Three wireless fitness devices to help shed pounds and blood pressure

What follows is a tale  of my effort to get back in shape and the wireless fitness gear that I purchased to help me get there.  continued below....

	Video: To see a video of the wireless gear David ended up buying and how it works on his bike (as well the way his cycling apparel makes it clear that he's got a real inner-tube to work-off!), check the video below.

(continued from above) It's been a little more than a year since the surgeons put me back on my feet after a debilitating back injury. Like a popped scallop, 85 percent of the contents of a disc that belonged between vertebraes L3 and L4 in my lower back found their way out from between those two bones and into a position where they were crushing the nerves going through my back, buttocks, and legs. I got to the know the floor of my house very well during this time. Picking myself up off of it was pretty much impossible. Even methadone -- the last drug the doctors tried on me before deciding to give me an epidural shot (like the ones given to mothers in painful labor) -- was ineffective at getting the pain under control. When I went for the shot, the neurologist said "You don't need a shot. You need surgery."  Three days later, the ejected disc material was removed from my back and within hours of the surgery, I walked out of the hospital on my own two feet. They gave me some pain killers for the post-surgery pain and I laughed. Compared to the pain I had before the surgery, the pain I had after was like a minor scratch. I haven't taken a pain killer since (I hated those things anyway).

But even though the pain was no longer an issue (there is some permanent numbness), recovery was not instantaneous and it would be a while before I could engage in certain activities.  One of those activities -- actually, a passion for me -- is cycling. For me, cycling has always been my favorite way to stay fit. Unable to climb back into the saddle the better part of last year, I slipped into a fairly sedentary lifestyle and at 45 years old, my body responded in ways that it never had before. My weight shot up to the highest it has ever been in my entire life (206), my cholesterol was over the normal range, and my blood pressure which can hover around 100/60 when I'm fit was in the 130/85 range. None of these vital signs were emergencies. But they were a clear signal to start a return to fitness as soon as possible. So, with the green light from my surgeon, I climbed aboard my bike (a relic by today's standards) and began what will likely be a long journey given how much harder it is, at 45, to restore a body to a state of fitness, than it was in earlier years.

To really do something like this right though, one needs feedback. Modern science and cycling fitness have advanced to the point that if you can get access to the right information, it might not take as long or as much work to get fit and stay fit. For example, what many people don't know is that there are thresholds of workloads at which the body draws upon different sources for energy. Relative heartrate (relative to your normal and maximum heartrates) is the leading indicator of your body's current workload and, in one heartrate range (near the low end), your body will use fat as its primary energy source instead of carbohydrates. Often called the "fat-burning zone," restricting one's workout to this heartrate range is counterintuitive to those of us who were taught that one must sweat like a pig in order to lose weight. In the fat-burning zone, I don't even feel like I'm breaking a sweat. But science has proven that people who are looking to lose weight will do it faster if they restrict their heartrate to the fat-burning zone than not. 

So, one critical piece of feedback for fitness is heartrate. Three others, when you're on a bike, are speed, cadence (RPM's of the pedals and cranks), and time. The same technology that tells you how fast your going is also the key to other metrics like how far you've gone in one workout, how far you've gone over all your workouts and average speed: all of which may not be leading indicators of fitness, but that do help you set the goals that you should be setting for yourself in order to stay motivated.

For example, in returning to fitness, I've been careful not to go to hard out of the gate. Instead, each day, I add one minute to my total workout time and one minute to the high intensity portion of my workout. At the end, I can see how far I've gone and my average speed and this data often gets me excited about the next day and whether I can improve on that without going outside of my target heart range. And that ultimately is a great measure of how fit you are. If for example riding 18 miles in an hour requires you to work at or above your anaerobic threshold the entire time (a heartrate threshold you probably don't want to exceed if general fitness is what you're after), but you later get to a point where your covering 20 miles in an hour without ever exceeding your anaerobic threshold, that's a great sign that your fitness is improving. In order to keep track of things like time and distance, you'll need the right bicycle computer on your bike. 

One other additional form of feedback is cadence. Most bikes have gears and, while you may be able to cover 18 or 20 miles in an hour, the difference between doing it in 13th gear vs. 14th gear will show up in your cadence -- the number of revolutions/minute of your bike's crank arms (the part that the pedal  connects to). One school of thought in cycling fitness is that it's most efficient to keep your cadence in the 80-100 RPM range. For competitive cyclists, the range is more like 90-110. Once I was able to get actual data on my cadence, I discovered that I was using too big of a gear for my workouts (the cadence was low). Since getting access to that data, not only have I shifted into a lower gear for my workouts (bringing up my cadence), I've discovered that I'm going farther in my workout without increasing my heartrate.

When I first got back on the bike, I had no feedback at all. The contacts on my old bicycle computer had oxydized to a point that they no longer registered the bike's speed (which meant I couldn't get other metric I wanted like distance, average speed, etc.). Not only that, my heartrate monitor (one that was never very much good in the first place) was dead as a doornail. So, I decided to do a little shopping and one of the things that has changed since the last time I bought a bike computer is how everything is wireless. Sure, heartrate detection has been wireless for quite some time. But so too now are speed and cadence (each of the three require a distinctly separate transmitter). This video tells the story of what I picked and why (please note: I looked at a great many more devices than are shown in the video and before deciding on the ones that I purchased):