Heart Rate Monitors - Head to Head Test | Apple vs Garmin vs Polar (Not Sponsored)

In 2024, most of us wear a heart rate monitor (HRM) on our wrist with the explosion in popularity and advances in technology of smart watches and sports watches.

I had the opportunity to test a couple of the most popular watches:

Apple Watch SE 2 - Optical Wrist Based
Garmin Forerunner 965 - Optical Wrist Based

I also threw a couple of other heart rate monitors in the mix:

Garmin HRM-Pro Plus - Electrode Contact Patch Chest Based
Polar Verity Sense - Optical Bicep Based

I used all four HRMs simultaneously across six activities of differing intensity including easy runs, tempo runs, interval runs & an olympic weightlifting session so I was able to compare the data of the four devices and report if their were any significant differences in the data.

To compare the results I used a couple of comparisons. Firstly, I simply compared the @stravainc Relative Effort of each activity across the four devices to see if there were any major differences in a simple numeric result.

Next I did a more detailed analysis using the @Dcrainmaker Analyser tool where I layered the heart rate from each device on top of each other to see where any key differences in the results.

The results were quite surprising.

00:00 Introduction
00:23 The Heart Rate Monitors on test
03:45 How I conducted the tests
04:58 Activity 1
06:38 Activity 2
07:25 Activity 3
08:51 Activity 4
09:57 Activity 5
10:55 Activity 6
12:05 What Have I Learned

@Apple @Garmin @PolarGlobal