Luddite seeks Wahoo Heart Rate training advice

I have a Roam v2 on my bike and a Rival on my wrist – yes, I know the Rival is not great but it was a deal and I was curious. The Rival gives me my heart rate (or approximation of it). Occasionally it sends the heart rate to the Roam while I am riding – they don’t seem to like to stay synched for some reason.

So, in my head, I should be able to use the heart rate showing on my Roam to be a bit more structured to work on my fitness – most weekends I lead the easier club rides which are recorded as mainly Zone 1, so I want to plan in some solo rides to focus on staying in Zone 2 and then I can use hills to push on higher.

Am I right in my simplistic planning here?

How do I keep the Rival and the Roam synched – they seem to like to be checked and synched before each ride?

Or would I be better synching the Roam with ANOther heart rate monitor?

Anyone tried this and did it work or not work? (Accepting that real world riding is harder to hold a Zone than sitting in a pain cave)

Couple of things.

I’m not sure how you are riding in Zone 1. If I try and do Zone 2 on the road it’s tricky when I hit an incline.

I would forget about wrist based HR, in my experience it is useless. I would get a chest strap and link it to the Roam. I do this with a Bolt and it remains connected and never loses a beat.

and never loses a beat.

I like what you did there….

You cam stray briefly out of your HR zone, it’s no big deal.

Make it simpler, use the three zone model for endurance rides (ie. stay below LT1)?

Not a wahoo person…..but…. how are you getting HR to the Roam? If it’s the rival and that’s not working, then you need a wahoo hr strap to give you a reliable hr on the roam. If you are in a club there will be a techy millennial who can help you sort that out.

My BIL has multiple garmins and is a effing nightmare to ride with as it takes him so long to get his different buts of garmin to talk to each other. I have a polar hr strap w BT that talks to my watch and another head unit/trainer. Works every time

You don’t need a Wahoo strap (I had one and didn’t like it). I use a Garmin one now.

I’ve a Garmin Fenix 6 watch which I use the majority of the time and a Garmin 810 bike computer.

If I do use the bike computer as well, it just picks up my heart rate from my watch and displays it.

Are you sure you’ve not got some ‘pause’ setting or the like?

And I find my watch as accurate as previously used chest straps – is your watch strap tight?

I have a bolt v2 computer and used to try and get the watch I had (not wahoo) to give me heart rate for tracking and recording fitness. The wrist based values were pretty rubbish, either not recording anything or saying I was doing 80bpm when I was breathing out my hoop, if only !

To get any sort of decent results needed the watch to be tightened to strap snapping tensions and even then the whole wrist arm angle when cycling really didn’t get on with the heart rate sensor.

So, the short of it, I bought the new wahoo chest strap (the rechargeable one, about 100hrs per charge) and it’s been flawless. Has multiple Bluetooth connections so I can pair it to my wahoo bike computer and also to my watch at the same time. My watch is what has the PAI fitness thing monitoring my daily/weekly/monthly activity.