Swimming, Heart Rate data collection

[SteveMarshall]

Any updates on its ability/inability to record Heart Rate in water and/or buffer and send out of water at the end of session ?

I have my iphone 7plus in belt while swimming, and I am looking for THE LATEST smartwatch/tracker that will send live/buffered from wrist watch

[SteveMarshall]

Yes, good tracker/watch...

I am trying to remove the need for a separate HR strap.

[HiTekDrifter]

Hi Steve, the Ionic is the first wrist tracker I have tried to use.   And my swim workouts are typical master's swim workouts, mostly interval training, eg 10x (50yd / 50sec) or 5x (100 yd / 20 seconds rest), averaging 3000yd.  FWIW, I have been tracking my own pulse during swim workouts for over 45 years, it was standard practice in AAU, high school and college swim workouts. I have now done 5 more swim workouts with the watch, cranked down to (tourniquet - 1) notches on the wrist band (i.e. really snug, but still circulating), and the HR tracking is accurate about 90% of the time, but sometimes appears "stuck" at a level too low or two high compared to what I'm feeling.  When that happens, I will shift the contacts on my wrist a little, having no idea whether it helps or not, but a minute later, it is tracking my pulse accurately again.   My pulse ranges from 85 to 160 during a workout.   All told, I am satisfied with the HR tracking.  BUT... now the watch spontaneously vibrates at all hours of day and night, while cutting to the "Screen Wake / Notifications" screen on the tracker.  It did that at 3AM this morning, waking me up!  It recorded the fact that I was up for an hour resetting the watch and getting back to sleep, but since it actually manufactured the interruption, I am not happy about that.   So I'm going to contact customer support, since I doubt anybody from Fitbit is reading these posts. 

[SteveMarshall]

Thanks for details 🙂

Yeah, I am poised to get the best HR capture tracker, and if the ICONIC is capturing real-time on the tracker, then sending the full data (probably buffered), to the app great ?

The wake/alarm, is something on Iconic setup to alarm you on low HR ? ! check settings ?

[HiTekDrifter]

No Problemo, and I hope your Ionic is holding up better than mine did.   After doing a customer chat with fitbit this morning to discuss this issue, I did a factory reset, which did nothing to alleviate the problem, in fact it got progressively worse until about noon, when it got locked into continual reboot, with no response for hours.   Soooo, I'm assuming it is a lemon, so am exchanging mine for a new one, under the retailer's generous return/exchange policy, i.e. bypassing direct fitbit service this time.   Hope the next one holds up longer than 10 days!!!!!

[Skeletor]

So far, I've had two swims with my ionic. The first time, it showed a category for heart rate on my app dashboard but didn't register a heart rate. The second time, the dashboard only had a calories burned category and still no heart rate registered. Haven't had a chance to try music in the water yet, otherwise, everything else worked fine. Would rather my laps register in meters not yards. Right?

[HiTekDrifter]

Hey Skeletor,  a couple of my observations on swimming; FWIW, I am on my second Ionic, having returned the first one when it shorted out and stopped being useful.  The second one has held up for over two weeks and counting.

Back to swimming:

1. are you letting the watch detect your swim workouts automatically, or manually starting/stopping your swim workout?  By my experience and that in this forum, the heart tracker stops for manually start/stop workouts, but keeps running for automatically detected workouts.   The automatic workout detection works fine for me, I haven't even bothered with the manual start/stop method yet.

2. Are you wearing your wristband tight enough?   I crank mine down a notch or two for swim workouts, and also weight and running workouts, and any time when I know I'm going to sweat like a pig.  Don't cut off circulation, but come close to it, and the heart monitor usually works.

3. If wearing the watch on one wrist doesn't work well, try wearing the watch on the other wrist.   For me, my right wrist works better than my left for swimming, where my left wrist tends to register a too-low pulse when my right wrist usually shows the right pulse (but not always, perhaps 20% of time it is off also).   On the other hand, when walking, especially walking downhill, my tracker often reports a super-high rate on my left wrist (like 120-130), when it is about 75-80 on my right wrist, the latter of which agrees with taking my own pulse at the neck.   Perhaps the "Dominant/Non-dominant" wrist setting makes a difference.   I use the Dominant setting, wear the wrist on my right wrist for workouts and on the left for other times, mainly to give my skin a break.

A final note for now:  I have seen my tracker report an obviously incorrect pulse, then no pulse at all in most conditions by now, including just sitting and reading (my fitbit app even).  After a few seconds/minutes, it gets back on track, but this still dings my confidence in the reported results.   Still, useful things seem to come from it, so I keep using it.   Good swimming with yours! 

[Duke552]

The HR value is juste the HR at the beginning of the swim  activitie... Useless

[Skeletor]

Hey, thanks for the detailed reply HiTekDrifter! I manually started my workouts, I'll try just going into my swim.


Sent via the Samsung Galaxy S7, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone

[Skeletor]

Nice work HiTekDrifter! You got me on track! I logged my first good swim workout today, HR and all. Thanks! I let the watch auto track me, wore it on the right arm this time, and really tightened it down.

[HiTekDrifter]

Glad it is giving you better results.  By now, I am still seeing the reported HR get off-track 10-20% of the time when I am swimming pretty much every time I swim.  I mostly do interval training, as most organized swim workouts are structured, so have many opportunities to both check my heart rate, and when it seems off, I manually take my pulse.   While it regularly "freaks out" once or twice a workout, it seems to come back in a few minutes and seems to average out to a reasonable HR.   By now, my bigger problem is walking downhill (or downstairs), which almost always triggers a watch freakout, where I observe my HR go from ~60, where it should be, steadily climb to >140 Bpm over a couple of minutes, then show all dashes, then resume a normal pulse after several minutes, then repeats this cycle over and over on a long downhill walk.   By now, I have learned to just take the thing off my wrist if I am going to walk downhill/stairs, lest I get a super-high report of calorie burn.   But this is, I assume, a different problem, so I"m going to start looking for similar reports and join that discussion.   Meanwhile, happy swimming!