GPS Watches For Fitness and Outdoors

GPS watches are specialist tools that have burst onto the market on the crest of the wave of popularity of consumer GPS devices over the last five or ten years. Do you like to exercise off the beaten track and would like to keep track of your travelled routes and other details of your adventures as well as the times and statistics of your workouts? You would not be alone in the desire for an outdoor tracking tool that can track and store this sort of information.

Many fitness enthusiasts and athletes have turned to a specialist tool that can accommodate these needs and have started utilizing a GPS watch for their workouts and outdoor adventures. By simply setting up some features on the watch, you can track a ton of workout information in terms of both your times and workout segment as well as speed, pace, distance travelled and even the saving of your routes in three dimensions.

What is a GPS watch?

A GPS watch utilizes GPS technology to lock onto at least four of the 12 GPS satellites thereby obtaining the ability to keep track of changes in your position to determine information such as speed and distance travelled over time. In the leading GPS watches, the GPS receiver is mounted in the wrist watch itself making it convenient to just pick up and wear.

Why Use a GPS Watch?

A GPS watch offers what many athletes have been seeking for a long time, namely the ability to track your speed in real time, record route information including horizontal distance travelled and changes in elevation over the course of a run. Most modern GPS watches offer a lot of great sports features too, such as the ability to link up to a heart rate monitor chest strap, allowing you to tie in heart rate monitor features such as heart rate zones and alerts with the finest features of GPS.

The advantages are tremendous and as a result many athletes, outdoors enthusiasts and people who wish to track their health and fitness in much finer detail are turning to these highly functional wrist watches. Not only is a GPS watch convenient in that it can fit your wrist with ease, but has numerous features that can be tweaked to just about any fitness or performance goal.

What Products Are Available?

There are currently GPS watches offered by Garmin, Timex, Polar, Suunto, GlobalSat and others. A significant difference between GPS watches offered by watchmakers is that some require you to attach an external GPS device to your body which then communicates wirelessly to the wristwatch (much like a wireless heart rate monitor strap), whereas others like the Garmin Forerunner mount the GPS antenna in the wristwatch itself and thus offer you the ease and convenience of just picking up the watch and heading out the door, albeit in a slightly bulkier case.

The benefits of a GPS watch is considerable, whether you want to time your speed and distance or keep track of your running routes or with to keep track of your precise location on outdoor adventures. GPS opens up a whole new world of opportunity for navigation as well as tracking and monitoring your fitness statistics allowing you to set achievable goals.

Visit our website to learn much more about GPS watches including more information on the best gps running watch choices from Garmin, Polar, Timex and Suunto.

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Three Popular GPS Running Watch Choices - Timex GPS Watches, Suunto T Series and Garmin Forerunner

The best equipment can help make hard physical training a little easier. While good training shoes and fabrics that breath can make exerting physical effort more comfortable, the best technology can handle much of the hard work in tracking and comparing results. For runners, cyclists and any sport that involves moving from point A to point B in quick time, a GPS watch can be a beneficial tool, providing you with valuable feedback on how you are performing and storing performance statistics for later comparison. As there are a various models of GPS watches on the market, lets take a look at a few of the popular ones.

At the cheap end of the price scale, you'll discover the Timex Speed and Distance watch. Timex GPS watches require an external GPS device be mounted on the wearer's body, which transmits data wirelessly to the wrist watch via a digital FM signal. The Timex Speed and Distance model measures horizontal speed and distance, but unlike the more expensive Timex Bodylink GPS system, cannot measure altitude. That aside, it has many nice features that runners need such as lap and target speed sessions, 100 Laps of memory and the famous Timex INDIGLO illumination lighting system for night time running. The GPS system also features auto-pause which stops the timers when you stop running and starts when you resume.

Another GPS watch system for runners is the Suunto Training series watches. The Training series watches is a series of three GPS enabled watches, the T3C, T4C and T6C. These watches also utilize an external, wireless GPS device and unlike the Timex watches feature "Training Effect", an accurate indicator of the actual fitness benefit of a workout. The pricier T6C can also measure EPOC and is packed with bunch of other analytical features, although these are mostly overkill to all but the most specialist runners and coaches. Only the T6C measures altitude, and utilizes a barometric altimeter which is more accurate than GPS.

The Suunto Training Series watches offer a different set of features to the Timex GPS system and any one of these might be considered one of the "best GPS running watches", but there is a more popular brand of GPS watch that is a clear favorite amongst athletes and runners everywhere. This watch would be the Garmin Forerunner line of GPS watches.

The Forerunner 305 is an older GPS system, yet is still amongst the most popular GPS system in existence. It was superceded by the Forerunner 405, which is sleeker and looks more like a watch, but stripped out were the navigation features that the Forerunner 305 could accommodate with its larger screen size. The 405 was then superceded by the 405CX which was essentially a minor upgrade. The 405 and 405CX are high tech watches that feature a touch-sensitive bezel and a wireless ANT+ transfer mechanism for transferring data to PC. Data can even be wirelessly transmitted between 405 watches. While the 405CX is probably the most popular running GPS watch, the 405 and 305, being older watches can be picked up slightly cheaper and still deliver a lot of bang for your buck!

These three watch brands all offer their advantages, but the best GPS running watch for you will depend on which features you need individually and what price you are prepared to pay. A GPS running watch is a tool highly worthy of investment. It will keep you on track and on time.

Visit our website to learn much more about running watches GPS systems and other GPS running watch choices.

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