We are all caught up in making a living day after day, shift on top of shift. Trying to stay on top of things, keep’s us focused on getting our work done. And in a timely fashion. Doing this we sometimes neglect the fact that we need to be active on a regular basis, and we can’t be active while we’re sitting at a desk, pounding a keyboard trying to get that report off. We keep track of the deadlines we are faced with, but usually, we’re NOT keeping track of how much physical activity we do, or don’t do on a daily basis.

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We know full well that we need to be physical, each day, every day! It’s important to our living a healthy life. And physical exercise is important as it can also help us with the daily stress that life throws our way too. Today’s technology can provide a helpful nudge in getting us up off of our chairs and moving around as much as we can while we’re at work. Or after work, instead of walking out to that parking lot and getting into our cars, we can choose to walk around that parking lot a few times at lunch or take our lunch time and walk a few blocks at a good enough pace to increase our heart rates. Getting back to today’s technology, there is a device that’s simple enough, but advanced enough to even remind us to get up and get moving. It’s called the Garmin Vivofit 3 Activity Tracker  The Vívofit 3 features a red move bar that appears on the display. This is to indicate all your movements. It also indicates inactivity and even offers a friendly reminder to get off your backside and get moving again. After every 1 hour of inactivity Vívofit® 3 will notify you with a gentle alert sound, just to keep you on your toes.

This little wrist-based tracker goes a long way to keeping you honest in promoting a more active lifestyle. The Vívofit 4 comes with Move IQ, which recognizes your activities and the changes in your movements. All your activities including walking, running, swimming, biking etc are captured by Vívofit 4. Additionally, you won’t even have to enter changes manually on your watch when you start a new activity. The watch itself knows how you move. You can later access this data in detail on Garmin Connect.

And what is Garmin Connect? Its basically a community of other like-minded fitness people that are able to upload, depending on the devices they have, automatically to the Garmin Connect app. It’s the only online community created specifically for Garmin device users. It’s basically an online training tool that allows you to analyze and share your data once its uploaded.

The Garmin Connect app will deliver consequential and attainable goals to you, recommended just for you. It will also remind you to move if in case you lose track of time and lag behind in meeting your daily goals, this watch will act as your conscious to help you stay active to maintain your goals.

Additionally, it includes health tips from experts so that you can have your virtual trainer and coach with you at all times in the form of a watch.  Not too shabby for  a wrist based tracker, right?

The Garmin Vivosmart 3 is slim, very comfortable to wear, has a built-in heart-rate monitor and is fully waterproof. It's loaded with extra features, including stress-level measurements, VO2 Max readings, and a rep counter. It also shows notifications from your phone.

It's heart-monitor capability with 24-7 monitoring adds new, smarter features while returning to the slimmer design and hidden display of the original Vivosmart. It's a nice improvement and very comfortable to wear. Like its predecessor, this model is waterproof and features 24-7 heart-rate monitoring. It automatically tracks activity, including steps, floors climbed, calories burned, intensity minutes, sleep and more. As part of that 24-7 monitoring, the device will measure your heart-rate variability and translate it into a stress level, then prompt you to breathe and relax when that level is elevated. With its ultra-slim design, you get higher end fitness-tracking tools such as VO2 max and fitness age, all-day stress tracking and a rep counter when pumping iron, doing push-ups or pull ups.

Battery life is rated at up to 5 days of use between charges, which we confirmed in our testing. As with most fitness trackers, this one comes with a proprietary charging cable (it clamps onto the watch), not a standard Micro-USB cable.

This is the first product in the Garmin Vivo family to estimate VO2 max, a measurable indication of aerobic performance that was previously available only in higher-end Garmin running watches. Your VO2 max score translates into a fitness level, ranging from poor to superior, and it's also used to calculate your fitness age, "a  metric that puts a user's fitness level in terms of an age."

Overall, we liked the feel of the Vivosmart 3, particularly its light, slim design, and thought both the touchscreen and the device were pretty responsive. We found it more comfortable to wear than the Fitbit Charge 3 and liked that we didn't have to worry about jumping into the pool or another body of water with the device on. It really is great for wearing all day, every day.

Why not try it for yourselves and see if you agree that this tracker could be just what you, or a family member could use to get started on the path to being more active, and in turn, healthier!

We live in a society that is obsessed with having the latest and greatest of just about everything. From the latest iPhone, regardless of the cost. I’m no judge but I may think more than twice or three times before shelling out a grand for a phone that when you get past all the bells and whistles, we ALL started off just looking into getting something that we could make just make calls with right?

