Biostrap Review

The Biostrap is a fairly new device within the fitness tracking market.  Most people probably haven’t heard of Biostrap because you can’t buy it in stores or on Amazon but only directly from Biostrap.  The device features a 3 axis accelerometer, gyro, and is 5 ATM waterproof,  It also packs a clinical grade red+infrared PPG heart rate sensor that measures heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, heart rate variability, and sleep analysis.  Also, depending on which package you purchase, a shoe clip comes with the Biostrap.  You see, one of the main features of Biostrap is it can automatically classify certain activities that you perform.  The shoe clip helps the device to further determine what activity you’re engaging in and therefore, more accurately track that activity as it packs a 3-axis accelerometer and gyro.

Daily Use

The Biostrap is actually a “pod” itself that you put inside of a band which you then strap onto your wrist.  The pod is pretty secure within the band.  The band however, doesn’t stay so secure on your wrist.  The clasp on the band has come undone numerous times causing the band to fall off my wrist.  Luckily I haven’t lost the device but I can clearly see how someone could easily lose it.  The Biostrap is so comfortable on your wrist you can forget it’s there.  Which means, when Biostrap comes off of your wrist, you might not notice.  I quick search of the internet and you’ll see that many people have lost their devices and complained about this.  Biostrap has recognized this problem and released a new band with a better clasp, but it cost $30.  EDIT: I lost my Biostrap due to the faulty clasp.  It fell off my wrist while bar hopping for my birthday and I wasn’t able to find it.  Since Biostrap is waterproof, you don’t have to take it off except to charge it.  This allows you to get a more complete view of your health and track your activity and movement.  Note that you only wear the shoe clip when you’re about to perform some type of activity or workout.  There is no display on the Biostrap, so you have to get all of your health related information within the app. Syncing the device is a real pain.  The sync process takes way too long and many times when you’re syncing the device the connection drops.  You can have the pod literally sitting next to your phone and the device will drop the connection while syncing.  Additionally, the battery life isn’t stellar.  I average about two days of battery before I need to charge it, but I work out every day usually twice a day.  Overall, Biostrap tracks your steps, sleep, active calories, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation.  These measurements are all displayed once you open up the app.  Additionally, the app will give you activity level recommendations based on your sleep, resting heart rate and heart rate variability measurements.

 

Sleep Tracking

Sleep tracking offers up a wealth of knowledge.  During sleep is when Biostrap takes the most important readings and gives you feedback in regard to your readiness to exert yourself working out.  The sleep page gives you a sleep score, provides a break out of the time spent in the different sleep stages, resting heart rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep latency and sleep disturbances.  It also charts your heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen saturation, and respiratory rate which are all captured while you sleep.  Simply beautiful.  There is one major problem with the sleep tracking.  Biostrap doesn’t automatically track sleep.  You have to start and stop this activity within the app similar to how you would track an activity (workout).  This is a huge pain as sometimes you’ll definitely forget to start and stop the sleep tracking.  And you can’t go back and add a missed sleep session or modify a sleep session.  Also, syncing sleep is another pain point.  The app takes forever to sync the sleep and constantly loses the connection.  I’ve had times where it lost my sleep data because Biostrap wouldn’t sync properly.  I hope Biostrap figures this out because as I said earlier, the most important readings are taken while you’re sleeping.  EDIT: Biostrap released an update that enables the device to automatically track sleep.

