After seeing this thread about problems with the garmin chest strap misbehaving I was sort of happy because other people had the same problem and it wasn’t my heart misbehaving, but I wasn’t so happy as I had the cheaper plastic strap so could just switch it for the Polar one which seems to be the standard solution.

To cut a long story short though, from looking at the various solutions I guessed that the problem was sweat from your body shorting the contacts so I tried just putting a small amount of vaseline (well lip balm actually) between the two sets of contacts to prevent tracking across the surface…

…and it works 🙂 . Used it a few times now in situations where it would reliably fail before and now it works so I’m a happy man. Well, except that I no longer had an excuse to buy a wrist mounted one instead

hope this is useful to someone else

KY Jelly works for me 🙂

Me too, but what’s a chest strap?

knew I shouldn’t have mentioned vaseline 🙂

So you use KY jelly before you put your strap on?

I’ve had this problem. My Garmin strap is about 3 years old and definitely a bit dodgy. I considered switching to something like a http://www.mioglobal.com/Default.aspx as I really don’t like the chest strap at all, and that’d work with both my phone and my Garmin 800. Anyone any experience of them?

For the cash tho, I’m almost tempted to pick up something like a Garmin FR70 or A Suunto Quest as the time I use the HRM most is at Spin class.