Garmin sports watches have seen me through many years of running. My first was a chunky but functional Garmin Forerunner 35, which saw me through my first foray into ‘serious’ training, through to a Garmin Fenix 7S, which was frankly much more watch than I needed.
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The switch was easy, and I was already familiar with the interface and the Polar Flow app from my time as TechRadar’s fitness editor many years ago. Everything went perfectly smoothly – until it didn’t.
The problem was a heart rate monitor. I’ve owned a chest strap heart rate monitor for several years, and find it particularly useful for interval training on a spin bike, where a wrist-based monitor isn’t as quick to respond as I’d like, and can be affected by me gripping the handlebars. Having a reading from the chest strap fed straight to the bike’s screen via ANT+ is quick, convenient, and makes it easy to see how my efforts are impacting my heart rate in as timely a manner as possible.
The problem is the strap itself. If you wear a bra to exercise, as I do, you have to position the heart rate monitor somewhere below the bra’s bottom band, meaning it’s sitting awkwardly around your ribs. Even if it doesn’t slip down (which it might), it’s not a particularly comfortable arrangement.
I was therefore very pleased when, a few years ago, Garmin released the HRM-Fit – a heart rate monitor that snaps directly onto your bra’s band. No more worrying about a second strip of elastic sliding down mid-workout. It’s a brilliant idea, and one I’ve not seen copied by any of the other major fitness tech brands to date.
Sure, there are HRMs that get around this problem by strapping around your arm rather than your chest (eg the Polar Verity Sense), but these use the same tech as the monitor in a watch and are therefore subject to the same limitations
My Polar watch supports sensors via ANT+ and Bluetooth, so I put the HRM-Fit on my Christmas wish list. Santa kindly obliged, and I quickly connected the two, excited to take the new duo on their maiden run on Boxing Day.
Running smoothly?
With the HRM-Fit clipped comfortably into place and wrapped up against the British weather, I stepped outside, hit the start button, took a few paces and… nothing. Not only could I see no heart rate on my watch, there was no pace or distance visible either. I cancelled the workout and began again, making sure to wait until the watch had established a firm GPS link before hitting ‘start’. Again, nothing.
Starting to get cold, I decided to go ahead and start running anyway, making up a rough 5km route along my home town’s empty footpaths.
When I got home, the workout showed no speed or distance in the Polar Flow app, though the route had been tracked somehow, and even appeared plotted on a map when synced with Strava. Most strange.
A quick search online suggested that it might be a temporary GPS hiccup with the watch, but that seemed like a strange coincidence considering the only factor that had changed that day was the new heart rate monitor. Then I found it. Apparently several Garmin heart rate monitors, including but not limited to the HRM-Fit, misidentify themselves as foot-pods when connected to Polar watches.
The watch is therefore expecting data like cadence and stride length, not heart rate, and to make a long story short, everything gets very messed up. There’s no fix for the problem; the devices are simply incompatible. Bother.
It was then a choice – keep either the heart rate monitor or the watch, and stick the other on eBay. I decided I valued the comfort of the Garmin HRM-Fit more than my (possibly somewhat childish) urge to stick it to Garmin for bringing out a paid tier to a previously free-to-use app.
After a lot of research (I used to review sports watches as part of my job, but that was several years ago) I opted for a Garmin Lily 2 Active. It’s the company’s smallest sports watch with on-board GPS (I’ve never been a great fan of connected GPS that piggybacks off your phone), and unlike the standard Garmin Lily 2, it supports accessories via ANT+ and Bluetooth.
Its feature set is much leaner than the Polar, or even my previous Garmin, but that’s fine for me. I’ve never actually used maps on a watch unless I’m writing a review, so their absence isn’t an issue, and I don’t miss a color screen. As long as it allows me to sync a plan from TrainingPeaks and nags me when I’m outside the appropriate heart rate range, it’s all good.
The Lily 2 Active’s tiny size means it’s also comfortable enough to wear at night, so I’m actually tracking my sleep without feeling like I have a brick strapped around my wrist. It has everything I need and absolutely no more, and that’s fine.
The moral of the story is clearly that if you’re planning on picking up a new sensor or accessory, make sure you search for the names of both products together to find out whether they’re truly compatible – even if the specs suggest that they should be.
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