Fitness Tracking

For Biostrap to track your fitness activity, you have to open up the app and select the activity you’re about to participate in and start the activity.  To get the most out of the activity tracking you’ll want to wear the shoe clip.  Biostrap does NOT track your heart rate while exercising.  I really have no idea why they don’t track heart rate, but you can pair the Biostrap with a Bluetooth heart rate monitor and use it to track heart rate during exercise.  Personally, I think it’s very important to know your heart rate during exercise and I hope Biostrap enables this feature with a software update.  In the meantime, I use Biostrap with the Polar OH1 forearm strap.  Let me explain why this is so important.  One day I played basketball for an hour and forty minutes or so and I tracked the activity with the Biostrap, Whoop and Fitbit Iconic (reviews for those coming soon!).  I played 5 vigorous full court games on a high school sized court.  The Biostrap reported 375 calories burned.    The Whoop reported 1,126 calories burned while the Iconic reported 1,105 calories burned.  That is a huge discrepancy in the calories burned and I can only assume it’s because Biostrap can’t tell that my heart is pounding from the constant stop and go sprinting.  Big miss by Biostrap, but again, you can correct this by wearing some type of heart rate strap.  But honestly, it somewhat defeats the purpose of buying a wrist based optical heart rate device.

If you select the general “workout” category (there are many to choose from), Biostrap will automatically classify your activity.  Additionally, you can train Biostrap to recognize certain activities.  For example, in weight training sessions Biostrap usually classifies exercises as upper or lower body exercises.  You can train the device to recognize a bench press or bicep curl rather than just and upper body exercise.  Once you’ve completed a workout and gone through the horrible sync process, you can view a workout and its corresponding data.  Within the workout data, I appreciate that the app shows active time vs rest/inactive time and active calories burned.  It would be nice if Biostrap had a screen that you can view and see your workout progress real time.

 

Conclusion:

The Biostrap is a cutting edge device.  There aren’t many devices that track heart rate variability in a measurable way that can be used to determine your readiness to perform.  Not to mention the ability to capture blood oxygen saturation and respiratory rate.  Biostrap falls short on some fairly basic things like the wrist strap, active heart rate monitoring and Bluetooth syncing issues.  Many of these things can be remedied with software and firmware updates, which lead me to feel like Biostrap was rushed to production.

Pros:

  • Water proof
  • Tracks multiple types of activities with automatic tracking classification
  • PPG heart rate monitor allowing for heart rate variability, blood oxygen saturation and respiratory rate monitoring
  • Tracks recovery with recommendations for exercise exertion and sleep improvements
  • Shoe clip to help track exercises
  • Ability to train the device and create custom exercise library
  • Comfortable to wear

 

Cons:

  • No GPS
  • Wrist strap/clasp not secure
  • No active heart rate monitoring during exercise (can pair a Bluetooth HR monitor)
  • Syncing issues between the device and app
  • Manual sleep tracking (FIXED)
  • Shoe clip (have to remember to bring it for workouts and an item to potentially lose)
  • No screen/display
  • No phone notifications
  • Battery life could be better

 

Is it worth buying?  Maybe.  If you’re a fitness enthusiast who works out frequently and you’re concerned with recovery and you know or understand what HRV, SPO2, and respiratory rates are all about and how they affect recovery.  If you don’t, Biostrap does a good job of explaining them and why they’re important.  But I say this because I feel like the device was rushed to production.  It’s missing a few basic things that are essential or downright mandatory.  That isn’t to say that these won’t be added with firmware updates and improved pod housing.  But again, there aren’t many devices that track HRV out right now AND use that information to help keep you informed of your health and readiness to train.  Whoop does this but it cost a small fortune.  LifeTrak ZoomHRV does this also at a much cheaper price but I haven’t used the device so I can’t speak to it. Also, I’d like to note that their technical support team is superb.  I had an instance where the device deleted one of my workouts and the support team reached out to me to let me know they were troubleshooting the issue before I could reach out to notify them.

I think the future is bright for Biostrap but I can’t whole heartedly recommend this device.  The faulty clasp alone is enough to warrant looking elsewhere.  I love the data provided by Biostrap but can’t justify buying another device knowing all the issues it has and the fact that the clasp isn’t strong enough to keep it on my wrist.  I think Biostrap needs to fix the glaring issues with the device via updates and start to include the new wrist strap with the device or we’ll be waiting for Biostrap 2 to address these issues.

