle
Defrenistration is a definite option. One of my favourite rarely used words.
(I did manage to put it back together. Just lots of swearing, but it was still being wonky and stupid so I replaced it. Strap was all manky as well, so time for an upgrade).
Very cool. Just tried it. Pushed an existing route on my strava account to my 945 in about 15s.
The fact it works with such old devices is the big deal here
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