[Sportsandrec] Talking HR Monitor

[Joe Shaw]

Does someone have a stopwatch that is easy to use?
JS
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Thornbury, Kelly" <kthornbury at bresnan.net>
To: <sportsandrec at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 1:50 PM
Subject: [Sportsandrec] Talking HR Monitor


> Carly,
>
> Oregon Scientific makes a talking heart monitor...It works, but I'm not 
> overly happy with it. I find it to be consistently 10 or more beats off 
> (reading high), and when I really start to sweat it jumps all over from 
> not reading anything to reading over 250 beats per minute. Other people 
> might have better luck with it.
> I paid around $80 or $90 if I remember right, and this included the radio. 
> The radio is a small, FM receiver that plugs into the HR monitor, and you 
> plug the headphones into it, and the HR information cuts out the music 
> when reported. Its nice if you get some decent radio stations in your 
> area. There is a less expensive model that does not include the radio, but 
> I'm not sure of the cost.
> The set up of the monitor takes some playing with, but is manageable once 
> you figure out the details. You can set it up to count down workouts 
> (including a warm-up, workout time, and cool-down counter), or as a 
> stopwatch, set HR zones, and it tracks your workout with average HR, 
> cool-down HR, your total workout time and time in your zone, and calories 
> burned (not something I trust as fact, but nice to use as a rough 
> estimate).
> Another talking monitor is by HEARTalker, but I've never used one of 
> these. They are priced somewhere between $60 and $80 depending on the 
> model.
> I used to use a Polar monitor, which I found to be much more accurate, but 
> I needed sighted help to set it up. These come in a wide variety of 
> models, ranging from around $30 or so to well into the hundreds. Even on 
> the cheaper models, you can set up your target heart rate zone and alarms 
> will sound if you are above or below (and you can judge by how hard you 
> are working whether its above or below). On the simpler models its pretty 
> easy to remember how to start and stop the monitor, and works well if your 
> workouts are generally all in the same target zone (or if you have 
> assistance in resetting the zones). Some Polar monitors, once set up, are 
> as easy to start as putting on the chest belt and the watch, then holding 
> the watch close to the strap for a couple seconds...but watch putting them 
> both in your gym bag together as they might start and run down the 
> batteries. The chest belt batteries are not user changeable, and if they 
> die, just buy a new chest belt, its way cheaper then sending the belt off 
> to Polar to have the battery changed (the last time I bought one, it was 
> around $35 to replace the belt, and around $75 to replace the 
> battery...welcome to a throw-away society).
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