I'm looking for a new HRM - had a Polar M21, but never been very happy with it - dodgy buttons and is now not working after I dropped it (only 1 metre!).
I've heard Cardiosport ones are reliable - I want one for under £100, and I like the Autozone one, but is the way it calculates the 5 Target heart rate zones accurate (via maximum heart rate or age)? I currently use the WHR method, which takes into account resting HR. I liked the "blobs" that came up on my Polar M21 when I had burned 100 kcals. I would like one with interval timers, but think that only the top-range Cardiosport monitors have that.
Also - the size of the watch - I have read that some of the Cardiosport ones are bulky - GraphX, Xtreme & Heartsafe - if you have "skinny wrists" (see
http://www.heartratemonitor.co.uk/cardiosport.html ). Are they too big for the average female wrist?!
Does anyone use Cardiosport & can give me some advice? Thanks!
Comments
How big is your wrist?
in terms of heart rates, I think it does the following:
Max is set either from age, or manually. This is used to display current as a percentage of max.
Two zones are programmable with a range of 5bpm - one is selected at any one time, with independant high/low alarms.
So if you use whr, the percentage displayed won't be right, but everything else is done in BPM, which is independant of any other variables. There isn't anything related to no. of cal burnt (but that's got to be a wild guess anyway?), and it does intervals based on time or heart rate recovery.
Shame the instructions are rather brief - just 20 very small pages.
The calories burnt function is more of a gimmick really, but can be useful as a rough estimate / motivator, if one of the reasons you're running is to lose weight.