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Maximum HR the optical sensor can measure without starting an activity?

I noticed that the optical HR sensor has some kind of artificial upper limit when not in an activity. Seems to be around 120 bpm. Can anyone confirm?

I was gardening today (painful digging of roots) and I was out of breath while the watch showed 110 bpm for a long time. Started a Cardio activity and it went up to 160 bpm.

Similarly, after running with a HR belt, the watch shows 60-70 bpm when the belt is disconnected and only very slowly (over the course of several minutes) goes up to 80 bpm. Which is 40 bpm less than my actual heart rate when walking home after a run.

The second case can be handled by stopping but not saving the activity for at least 30 minutes after the run, so the watch won't disconnect from the belt. But what about the first case? Should I start an activity every time I leave the couch?

0 CindiL over 4 years ago

I’m going to say no because you can set a high HR alert that goes up to 200 within the connect app. The high HR alert is when you’ve been inactive for 10 minutes and your HR is high.

0 nsomlai over 4 years ago in reply to CindiL

Inactive HR is usually accurate. The problem starts when I do something.

I have seen another complaint that indicates that a lot of guesswork is involved when determining the heart rate even during an activity when the sampling rate is much higher: forums.garmin.com/.../heart-rate-different-during-strength-vs-cardio-workouts

0 CindiL over 4 years ago in reply to nsomlai

I don’t know about guesswork since its using the optical sensor. One thing to check is the setting you have in the Connect app under device, general, data recording. Do you have it set to “smart” or “every 1 second”? See if changing that makes any difference.

0 nsomlai over 4 years ago in reply to CindiL

That was the first thing I changed when I got the watch, but I think that setting only used during an activity.