Garmin heart rate swim/run/tri straps
Ljs
Posts: 2
Hi, I'm looking at buying a Garmin 735XT watch and am wondering whether to buy the tri and swim hrm straps too. I have an older hrm strap which should be compatible for running and cycling, but I have a couple of questions..
1) is there real benefit from getting swim hrm data.. and how do you interpret it as it's not "live" during the swim?
2) are the advanced metrics such as vertical oscillation and ground contact time useful or just interesting data points?!
I'm fairly new to triathlon, doing and training for standard distance events for the moment, want the kit to be suitable for maybe moving onto half irons but nothing more.
Many thanks in advance for any help!
Luke
0
Comments
1) Swim stuff - you can analyse it afterwards and where I guess it does give you a theoretical benefit is heart rate vs pace and gives you something other than perceived exertion to base your performance gains on... i.e. did I do that 100m faster because I worked harder or because I am fitter but debateable how much you really benefit.
2)Run dynamics - no one has really worked out what to do with vertical oscillation etc. Ground contact time is pretty well correlated with cadence in most cases and I'm not sure I know anyone who has made changes to GCT without changing cadence and its not immediately clear/well documented about whether you should try to increase or decrease GCT for the same cadence (if that's even really possible). Vertical oscillation is theoretically more interesting because it to some extent covers energy wastage but I still don't think we've seen anyone put together a coherent theory as to what you should be trying to achieve with it - the vertical ratio is probably where I had the most interest as its vertical oscillation against stride length which gives a better idea of what percentage of your effort is spent on going forwards vs wasted going up but even then I don't think that much has gone into how to use these metrics.
In conclusion - I thought it was interesting when I had the run data but I never spent much time analysing it because I don't think there is anyone really telling the story as to what you can do with that data and now that my HRM-run died and I am using a bog standard HRM I don't really notice/miss the data.
Go figure.