Accurate Enough

I've been testing the Garmin Cirqa for a few days, trying to figure out where this device sits and gaging the market to see where it fits. On thing I have noticed on every Reddit thread and YouTube review I watch, the same question of how accurate it is comes up. For what it's worth I find it very accurate and nice to use, but the question itself is easy to cover, because I'm not convinced it matters anywhere near as much as everyone seems to think.

Reviewers go to great lengths to answer this. Plotting the Garmin Cirqa against an Apple Watch, an HRM 600 and maybe a couple of other Garmin watches, and producing fancy graphs that always show good results. The real differences people see are a few bpm at most, nothing ever goes wildly off the scale without a hardware issue behind it, and every comparison ends the same way with everything being declared ‘fine’.

I understand why the graphs keep coming, an accuracy comparison is easy to film and gives a clean verdict at the end, but boiling a sensor down to a single score tells you very little about living with one. The far more interesting question is what all these numbers are actually for, and that one never seems to be covered.

Heart rate recording is there to show trends over time, and ultimate accuracy is vastly overrated. My watch could read a percentage out on every run I do and it honestly wouldn't matter. As long as that error stays consistent from one session to the next, those 2 or 4 bpm make no difference to anything users would ever do with the data. Your training zones are built from your own numbers anyway, so a sensor that reads slightly high sets those zones slightly high too, and everything still lines up exactly as it should.

Granted, better sensors do suffer from fewer issues and less cadence lock, but even that seems to be a very personal thing. I get constant problems with the Apple Watch locking my heart rate to my stride rate, and that's a device most people would tell you is highly accurate, so a good result on someone else's wrist means very little for what happens on mine.

What actually matters is that you can see and understand whereabouts your training is, your pace measured against your heart rate and your rate of perceived exertion, and that the heart rate is read consistently every time you head out. Those three tell you far more together than any one of them does alone, a run that felt hard at a low heart rate is telling you something, and so is an easy pace that sends the number climbing, none of which needs a perfect sensor to spot.

Most devices manage the consistency part nowadays, and after a few days of wearing it, the Garmin Cirqa manages it as well as anything else I have used. The accuracy question is the easiest one to ask and the least useful one to answer, and I suspect that's exactly why it gets asked so much.