Heartrate so inaccurate that my watch is basically useless for training

Time to put pressure on those who cover Garmin to address this. Apple already has better HR tracking then Garmin, if they've in fact made HR tracking worse on their watches since a certain update. The public deserves to know why! Did they lose a patent dispute and have to remove something? Did they stop paying for some service and have to remove it from all watches? Is something broken in the firmware for the sensor or for the watches? HR detection should be getting better release to release, not worse!

I agree! The public deserves to know what’s really going on. I’ve been pestering Garmin for months. What good is a fitness watch with wildly inaccurate HR tracking? Since the defect was exacerbated by Garmin’s recent software release, aren’t there some legal remedies? Garmin admitted to me in writing they have been aware of software glitch for some time, but have no idea when a software fix will be released. I asked them for credit to purchase a diff watch, but they refused, but offered to send me a chest strap to use to monitor HR free of charge. If everyone demanded a free chest strap or credit or threatened to sue, maybe Garmin, assuming the underlying cause isn’t patent-related, would get off its lazy ass & pay for a team of top software developers to finally address this longstanding flaw. After all, the public would never stand for a phone that doesn’t take messages and only sporadically take calls even if the phone’s other features work fine. Same with this watch. An accurate or at least somewhat accurate HR tracker is an essential component of a fitness watch. 

Another example. Extremely annoying this.

That looks like a Cadence lock while running...unfortunately I don't think any of the wrist based HR monitors have this solved.

Interesting...I'm curious if you had this problem with your Garmin before the version 15 or whatnot software update where they seemed to break HR accuracy for a lot of people. All wrist based usually take a few minutes to lock on, but 15 minutes is ridiculous. All the Garmin forums for the newer watches seem to be having this issue, and Garmin wasn't exactly known for HR or sleep accuracy even before this issue. It's high time they addressed this with their customers!

The watch was a xmas present and worked perfectly fine up until around 2 months ago. I’m running the latest software, no idea what it was running before it updated but yeah no issues at all for 4 months and now almost every run is the same.. really low HR until 10-20 mins into the run where it then jumps to my actual HR. I wouldn’t mind, but this then has a massive knock of effect of all the other stats… particularly when it thinks I’m running 4:00km with a HR of 110 for 15 mins!!

Looks like you're experiencing what a lot of people seem to be experiencing across most of the new watches released in the last few years...something in one of the software updates over the last 6 months or so made HR tracking much worse. I haven't seen Garmin, or those testing Garmin cover this properly yet. The only thing I do know is with a lot of Garmin issues a hard reset of the watch can fix things. But then you have to set everything up again on the watch how you like it. Haven't seen if this has helped anyone, and I'm in the market for a new Garmin, but not touching it until they resolve this. Sadly this is the second time I've almost bought a Garmin watch, but software hiccups caused me to hesitate and stick with another platform.

My FR955 worked flawlessly in 15 and 16... quick lock on and no problem running interval training, impossible with current versions. They suggest the 10/15 minute warmup due to the low-pass filter it seems they have put in their software in v18 and 19 to filter the spikes out.