Wrist guards and fitness watches
While trying on my 20yo wrist guards to see if they were still ok, a thought occurred to me - how do I wear my gps watch and wrist guards? I use it for heart rate too, so putting it over the guard won’t work...
Any thoughts?
Comments
I can think of three solutions:
1) If you can, loosen the strap way (may need an extension) and attach the watch to your forearm behind the wrist guard.
2) Get a chest strap for heart rate. Then you can wrap the watch over the wrist guard.
3) Replace wrist guard with a palm slider. Since the guard only goes a little way up the wrist, you can easily mount a watch behind it. Unfortunately, the palm sliders currently available are questionably protective. The orginal Salomon Palm Sliders really work but they have been out of manufacture more than 15 years and nearly impossible to obtain.
I’ve got pretty skinny forearms so will try wearing the watch above the wrist guards once some new triple8 RD guards arrive (my old wrist guards are huge and don’t fit well anymore).
On a related subject, I have a Garmin watch and upload to Strava. I believe Strava does allow recording activities as skating, but Garmin doesn’t except for a paid-for third party app. What do others here use?
Garmin Connect actually does allow activities to be recorded as Skating and so does Strava. The catch is that the Garmin watches do not so I end up having to change the activity type manually after I upload.
If you have a relatively new Garmin that supports ConnectIQ apps you can get around this by running a skating app that will then set the type correctly from the start. There is even an app called "Any Activity" that lets to set any activity supported by Garmin Connect. Why Garmin didn't put this ability into the basic firmware is a mystery. The downside is that the apps do not support all features of your watch. I use an HRM-tri. This HRM has buffers all data locally. It is really useful to overcome dropouts in communication between the strap and the watch. Unfortunately, none of the skating apps have support for download data from the HRM-tri's buffer.
Be aware that if you go the chest strap heart rate monitor, you might get incomplete data when your hands are on your back. A new battery in the strap and wearing the watch pointing away from me when my hands are on my back, made it more reliable but not perfect.
That is why the HRM-tri is useful. Heart rate data is stored on the chest strap and then when you save the activity, the data is transmitted to the watch glitch free.
You are right, though. Without the buffer, reliable heart rate data is difficult. I even tried putting the strap on my back. It worked but when my hands were in back but when I sprinted, I saw dropouts. This is with a Forerunner 920xt. Oddly, I don't remember having so much trouble with the 310xt even using the same hrm strap.
I’ve been wearing my watch halfway up my forearm above the Triple8 RD guards and seem to be getting plausible heart rate data (it’s pretty close to what I get for running), and it doesn’t feel too weird (I barely notice it’s there) so I’m good. Anyone with any muscle in their arms will struggle to make it work though, as I’m on the 4th hole from the end on the strap, and I have small arms (I could easily use the “ladies” strap on my previous TomTom watch).