970 heart rate not recording during indoor rides

5732950 1 month ago

Hello. My 970 does not record my HR during indoor rides. My setup has the trainer linked to the watch via Ant+ Open (and Bluetooth to the Apple TV app). I have established that the watch does not record the HR (it shows up very intermittently) when the trainer is connected but will record HR normally in the same activity when the trainer is not connected. The HR sensor is active during the activity. This has been happening for some time and a hard restart does not cure the problem. It is running the latest 12.72 firmware. Any one have any solutions for this?

0 7197053 1 month ago

Same issue. When I connect to a smart trainer my I lose HR. Whenever my sensors drop out or I turn off and reconnect I get the HR back. My Garmin coach plans are not accurately able to gauge my effort now.

Update: smart trainer connection makes me lose HR but with only power meter things are fine.

0 Garmin - SP 29 days ago

Is this only happening when the trainer is connected to the watch? Sometimes the flexing of your wrist can cause the watch to pull away from your skin and will result in no or inaccurate heart rate readings. Please review the article below to ensure you are wearing the watch in the best place during these activities.

Garmin Watch Optical Heart Rate Accuracy Tips

0 7197053 29 days ago in reply to Garmin - SP

It's for sure only happening when I connect the smart trainer. The moment I disconnect it I get the heart rate back. I've tested this over multiple sessions and looks like there's a similar bug in the Fenix series as well.

Fenix 8 does not record heart rate data during Indoor Cycling workout - fēnix 8 Series - Wearables - Garmin Forums share.google/qleJbzkEhvfa0t8Qe

0 5732950 28 days ago in reply to Garmin - SP

Yes, only when connected to the trainer.

I have controlled for everything, including doing the activity on the same bike without having the bike connected to the watch, when it works just fine. And this behaviour is very repeatable from ride to ride. So it is not about the wrist placement or anything (and, of course, during every ride my hand placement on the bars does change throughout the ride). The connection does something to the watching ability to monitor HR even though the green sensing light is active.

0 5732950 26 days ago in reply to 5732950

if it is any help in diagnosing the problem, my recollection is that my watch had been connected to another HR sensor by accicent. that was the first issue. However, after I removed that BT connection from the watch, the watch no longer recorded HR during indoor rides. Perhaps the issue is to do with way the watch is managing various HR sensors, including those that have been removed.

0 7197053 26 days ago in reply to 5732950

I can confirm that this isn't the case for me. Mine is a very simple setup. Smart trainer connected to watch. That's all. I've never had any other sources of HR connect to my watch ever.

To get around I've had to do one of the 2 things

1. Watch connects to power meter and not the smart trainer. This way at least I get HR data + power but then lose out on speed and distance which I have to enter manually

2. Using my Garmin edge to connect to Smart trainer and broadcast my HR to that.

Ideally I would just like to connect watch to Smart trainer and that's it. But I'm putting these solutions here for anyone else incase they want to get around the issue while Garmin works on fixing them. As mentioned above this seems to be an issue on the Fenix series as well where many more users have reported the exact same behavior. Hopefully there's a fix coming soon.