Exploring the possibilities with my Garmin watch
So after a bit of frustration and finally figuring out how the hell to get the GPS to actually connect, I am starting to dig into what the Garmin watch can actually do for me. Some of it I like better than Strava but I also question how accurate it is.
I like how it tries to guess what exercise you are doing in the gym for one thing, which is something I found incredibly unreliable.
I suppose it is asking a lot of a watch to guess what you are doing based on your arm movements and it was correct a lot of the time even though every single one of those sets except for the last one was sets of 12 of a bench press. I found that if I do the sets slower it has a better chance of guessing correctly but ever since reading an article the other day about how muscles don't necessarily respond better to slower movements, I don't really see the point of going slow especially when I have limited time. I guess I am more interested in the watch keeping track of my heart rate in order to make a guess at how many calories I burned.
If that is at all accurate I am happy to burn 300 calories doing something that I don't really mind doing, but I don't think i will even bother with recording the individual sets in the future since it is quite inaccurate about what exercise I am actually doing not to mention the fact that it couldn't possibly know what sort of weight I was doing. I will stick to my notebook as far as that is concerned.
On a bike ride, after the initial EXTREMELY frustrating experience of getting it to actually get a GPS signal, it seemed to do a really good job of maintaining it.
I wasn't trying to do a long bike ride but I was more so interested in seeing if the watch could actually maintain a GPS signal and even though it was truly a pain in the ass to get it to connect in the first place, it didn't lose the signal at all during my ride even though I was in the shadow of skyscrapers constantly. I don't pretend to know how GPS works but perhaps the difficult part is getting the connection in the first place and then it has very little difficulty making adjustments even if a building is in the way. I hope it can continue to do this because I quite like this readout at the end.
I doubt the accuracy of the average BPM on my heartrate because this was a rather light ride by my standards so I hope I wasn't reaching that high of a heart rate because if so I should probably be a bit concerned about my blood pressure.
There is a huge amount of data that you are presented with at the end of any cardio and all I can do is hope that it is somewhat accurate. I feel as though the 304 calories that it claims I burned in less than 30 minutes is a bit high but they say it is based on your age, height, weight, and heart-rate so it's math I guess. I know I would be delighted if I can burn that many calories on what I considered to be not very strenuous at all exercise.
So far I like this readout better than Strava because I don't pay for Strava and never will. I never really cared about the social media aspect of Strava so since I can't figure out how to do that on my Garmin app, I probably wont even bother.
Now I suppose the next step for me is going to be to purchase a scale of some sort so I can see if I am actually gaining or losing any body mass because of the activities I do.
I will say this so far, and yes, it is really too early to pass judgement but, I feel as though this purchase may actually encourage me to exercise more often and to make sure I stick with it. Is it worth the $300? Well, that remains to be seen