My New Fitness Toy: Garmin Vivoactive

This is my new toy, a gift from The Mr. for our anniversary:
the Garmin Vivoactive

I'm in love!

For my entire life I've been a techie.  While everyone else was rolling their eyes, snoring, or dying of boredom, my dad and I would be talking form, tech, mechanics, and constantly finding ways to improve every activity from water skiing and downhill skiing.  

Good thing I married right: we still can talk tech till the cows come home.

For an incredibly in-depth review, follow this link to DC Rainmaker.  He's an athlete who buys every fitness tech and tests it extensively.  I like his review because he actually buys every item, rather than getting things for free from manufacturers, which allows him to give completely unbiased and truthful reviews on every product on his site.

I'll give you my little rundown of my experience based on the three days I've had mine.

I love the white.  It's cute and wearable at all times.  Except to church, where it looks a little...meh...like I'm trying too hard.

The touch screen is fantastic; highly sensitive, but I'm getting the feel.  I like that there are only two side buttons.

I adore the steps and "move" reminders.  I get stuck on the computer (I've been prompted twice as I madly try to get some content on this blog) and I like to remember to stop being a stump and get up and walk.  I walked 13,000+ steps yesterday!  Take that...

I ran for the first time with it yesterday, and it was spectacularly fun.  I wore my Garmin heart rate chest strap, and it made my 800m repeats slick and brainless.  I could keep track of my pace and keep it up even when I thought I was going to die, which I wasn't even close to doing based on my heart rate.  Yay!

As far as heart rate monitors go, Garmin invented ANT+ technology, so while there are now many Bluetooth HRMs out there, Garmin is going to promote its own, so for now Garmin devices only pair with ANT+.  There are some wrist strap HRMs that are nice if you don't like the chest strap.  The Vivoactive does NOT read heart rate by itself.  This is my ONE negative mark thus far. 

I love that it pairs with my phone via the Garmin Connect app, and it syncs with My Fitness Pal to keep all my fitness related information on once screen on my phone.  This is huge for me.  All visible in one place.  

Another beautiful feature of the Bluetooth pairing is that I can get notifications from my phone on my watch face.  So when my phone is tightly tucked in to the waistband of my workout pants, and is not easily coming out, I can check my watch to see if the text or call I'm getting is vital enough to stop and remove the phone.  Handy!

And the final icing on the cake is that I can also control the music on my phone from the watch face.  No more struggling through the slow song that came at a most in-opportune moment, I can quickly skip to something more inspiring.  Ahhhh!

I have enjoyed getting data on my sleep patterns.  I am having sleep-performance-anxiety: I have never slept with a watch and it is going to take some getting used to.  I don't flat-line as much as I thought I did.  Why do I feel competitive in this aspect of my life?  I want the stillest sleep of everyone I know.  How do I train for this...?  

The Mr., in a gesture of helpfulness, downloaded an IQ app:  an added sugar tracker.  Just tap the screen to add a gram of added sugar.  After 12 taps and reaching 52% of my daily allowance by 10 am, I have probably given up on this particularly unhelpful and anger inducing reminder of how naughty I am.  Any programmer can create an app for Garmin watches, for many activities and generally fun and useless purposes that aren't on the freshly-unboxed watch.  You can explore them on the Garmin Connect site.  I am excited to do so.

I also love the customized nature of all the screens.  I can pick and choose which telemetries I want displayed and how deep I have to scroll to view them.  I can also set alarms to remind me to drink water and eat, create my own run/walk program, choose which notifications I get on the watch during an activity so I can have less distraction, set alarms based on low or high pace or heart rate.  All this will help me reach the goals I have and spend my workouts focused on working out, not changing music, checking my phone, and keeping track of minutes and performance.  Quality, people.  If you're going to spend the time, make it quality.

So far I'm sold.  I have yet to get out on the bike with it, and I'm excited to do so.  I do like to have my cycle-computer on my handlebars so I don't have to take my hand off to read my data, but luckily Garmin makes a bike mount that I can hook the watch to, so I can have it just the way I like it.

If you haven't seen TIME magazine for July 6-13, 2015, it is called the "Answers Issue", and here's a link to the good bits. Eeeek!  I am a TIME magazine groupie. (Why don't we get heart cancer?  The answer is fascinating!) I saw it at the dentist and was so engrossed that I made them sit me up every chance I could so I could read, and I very nearly stuffed it into my purse to take home, thought about asking, then left it on the table with a sigh of regret and a wave goodbye, with a promise to run to Walgreens and see if I can still buy it.  Let's hope.  The main idea of this issue is that it is possible to have too much information, and I wholeheartedly agree, in some cases.  I removed one screen of telemetrics from my running activity because really, who needs that much info during a run?  How much info is too much?  With the Vivoactive you are grown-up enough to decide for yourself.

I am perfectly content with my new toy, and madly collecting data about my everyday life that really no one cares much about.  But it makes me feel empowered and knowledgeable, and that helps me improve.

Here's to improvement and drowning in data!