Review of Garmin Vivoactive

I'm a fan of the biggest loser show.  I do appreciate the fact that it's promoting wellness, but instead of measuring success purely by the number on the scale, a more productive and useful measure would be a measure of body fat percentage.  Just because the number on the scale is down, doesn't mean its a step in the right direction.  But all that aside, I saw that they gave all the contestants a Garmin Vivo active watch which tracks all their exercise, including their swimming.

Two weeks ago I lost my watch at SDRC (and someone decided to keep it rather than turn it in at the lost and found).  I fastened it to the lane line to get a temp reading and then forgot about it.  So I needed a new watch.  So I picked up this one.

When I'm doing laps and need to peek real quick to get a reminder of where I am, it's easier to read this display rather than the Garmin Forerunner watch I also use.  I like how it connects to my phone with updates of how well I'm sleeping, as well.

The watch face can be one of several that you can download from the website.  I chose Actiface which shows a measure of my calorie burn over the past week.

The green in the graph is the calorie burn,
and the white line is the number of steps
The graph on the right is the number of steps
for the day and the step goal adjusts based on your history
and your average.  Mine keeps incrementing every
day since I'm doubling the default step goal.

The watch does have GPS, which I've disabled since I'm not doing any exercises outside right now, and the GPS turned on drains the battery.  I can go about 5 days on a full charge, but I just put it on the charger at work for about a half hour when I get in and it never gets below 80%.  Out of curiousity I noticed that the Swim setting don't allow me to set "Open Water", like my Forerunner.  After researching it, the vivoactive doesn't allow for measuring open water swimming.  The GPS is disabled for open water, and it's simply a pool watch.  Not a big deal since I have the forerunner.  But if this were my only sports watch, I'd actually get the forerunner instead so that I can measure my open water swims.

I like how it uploads to Garmin Express and puts my workout online.  Just like the Forerunner, it doesn't measure kick sets or one arm fly (when the leading arm is the watch arm).  

Yesterday I had the day off work so I took the kids with me to Rush and swam 5500 yards.  The boys swam about 2000 yards of it, and Lucy swam the whole thing with me.  100-1000 ladder

This morning I swam at SDRC and did:

Warmup: 500 easy, 200 kick no fins, 300 IM

Main Set: 

    8 x 50's kick with fins on :50

    12 x 100's on 1:30 (all around 1:20)

    4 x 200's free on 3:00

    2 x 400's pull large paddles on 6:00

    1000 snorkel freestyle

    5 x 100's free on 1:30

Cooldown: 300 easy

Total: 6,000 yards