Wrist watch HR sensor v Chest strap

the wrist heart rate monitors are not as good as chest straps. The flex in the wrist can let light in so for certain exercises such as weight training they aren't as accurate. There are however some new straps you can wear on the upper forearm or bicep which are just as good as the best chest straps. Specifically the polar oh1 (the best) and schosche rhythm+
For very rapid interval training a chest strap is probably slightly quicker at detecting heart rate dips and peaks due to it's location near the heart.
For steady state training such as jogging the built in heart rate monitors on activity trackers will probably suffice, but they won't be quite as effective as the dedicated chest or arm HRM's.

Good advice above, but I'd add that there's another option (if you want an all-day tracker for other reasons). You can get a wrist tracker that doesn't require your phone to be with you in order to collect data, and that connects to a chest strap when you need it for more accurate exercise tracking. (This is how my Garmin Vivoactive 3 works.)

I've found the wrist-based tracker reasonable for most other kinds of exercise, but it works poorly when I row on-water or machine (too much arm flexion; it loses contact). So, I use a chest belt that connects to the watch via Ant+ for rowing workouts, and let the wrist-based tracker do the work alone for other activities. (I don't run, so I don't have an opinion about how the wrist monitor works for running specifically.) I think it's helpful not to need the phone close while working out (because I don't usually take my phone on the water), but you may prefer to have your phone nearby anyway when running for other reasons, I don't know.

When the watch gets back within range of my phone, it connects to the phone via Bluetooth, and the phone app uploads the data to the cloud, so it's then accessible long term from any of my phone/computer devices (with the appropriate app) for various kinds of reporting and analysis, which is kind of fun.

I believe my device does more frequent HR sampling during exercise (it knows I'm exercising because I tell it what I'm doing in order to get it to track miscellaneous useful stats). I'm not sure whether that sampling rate difference is true without the chest belt because I pretty much always use the chest belt when doing intentional workouts.

Since you mention being 70 and monitoring heart rate, I'm inferring you may have some cardiac concerns. (I'm 63, BTW.) Some of these all-day devices - while they're not certified as medical devices - will try to look for heart rate irregularities and let you know (wrist vibrate/message) if it sees them.

Have a Fenix 3HR and will run short runs with it. If I'm going for a longer or, or a training specific run I put on the chest strap. It does give better HR numbers. I've seen my wrist one go to 185 when I know my HR isn't that high.

dewd2 wrote: »

Or better yet. Ignore HR and just run.

FWIW - I almost never use my chest strap any more. My watch does track my HR but I couldn't tell you the last time I actually looked at it (during a run or even after).

Good luck.

I'm working on picking up my cadence so my watch is helpful for that. But I do flip between screens on it.

My watch has a wrist HR sensor. Sometimes it's spot on, sometimes it's comically far off. It's useful for at rest heart rate of that's of interest to you. I don't trust it for exercise. My experiences when I've forgotten my chest strap bear my mistrust out.

aokoye wrote: »

In addition to what other people have said, a good chunk of the accuracy issues people have with otherwise reliable wrist based HR monitores when running (as opposed to some other activities/sports) is due to user error. There's a good blog post on DCRainmaker about that here.

THIS ^^^^^^^^

While not all the issues are user related, once I learned the tricks of getting good readings, I get pretty solid readings while running now that actually make sense. The clothing I wore on colder runs affected it, the location on my wrist was too loose causing issues, etc.

Chest strap is still going to be more accurate. I can go for a ride and sometimes my average HR on my watch is pretty close to my bike computer that is reading my chest strap...other times it's ridiculously off. Awhile back I got into racing time trials...mostly 12Ks as hard as you can go and still finish. On one race my bike computer gave me an average HR of 155...my watch gave me an average of 105.