The same can be said for our cars, whether it’s a Sedan, SUV, or Truck. They can do just about everything from parking themselves into a hard to get into parking space (whatever happened to practicing a “K” turn in order to pass a driving’s test)?.

And the same is happening to our fitness trackers as well. Now, don’t get me wrong. Technology is a great thing. It’s taken us from a static world to one that just about any kind of information is available to us within virtually seconds, or Nanoseconds (What’s a Nano? :)). Fitness watches have come such a long way from just telling time and tracking our steps and the calories burned, like a fancy pedometer. Now, you can track your VO2 levels, your target heart performance zones, even your stress levels, that may go up and down depending on whether your boss, significant other is on your case again.

Let’s face it, these days we expect running/activity watches to be more than distance and pace trackers. Increasingly, we want them to coach us too, with insights on how to improve form and train smarter.

It’s why the latest devices offer ever-more-detailed running dynamics, heart rate analysis and training feedback. It’s why you’d also think that a watch launched more than two years ago might struggle to keep up. But, not so dear reader. Let's take a look at the Garmin Forerunner 235 . Let’s be clear, there are more watches out there that are loaded with the latest and greatest that technology can offer, Garmin Forerunner 645 for a start, which means the 235 isn’t even close to the latest Garmin watch money can buy, but before you click away in a fit of I gotta have the latest and greatest fitness watch out there, it’s worth giving the Forerunner 235 a closer look, because this is a powerful watch with a lot going for it. Not the least its price!

Because of the Forerunner 235’s has been around for a while, you can pick it up much cheaper than its original launch cost of about $329.99, based on various vendors pricing structure. It launched toward the end of 2015, so it's almost three years old now.

We’ve seen it drop below its original price for a while now, so if you’re looking for lots of run-tracking capability but on a budget, this pricing drop should make it a very attractive option.

Let's go back over the features of the Garmin Forerunner 235  Built-in GPS and Strapless Heart Rate, the Garmin Forerunner 235 is a must-have for any fitness person who is looking for valuable feedback during a run or post run or hardworking exercise routine.

GPS Running Watch with Wrist-based Heart Rate
Tracks distance, pace, time, heart rate and more
Connected features: automatic uploads to Garmin Connect, live tracking, audio prompts, smart notifications, and social media sharing
Activity tracking counts daily steps, distance, calories, and sleep
Download data fields, watch faces, widgets, and applications from Connect IQ
Crisp color screen
Comfortable silicone strap, which is also interchangeable

Sport watches are rarely stylish and though the Forerunner 235 is still unmistakably a Garmin, it’s among the better-looking run trackers you can buy. It comes in three color combinations: black and frost blue, black and red and black and grey, and there’s some smart subtlety to the latter two.

There’s a classic round-faced, 1.23-inch diameter color screen that’s crisp and easy to read in most light, with enough real estate to display up to four stats on two customizable screens.

No touch screen but you get five side buttons to navigate your way through Garmin’s relatively simple menus.

The perforated soft silicone strap makes for a more comfortable, less sweaty run, particularly useful over longer distances and considering you’ll need to wear this a little tighter on the wrist to get the best accuracy from the built-in optical heart rate sensor.

The buttons are responsive and easy enough to use on the move though and the whole thing weighs in at just 42g, which makes it one of the lighter watches you can strap on.

Forerunner 235 Heart rate:
Useful 24/7 heart rate tracking
VO2 Max scores

The Garmin Forerunner 235 tracks heart rate (HR) from the wrist, though you can also pair ANT+ chest straps if you prefer the high-accuracy this brings.

This tracker was one of the earlier devices to embrace the Mio optical heart rate sensors in favor of Garmin Elevate sensor technology.

Compare the 235 against the Polar M430 over a range of tests, including a marathon distance run.

The devices performed fairly consistently. Garmin clocked the average HR at 154bpm and Max HR at 179bpm while the Polar M430 registered a 154bpm average but a Max HR of 172bpm. Anecdotally during the run the Polar seemed to run at 3-4bpm lower than the Garmin.
Both devices offer resting heart rate (RHR) tracking and when we came to compare them, both gave identical readings but the way Garmin highlights this hugely useful benchmark for health and fitness is much better.

In fact, the continuous 24/7 heart rate tracking on the Forerunner 235 is one of the best we’ve seen for monitoring your progress and spotting things like potential over-training and incoming colds.

