Sunday, February 7, 2016

The Garmin fenix 3 now comes with an optical HR option

Recently, Garmin announced that they will be selling a version of their popular fenix 3 fitness watch with an optical heart rate (HR) built-in so that you don't need to wear a separate HR monitor. Garmin has added the optical wrist-based HR feature into several of their GPS running watches. However, serious runners may still choose to wear the Garmin HRM-Run strap around the chest since the HRM-Run also provides:

  • Cadence — the number of steps per minute. It displays the total steps (right and left combined).
  • Vertical oscillation — the bounce in your running motion. It displays the vertical motion of your torso (measured in centimeters).
  • Ground contact time — the amount of time in each step that your foot spends on the ground while running (measured in milliseconds).
I'm not sure if we'll ever see all these metrics accurately captures from a wrist-based device (you can easily capture cadence, but I'm not sure about the vertical oscillation or ground contact time). 

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