Optical HR locking on cadence?

It's a known issue for all optical HR sensors, so it applies to Garmins Elevate sensor as well. Some have reported having more issues with the cadence lock/crossover problem. I have only encountered this a few times and it was not awfully bad, the watch caught up pretty quickly. You can check my thread for my tests, there's a link in my signature.

Also make sure you are not looking at the "avg HR" data field. Happened to me once when I was on the second page where I had "avg lap HR" instead of current. I thought it was locked on cadence, stopped, wiggled the watch, took it off even though in the "background" current HR was still ok :rolleyes:

It's a common problem for most wrist-based optical HRM trackers. I've previously used a Fitbit Surge and Tomtom Spark, and with the benefit of hindsight I now realise both of them had the same cadence lock issue that I've experienced with the Forerunner 235. But it wasn't as obvious for those watches as neither of them tracked your cadence.

It will take a bit of trial and error to work out how best to position the watch to minimise the issue - I have quite hairy arms so it requires a lot more trial and error for me versus Ray from DCrainmaker for example.
You can see the cadence lock issue on my run below, and then you can see how that is quite different to what happened when I ran with a Wahoo TICKR Run chest HR strap.

Cadence lock when using optical
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/977945044
No cadence lock when using chest strap
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/978756577

You can see it more clearly if you expand out the heart rate chart and then overlay cadence. If you hover over the mid-sections of my run you'll see bpm and spm are the same number in the first run for large sections but they're quite different values in the second run.

I actually don't run that often, so I don't feel like exploring the subject much more - for now I will just use my chest strap on the rare runs I actually do and I'll wait patiently for Garmin to improve the tracking (oh and fix the all day heart-rate tracking...)

I would recommend throwing the latest SW (3.20) on there and testing in the same conditions again. I haven't seen anything like this on the 235 or the vvs hr. They have the same OHR inside.

I updated to 3.2 right after opening the box yesterday.

I would post a link, but unless there's a way to hide the map, I'm not broadcasting my address and running route. I could probably do a screenshot although it's not interactive of course.

I also am upgraded to 3.2.

Just did a run with the new update. My pace went down the last half of the run but the hrm locked on to the cadence. Frustrating!

Here's a screenshot of mine. Like I said earlier. I highly doubt I was at 169 bpm during the majority of the run. I was not breathing that hard and felt pretty relaxed. It was consistently in step with my running cadence. See below.
http://imgur.com/6VGj6qN

I had this same issue until I realized that I wasn't wearing my strap tightly enough. I tightened up the strap to the point that the sensor left an imprint on my wrist, and my HR numbers looked realistic thereafter.

I had this same issue until I realized that I wasn't wearing my strap tightly enough. I tightened up the strap to the point that the sensor left an imprint on my wrist, and my HR numbers looked realistic thereafter.

I had it tight enough to leave a wrist band imprint. Didn't see an optical imprint though lol. I also made sure I wore it above(toward the elbow) the wrist bone. Not running tomorrow, but will try it Thursday if my chest strap doesn't come before I run.

I get this sometimes, and it's always towards the end of my runs when I'm pushing it a bit, my HR gets up to my cadence (180), I usually start slowing to cool down towards the end but HR sticks.

Because it's fine to that point it feels like it is fixable plus they do actually have the cadence data so seems like they could cancel it somehow. I'm hoping it will improve as they start getting to grips with the software side of this watch.

Just posted this in my thread (see signature)...

The graph was done in Excel so I could use the same axis for all data.

On my last run I experienced a very short cadence lock. But the FR235 caught up quickly, after one minute.