This discussion has been locked.

You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

HR and Weightlifting(Calories)

Hello,

I have always been hesitant to buy a smartwatch with a HR monitor. I bought the Garmin Vivoactive 3 a few months back but I have not been working out. I am going to start tomorrow. My main concern with HR(Calories burned) and weight lifting are that when you lift a weight, your blood vessels constrict. Your heart has to pump harder to overcome the resistance of the constriction. Hence, your heart rate elevates and of course, your caloric burn increases as well. In elevated heart rate during weight lifting means absolutely NOTHING in terms of calorie burn(We're not doing cardio here). SO does the Garmin have a built-in feature for this, or is there a way to combat this?

I used to have a Vivoactive 2 for a long time. When I was working out I would not wear my chest strap when I was weight lifting.

0 Bernhard over 6 years ago

I would also have no worries about overestimating burned calories. I use a VA3 since 9 months, 6 of them with wrist-hrm and 3 of them with chest strap. Your average HR at weight lifting is much less but more volatile than at doing cardio, but your burned calories are much less. The difference between wrist hrm and chest strap is that with wrist hrm, you see more ore less an average of the hr and the chest strap reacts within 1 sec for your hr.

For example with wrist hrm when doing a set my HR goes slowly up from 80 to 110 and then goes slowly down to 80. When using chest strap, you see that your HR is at 80, goes up to 130 for 10 secs, and then quickly down to 80. For an estimate of burned calories for your workout, I think wrist hrm is ok. I have a little bit more burned calories with chest strap, but not significant (~300 per hour with wrist hrm, 400 per hour with chest strap). When doing cardio I have an avg HR of 140 and 700 calories per hour.

But that doesn't depend on the activity you are starting on the watch (cardio or weith lifting) - calories burned and hr is always the same. The difference is that with weight-lifting, the presentation on watch and garmin connect (phone) is different. In addition for weight lifting the reps are counted, but in my opinion not very precise. You can create custom trainings with both activity types on Garmin connect (for example 5 sets of deadlifts, then 5 sets of bench press etc.).