 

Thanks for reading!

by Categories: Activity Trackers, Exercise, Fitness Trackers 3 Comments

Garmin Vivoactive 3 Review

 

The Vivoactive 3 is an upgrade to the Vivoactive HR which was released back in 2016. Not much has changed from the 2016 version to the new version.  The Vivoactive 3 (Va3) has optical wrist based heart rate monitoring; on board GPS for tracking your runs, walks, cycling, etc.; full water proofing (5ATM) for swim tracking; ability to track multiple sports and fitness activities with customizable data screens; “apps” available for download in the Connect IQ store.  You would expect it to have these features given they were on the previous model.  What sets the Va3 apart from the Vivoactive HR (vHR) is the addition of Garmin Pay, all day Stress Tracking with guided breathing, VO2 max and fitness age estimations, and finally the ability to track your gym workout sets and reps which I think works in conjunction with MoveIQ.  Yeah, I think that’s it.  Since everything else on the Va3 is virtually the same as with the vHR, and I’ve already written a review on the vHR, I’ll focus only on the new functionality.

Garmin Pay

At the time of my testing, Garmin Pay wasn’t available to activate or use. Not much to say here.  I will say it’s a nice welcomed feature and it seems many wearable companies are adding or introducing this feature to devices.  Having this feature reduces the need to pull out a wallet when making purchases, or say you go for a run, now you don’t have to bring your wallet to buy that post workout drink you like to grad at the smoothie shop.  At the same time, it’s a bit of a hassle.  Why?  Because like I said earlier, many companies are moving to pay-by-device.  I’ve already got Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay and more services on the way.  Not to mention Pay Pal, Venmo, etc.  If those services start making apps for wearable devices then the list goes on and on.  The easy fix is to settle on one or two services and stick it out.  That said, I’m not sure Garmin Pay could be the winner of that battle.  Garmin is a fitness focused company, not a banking solution.  For all I know they could be outsourcing this feature to someone else but for me, it feels odd letting a fitness technology company handle my payment activity.

Stress Tracking

The stress tracking feature essentially looks at your heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) to determine your levels of stress. I’m a huge fan of HRV.  The Va3 displays a score indicating your level of stress.   From there, you decide what you’d like to do to manage or lower your stress level such as completing a guided breathing session.  It’s pretty straight forward.  In my experience it seemed to work rather nicely.  I do wish that the HRV data could be displayed so I could see what my actual readings were.  Garmin is somewhat late to this market with this as Apple and Fitbit have had these features for a little while now.

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VO2 Max

If you’re not familiar, this statistic is used to quantify a person’s athletic fitness level. It increases as a person’s fitness level increases.  The inverse is true for this as well.  This feature has been integrated into other higher tier Garmin devices but I believe this is new for the Va3 line.  I didn’t have any success with this feature on the Va3.  What I mean to say is, the device didn’t seem to register my VO2 max.  It consistently rated me as having a poor VO2 max level indicating my fitness level was very low (which simply isn’t true lol).  I’m not sure why it didn’t measure my VO2 max.  My only guess is that maybe it gets the initial reading when you use the device on a run, which I didn’t do.  I haven’t been doing much of any running since injuring my back (which is a whole different story).  Oh well.

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Strength Training/Rep Counting

