Heart Rate Monitors, Chest Strap vs Wrist.... Continued

Last week I did a running workout with Taylor. I forgot my heart rate monitor at home, so we wouldn’t be able to compare data like we normally would since my heart rate would be recorded by the built in wrist-based monitor built into my watch.

This begs the question, is your wrist heart rate monitor as good as a chest strap?

My wrist monitor seems to be good at measuring my resting HR and my overnight HR while sleeping. I’ve done workouts comparing both at the same time, and the lag alone on the wrist can skew the data and paint an inaccurate picture of what happened. If you want to use your heart rate to measure recovery times or get as certain amount of zone 2 work, the chest strap's accuracy is incomparable.

After last week’s interval workout, I sync up my watch to check out the data anyway, and I’m surprised to see it looks like I wore my heart rate strap. You can clearly see a steady, subtle build in our 1.75 mile warm up run, then 3 distinctive spikes for our 3 intervals. The numbers are right around where I would expect them to be for a chest strap.

While I’m still not going to trust the wrist strap, I was happy to see such a similar reporting based off my perceived exertion. Of course, the only way that I could in fact correlate the data, is because I usually wear the chest strap.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

My warm up and 3 sets of running (and biking) intervals recorded from wrist based HR monitor.

Taylor’s intervals recorded with chest strap.