The Garmin Vivoactive HR is the company’s second stab at its big all-rounder – its everything watch. Across Garmin’s huge range of specialist sports wearables, the Vivoactive HR is the only watch designed to do it all, and bring all those disparate modes together in one fitness watch.
Running, cycling, golf, swimming, fitness tracking, smartwatch notifications and heart rate: they’re all here. Not to mention cross country skiing, indoor cycling, indoor running, indoor rowing and more.
Essential reading: Garmin Vivoactive HR vs Fitbit Blaze
Price when reviewed:
$249.99
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The Vivoactive HR is a Forerunner, Swim, Approach, Fenix and Edge all in one watch, at least to a certain degree. The kind of person who goes on a morning run, hacks 18 holes on the golf course in the afternoon and takes a Sunday walk with the family.It’s the unashamed jack-of-all-trades for the weekend warrior.
But is Garmin’s new everyday sports watch the perfect watch for you? We’ve put the Vivoactive HR to the test to find out what it can really do.
Garmin Vivoactive HR: Design
Our biggest issue with the first Vivoactive was the design – it was possibly the dullest, least stylish black square ever created. It’s dated badly too, and the design actually makes us feel a little queasy in retrospect.
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The new Vivoactive HR’s design is at least more normal – but it’s still a hunk of lifeless black plastic. We just don’t get the logic of why the Vivoactive has to be so… bland. It’s supposed to be the ultimate, everyday watch of the people. Is it just us that refuses to be defined by this plastic obelisk?
When you look a little closer, changes to the Garmin Vivoactive HR become apparent. It’s pretty thick and long, housing the heart rate monitor at the rear and a fairly sizeable battery. It’s also “water resistant” to 5ATM (around 50m), which always adds a bit of bulk.
Garmin’s recent strategy has been to sacrifice screen quality and brightness in favour of longer battery life, which goes a long way to explain the Vivoactive’s lacklustre display. It’s colour (just about) and features a low 205 x 148 pixel resolution. To put that in context, most smartwatches are at least 300 x 300.
It’s fairly hard to read, especially as the display defaults to a dull power saving mode until you interact with the watch, which will fire up the backlight. By default this is set on 3/10 and you can adjust it, although there’s no real need. There’s a flick gesture to switch on the backlight, which can be turned on in the settings and which works about 50% of the time – this can make the watch irritating to use in the dark.
Garmin Vivoactive HR: Features
The Vicoactive HR uses a touchscreen, and you can swipe down through the daily activity and notifications menus. You get an overview of your day followed by steps, intensity minutes, last sport completed, weather report, notifications and heart rate over the last four hours including resting HR. Tapping any of these menus gives you an extra detailed view, so for resting heart rate – for example – you get a seven day average when you tap for more.
For sports, you press the right-hand button at the bottom of the watch, and the list appears. The full list includes: Run, bike, pool swim, golf, walk, row, SUP (paddle board) ski, XC ski, run indoor, bike indoor, walk indoor and row indoor.
It’s an incredible list – and there’s a surprising amount of data involved in each mode. You get pace, distance, HR and cadence for running, but also ascent for skiing, distance for indoor running. Very few of the modes are just standard stopwatches.
Aside than sports tracking there’s also a host of smart functionality, with the watch able to show notifications from your smartphone, as well as some limited connected features such as weather forecasts on the wrist.
Garmin Vivoactive HR: Sports tracking
We’ll get through testing as many of the different modes as possible in due course, but for the purpose of this review, we’re sticking to running, swimming and golf. Most of the other modes ape these features, and those modes are most important in terms of making comparisons and testing accuracy.
When running, tracking is a fairly standard affair: you get pace, cadence, heart rate and the obvious pace/distance data. It falls short of a dedicated Forerunner by neglecting to add more advanced details such as VO2 Max or recovery details, but for most runners, it’s a decent set of metrics.
Of course, the big addition here is heart rate, delivered thanks to the Elevate (Garmin’s own tech) sensor under the watch. It’s a standard optical sensor that looks for the blood pulsing under your skin, and just like the scores of devices out there that promise the same, it does a fairly decent job.
