Garmin's new heart rate monitors are just for swimmers

Garmin chest straps
The HRM-Tri and HRM-Swim fit around your chest.

Swimmers have a hard time when it comes to picking fitness tracking kits, as all that water tends to interfere with delicate wearable gadgetry. Garmin is here to help with two new chest bands, the HRM-Swim and HRM-Tri.

Designed for triathletes and plain old swimmers, they can store up to 20 hours of heart rate data which is then transfered to a compatible Garmin device (like the Forerunner 920XT) when you're out of the water.

As you would expect, they stick closely to the body to minimise drag, so you can keep an eye on your vital statistics without worrying about the extra hardware slowing you down.

Just keep swimming

The HRM-Tri is smaller and lighter and the one for triathletes should go for (hence the name): it measures running dynamics, cadence, vertical oscillation and ground contact time as well as monitoring your swims.

The HRM-Swim is the dedicated wearable for everyday swimmers. Its replaceable battery lasts longer than the HRM-Tri (18 months rather than 10 months) but both devices sync up to the Garmin Connect ecosystem.

Interested? The gadgets will be available sometime between now and September, costing £99.99/US$129.99 for the HRM-Tri and £79.99/US$99.99 for the HRM-Swim. You can also pick them both up for £149.99/US$199.99.

David Nield
Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.