Strength training with Garmin Vivoactive 4

I was complaining an awful lot when I first got this thing because a lot of times me and technology do not get along. I do not like signing up for ANYTHING and that was something you had to do. I guess I understand why they do it because data is the most valuable thing in the world right now but at least they gave you the option of not sharing any of your data. Whether they actually uphold their end of the bargain is anyone's guess but I used a fake name and a rarely-used email address anyway so go ahead and sell it I guess.

I reluctantly read the manual and got everything set up and now I am quite enjoying all the things that this watch can do. The thing that kind of amazes me the most is the accuracy of the strength training on the watch.

In the past I have manually entered various sets into an app to log my progress but it was so tedious and time-consuming that my trusty paper notebook was more efficient than this. With the Garmin watch though, it knows my height weight and age and this combined with the heartrate that it constantly reads it is able to come up with some semblance of calories burned, which is something that I have always been curious about as far as weight training is concerned.

The thing that amazes me is that the watch is somehow able to figure out with a relatively high level of accuracy what exercises I am actually doing. I keep testing this on a wide variety of strength exercises and for the most part, it guesses correctly.

On this day I was doing exactly what it says here and is common for me to do these 60% max weight quick lifts just to remind certain body parts that they do not get to rest fully. I take very short breaks between sets and the watch even lets you know how long you have been resting between sets. You do need to press a button when your set is finished and it gets the number of reps wrong every now and then but to me, the fact that it even knows that you are lifting at all is amazing to me, let alone that it can correctly guess what exercise you are doing.

For me, I can't fathom how the watch knows the difference between a bench press and a lat pull-down for example, but it DOES know the difference 80% of the time. I get a bogus readout every now and then but honestly, it doesn't really matter. I am more into the fact that it knows my heartrate, how long I am lifting, and makes an educated guess on how many calories i have burned based on that. I have read and even written about the calorie burning excellence that is weight training but I never really had readouts there were specific to just me.

Despite my initial gripes about how difficult it was to set up we need to keep in mind that I am in my 40's, have never been very keen on staying up to day with the latest and greatest technology, and am quite secretive about providing my information to any company at all. So if you are younger than I am and don't have these fears or limitations, the setup will probably be a breeze to you.

Now this watch isn't cheap by any means but it is by far the most useful piece of exercise equipment that I have ever had. At some point in the future I am going to investigate the internal storage for music and how that can bluetooth to your headphones. This will be useful on a run. Unless you pay for something like Spotify, you cannot have entire podcasts that are on the phone because it has no simcard and I don't know if that is even an option. It might be. You can stream all sorts of stuff from the watch but in order to do that you would need to have your phone with you and I don't know about you but when I go exercise I try to bring as little extra gear with me as possible.

I actually paid more than this for it because I wanted to be able to get help from the retail outlet if I had any problems and you may recall I had some problems that were very frustrating to me to the point where I was nearly ready to walk away from it and return it the next day. I paid around $340 for it after stupid USA tax.

I think that for anyone that is counting calories that this watch is a very good investment in your physical fitness. I even leave it on while I am asleep and it is meant to be telling me if I am getting "quality sleep" or not. I guess that will be the next thing I work on!

So far the Garmin, after a bit of a rocky start, gets two thumbs up from me!