How to Use a Samsung Galaxy Watch4 as a Heart Rate Monitor for a Peloton Bike

To use a Samsung Galaxy Watch4 as a heart rate monitor for a Peloton bike, install the Peloton app for WearOS. Another option is to install the free Heart for Bluetooth app. Beyond seeing your heart rate in real time, syncing your heart rate also allows you to use Peloton’s Strive Score feature.

Peloton

Peloton released an app for WearOS on April 4, 2023. The app lets you use your watch as a heart rate monitor. But if you have any problems with the Peloton app or if you want to send your heart rate to a non-Peloton device, you can try Heart for Bluetooth instead.

Heart for Bluetooth

First pair your watch to your bike using Bluetooth.

Then open the Heart for Bluetooth app, and your bike should connect and pick up your heart rate. In my experience, it can be finicky to get this to work in subsequent sessions. After some trial and error, the most reliable method that I’ve found is to do the following.

Turn on the Peloton, but don’t go into a class yet. Now open the app on your watch.

It takes a few seconds to pick up your heart rate. Wait for it to finish.

In the meantime, you should see a “connecting” message on your bike.

Next, you might see a “couldn’t connect” message.

If this happens, press the refresh button in the bottom right of the app to restart Bluetooth advertising. In a few seconds, the bike should try to connect again, and then you should see a “connected” message.

There should be a heart symbol in the top right.

Now you can start a class, and you should see your heart rate!

If you frequently get connection failures, try updating your watch to the latest version. The connection failures largely went away for me after an April 2022 update.

I have also experienced an issue where the heart rate updates would stop in the middle of the ride, so the heart rate on the bike would freeze at a particular number. At first, I was able to avoid the issue by turning on my watch’s always on display while I ride. I later noticed that the Heart for Bluetooth description has a fix for this issue. You need to go into the Galaxy Wearable app, go to the watch settings, go to the list of apps, go to Heart for Bluetooth, and turn on “Allow background activity.”

A final tip is that when you’re done with your ride, you can manually stop the Heart for Bluetooth app by pressing the flag button in the middle left. This lets you avoid draining your battery unnecessarily. You can also rely on the app’s timeout feature, which will end the session automatically after the set amount of time ends.

Apple Watch

If you have an Apple Watch and a Bike+, syncing your heart rate is easy because Bike+ supports GymKit. If you have a regular Bike, you can try using the HeartCast app.