{"id":52167,"date":"2017-05-31T07:49:26","date_gmt":"2017-05-31T14:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/?p=52167"},"modified":"2017-05-29T15:17:20","modified_gmt":"2017-05-29T22:17:20","slug":"garmin-vivofit-heart-rate-monitor-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/?p=52167","title":{"rendered":"Garmin VivoFit Heart Rate Monitor Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For Mother&#8217;s Day Logan (Michael \ud83d\ude09 ) got me a new heart rate monitor as a gift. I&#8217;ve been talking about getting a Garmin for a few years now.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been a faithful Polar HR monitor wearer for years but I feel like the Polar watch has gone downhill the last few years. I&#8217;ve had nothing but problems with them. The battery life is not great and even replacing the batteries when it dies, I was having issues with the watch just not working anymore. The price point for the Polar is &#8220;cheap&#8221; enough that whenever the battery replacement crapped out on me, I could just buy a new watch. But that was a pain and felt like a waste of money. It also irked me that I was basically having to buy a new heart rate monitor every year. I don&#8217;t know why the battery replacements wouldn&#8217;t work (at least 50% of the time). It was very frustrating.<\/p>\n<p>So I started to look into some of the entry-level Garmin watches and I got really overwhelmed with reading reviews and trying to figure out which one would be best for me that I gave up.<\/p>\n<p>I was really excited when Michael got this watch for me because he&#8217;s in IT and a tech guy and he reads ALL the reviews about this kind of stuff and is very knowledgeable about what is good, what is crappy, what features to look for, etc.<\/p>\n<p>What I need in a watch or app is pretty basic. <em>I want:<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #993366;\">Calories burned<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #993366;\">Heart rate<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #993366;\">Miles ran\/biked<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s pretty much all I&#8217;m looking for. But this watch has so much more! It has dozens of activities to choose from. You can personalize it a bit, too. It also tracks steps and sleep.<\/p>\n<p>I use the <span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">Garmin Connect App on my iPhone<\/span>. I synced it with the watch and a few times a day it\u00a0syncs automatically with the app and updates everything. ALSO, a cool feature, you can connect it to your MyFitnessPal app and it will record your steps\/calories\/activities in the app for your day. I like that feature. One less place I have to LOG everything! It just does it for me.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to read a step by step instruction of the watch, with photos, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dcrainmaker.com\/2016\/05\/garmin-vivoactivehr-review.html\">check out this link<\/a>. It was very helpful for me when I was first learning my watch. My review today is more about the functionality of it.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t think the<strong> sleep tracking<\/strong> would be all that interesting to me, but after using it for a few weeks I actually kind of liked that feature. It was interesting to see how well \u00a0I slept &#8212; it tracks light sleep, deep sleep, and when you are awake. It&#8217;s funny seeing the graph for the nights I get up with Logan!<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-52292\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/L1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"636\" height=\"848\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/L1.png 636w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/L1-225x300.png 225w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 636px) 100vw, 636px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-52293\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/sleep1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"501\" height=\"848\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/sleep1.png 501w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/sleep1-177x300.png 177w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 501px) 100vw, 501px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52294\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/sleep2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"496\" height=\"848\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/sleep2.png 496w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/sleep2-175x300.png 175w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 496px) 100vw, 496px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It also tracks <strong>steps<\/strong>, which is interesting to see how active I am but I don&#8217;t really track the steps in any other way so I rarely look at that info. I will say that at work I have a standing desk and I walk around a lot to the printer, mail room, around the office, etc, so I move a lot during the day. The only time I really sit at work is in meetings!<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52304\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin3.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"636\" height=\"848\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin3.png 636w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin3-225x300.png 225w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 636px) 100vw, 636px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52295\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/steps.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"496\" height=\"848\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/steps.png 496w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/steps-175x300.png 175w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 496px) 100vw, 496px\" \/><\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><span style=\"color: #3366ff; text-decoration: underline;\">Fitness<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n<p>I&#8217;ve used the Garmin watch for a few different activities now. Hiking, walking, running, cardio in the gym and strength training.<\/p>\n<p>When I used it <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>hiking<\/strong> <\/span>in Bend, I feel like the calorie count was WAY off. But I didn&#8217;t wear my Polar heart rate monitor to compare (I had planned on using both for the first few weeks to compare the stats and see how accurate the Garmin is).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve worn it going for <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>walks<\/strong><\/span>&#8211;long and short&#8211;and I also feel like the calorie burn is a little on the high side. Again, I need to wear my Polar on my next walk to compare the calories and see. Maybe I&#8217;m wrong.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Running<\/strong><\/span> &#8212; It&#8217;s accurate and it works great! I&#8217;ve worn it running outside three times now and I compared it to my Polar heart rate monitor and the Cyclemeter iPhone app for mileage and it&#8217;s accurate in the mileage and it&#8217;s accurate in the calories burned within about 10 calories.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52305\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin4.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"636\" height=\"848\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin4.png 636w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin4-225x300.png 225w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 636px) 100vw, 636px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve worn it running on the <strong>treadmill<\/strong> once and the mileage was NOT accurate. It was off by about half a mile. Which is no big deal to me because I have the mileage on the treadmill I can look at. I am more concerned about it being accurate when I run outside.<\/p>\n<p>Running on the treadmill gave me a fairly accurate calorie burn, when I compare it to the Polar HRM. It was about 20 calories more than the Polar. Not a big deal. Anything more than that and I&#8217;d be concerned, but 10-20 calories isn&#8217;t a huge deal to me.