As usual, I had been lazy in the winter but once spring’s beautiful weather came around, I picked up my training again. Now that it is summer, I’ve regained at least my basic fitness and, motivated by my marathon-running friends, am thinking about taking my workouts to the next level.

One of the aforementioned marathon runners introduced me to her brand new professional personal coaching team which consists of
• a high-tech Polar watch equipped with GPS which seems to track and display everything one could possibly want to know (stop watch, heart rate, speed, days to your next marathon, etc.)
• a chest strap to measure and wirelessly transmit the heart rate
• a step counter to record speed and distance
• the Polar Personal Trainer online portal, where all personal training data recorded on the watch can be uploaded and analyzed. In addition, it offers professional training plans, advice and a community.

Unsure how long my sports enthusiasm will last this time and therefore not wanting to spend too much money, I decided to research other mobile training solutions. While not having been able to try out all of them, I have compiled an overview of my findings.

Basically, I found four groups of providers: cell phone manufacturers, sports equipment manufacturers, software companies and any type of cooperation between them.

Nokia offers its own solution, the GPS-based activity tracker Nokia Sports Tracker.
The Symbian S60 application Sports Tracker can be installed on a compatible Nokia device and replaces Polar’s watch tracking data such as time, speed, and distance during the workout. For the N79, Nokia teamed up with the Finnish company Polar offering the special version Nokia N79 Active, which includes a heart rate transmitting chest strap by Polar. The information stored in the training diary can be uploaded from the phone to Nokia’s Web site and shared with the community. The site offers a feature where you can create your route by drawing it on Google Maps which then appears on your profile.
Finally, in an effort to extend the use beyond “regular” running, in cooperation with Salomon, trail running is introduced.

The two biggest players in the sporting goods industry, Nike and adidas, each have teamed up with mobile hardware and software specialists.

Nike and Apple created the Nike + iPod Sport Kit . Apple contributes the iPod touch, iPod nano or, of course, the iPhone 3GS. To make your workout more interesting, you can download specific Nike Sport Mixes on iTunes. Nike has created specific Nike+ running shoes. Nike+ shoes have a pocket for a sensor which transmits information to the iPod/iPhone which in turns informs you about the speed, distance, time and calories.
When the iPod/iPhone is connected to your PC or MAC the data is uploaded to this system’s Web site Nikeplus.com . The Web site looks very professional and offers vast amounts of features such as pre-configured and customizable training plans, find and share routes as well as various challenges, men vs. women being the latest one.
The newest feature addition seems to be the cooperation with various fitness and health clubs. The iPod/iPhone can be connected to Nike + iPod compatible cardio machines and your workout is summarized plus saved on your iPod.

Adidas and Samsung decided to create something brand new from scratch and developed the cell phone SGH-F110  and online platform combination, miCoach, together.
The slider phone comes packaged with a heart rate monitor in form of a chest strap and a stride sensor which records pace, stride rate and step count. The miCoach Web site also offers a lot of information, support and features around optimizing your training. The media library for example offers warm-up and cool down videos created by Core Performance, a company specializing in creating training programs for athletes. Of course, the professional site includes tools to plan and schedule your training in an optimal way with pre-configured plans based on hear rate monitoring available from “Learn to run” to “Finish faster > Marathon”. If you don’t own or work out with the Samsung device, adidas let’s you enter your workout data manually.

Mobimotion is a German-based company with a more technical and scientific background. Mobimotion offers Spurty, a novel mobile fitness and lifestyle product, as the Web site states.
Comparable to the other services, Spurty is the combination of a chest strap, a mobile application and a Web site with an online community. The Spurty mobile application is a JAVA application and handset manufacturer independent. It can be installed on more than 130 handsets.
The online platform Spurty offers the same functionalities as the ones presented above, but appeared to still be in testing phase.

Last but not least, there are various mobile applications for all platforms such as FitDeck Mobile, Star Exercise Assistant, Gym Journal, and many more.

With all these options available, in a next step, I am going to try out the different solutions and see how they fare are in terms of usability, quality of advice and other relevant areas.
Maybe that will keep my motivation up for a bit longer this time…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 6:22 pm by Jens Bay and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.