With the touch of a button you get a read out of your current heart rate, highs and lows, your average RHR and a visual showing the last 4 hours. You can then tap for a chart of your RHR over the last 7 days.

Resting heart rate high that morning? That’s a sign you might want to skip a training session or ease off the intensity, and the Forerunner 235 makes that a much easier decision. This is definitely an added bonus when seeing a potential problem that you can alert a physician too, if it becomes a regular occurrence!

Run tracking and running metrics:
GPS locks on quickly
Accuracy seems reasonable
There are four sports modes: Run, Run Indoor, Cycle and Other, and it’s really useful that you can customize two data screens with up to four fields to create your own preferred displays for each of these.

Indoor runs are tracked by the onboard accelerometer while GLONASS and GPS provide the usual outdoor pace, distance and speed metrics. In our treadmill test, the Garmin was within 5% on total distance, though unsurprisingly the pacing rarely matched the treadmills.

Outdoors we consistently see a rapid GPS fix, though when it came to accuracy there were some question marks. For example, on our marathon test, running an officially measured course, the Forerunner 235 clocked our distance at 41.96km, short of the 42.195km. But again, stacked up against watches of a far greater price range, this was within an acceptable level.

In addition to distance, time, pace and calories, during your run, or rigorous exercise routines like HITT or CrossFit training, you can also see cadence, heart rate, and heart rate zone and there are customizable audio and vibrating alerts to help guide you on target pace and heart rate.

You can store up to 200 hours of activity on the watch itself giving you plenty of data should you wish to dig for insights from your past runs or fitness routines from the wrist, though with instant updates via your smartphone’s Bluetooth to Garmin Connect you might not need that.

How Active You Are:
Tracks your steps and distance all day
Shows how active you've been at a glance
The Forerunner 235 isn’t just a running watch, it’s also a comprehensive activity tracker that learns your daily patterns and automatically sets your step goals to strive for.

The main screen features an inactivity bar that creeps around the watch face when you’re on your backside, plus the accelerometer will keep tabs on your overall step count and distance covered during the day. All of which you can access with two taps of the left-hand arrow button to take you to a display.


Battery life and charging
Enough battery to last an average week!
The proprietary charger like all other Garmins
When it comes to endurance, Garmin claims the Forerunner 235 can last up to 9 days in watch mode and up to 11 hours in GPS mode with the heart rate monitor in use.

It was tested over a normal training week starting on Sunday with a long 1.5-hour run, with three short midweek runs of up to an hour and then normal daily usage in between. It performed well and did all we expected it to do, then we put it back on the charging dock before the following week’s Sunday run.

We also tried it out on a marathon, taking it off the dock at 6.30am on race day. It had no trouble tracking a 4-hour marathon and made it through to Wednesday with normal activity tracking and smartphone notifications on before it finally died. It’s more than capable of coping with an average training week, and it could potentially handle a 100km ultra for faster runners.

Bottom Line:
The Garmin Forerunner 235 delivers enough training insights to satisfy runners at most levels, right up to those shooting for personal bests at the faster end of the pack.

It’s a great tool for those who take performance at least semi-seriously more than casual fitness enthusiasts, as there are cheaper options for those who really only want to know how far, fast and hard they’ve worked.

The 11-hour battery life could potentially make it suitable for faster ultra-runners tackling runs up to 100km, but its skills are more suited to tarmac than the trail.

The Forerunner 235 has carried itself well during the past 3 years. This is a great running tool that’s still very competitive. In fact, if you don’t care about some of the more complex running dynamics we’re seeing offered on newer models, then this should definitely be the one you should consider strapping on your own wrist.

The following post is a little redo of one that we did previously, but we added a few points and wanted to just put it out there for anyone who is considering to invest in a good reliable tracking HRM, that will provide them with all they need to help them on their way to a healthier lifestyle.

Ever take in a local marathon race? Have you noticed that the serious runners are all decked out wearing the latest gear including compression socks, technical shirts, iPods, Garmin’s and yes heart rate monitors, or HRM ’s as they are called.

Do you know how to get the most out of your workout using a heart rate monitor? Unfortunately, most runners and those into fitness training don’t either, or rather they may not use them as effective as they should.

But you may ask, why really use a heart rate monitor?? One of the best reasons is to track your endurance, against your heart rate but the most important reason to use one is that they can ensure you recover properly!

