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What is going on with the HR readings since 14.13?

Former Member
Former Member over 1 year ago

I am getting very weird HR readings both from normal Run activities as well as Swim activities.

So what I'm experiencing is that the HR is much lower than it should be compared to all activities I've done since I got this watch (955 Solar) in the summer of 2022, and compared to how I feel.

It started with 14.13 where I was going out for a normal 5km run but the HR suddenly started to go down after about 1:30, instead of go up, and then after roughly 4:30 it dropped like a rock to 60. When this happened I watched it closely while running and it just sat there, in the low 70-80 and after about 7:30 I stopped the run because I thought the watch was bad.

Here's what it looked like:

Then I checked the forums and at the time some people was experiencing similar HR reading problems. After 7:30 my HR should be somewhere around 160 for me, so I understood that something fish was going on.

Here's an example of a swim activity with Firmware 13.22 back in November, 612 meters in a 12m pool at around 28 C temperature, and 148 HR average and 83% in Swim HR Zone 4:


Here's the same activity today with Firmware 14.15, same pool and same length, same temperature. Even with a slightly faster pace than the one above, now it says the HR average is 113 and 86% in Swim HR Zone 2. What??

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  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to pw

    My Heart rate on the watch itself seems to be pretty ok if i don't pause my activity. But to me I can easily create an error here:

    1) start a Running activity
    2) Ran towards  traffic light that turned red and I paused myt watch. Waited 40 seconds for green and started the watch again and did my running.

    When I afterwards looked at my pulse it seems to be 8-12 heartbeats to high. If i pause once more on the same run at a later point the faulty heart rate seems to go even higher.

    SO I would guess that there is a bug here.

    Using a HR Pro and then I got no problems at all.


  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to parentoft

    I've been reporting the same problem as you for the past few weeks, I'm glad to see it because I thought I was the only one. By the way, you don't even need to pause the activity. Just stopping at a red light will spike your HR, you can see it happening in real time on the watch.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Garmin-Sierra

    Hi Garmin-Sierra I don't see any more beta coming out and the HR issue is still there with 15.19.

    I'm a little bit worried you're not going to solve the issue in the short term.

    "short" considering the issue has been there for several months.

    I have frequent random HR drops and spike on 15.19 yet, can you please update the thread?

    ty

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    Having problems with external HR too for quite some time. Added a post about it. Now I just run with optical. Same HRM flawless with Edge 530. 

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    Optical heart rate readings are still horrid for me on the latest update. A lot of my runs give me extremely high heart rates (max heart rates hitting well above 200 for the first time in my life, with averages sitting in the 190s!); I still have random spikes in the middle of a run despite consistent efforts; heart rate gets stuck at around 150bpm no matter the effort; and heart rates readings have a mind of their own after every time I stop at a traffic light. First image below is an app which shows the difference between optical heart rate and heart rate monitor chest strap a few minutes after I stopped at a traffic light (all optical HR readings for the rest of the run from there on out were incorrect as well).

    The watch and its readings were second to none when first purchased. It just seems to be getting worse and worse with every update.

    would appreciate if you could please provide an update on this.





  • 0 over 1 year ago

    Yesterday's run on a track where my cool down (very easy pace and effort) had the highest heart rate readings (~175bpm) of my whole session. The watch's readings keep getting jammed on certain bpm numbers and no matter if I increase/lower my effort, the optical heart rate readings do not change/correlate with actuals.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Garmin-Sierra

    So, when will we see a new Beta with a fix?

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Garmin-Sierra

    I may as well keep posting these... This run had massive heart rate drop-offs (up to 70bpm). It would then slowly rise back up then drop-off again. In the end, the optical heart rate sensor got jammed around 70bpm, a heart rate I can barely maintain walking - never mind being 20 minutes into a run at 5 minutes per kilometer. if this doesn't show that there's a major issue then I don't know what does.

  • +1 over 1 year ago

    Thank you for your patience as we investigated. We are hoping to include a fix for this in our next quarterly software release. I will update this thread when it is available.