Reply To: watch recommendation?

#24547
Ryan Vaart
Participant

Really interesting feedback on the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the wrist-based HR.

I’ve been using a Garmin 920XT (no HR) for some time, and have pretty much no complaints… except that it doesn’t have a HR monitor built in!  I used a MIO wrist-based optical HR monitor along with it for about a year (and set it up to send the data to the watch), but it recently died, and I’ve not yet replaced it.  I definitely wouldn’t recommend that approach — having to put yet another watch-like thing on for training and races was just a bit too much.

That said, my 920XT  has survived 2+ years of pretty much constant training without a glitch (jinx!).  It has a nice setting for use in races (just hit lap to go from swim to transition… lap to go to bike… etc), and seems to work pretty accurately during open water swims.  Now that they’re “old”, you can find them a bunch cheaper than the 935 these days, and if you’re not sold on the HR monitoring built in (and are thinking a chest-strap is the way to do), it’s probably a really good option…

Coach and others — does anyone have good recommendations or experiences for chest-strap based HR monitors?