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52290\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"636\" height=\"848\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin.png 636w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin-225x300.png 225w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 636px) 100vw, 636px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52291\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"636\" height=\"848\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin2.png 636w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin2-225x300.png 225w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 636px) 100vw, 636px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The above photos were from my treadmill run. I started the Garmin 1 minute late and stopped it 1 minute earlier than the Polar, but despite that, the calories were pretty close. This particular run was 3 miles on the treadmill but the Garmin thought I did 3.58.<\/p>\n<p>I like the screens that show heart rate and distance. It&#8217;s easy to scroll through and see quickly while you are doing the activity.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52306\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin5.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"636\" height=\"848\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin5.png 636w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/garmin5-225x300.png 225w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 636px) 100vw, 636px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Swimming<\/strong><\/span> &#8211; I wore it in the pool to check it out. The first big issue I have with it? It doesn&#8217;t track heart rate while swimming. I found that odd and I&#8217;m not sure why it doesn&#8217;t do that. It gave me a calorie count at the end of my swim session but I doubt it&#8217;s reliability because it didn&#8217;t link in my heart rate. At this point in my life, swimming is very very easy and I&#8217;m very efficient when I swim&#8211;meaning, I don&#8217;t burn the same amount of calories in a session as I used to.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52338\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-4-9.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"498\" height=\"664\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-4-9.jpg 498w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-4-9-225x300.jpg 225w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 498px) 100vw, 498px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I highly doubt I burned 440 calories swimming. I wear my Polar HRM once or twice a year in the pool just to check in and see where I am at calorie-wise and it rarely changes&#8211;one session according to Polar is between 300-350 calories burned. So that is a little disappointing.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-52339\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-5-5.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"498\" height=\"664\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-5-5.jpg 498w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-5-5-225x300.jpg 225w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 498px) 100vw, 498px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I do like that it gave me the break down of the strokes, etc. It also synced to the app and gave me info:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52340\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-3-10.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"396\" height=\"664\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-3-10.jpg 396w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-3-10-179x300.jpg 179w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 396px) 100vw, 396px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I kind of love the charts and break down of pace and when I rested and stroke info. One other glitch? When I tried to swim some laps with the paddle board, it stopped counting my yards. I guess it&#8217;s calculating everything by arm movement. That was kind of frustrating.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-52341\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-1-13.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"392\" height=\"664\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-1-13.jpg 392w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-1-13-177x300.jpg 177w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 392px) 100vw, 392px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>So in that particular session I did 2000 yards, even though it didn&#8217;t quite calculate it correctly.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52342\" src=\"http:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-4-10.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"542\" height=\"664\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-4-10.jpg 542w, https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/unnamed-4-10-245x300.jpg 245w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 542px) 100vw, 542px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\"><strong>PROS<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">No chest strap!!! It&#8217;s just the watch<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">Long battery life in between charging<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">It finds GPS quickly and doesn&#8217;t seem to lose the GPS signal<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">Accurate mileage and calorie burn<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">Easy to use<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">Syncs with Garmin Connect app for full data<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">Touch Screen on watch<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">LOTS of features<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">The watch is light and fairly comfortable<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">It notifies you to move if you&#8217;ve been inactive for too long<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993366;\"><strong>CONS<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #993366;\">A lot of features that I&#8217;m not sure how to use yet, if you&#8217;re not really &#8220;techy&#8221; it can feel overwhelming<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #993366;\">Sometimes it takes too much time to scroll through all the screens on the touch screen watch<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #993366;\">It doesn&#8217;t show your calories being burned DURING the activity, only once you are done<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #993366;\">Exercise limitations&#8211;You can add more activities to personalize it but it would be nice to have other options instead of just &#8220;other&#8221;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #993366;\">The limitations in the pool are a big con for me<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t had a chance yet to test it out biking. I&#8217;m hoping to bike to work sometime in the next few weeks and write a review on it then.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>QUESTION: What kind of heart rate monitor\/activity tracker to you use? Thoughts?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For Mother&#8217;s Day Logan (Michael \ud83d\ude09 ) got me a new heart rate monitor as a gift. I&#8217;ve been talking about getting a Garmin for a few years now. I&#8217;ve been a faithful Polar HR monitor wearer for years but I feel like the Polar watch has gone downhill the last few years. I&#8217;ve had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[55,60,2721,3207,101,112,123,127,190,908,5167,5170,224,267,276,277,291,299],"tags":[9490,8634,9493,9491,9492,9486,9487,9488,663,9489,4821,3117,8685,9495,8707,9494,8735],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52167"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52167"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52343,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52167\/revisions\/52343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.110pounds.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}