This is probably the feature that I was most excited to see added to the Va3. To use this feature, you start a strength workout session on the device, and then before you start an exercise you press the button to let the device know you’ve begun a set.  It counts the reps until you push the button again to let the device know you’ve completed the set.  The device gives you the option to add any reps it may have miss plus add in the amount of weight.  The Va3 attempts to guess what exercise you just did but you don’t see that on the device but rather on the app and website once you’ve synced the device up.  In my experience, the device usually under counted my reps and guessed the wrong exercise I was doing.  But all in all, it was fairly close.  There aren’t many devices out that actually count the reps of your exercises and choose the exercise correctly, let alone track it in the first place.  None that I’ve tried and I’ve tried a few (Biostrap, PUSH, Atlas).  Once you’ve synced the device you can go on Garmin Connect and edit the workout information to correctly reflect the weights, reps etc.  That said, even with its misreading’s I’m happy to see it added to the device.  It makes the Va3 a better-rounded useful device.  I imagine that this feature will get better as updates roll out.  Also, one thing I liked was the app displays your total workout time and breaks that down into work time (time under tension) and rest time (time not working out) based on when you’re hitting the button to start and stop sets.  This gives you a good idea of how your time is actually spent in the gym especially if you’re one of those people who spends more time talking rather than working out in the gym.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the Va3 is a great device. It’s somewhat a jack of all trades while being a master of none.  The new features are welcomed additions from the vHR.  The heart rate monitor is a newer designed monitor which adds the HRV monitoring in the stress level tracking but the device still seems to struggle with high intensity workouts just like it did in the past.  This is not new as virtually all wrist based devices struggle with reading heart rate during high intensity workouts.  For those types of workouts I still suggest using/connecting to a chest strap.  One more thing I’d like to mention.  Garmin is a fitness focused company.  That being said, this is a fitness watch first with a few smartwatch-esque capabilities.  And it doesn’t do those smartwatch functions as well as an Apple Watch or Samsung Gear watch would.  For example, when you receive a text message notification, you can’t respond to the message.  All you can do is view and read the message and dismiss it.  If you want to interact with that message you have to pull out your phone.

Should you buy the device? Absolutely if you’re a fitness enthusiast who takes part in many different fitness related activities and you’re looking for a midrange FITNESS watch that can track all of those activities well and nothing exceptionally great.  You’ll be pretty happy with this device.  I would’ve like to see the ability to add music to the device but oh well.  If you’ve got the vHR and thinking of upgrading its kinda a tough sell.  You’d need to weigh if the new features warrant and upgrade for you.  The Garmin Vivoactive is currently priced at around $299.

 

Thanks for reading!

by Categories: Activity Trackers, Exercise, Fitness Trackers, Fitness Watches 4 Comments

Microsoft Band 2 Review

Next up is the Microsoft Band 2.  Let’s get right into it.

Daily Use:

In comparison to the original MS band, version 2 is much more ergonomic and form fitting to the wrist.  You could wear this device all day with no issue.  If you do wear it too tight, it will leave some pressure markings and possibly some skin irritation.  That being said, don’t wear it super tight.  The device tracks steps, floors climbed, 24/7 heart rate, UV exposure, and sleep.  Cool thing about the sleep, if you put the device in sleep mode prior to sleeping, it will give you a better analysis of your sleep like a sleep quality score.  The device also has alarm functionality with a smart alarm that helps to wake you up when at the optimal time based on when you set it.  This helps to wake you up when you’re not in a deep sleep state but rather a light sleep cycle with a certain window of time.

The device display is nice.  It’s a color screen with the ability to customize with your favorite color as the screen accent.  The screen is a touch screen and doesn’t wash out in the sun much.  When paired to your phone, the device receives smart notifications (call, text, email, facebook, twitter) with limited ability to interact with the notifications.  You can also enable something called the notification center and virtually any notification that your phone receives will be pushed to the Band.  I found this setting to be a bit annoying.  I started received way too many notifications.

I do like the design of the device as I mentioned earlier.  It’s probably one of the best designed bands on the market.  It just feels good on your wrist.  The device also has a small subset of apps and workouts that can be downloaded to the device.  One workout that I used numerous times was the tabata cycling workout.  It broke the workout into a warm up, the tabata sessions, a cool down and even some light stretching.  I can’t think of any other device that does this type of guided workout.  Maybe the apple watch.

The Microsoft Health app is decent.  It gives you a solid view of your achievements for the day, workout stats and sleep information.  It was somewhat challenging to view the heart rate information.  But the website is pretty verbose.  Anything you struggle to find in the app is fairly easy to find on the corresponding website.

