Polling the sf2g collective: smart watch & bike computer?

[Daniel Hobe]

I recently picked up a new Garmin bike computer after having a Wahoo for ages.  Garmin has added a whole bunch of fitness tracking to their app since I last used them and it's got me wondering how I can more comprehensively track bio data over the full day rather than just when riding my bike (unlike Peter, I unfortunately don't spend the majority of my time on a bike :).

Most of the Garmin wearables are marketed as standalone units but does anyone here have experience using a bike computer & wearable in tandem?  Any recommendations?

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Daniel Hobe <ho...@gmail.com>

[Matteo Scandolo]

Hi Daniel,
I have a Garmin Edge 530 and a Vivoactive 3 (watch) that I was using as heart rate monitor while riding and I wear all day so it tracks everything else (steps, calories, sleep, etc...)

I'm not big on looking at data (and not really good at training) so I can't really talk about that.

The paring with the Edge device always worked well, even though you manually need to start it at the beginning of the ride, I would say it works well enough but it has two downsides:
- once you activate the heart monitor function your watch only shows your BPM and doesn't do anything else (text messages, notifications, ...)

- sometimes the registered rate was lower that I believe it was, especially if riding mtb/gravel, I suspect that has to do with either the wrist position or the watch bouncing around

I now switched to a proper heart rate monitor mostly so that I use my watch as a regular smart watch while I ride... 

Teo

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<|TeO|>@www.flickr.com/dumbsim |>@<|www.dumbsim.com|>

[Ben Blizard]

I…. Did triathlon for a while and had runs and bikes to track.  I hated having both a garmin watch and a garmin bike computer —- I would end up recording duplicate activities. 

I had an edge and a forerunner.  I really liked them both a lot for individual activity tracking. 

Ideally for me there would be a mode where the bike comp kind of only worked as a display?  Or garmin knew to delete duplicate bike rides uploaded from the watch.  Seems reasonably easy to do, but afaik it was not a feature then. 

I liked the individual products quite well. 

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Ben Blizard
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[David Borowitz]

I have a Fenix 6 Pro and a 530. I like the Fenix for runs (especially phone-free music), hikes, and snowboarding. I also like the step tracking, plus sleep & stress tracking. What you actually do with the sleep/stress data is maybe a little questionable; I find it accurately identifies when I'm feeling tired or otherwise crappy, but then again, do you actually need a watch to tell you that? Trends over time can be nice, I guess.

Maybe I have weird bony wrists or a weird riding position, but I find wrist-mounted optical HRMs absolutely worthless while cycling. Not just can't find a lock, but actually off by 20+ bpm. It's ok for running once I figured out exactly where on my wrist it has to sit.

Like others, I prefer having something attached to my bike when riding. One other gotcha for the SF2G crowd is if the watch is in your backpack, it'll record thousands of steps during the ride. Turning off step tracking isn't hard, but you have to remember to do it.

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