So. It’s now been a few months since I’ve had the Garmin Vivoactive 3 and I now think I’ve taken it for enough of a spin to make my full and honest opinion. In short, I very much enjoy the watch and it’s a great training tool but still certainly has its downfalls.
The Garmin Vivoactive 3 is a multisport watch with built in wrist HRM, and as with all wrist based HRM that’s were it tends to fall flat. I use my watch primarily to track my rowing, however I’ve also tested it on runs, cycles, swims, ergs, indoor cycles and weights so I’ve tried it all (except golf…). I think the best way to break down my review is to split it into the sports, so I’ll start with the main one for me: rowing.
Rowing
On the erg I split between either using the ErgIQ app which I downloaded, or just the ‘indoor rowing’ application already on the watch. Out of these I find the ErgIQ gives me the best data, though the concept2 PM5 set up at Leander seems to be slightly temperamental with whether they’ll pick the watch up or not. On days they don’t (which is more often then not) I switch to the indoor rowing app. I am not sure if I am missing something big here, but apart from telling me how long I’ve been going for and what my HR is…the indoor rowing app tells me absolutely nothing. I have never been able to pair my watch with an erg using this app, so although on Garmin Connect there’s a /500m pace section on the data field it always reads 0:00/500m for me so …pretty useless. Please tell me if I am doing this terribly wrong.
If using a chest strap with ANT+ monitor, then tracking your calories/HR with the watch during these work outs is very good. With the built-in wrist HRM it’s incredibly unreliable, especially when you’re doing harder pieces. I’ve apparently burnt an impressive ~60 calories during a 30min r20 test, when we all know that can easily clock in 400+.
On the water the same can be said again. With a chest strap the HR/calorie data is useful, without one it’s incredible hit or miss. It depends entirely on where/high tightly you’ve strapped your watch and what you happen to be doing. Except even during UT2 paddles it can think I don’t top 60bpm over 16Km which is entirely inaccurate. What is great however is the split tracking and also the SR – if you’re happy to keep peeping down at your wrist it’s very accurate.
I tested all this alongside a speed coach during 500m pieces and the two matched up excellently. On the fly the watch will only tell you splits in 5’s (2:40 or 2:45), but in the app it can break it down more than that and give accurate data which matches the speed coach. Annoyingly, strapping the watch to a blade doesn’t let you monitor stroke rate and nor does strapping it to a rigger, obviously. When I fix my stroke coach my plan is to strap it to my rigger for the pace and use the stroke coach for rate…but that’s only if I can resurrect it. Honestly for me I’m at the stage with my sculling where rates aren’t too much as I can barely break 30!
Using this watch for rowing has boosted my confidence, helped me see all my improvements and also highlighted to me how much conditions can affect your speed.
Running
I took this watch on a few runs, and this is an activity where I have found the wrist based HRM to be perfectly OK. Being able to look at my splits without getting my phone out was also very handy and I could also change my music so all in all made for some nice running experiences (I usually hold my phone in my hand so was nice to not get the cramp 2 miles in). One thing I would like to see is the ability to view a map whilst running and pre-input routes. You can pre-select work outs to do and Garmin have several distance related training programmes which are really handy, but being able to not get lost on a new running route would be incredibly useful (for example my fathers Samsung Gear 3 has this feature).
Cycling
For indoor cycling I’ve had the exact same issues as I did with the indoor rowing app. I have absolutely no idea how to set it up to enable the watch to pick up what the bike is doing, despite the bike having ANT+ capabilities. I should probably google this as I’m 95% sure it’s user error! However, I must say it’s very good at tracking HR using just the inbuilt wrist HRM and pairing it with some training programmes (again downloadable) actually makes indoor cycling that much more enjoyable than it is.
I have only taken it on one, very short, road cycle but I enjoyed the data I got from that. If I was fully decked out in Garmin gear as well it’s very cool that you can control all of them from your watch. Again, the wrist based HRM seemed to do a perfectly good job with the cycling. It blipped occasionally and read unrealistically low, but I believe that was whenever my wrist was at an odd angle due to my awful hill climbing abilities.
Swimming
I had issues with this swimming app… The wrist based HRM just stops working in water, which is understandable as almost all HRM’s stop working unless they are specific for swimming. However, the lack of complete customisation was frustrating. Although the app has lots of ‘pool lengths’ you can choose from, I found no way to input my own pool length info.
There was no open water swimming app already on the phone, but I have since downloaded another app which is based off GPS. It hasn’t been tested yet, but I’m hopefully it’ll correct this big downer for me. I was swimming in a pool which was 12.5 meters, so all of my data is squiffed because I’ve actually done half the distance. Someone suggested just using the running app, but as that doesn’t turn off the HRM I was nervous to give it a go and risk exploding my wrist.
Strength
The strength stuff was fun when I first started using it. The watch tried to pick up what exercise you are doing and then all you do is input the weight but looking back it does make a lot of mistakes. Reps for exercises like bench pull (which doesn’t really exist in the Garmin list of exercises) are usually counted twice, purely due to the movement involved and weights can only be input in round numbers. This meant a lot of my weights were input as 37kg instead of 37.5kg for example which bugs my perfection brain.
Although I stuck to using the stretch stuff for a good 6 weeks, the novelty wore off. I track all my exercises/weights/reps in a strength diary anyway, so it was info I didn’t need and the number of times I forgot to ‘start a new set’ got tedious. I haven’t investigated this on Garmin Connect too much, but if there was a way to select a pre-written weights or circuit programme to use with the watch then that would be a lot cooler in my mind.
Overall, I’m extremely happy I’ve got this watch. There is most definitely 1000’s more awesome things it can do which I have not explored, but as I primarily got it to monitor my OTW rowing sessions then it ticked pretty much all the boxes. When paired with a chest HR strap it’s truly an excellent piece of kit, as it allows me to monitor how fatigued I am.
How many of you have a watch you use to track your rowing? I’d love to know what you thought!
Natalie X
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