So, yesterday I finally got my Midnight Blue Garmin Forerunner 735XT. I decided to fork out hundreds of dollars to get this watch because it has soooooo many cool features. I thought I’d give you an insight into some of the features I have discovered so far.

Activity Tracking

So this watch tracks your steps, distance walked, heart rate (optical) and calories burned (not ideal for Australians but that’s okay). I am a huge fan of activity tracking as I love challenging myself to reach a step goal each day, as I believe even though doing an extra 2000 steps one day to reach your goal of 10,000 isn’t going to help you burn 200 extra calories that day, it will overtime add up. Imagine pushing yourself to do an extra 2000 steps each day for a month, that is an extra 60,000 steps in a month, which is a fair few extra calories burned.

Heart Rate

So this watch tracks your heart rate through an optical sensor, however it can also be connected to a Heart Rate strap.

The Optical Heart Rate Sensor built into the watch is a pretty accurate depiction of your day to day heart rate and is a good indicator of the fluctuations of heart rate during a run.

When connected to the Heart Rate strap there are a few extra added features which excite the sport science lover in me. However, I wasn’t smart enough to buy the strap unfortunately, so I think when I have the money I will invest in this. So the Heart Rate strap allows you to use Strava’s Stress Score which gives you a score out of 20 telling you how hard you worked during your activity, hence telling you when you need to work harder. It also gives you an estimate of your VO2 Max, which is a measure of how fit you are and it will increase as you get fitter, Lactate Threshold, Recovery Advisor and Race Predictor which helps to give you an indication of how fast you can go in a race based on your current fitness. It also has a sensor in it to track things like stride length, cadence and ground contact time.

Workout Tracking

The watch has several different types of tracking and can track soooooo many sports.

It also tells you how many intensity minutes you complete during a week, showing if you have gotten your heart rate up enough times in that week.

So the watch tracks running (outdoor and indoor), cycling (indoor and outdoor), swimming (pool and open water), strength work, cardio, rowing, SUP and many other sports. There are also apps you can add on to the watch to track other sports and to track other aspects of a workout.

You are also able to adjust the screens that you view in a workout to display a wide range of stats about your workout like % HR max and muscle oxygen consumption.

Add on Apps

So perhaps the biggest aspect that Garmin have added to help compete with other brands of sports watched like Apple and Tom Tom is the fact that you can add apps to customise how your watch works, like there is one app that lets you set your clock face up so the numbers fill up with colour as you move towards one of your goals, like a step goal. I am yet to use any of these as I want to learn the basics of the watch first, so I will look into this further.

Notifications

I literally receive EVERY SINGLE NOTIFICATION from my watch. This is pretty awesome I think and because the bluetooth is soo good I can be down the other end of my house and it will still pick up notifications. The watch even tells me how long it will take to get to a place that I have in my calendar based on the traffic, like who even thinks of that!!!

Downfalls

Now the only thing I don’t like so far is the fact that when it goes into power saving mode it vibrates to tell me it is doing so and has a 30 second countdown and then proceeds to vibrate every 10 seconds until it is in power saving mode. This can be very annoying when I am falling off to sleep as the Do Not Disturb mode doesn’t stop the vibrations.

It also has a weather widget, which is cool, except I don’t think it is very accurate even though the app knows my location.

All in all I think this watch is going to be a great investment and a good tool for my PT course!

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask me!!!

Love Caite xx