hopefully soon, but i'm skeptical it will be. The problem with OHR underwater is it is unreliable and very individual user dependent. Just look at how much complaining people do about reliability and accuracy of the OHR in normal wear. I also think that since Garmin is at heart an avionics company, there is a very real aversion to releasing anything that can provide misleading information. In the aviation world it is better to have something give you no information(turn off) then it is to have it give you the wrong information. Plus the swim features seem to be on the absolute bottom of their priority list. Heck, over a year since they released the swim workout function builder and you still can't have multiple repeats in the workout.
There are many things that can be considered unreliable, like OHR when cycling, GPS while swimming, VO2Max estimation, recovery times between workouts etc. and Garmin hasn't disabled them. I would rather have something that works "some times" than not have it at all. For example, the Polar M600 supports OHR while swimming and it works quite well for me most of the times. I also have a HRM-swim strap, but that is not an option except in rare occasions, it needs constant adjustment.
One almost valid reason to not enable OHR while swimming in the pool was the way the pool swimming application works. It only stores certain data per length (strokes, time, distance etc.). Even when wearing the strap, all the data is stored in the strap memory, and appended to the FIT file after the workout, because HR is per second, and doesn't "mix" well with per-length data. Garmin Connect then shows the usual swimming data, and HR per second in a graph, but they come from different areas of the FIT file. That is why open water OHR is easy to support, all the data is per second, and HR can be mixed with GPS, pace etc. and stored incrementally in the FIT file.
I don't think it would be very hard to modify the pool swimming application to store Max/MinHR and AvgHR per length anabling OHR. That would be a huge improvement. Swimming doesn't usually have huge changes in HR per length when doing long repeats, so having at least AvgHR and Max/MinHR per length instead of per second would make us all swimmers happy.
Well I guess you could always try swimming say in run indoor mode to actually see how OHR does. If it comes back great (or at least usable) then we can ask Garmin with more credibility why it is currently locked out. Is anybody done this already?
The whole point of the HRM-Swim I thought was that it "sticks" to you so does not need "constant adjustment". I've tried it a few times and did not recall it moving about.
I guess the HRM-swim strap is another thing that works for some people and doesn't for others. In my case, pushing off the wall after a turn is a coin toss. When doing sets of 100s, I need to adjust it every rest. It is quite stressful, so I end up not using it. I have had it since the date of release (almost 2 years now?) and used it less than a dozen times, when I do about 9-11 swim sessions per week.
I have written a small application that outputs data from the watch to a FIT file, including OHR, and the heart rate values while swimming don't look too bad. But again, what works for me doesn't necessarily work for everyone, so I doubt Garmin cares very much about one particular case. I think the discussion would be more like can you enable some "experimental" feature at the user's risk?
I have written a small application that outputs data from the watch to a FIT file, including OHR, and the heart rate values while swimming don't look too bad. But again, what works for me doesn't necessarily work for everyone, so I doubt Garmin cares very much about one particular case. I think the discussion would be more like can you enable some "experimental" feature at the user's risk?
I think that also Garmin like Suunto must enable the the optical HR sensor. Suunto alert the users that the HR data while swimming could be not accurate and the users are free to choose if use or not this possibility. Dcrainmaker into "Suunto Spartan Sport Wrist HR In-Depth Review" had test the function with excellent results. I think that garmin only want to sell their bands and if they will allow the HR optical sensor many users would not buy the bands...
I think that also Garmin like Suunto must enable the the optical HR sensor. Suunto alert the users that the HR data while swimming could be not accurate and the users are free to choose if use or not this possibility. Dcrainmaker into "Suunto Spartan Sport Wrist HR In-Depth Review" had test the function with excellent results. I think that garmin only want to sell their bands and if they will allow the HR optical sensor many users would not buy the bands...
excellent results?
this is what he wrote:
In my case, it was a mixed bag (as I’ll show in the HR accuracy section). It roughly showed the trend correctly, but didn’t get the nuances of brief higher efforts. So while it’s better than nothing, I probably wouldn’t make second by second pacing decisions from it.
<< It roughly showed the trend correctly>> is a good result for optical HR, if you want a great result you must use the band. With HR from wrist you just need to understand more or less how your heart work, if you want a precise value (for professional swimmers) is obviously that you have to use a band...
