One of the reasons I use a fitness watch is the ability to program and follow custom workouts. Here is my experience of following a custom strength workout on Epix2 today.
The workout is a warmup, then 3 rounds of about 10 exercises with rest in between, then a jog. The exercises are ‘to lap press’ and the rests are timer based. I do not need the watch to count reps. I have 3 screens, autoscroll is off. I also played music.
What I expect:
- On the main screen the watch shows me which is the current and the next exercise/rest, times or counts it down, plays music and stays on the screen I set. I want to use any exercise I want.
What actually happens:
Workout:
- Each exercise is shown for abt 5 seconds. Then the name of the exercise disappears and all I see is ‘set time’ and reps (even if reps count is off). I want the exercise name to stay on screen. I want the screen to show what is current (exercise name) with time, and what is next. And x of y rounds (as is the case).
- After the initial 5 sec announcement, there is no way to see the name of the current exercise anywhere, on any screen.
- It wants to show me reps. And weight. Even if the exercise is jog and I switched rep counting off. I want to see no field for reps (customise it out).
- I can only choose from a fixed list of exercises (a limitation that Garmin needed to remove for ages. I know I may lose muscle heat map, but that is fine). I try to work around this by adding notes, but the note is not sown to me, I have to scroll to it.
- If I choose a particular screen, each announcement resets this to the ‘set timer’ screen. After the announcement I want it to stay on the screen I choose.
Music:
- During 2 hours there were about 10 interruptions of sound, 1-2 secs long, some of them coincided with exercise/rest transitions. There should be no interruptions.
Is this how a 1000 dollar watch should perform? No.
Can Garmin fix this? Yes. Probably all of these are fixable in software.
What is your experience? Any tips/workarounds?