LondonSkaters Speed Team - Speed Skating & Rollerblading Club in London

Mikey-two-Names · Joined: 24 Feb 2004 Posts: 4106

Looks like Aldi will be selling cheap heart rate monitors from Thursday 12th January 2006. At £12.99 it's worth a try, particularly if you're training for Le Mans or doing the long slow skates.

http://uk.aldi.com/special_buys/productnl_210.html

A heart rate monitor is a good way to learn about how your heart responds to the different types of exercise, and will help you train more effectively.

merten · Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2006 9:52 pm Subject:

A good offer - but keep in mind that these cheapish monitors are not digitally encoded. That means that when somebody else uses a HR monitor nearby (e.g. less than 1 m away, which is likely to happen in a paceline) it will get confused and suddenly claim you are dead (HR 0 or maybe 250, I've seen both Smile

).

I've used a Lidl HR monitor (20 EUR - so same price) for the last year - it worked well for training, but was pretty much useless in races. I've switched to a coded Polar now, but these start around maybe 70 quid.

dan_b · Joined: 15 Jun 2004 Posts: 2428

I got a non-encoded HRM from decathlon last week - £17 or thereabouts. I expect to be using it more for training than racing anyway (if I can't tell already whether I'm about to blow up in a race, an HRM will only tell me too late), provided I can be convinced the alleged heart rate it prints is significantly more accurate than the output of a random number generator.