Is there any HRM that actually works well in water?

Your heart rate is much lower underwater, as much as 15-20 beats at the same effort as land running. RPE is also higher underwater. The point is that you worked harder than 123bpm, but you also didn't work as hard as you think you did. This is everyone's experience in the dreaded pool. Injuries suck.

If you want to go by HR for aqua jogging, Coros watch is your best bet. HR chest straps don't work underwater.

My advice: go by feel for intervals and steady efforts, just bump everything up 1 or 2 points on the RPE scale. And stick to quality. Intervals or tempos almost every day. Don't go in there for 2 hours and float around. You have to keep your mental sanity somehow.

Thanks, that makes sense. Didn’t know this was a common experience. Will just go by RPE.

The Garmin Tri and Pro straps are supposed to record HR during swimming, so they should be fine.

They can record the data and download them to the watch AFTER the activity.

Facts right here

I have the Garmin Tri chest strap. It works fine, but it always slides down on my torso whenever I push off the wall after flip turns. So I guess it's not recommended for fast swimmers such as myself.

Swagmeister_69 wrote:

I have the Garmin Tri chest strap. It works fine, but it always slides down on my torso whenever I push off the wall after flip turns. So I guess it's not recommended for fast swimmers such as myself.

Do you feel like its reported HR matches your RPE during swims when it doesn’t slip?

So, I found a trick today that essentially seems to solve my aquajogging HRM problem using just my watch. If you aquajog without using your hands with both fists under your chin and elbows level with the water surface, you get a great hard leg workout as well as a seemingly pretty accurate HR measurement because the wrist is mostly at or just above the water surface.

I tried doing no-hands for the second half of my aqua jog today and my average second half HR was ~160 with 176 max, which roughly matches my RPE and is slightly lower probably because underwater HR generally tends to be lower for a given RPE.

garmin tri/pro chest hr straps can record underwater then send the hr data to supported watches (not all garmins are supported)

also whoop sells a rubber sleeve that goes over the band and keeps it dry so it does record accurately. You could try doing something similar to cover your watch but you wouldnt be able to check time/hr etc while in the water

fast wrote:

also whoop sells a rubber sleeve that goes over the band and keeps it dry so it does record accurately. You could try doing something similar to cover your watch but you wouldnt be able to check time/hr etc while in the water

Thanks, the sleeve actually would work great as I also wear an Apple Watch on the other wrist and don’t need to look at the Coros watch. Can you post a link? I couldn’t find anything on whoop’s website that looks like a rubber sleeve to keep a generic (non-whoop) watch dry. They seem to sell bands for their own watches.

It may be wide enough to fit your watch

Thanks.