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Main missing features coming from Polar

Hi,

while Garmin in general clearly has a much richer feature-set than my previous watches from Polar, my FR945 annoyingly falls short in some seemingly trivial ways:

1) No Lap-Feature during multi-sport activities.
WTF? I used this extensively for pacing and seeing lap average power, heart rate etc during races. Also useful for post-race-analysis

2) No convenient way of doing "spontaneous" interval workouts.
I know there is a workout editor and an interval timer, but I am yet to meet somebody who uses those features. The issue is, that in most cases I don't want to or don't have the time to PRE-PLAN my workouts before the start. Usually I head out, do my warm-up and THEN decide (e.g. based on how I feel) what sort of intervals I want to do. With competing watches from Finland, it was a matter of about 10 button pushes to set up a simple A-B-A-B-... type interval workout with A and B being either time or distance based. Garmin has these too, but they can't be configured once the activity is already started AND you can't chain together several different interval sets.

3) Changing pool-length
This might not be an issue for everybody and it is more of a nuisance than an issue. I frequently switch between two different pools of different sizes. How the *** is the menu structure for pool workouts not optimized for making that pool-length switch the minimal amount of button presses? It is 11 right now. Every-Single-time. I think this should be an extra toplevel menu entry for pool-workouts and not the 3rd entry ("Pool Size") in the 3rd sub-menu ("Pool Swim Settings"). I am tempted to create a separate profile for it (which seems like a ridiculous workaround...)

4) No alert when continuing activity without un-pausing.
Sometimes I don't trust or want to use Auto-Pause (I know I am not alone on this one). The problem is, that I sometimes forget to un-pause from manual pause and only notice after a few minutes of running/riding/swimming/etc. Polar would (that's my guess at least) notice an increase of heart rate or "accelerometric activity" and pretty faithfully immediatly vibrate at me with a prompt (something like: "Hey! You're still in Pause-Mode you Bozo"). Many a good mile has been lost to this and the interwebs will never learn of my KOM achievements that transgressed.

5) Swimming
So there's the concept of intervals with the associated screen that automatically takes on a different form between during the interval and during rest. Cool so far. Also the data-Fields make sense: "interval time" "rest timer" "repeat on" etc.. What I don't like is that I always have to manually stop and start those intervals. Now I understand why Garmin users are constantly on the pool-side pressing buttons (which honestly seems like the triathlete-est thing to do). Wouldn't it be cool to have automatic interval start/stop based on the accelerometer detecting that you start/stop swimming (Polar does exactly that) or at least an automatic start+stop (i.e. lap) on a specified wall-time (see #2)?
Right now If I do a set of say 8x100 I only start stop the interval at the beginning and end of the whole set and have to know my push-off times for the individual 100s based on good old head-maths which begs the question why I need the fancy watch...

6) Menu structure
That's a short one: It is too cluttered and the items accessible should be severely reduced during workouts. Why would I want to be able to change the NAME of an activity WHILE I am in the activity. Same goes for sensors and data-screens and many other things...

I get that no watch or feature will be perfect for everybody and some things need some getting used to. I just frustrates me that Garmin apparently has some brilliant people coming up with complex and frankly ingenious features like Climb-Pro, but then messes up on such basic usability and practicality aspects like the ones listed above. Do they work with real pro athletes giving them feedback on how well the watch handles those simple lap/timing/setup/workout things?

Anyway - I don't expect this post to change anything really, but maybe some of you can console me with a message of sympathy or a handy trick to resolve any of the above...

Cheers,

  Flo

  • I have limited time, so I try to answer two of your questions.

    2) I do 80% of my workouts with custom workouts (designed through Garmin Connect or app) and am very happy with it. Also the internal interval editor is really easy to use.

    Suggestion: prepare a few workouts with Garmin Connect and upload them to your watch. Then you can still decide whenever you want, what you want to do after warmup.

    3) For your two known distances you can simply copy/duplicate the swim activities and have one for pool length A and one for pool length B. I have this for 25m and 50m.

  • I think about 2) Flo is saying that you HAVE to stop actual activity to start new with custom workout. It will be saved as separate workout. I dislike this too, but it is a garmin thing from old days. 

  • Yes, true. I even know a lot of folks who train exactly like this. Record the warmup in one activity and do their intervals in another.

    As I typically know which kind of workout I am going to do one specific day, I have my preplanned workout on the watch with a warmup section before. If I am not feeling like doing the workout, I cancel it and do something other and live with two separate activities.

    An option would also be to chain the two activities together with fitfiletools afterwards.