Most runners overdo their easy runs (and fail to run hard enough on their fast workout days), thus undercutting their recovery and going into important workouts or races with too much fatigue.
The right heart rate monitor training can help you avoid this – enabling smarter training, better recovery, and ultimately faster racing. More importantly, since you won’t be pushing yourself too hard when you should be prioritizing recovery, you’re less likely to get an injury from demanding too much of your body too soon.

Not every run lends itself to heart rate monitor training. It wouldn’t make sense to wear an HRM for a 5k specific track workout. You have to choose your workouts wisely; fortunately, three types of workouts are perfect.

Tempo Runs: This is the obvious one – almost every runner does a tempo run with some regularity (or should!) and can easily incorporate a heart rate monitor. Tempo runs are done at about 85-90% of your maximum heart rate. After determining your max HR, so you can program your HRM to beep whenever your HR creeps over or under the range that corresponds to 85-90% of your max.

It doesn’t help you to run faster than your target heart range during a tempo run, so make sure you stay within your personal limits. When you run faster, you exceed your lactate threshold (This is the point at which your body goes from aerobic running to anaerobic running – or without oxygen) and the workout isn’t as effective. Don’t turn tempo runs into races.
So what’s your maximum heart rate?

A better way to determine your max HR is to wear your heart rate monitor for a very hard work out and note the highest Beats per Minute (BPM) that it records. Make sure that your workout is tough because you need to really challenge yourself to get an accurate maximum reading.

Heart Rate Recovery Workouts: A constant question among runners is, “how much time do I take for recovery in-between intervals?” It’s a great question and it depends on when you are in the training cycle.

If you want to prioritize your performance on each interval and start each one fully rested, you can use your heart rate to guide the recovery time.
Here’s what to do:
Wear your heart rate monitor for the entire workout! When you finish an interval, keep jogging easy, (or walk) until your heart rate reaches about 65-70% of your Maximum Heart Rate. Start the next interval only when your heart rate has recovered to an easy effort level.

This type of workout ensures you’re not starting the next interval too soon. Your heart rate won’t lie – it tells you exactly how hard your body is working to deliver oxygen to your muscles.

Need extra recovery from that last tough interval? Just glance at your heart rate and you’ll know when to start your next repetition.

Recovery Runs: Your shortest run per week – typically the day before or after your long run or a race, isn’t meant to gain fitness. Instead, these strategic runs help you maintain your weekly mileage while being a form of active recovery. So, running too fast is counter-productive but unfortunately, its something almost all of us do. This is an all-important element of your training. Your body needs a period of rest, (less strenuous exercise), to help it recover and allow it to grow accustomed to the rigors you’re putting it through.

Not only are you allowing your body (heart, muscles, connective tissue) to recover, but also your brain. Most of us only think about the physical side of recovery, but the brain needs time to rest as well. Remember, easy runs keep you on point and your enthusiasm high so that you won't mind training hard on the days that matter!

Now, for this example of why using a heart rate monitor is an important part of your training regimen, we concentrated on runners. But by no means is using a heart rate monitor used exclusively for those who run. Any person engaged in vigorous physical activity will benefit from knowing their heart rate during and after they expend their energy.

Those who train for any sport can benefit from using a heart rate monitor, another example of using one during a training session would be those that engage in CrossFit training or HIIT training. Both of these exercise routines engage in intense workouts that push your body to its limits for an intense workout in a short period of time. Knowing what your heart rate is during that workout and also important while you're at rest, can go a long way from knowing your body's limits and when you need to provide that all-important resting period.

Now, choosing a good heart rate monitor is always a matter of personal choice, but our recommendation for those that engage in high-end physical training and take their exercise seriously would be the Garmin Forerunner 935 Multi-Sport GPS Watch. Whether you are a triathlete, trail runner, HIIT fanatic or just a person who wants to get the most out of their workout by knowing your numbers, you cannot pass up on the Forerunner 935xt. Super concise data is an athlete's best friend and with the Forerunner 935, you'll have all of the data you need. Multi-Sport dynamics (Running, Swimming, and Cycling), VO2 Max, wrist-based heart rate, recovery time, race predictor, and more. The 935 also offers you more ways than ever to store and track your data. Use automatic uploads to Garmin Connect, or use Strava live segments to turn every run into a virtual race. The FR935 is truly the most powerful Forerunner ever.

So, there you have it, our version on the "Skinny" on why and how a heart rate monitor works for you by providing you with the necessary information on how well your body is performing during those intense workouts you’re putting it through.

We hope this helps offers some insights on why you should be using a heart rate monitor and if you have any questions, as always, our staff here at HeartRateMonitorsUSA.com are here to help.