Before anyone gets up in my grill about this - this blog is just my opinion, backed up by a few logical reasons. Almost 2 years ago, I succumbed to buying YAG (Yet Another Gadget).

Fitbit.
Let's just say that after a while, I realised that it just wasn't for me. I'll also state, right now, that I'm no fitness guru. I like to stay fit, exercise, stay kinda healthy, but I'm not a nut about it.

Now gadgets - there, I'm a nut. So, the fitbit. OK, thanks for telling me I slept well. It's taken me over 30 years to establish how well I sleep, but now I have a device that tells me just that. I'd prefer a gadget that tells me when I'm susceptible, getting sick and how to get batter faster.

Honestly, it's lame. How I managed, In 1/2 minutes, to climb 4 flights of stairs and gather a whole bunch of steps while on the bed, tying my shoe laces, indicates a flaw in the design. It uses a meter to detect motion in a series of directions. It's a smart concept, I will say, but flawed.

I've tried a whole bunch of fitness gadgets. Heart rate monitors, foot pods, Fitbit, Pedometers, GPS, Phone apps and I can tell you this: it's really pretty simple. you need something that can measure your heart rate accurately and uses a decent set of algorithms to determine your exertion. That's the ONLY way to tell if you're actually serious about it.

I now use a Suunto Ambit 3 Peak. It has built-in GPS, determines (very accurately) how much I exert myself when exercising, has a bunch of modes to choose from, plots my routes when I ride my bike or run, determines my resting heart rate over rest periods, syncs my exercise with my phone via its app, uploads them to the cloud if I want to and generates a movie of my routes, fastest mile, etc and even offers a recovery time frame after workouts. In fact, mine even tells me when bad weather is coming in and warns me about it...

If you want serious monitoring, you need to spend the money and get the serious gadgets :-)