I’ve been doing a fair bit of research on which watch is best for me.

Main uses are mountain biking and pool swimming.

It seems the Garmin forerunner 735XT is the best option around £200.

Any thoughts and is anyone able to confirm its swimming pool friendly?

Thanks

Craig

It will track your distance but will not give you a heart rate without the swim chest sensor fitted.

It does all sorts of metrics of your swim without the chest strap.

Likewise when running it will only do certain analysis such as update you FTP if your wearing a chest hrm strap.

But thAts not to knock it I still do most of my training without a strap it’s mostly just hard intervals/races where I want a quicker response than the optical gives.

Thanks, I wont be doing any running with it.
Purely for cycling and swimming.
Would like it to measure laps in the pool (without having to press a button after each length)
Will mainly be used for mountain biking though
Craig

It does that easily and ime very accurately. You pick swimming (indoor) and it tracks your direction change rather than using GPS as per ourdoor swimming.

Certainly lots more accurate than my old edge 500 in a bag in my swim cap.

Plus the metrics alot more useful.

Just bought a Garmin Instinct – think it will do all that, and is around £220 at the moment.

My wife has the 735XT for swimming and likes it (with the chest strap).

I’ve had a Garmin swim, vivoactive and now a 735xt and they’ve all handled swim laps excellently so I suspect any Garmin watch capable of tracking pool laps will work well, It’s probably more about the data you want to capture while riding that will determine which Garmin watch you go for.

I have one. Reliable, works with Stryd footpod for power, will talk to all the other Garmin stuff like Varia.

Battery life not quite what I’d like and occasionally goes funny and needs rebooting.

Not tried optical heart rate while swimming but it’s very hit and miss while running, tending to lock onto my cadence, and is utterly useless on a bike. It’s ok on a turbo trainer though.