Out on longer runs it kept within 2bpm of a chest strap, making it a perfectly acceptable indicator of how hard we worked. Throughout a steady run, which did involve a fair amount of hill work, the Garmin lasered onto the chest strap with impressive accuracy. We use Strava to track our runs, which Garmin syncs with, and the heart rate data unlocks all manner of new features, which just makes the whole experience more detailed. In short, heart rate is great.
But as we’ve proved, optical is a long way from being ECG on the wrist. The tech is prone to totally breaking down at high intensity and the Vivoactive HR is no different. Just compare the two graphs below of a short interval session versus a chest strap, which show the smooth curves of the strap versus the freaking out optical.
While it was flawless during steady exercise, as we added bursts of activity to our workout and our heart rate soared to 190 the Vivoactive stalled at around 165. It seemed paralysed there and when we returned to rest and the chest strap detected heart rate falling back to 150, the Vivoactive still lagged behind.
In short: it’s great for general running, but if you want to start tracking intervals, you’ll need to invest in a chest strap to pair with the Vivoactive.
Garmin watches have been cleaning up in our swimming tests too, and the Vivoactive HR features all the same modes that ensured the original Vivoactive aced our pool review just two months ago. It’ll track lengths, distance, pace, stroke count/rate, calories – and it’s one of the most reliable devices out there.
For cyclists, you’ll get standard GPS data on speed and distance, but the Vivoactive will pair with Garmin’s range of bike sensors, so serious cyclists are catered for.
Garmin Vivoactive HR: Golf tracking
A Garmin golf watch will easily set you back around £200/$200, so having the feature baked into a standard sports watch is a big draw for weekend hackers.
We tested it out on the course, and as you’d expect from Garmin, it works well. You get distances to the front, back and middle – and you can call up a map of the green and check lay-up distances too. A live score card is also available as well.
The only real bugbear is that unlike on dedicated golf watches, you have to download the course data on your phone before you play, and then pair the two devices in order to start. It’s a bit of a fiddly process, and prone to breaking down. We ended up trying to sort it out while walking down the first fairway, which isn’t ideal.
Of course, you don’t get the whizz-bang features of the new Approach S2 or Approach X40. There’s no automatic shot detection (which doesn’t work properly anyway) and it doesn’t sync up with the TruSwing. But for runners/cyclists who golf, it’s a good mix of features, even if there’s a pay off in usability.
Garmin Vivoactive HR: Swim tracking
Like its predecessor, the Vivoactive HR is waterproof to 5ATM (up to 50 metres) and it’s already equipped with a dedicated swim tracking mode. There’s no open water option like you get on more expensive Garmin watches like the Fenix 3. This is built for jumping in your local pool only.
Getting up and running is as straightforward as tracking a run or a bike ride. Hit the right physical button below the screen and tap on the Pool Swim tracking mode. For first time swimmers, it’ll let you select the pool size (25/50m) including a custom size option and it’ll set this to default the next time you jump in the pool.
The screen inverts giving you data fields for interval time, interval distance, total time and distance. The optical heart rate monitor is disabled as it’s not much use in the water. It’s the same story with the touchscreen, although you can use the physical buttons to mark lap intervals.
We put it up against the TomTom Spark’s swim tracker mode, which we’ve found reliable for accuracy in the pool. There was some noticeable differences in distance recorded with a 1o stroke difference for average stroke rates. What you do get with the Vivoactive HR is a pretty respectable collection of metrics including pace, speed and moving time indicating when you’ve taken breaks within the session. There’s also graphs breaking down pace, strokes and your SWOLF score. Even if swimming is not your primary reason for using the Vivoactive HR, there’s plenty of data to tap into and it’s a solid performer in the water.
Garmin Vivoactive HR: Activity tracking
Garmin has really nailed activity tracking, and it’s become a big feature of its current line-up of specialist sports watches.
In terms of detail and accuracy, it’s probably one of the best activity trackers on the market. Steps are recorded and movable goals are automatically calculated, so the longer you use it for, the smarter (and more difficult) your goals will be.
As well as step tracking it will also keep tabs on your active minutes and the move bar is a neat way of alerting you to sedentary habits, if you feel like you need a kickstart to get away from your desk. As the move bar fills, you’ll need to get out of your chair to clear it.
However, it’s the way Garmin treats heart rate that’s the real triumph. As we bleat on about endlessly at Wareable, resting heart rate is one of the key metrics for monitoring your fitness. As it gets lower you are getting fitter.