Best HRM to wear while swimming

joeylu

Can someone recommend a HRM for me to use in the pool. I will be doing laps os it must be submerged. Thank you.

NorthCascades

Garmin HRM-Swim, or whatever the equivalent Suunto is. Both of them work perfectly, neither is cheap. (Best is almost never cheapest.)

joeylu

I dont mind spending the money on something good. Thank you. I will look them up

NorthCascades

I've only used the Garmin one so I can't tell you anything about the Suunto variety. If you have any specific questions about the Garmin system, though, quote or tag me in this thread and I'll do my best to answer.

Here's a link to the chest strap. The HRM-Tri would work too but it costs more and won't stand up to pool chemicals.

These are both sensors only. You need a watch to go with them.

Swimming is a challenge because water blocks radio signals. These particular straps have a memory to store your heart data until they come out of the water, then they broadcast it and the watch merges that with the swim record. That's how the Suunto system works, too, it's called "store and forward." Obviously the watch needs to have this capability.

On the Garmin side, the Fenix and Forerunner lines have this feature, but you'd need to check specific FR models to make sure. Garmin just came out with some brand new watches in both of these lines and last year's models are still very capable but deeply discounted right now. I've used this many times with a Fenix 3. The watches will track other things like your stroke rate and pace (from GPS if outdoors, or from a known pool length indoors).

MeanderingMammal

Personally I have a Garmin Forerunner 735XT with the HRM Swim for indoor use. The HRM Tri also has the running dynamics sensors.

I've found stroke count very accurate, and the dynamics data around stroke length, frequency etc is useful from a performance improvement perspective.

The pod use a "store and forward" technique that collects data and then uploads it to the watch on completion of the session. You don't get real time data display, but that's of limited value anyway. The correlation of all the data together is where it becomes useful.