Garmin VivoActive HR Long Term Review


Vivo on holiday in Sweden

In July 2016 I bought a Garmin VivoActive HR (VAHR) for general activity tracking and more specifically to track my activities on a Stand Up Paddleboard, replacing my ageing Garmin Forerunner 310XT. Soon after purchase I put my thoughts on the unit on my blog here, since then my Vivo has been on my left wrist almost every day, this is an update of how Vivo and I have  got on.

The most important thing to note is that the VAHR I’m wearing as I type is not the unit I bought. My original Vivo failed in April 2016, 9 months after purchase. Luckily for me I’d bought it from a great retailer (Cotswold Outdoor in the UK) and they simply replaced the unit under warrantee. I’m still unsure what happened to my original, in the middle of a Stand Up Paddle session I noticed that the screen was filled with horizontal lines, I left it untouched until I got back to land, washed it off with freshwater and dried it. Still no change, the screen was unresponsive as were the two buttons. After going through all the advice I could find on-line I contacted Garmin and the shop, the shop replied first and I had a replacement the next day. Garmin got back to me a few days later. 



In those 9 months the original unit recorded over 5 million steps, tracked 135 separate activities with a total activity time of over 9 thousand minutes. Those were mostly on a SUP (recorded as ‘Other’ in CSV downloads from Garmin Connect) with a fair numbers of walks, pool swims and some time on the bike.  Through all of these the unit performed well, there was one incident where the unit became unresponsive early on but that was easily resolved with a reset and it didn’t happen again. Pairing with more than one external HR strap was easy and the unit would pick up either without issue. Through all of that the optical HR worked fine recording whenever the watch wasn’t paired with an external device. The accuracy during activities actually improved over time, maybe that was as a result of software updates or maybe my technique with a paddle improved, however it still isn’t as reliable as an external HR strap.

Using Garmin connect has been so easy that it’s hard to find fault with it, not always the case as I used to have a love / hate relationship with it when using older Garmin devices that were not bluetooth enabled. But synching the VAHR through my phone (currently an iPhone 6S) has proved to be pain free, even when left un-synched for several days. Start the Garmin app on the phone, it finds the watch and synchs data, this appears to happen more quickly than friends using different makes of activity tracker on different phones, but there’s no way to easily test that. Once synched both watch and phone let me know they’ve finished. 

Strava Vivo Track

I use Strava, a lot. Not the premium version but the free version. I have set Garmin Connect to automatically synch with Strava, again this happens seamlessly and often the Strava notification is displayed on the VAHR before the Garmin Connect one. Fast, clean and easy. 

Getting a box-fresh replacement meant I had to set it up from scratch which meant I had to think again about what I wanted displayed on screen. For SUP, my primary use for the VAHR. I have found that less is more. Originally I’d set up all available screens and set them to cycle through during the activity. I’ve now changed that to show far less information during the activity as most of the stats are more useful when looking at them on a laptop with a coffee. Now I have three screens set up as follows;
  1. Time of day
  2. Distance and Timer
  3. Heart Rate and Average Speed
Vivo on Dartmoor
These auto scroll at the medium setting, this is for two reasons; when paddling at any speed I don’t want to have to stop paddling to swipe the screen to see a different set of data and more often than not the screen gets wet on the water, then the touch screen isn’t as responsive as it might be. Autoscroll takes care of that. I also have Auto Lap set to 1km with Lap Key set to ‘on’ and an alert set to tell me when my HR goes into zone 5. A simple set up that works well for me. 

Garmin Connect

Great for stats for most people. A recent change means that the desktop application now has a similar look and feel to the mobile app, probably a good thing but in the short term that had me scratching my head initially as I tried to find things that were committed to my mouse and trackpad memory. The mobile app has also had a facelift and Garmin have done a good job improving an app that already worked well. 

Numbers for all activities are clearly displayed and you can drill down into them where appropriate. Graphs are easy to read and datasets can be combined, for example stroke rate and heart rate can be overlaid. There is a degree of intelligence with some of the datasets, when pool swimming Garmin algorithms make a good attempt at working out which stroke was done on each length, it’s only been caught out when I’ve had a rest at the end of a length or when doing leg-only drills. 



There are clear graphs to show Pace, Heart Rate and for SUP Stroke Rate and Distance Per Stroke. These are probably not as accurate as a more specialised (and more expensive) tracking tool would produce but for any paddler looking for some data to monitor their performance the VAHR does the job.

Summary

The VAHR is on my wrist as I type this. It’s an understated but of kit worn everyday as my only watch, it prompts me to move when I've been sat still for too long and it reliably tracks activities when told to. It’s hard to fault something that works exactly as it should.