Fitness Use:

The band is great for fitness tracking.  I’ve used it to track weight training, running, (dog) walking, indoor and outdoor cycling, martial arts, crossfit, even yoga.  The few gripes I have with the device is the battery life, optical HR runs high at times and not being water proof.  The battery on this thing drains rather quickly.  If you’ve got multiple exercise sessions in a day, it’s highly probably that the device will die during that second session unless you charge it at some point.  If you’ve had GPS running in one of those sessions, forget about it.  You HAVE to charge it after that session.  To guarantee my band survives the day, I always charge my device almost immediately after I’ve used it (usually while I’m showering).  Good news is, the battery does charge up pretty fast so 15 mins on the charger gives you a good amount of battery juice.  To the second item, many of you already know the optical HR is still growing and being refined.  That being said, virtually none of the devices with optical HR handle high intensity activities well.  Be prepared to see higher than anticipated HR readings when performing these activities.  That also means, higher than normal calories burned for those activities.  Lastly, the device isn’t’ water proofed, so no swim tracking.  I wouldn’t even advise wearing it in the shower.  Nothing else to really say about that.

Conclusion:

Even though the MS band 2 has its flaws, I still thinks is arguably the best fitness tracker and smart watch combination on the market, otherside of a do it all fitness watch like the Garmin Vivoactive HR.  It allows you to track a wide range of activities and looks awesome.  The only other fitness device that has HR on board plus GPS and smart notifications in the Garmin Vivosmart HR+.  I have this device (review coming soon) and it’s not nearly as attractive as the Band 2.

 

Pros:

Comfortable to wear

Display is vivid and touch screen works well

Tracks multiple activities

On-board GPS

Optical heart rate

Smart phone notifications

Limited number of apps available

 

Cons:

It’s not waterproof

Battery life isn’t great.  Worse when GPS is used

Can take a while to find GPS location to track a run

Calculations of calories burned seems high at times

Heart rate readings seem high at times

The band of the MS band tears easily

Limited number of apps available

 

Is it worth buying? Definitely.  In my opinion, it’s the best combination of fitness tracker and smart watch on the market.  Just be ready to charge it daily and take it on and off when you shower, etc.

Thanks for reading!

#Microsoft #MSBand2 #fitness #Garmin #fitnesstechgeek

 

by Categories: Activity Trackers, Fitness Smartbands, Fitness Technology, Fitness Trackers, Heart Rate Monitors Leave a comment

Garmin Vivoactive HR Review

Ok so I’ve had the Garmin vivoactive HR (vHR) for over 2 weeks now.  I’ve worn it consistently for most of that time and I’m ready to share my brief thoughts.

Daily Use:

Wearing the device on a day-to-day basis was very easy.  The device is light weight and not cumbersome at all.  The basic activity tracking aspects of the device work very well.  Steps (distance & floors) and sleep are tracked as you’d expect.  But I’d imagine you wouldn’t buy this device for the activity tracking portions so I won’t spend much time on that.  The 24/7 heart rate tracking is a nice addition to the activity tracking.  But what do you do with that information?  Not much I suppose.  The majority of the time, if your heart rate is elevated, you probably already know it.  Where the heart rate does provide some valuable information is while you’re sleeping.  The resting heart rate can help to determine things like if you’ve recovered properly, and the vHR does that nicely.  It’s much easier to see this information on the device than the Garmin connect app.  The device can receive notifications from your phone but with limited interaction.  For example, you can see a text messaged received but you can’t respond to it.  You can however, answer the phone from your watch.  Cool thing to be able to do, but you can’t talk through your watch so you still have to pick up the phone.

The display screen can be very tricky.  I found at times when I tried to go to a different screen, the device wouldn’t recognize my finger swipe.  And if my hands were wet or sweaty it made the situation worse.  And in the sunlight, the screen can wash out.  But it’s a color touchscreen display.

