I had a ‘special’ piece of swim kit on today (INSTABEAT) but I’ve not yet managed to get the data off it so here is the HR chart sans ‘special kit’ and you will also note that this is my first use of the new beta software on the Forerunner 945 which FINALLY enables oHR for any kind of swimming.
I think this is probably my record (5) for the most number of heart rate monitors worn and I have to say it was a bit embarrassing but, luckily, they were mostly hidden by various bits of swim gear.
The Polar OH1+ clipped onto my swim cap and the H10 recording onto the Polar Beat app via caching both worked in line with my RPE. As you can see both the Vantage M and Garmin 945 with oHR (beta) were wrong. Incidentally, I had both fully underneath each wetsuit sleeve which I would have thought would help accuracy.
My effort was a 30-minute swim that got progressively harder/faster in fairly warm water. It’s interesting that the Garmin 945 oHR shows a “stable” HR level rather than a rising one…I can’t explain that.
FWIW: Each watch produced a sufficiently acceptable GPS track of my swim.
The Instabeat device has a HUD showing my HR zone and did seem to show the right zone a the right time in a non-intrusive way. So, all is good on that front. I looked at the HR chart on their iOS app afterwards but the data was heavily smoothed so I’m not sure what details the smoothing might be masking. We shall see…maybe.
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