Heart Rate Monitors, Bike Computers & Bike GPS
The Best Heart Rate Monitors for Cycling
Let’s start with what is a heart rate monitor and how do they work? The heart rate monitor is designed to use electrical detection of your heart beating to track your heart rate. They detect electrical activity through a band that wraps around your chest.
For most of these devices to work as designed, the band must be wet and in direct contact with your skin. Knowing your heart rate whilst riding a bike is a key factor to improving your cycling performance. By monitoring your heart rate you’re able to keep your training consistent in the different zones to ensure you can improve your aerobic, anaerobic fitness or a combination of both.
Choosing the right heart rate monitor for your training is crucial to support your performance development. You can choose a heart rate monitor with a chest strap that talks to your bike computer, or you can choose a heart rate monitor watch that sits on your wrist.
Common reputable brands that cyclists choose include garmin heart rate monitors or polar heart rate monitors.
The Best Bike Computers
Cycling computers, bike computer, cyclometer, cyclocomputer or cycle computer are all essentially the same thing. However, there are a few distinctions between the types of bike computers. But first lets discuss the way a bike computer works is simple. One method is a bike computer with a cable which utilizes a magnet on the wheel passes and each time the magnet passes a sensor on the fork a signal is generated. The bike computer measures the time between those signals and works out the speed you’re traveling at. From that measurement the cycling computer can also work out a whole range of information including distance, average speed, cadence, ride time and maximum speed. Depending on the riders choices it may also have features like auto on/off — pausing the stopwatch when you’re stationary — and different types of timing and average speed. You may get average speed only when you’re moving, or for the whole ride, and likewise for time.
More sophisticated cycle computers may also be able to warn you if you drop below a target average speed, say, or provide an estimate of how long it’ll take to arrive at your destination.
The other method of bike computer is via gps or bluetooth which feeds the information back to an app such as strava on your phone or watch. You can pre-program different riding routes onto the bike gps which will help you on your weekend adventure.
Bike computers are an important part of any cyclist’s training arsenal. A bike computer helps you to capture key training factors such as heart rate, GPS or route, speed, cadence, distance, gradient, average speed and a multitude of other training variables. Each of which typically feeds into an app (such as Strava) where you can review these factors following a ride to monitor and tweak your training to improve cycling performance. Majority of the cycling computers are wireless which are connected to your mobile phone or garmin wrist watch. It’s important to review and compare the different bike computers to find the GPS computer best suited to what you would like to achieve in your training.
GPS is an important function, if not one of the main function bike computers are used for by cyclists. It allows you to track your route and capture important information like distance, gradient, speeds etc. A lot of the apps (such as Strava or Garmin) now allow you to download routes from other cyclists. There are multiple different functions hidden in a lot of the bike GPS computers and it’s important to choose the one that is going to compliment your training and performance needs.