[Closed] Heart rate monitors

Just bought an ANT+ one on Amazon for £24 or something like that - works well and communicates via BT with your phone. Works well.
(Chest straps are more accurate than wrist from what I've heard)

Chest straps are more accurate than optical, but optical is more comfortable. I wouldn't personally want to wear a chest strap permanently.

If you want to wear it all the time, and not just when exercising, I'd be looking at some of the watches.

If you are using Garmin Connect on your phone you want to be a bit careful what you choose. I have a Garmin chest strap and there is no way that will talk to Connect. It will talk quite nicely to my 520 bike computer. There is a list of compatible devices on the app which mainly seem to be wrist ones. My Vivoactive will connect. It will also connect to the 520, but has a habit of dropping connection and not picking up again.

My Garmin instinct connects to my hr strap when I’m wearing it, and of course is optical when not.  Never had a connection issue with it.

just checked it does have HR warnings.

Is the upper rate alarm for just normal use rather than running?  If you've got something a bit funny with your heart then you might find the straps don't work and the optical is also unreliable.  I find that the straps will sometimes cut out when my heart rate gets a bit high which turns out to be a slight problem with my heart rather than the strap.  It's fine for running/cycling as I'm watching it but I wouldn't want it to check me all the time as when the strap cuts out it just defaults down to something low rather than too high

I’ve yet to find one I could use for a swim. Just curious as I’d love to know how high it goes.

It is not my experience that a chest monitor is more accurate. Comparing my Apple Watch optical monitor to a Garmin chest monitor and bike computer they're basically bang on compared to one another. The sampling rate of the heart rate/Garmin set up seems quicker so if I suddenly do something to change my heart rate, e.g. suddenly break into a sprint, the AppleWatch might take a few more seconds to catch up...but ultimately sits on a heart rate identical to the chest monitor and tracks slower changes in heart rate just as well. So if you want something to monitor your heart rate all the time, then a wrist based monitor would be far more convenient and comfortable and accurate enough. Also I find the HRM is perfectly reliable if you have the strap on tight/firm..if I have it on slack it can sometimes drop out...makes sense as the back of the watch has to be in contact with your wrist for it to work. But I tighten the strap before I start a workout and it's perfectly reliable with no drop outs. I'm sure it would be the same for any other wrist based HRM. The only reason I still use my chest monitor on the bike is that I can't connect my AppleWatch to my Garmin head unit. But when I look at the HR data from both devices they are almost identical. But for running or any other activity I just use my watch.

Not necessarily plugging an AppleWatch...it's just what I know cause I have one and haven't had any experience of anything else, but it works fine and there are health based apps that can detect alsorts of heart conditions and raise alarms.

Caher

I’ve yet to find one I could use for a swim. Just curious as I’d love to know how high it goes.

I use a Garmin HRM Swim along with my Fenix 5 for pool swimming. Fenix does the laps and stroke detection, and chest strap gets the HR. It doesn’t transmit the HR to the watch during the session but syncs it up afterwards. Works perfectly.

https://buy.garmin.com/en-GB/GB/p/512311

Thanks for that. I do already use this https://www.swimovate.com/poolmatehr/ but find the chest strap quite odd in the pool. I suppose I'm looking for the moon on a stick in trying to find something that was wrist only.

Accuracy of optical wrist monitors varies between individuals. For me the wrist based monitor stops being accurate at the top of zone 2 and never records me going above zone 3. Think it may be to do with skin type/arm hair whatever. I think it’s generally accepted that chest straps are more reliable on the whole.

Optical hr lags drastically.

Great if you never do anything intense.

Pretty crap if you do intervals/racing and want meaningful data

I use both. But put the strap on for anything more than pootling.

Thanks fellas. I've got a bit if a heart defect, and the Doc says I shouldn't push my heart rate above the 80% mark as that's when it gets a bit more risky. I've got a chest strap which works great with my garmin edge and I can set up alerts when it gets that high so looking for something that i can wear during my normal day which will also throw up an alert if it gets to high.