One thing I don’t like so much about the vHR is the design.  It’s not the most attractive watch to wear daily.  And it’s shaped like a rectangle.  And you can’t change the band on the watch.  This all seems strange to me as there has been a big push for customizing your fitness watch with different bands ie apple watch and fitbit blaze.

Something that sets this device apart from many others in this category is the ConnectIQ app store.  The app store has a good amount of widgets, watch faces and data fields that can be downloaded to the device for use.  Widgets range from weather apps to phases of the moon. The sky is the limit here really.  Great idea by Garmin.

The Garmin Connect app is pretty horrible.  The setup of the app is confusing and can be difficult to find and understand the information within it.  The connect website is much easier to use and understand, but can be overwhelming with all the tiles of information available.

Fitness Use:

Garmin is well-known for it’s gps capabilities.  The vHR performs as you’d expect it would for any Garmin running watch.  I won’t go into details about this since that is virtually what the company is known for.

The device comes pre-installed with several “apps” which represent fitness activities.  So for example running, cycling, swimming, etc are all “apps”.  Within these apps, you can do a great deal of customizing the screen views and data displayed while training.  You can also create your own apps for activities that you want to track but aren’t pre-installed on the device.  Another great idea by Garmin.

I do a good amount of weight training, 3-5 times a week.  Along with that, I do some interval and endurance training (stationary bike, sprints, rowing) as well as more functional training (battle ropes, kettle bell swings, etc).  In my use of the vHR, I noticed a few things.  First, the heart rate data seemed to be off.  To check this, I wore the vHR and my Polar M400 with the chest strap.  Sure enough, the vHR heart rate readings were off, sometimes by as much as 20 bpm.  To make matters worse, the calories burned were off, sometimes by 100 calories or more.  To me, this is a huge problem.  The device’s purpose is to track my selected activity and let me know how I’m performing so I can make real-time adjustments.  I’ve noticed this problem with almost all of the Garmin devices I’ve owned (vivosmart HR, Fenix 3, Fenix 3 HR).  If you check out Garmin forums and customer reviews on Amazon and Best Buy, you’ll discover that many people have this problem.  But it will vary based on how you use the Garmin devices.

Conclusion:

So there you have it.  Just a few of my thoughts about the vHR.  I think this device is great for someone who is into many aspects of fitness.  Running, cycling, weight training, crossfit, swimming.  This device will allow you to do all of those things and then some.  The catch?  The information provided by the device isn’t as accurate as you’d like.  I don’t doubt that Garmin will provide updates to fix these concerns, but at $250, you kinda want a device to work as intended right out of the box.  Garmin is becoming a wearable powerhouse with their extensive line of devices.  Polar and other brands better get with the program or get left behind.

Pros:

  • Good battery life
  • Multifunctional fitness watch with activity tracking
  • ConnectIQ app store
  • MoveIQ (automatic exercise activity recognition)
  • Optical 24/7 HR monitoring on wrist
  • Very customizable (watch faces, “apps”, widgets)

Cons:

  • The Garmin Connect app is confusing
  • Heart rate tracking during exercise seems inaccurate
  • The shape of the watch
  • Watch bands not interchangeable
  • The screen can be dim, wash out in light and unresponsive to touch

Should you buy it?  It’s a mixed bag.  If you’re a multi-fitness enthusiast, probably so.  There aren’t many devices like this that allow you to track your overall fitness activities with this level of customization like the vivoactive HR.  Most of the devices that I can think of that offer this are made by Garmin and they’re tailored towards runners. If you’d like to read a more in-depth review with more of a triathletes perspective, check out DC Rainmaker’s review here.

Thanks for reading! #Garmin #vivoactiveHR #fitnesstechgeek #polar #fitness #fitnesstech

 

 

by Categories: Activity Trackers, Fitness Technology, Fitness Watches, Heart Rate Monitors 2 Comments