Strength training and reps - First impressions

Former Member over 7 years ago

Hey

Just wanted to share my thoughts about the strength training feature and rep counting. Whilst I appreciate its still in beta at this stage and improvements will be made.

I used Rep counting on the Vivosmart 3 for a review and I found it "ok" it was hit and miss at times (more hit though than miss). I found that doing for example shoulder press (military style) the workout would be recorded as bench press and I was hoping Garmin would improve the software over time and due to it being a great innovation and very new I didn't think it performed that bad.

My experience with the Fenix 5x rep counting as been impressive and a great improvement over the Vivosmart 3 and this maybe down to the hardware in the Fenix 5x, but still a great improvement

Out of the 5 times I have used it, I have done 65 sets of 8 totalling a 520 reps. Out of the 65 sets it miss counted 3 times! This is a dramatic improvement over my previous experience
I did have one issue yesterday when it recorded a 31 min workout and 23 something was rest and around 6 and half minutes as activity time. This was the wrong way around, but putting this down to beta software and its only happened once.
Its correctly catching exercises and even this time identifying between shoulder press and bench press!

So overall I am happy with the progress made and wondered what other experiences people have had?

0 ikim1967 over 7 years ago

Not tried this - looks interesting though. Can it records sets too? My only other thought was recording weight too. Used to be heavy, heavy into weight lifting ten years ago - i always found a little notepad was my friend then!

0 runningfan97 over 7 years ago

Thanks for your first impressions. Looking really forward to this feature. Have to wait until it is pushed to the 935 also.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Yes it identifies sets. When you starting a set you press the lap button, then when you have finished the set you press the map button again. This then identities the set

0 BenBristol over 7 years ago

I used the strength app today and am certainly impressed despite some accuracy issues.

The rep counter works reasonably well for simple push or pull exercises with weights i.e bench press, squats, bicep curls etc, but is not so good for more complex compound exercises like the clean and jerk, leg exercises (predictably), body weight exercises such as pull ups or press ups, or rapid repetition exercises.

However the ability to edit exercises and weights is awesome and fixes this accuracy problem. To be honest I am pretty happy with this because I can't imagine any wearable ever nailing an exercise count/rep with any great accuracy due to the almost infinite number of exercises possible as well as individual user form.

What I find useful is I now have a good record of the sets, reps, weight and rest time for my strength workout - this is all I need.

What is impressive is that if you go in Garmin Connect you can actually view / edit the strength exercises and the app attempts to identify the exercises you performed - it managed to correctly guess about 70% including bent arm pullovers, squats, bench, sit-ups etc.. certainly wasn't expecting this but offers a glimpse at future potential. I always thought wearables neglected strength and cardio workouts but it looks like Garmin is putting more focus into this area.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

What app you are referring to? Is that the common strength app in garmin F5? I can't see any rep and set counting. Do I miss something or this is still in beta soft?

0 b1azk0 over 7 years ago

If on beta, activate rep counting in app settings (strength).

EDIT:
WOW~! Not only it counts pushups well. It also knows how to classify reps in GarminConnect - as push ups in this case. Thats awesome.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Yes, I have found push ups are caught most of the time and the count, which is impressive.

WojtekBezPortek7 - You need to download and install the latest beta