The bad news is that the watch did a pretty bad job at recording the stroke rate. That can be easily adjusted in the watch settings, either on the watch itself or through the Garmin Connect mobile app. Now it was much easier to see the information on the watch, and it made me realize that stroke rate wasn’t being shown. That means that during the stroke, the watch is oriented facing the sky, and by feathering I turn it around so I can see it. In a second row, I had the watch wrapped around the scull shaft, watch face facing me on the recovery. It’s hard to see the small stroke rate number on the watch screen while rowing, but it records a decent number. In the end of the day, these are not the stroke rate data that are interesting.Īgain, for all practical purposes, the Garmin does a pretty good job. The SpeedCoach registers also the short turning strokes, and shows high values. The vivoactive doesn’t recognize turning the boat. Otherwise, the data are pretty consistent between the devices, for the rowing parts of the workout. The Vivoactive has integer stroke rate values, which is just slightly too coarse for rowers. The NK SpeedCoach has 0.5 spm precision, and that shows in the data. The next most important metric for rowers is stroke rate. I wouldn’t use it to draw conclusions on how small technique or rigging changes affect your boat speed, but as a general indication of how fast you’re going, it’s good. During the row, the split it showed was always within a few seconds per 500m compared to the SpeedCoach, and overall pace changes are registered pretty fast. The SpeedCoach is doing a better job here.įor practical purposes though, I think that the vivoactive is pretty good. Finally, the watch seems to be doing some averaging around the boat turns that I am not too happy about. The watch also seems to generate a bit more noisy speed data than the SpeedCoach. There are a few instances where the vivoactive seems to be off, for example just after turning the boat at 2000m, and at 3200m. The two charts above show boat speed (in meters per second) and pace (seconds per 500m, more familiar to rowers) for the Garmin Vivoactive (orange) and the NK SpeedCoach GPS (green). Apart from a few hundred meters at the start of the workout, the data are identical, and I did switch on the NK SpeedCoach a few minutes earlier than I switched on GPS on the Vivoactive, so this may just be a satellite acquisition artefact. I also added the GPX as downloaded directly from Garmin connect. You can zoom into the Google map below to compare the GPX files that I created from the data from both devices. So let’s see how the data compare for this short (6km) steady state row. On the other hand, serious rowers use Rowsandall (right), so it’s fair to include the import process as well. This may not be 100% fair, because all these sites may do some data smoothing, cleaning and filtering. From Rowsandall, I imported the Strava data. I did check the data now and then and they seemed to be pretty consistent with the NK SpeedCoach GPS, which I used as a benchmark.Īfter the row, the watch synced automatically with Garmin Connect, which I have set to export to Strava automatically. You have to look down to your hand during the tap-down, which I wouldn’t recommend. The disadvantage of wearing the watch on your wrist is that it’s hard to check the data on its screen. To be honest, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. I am very skeptical of wearing any watch during sculling, but I have seen people do it comfortably. In this post, I will give you a quick impression to its usefulness for rowing on the water.įor the first test, I wore the watch on my right wrist, to give it a chance to measure heart rate. I refer to DC Rainmaker’s review again, because I agree with everything he wrote there. ![]() ![]() It’s a great watch for tracking resting heart rate and a bunch of other things. ![]() If you want to know everything about this gadget, I highly recommend reading the In-depth Review by DC Rainmaker. I recently got myself a Garmin vivoactive 3 smartwatch.
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