Pedometer + heart rate monitor suggestions

Admiral Huddy · 15 Mar 2012 at 16:35

My wife has taken up long distance walking but she's also keen on starting running too. She needs a device that can monitor both the distances covered during walking and/or running and her current heart rate. She's hinted that she would like one so i thought i'd treat her.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

touch · 15 Mar 2012 at 16:49

A pedometer is not really what you want, it just counts steps taken. It wont give a very accurate distance.
Also best to avoid cheap heart rate monitors. I got one for around £25 and it worked fine, but all it could do was tell me my current heart rate (makes sense

). I wanted something that could track my HR over time and give me an average for the whole exercise, etc.

Best to get a GPS. Something like a Garmin Forerunner. It's not cheap, at £150 but will be a lot better than a stand alone pedometer + HR monitor. It will track where you run and how fast, your HR, etc. Then you can upload all that data to your garmin account and share it, or just keep a log of everything you have done.

Admiral Huddy · 15 Mar 2012 at 20:04

I see your point.. I can't see in the spec anything about monitoring distance?

touch · 15 Mar 2012 at 20:29

Its not a very well written spec really

but it does say that:

It's GPS-enabled so it knows how far and how fast you run

Also, here is an example of what you will see when you upload the run to the garmin training centre (there are a couple of graphs of speed vs time, HR vs time and probably elevation vs distance cut off the bottom of the image). I found it on this review, which looks like it goes into a massive amount of detail about the device (but i only skimmed through the pics and didnt read any of it)

edit: Trying to find a link to Garmin Connect with forerunner 110 data, but cant find anything. You can have a look at my cycle today, it should give a rough idea of what sort of stats you can get. (obviously cadence is bike-specific, so just ignore that )

Admiral Huddy · 15 Mar 2012 at 21:23

Thanks touch. I'll look into that

TommyV · 16 Mar 2012 at 09:09

Damn it, I chuckled at pedometer