I’ve just started a new bike specific training plan, in which I need to maintain a certain heart rate eg. recovery, aerobic, etc. for longer periods, and am looking for a heart rate monitor to assist with this.

I need it to display at a minimum, the time down to minutes/seconds, for the interval work and obviously the heart rate. After the best part of a day of looking at amazon, and various other websites, I’m not much further forward so I figured I’d see what the forum had to say.

Thanks for your assistance.

Budget?

Decathlon. About 15-20 quid.

What’s the issue? Almost all monitors do this.

Some HRM models I’ve looked at don’t seem to offer the time function.

Budget no more than £150.

I’ve not used an HRM before, just looking for suggestions from those in the know, who may or may not recommend what they use

Forerunner 110 from Garmin.

If you have a smart phone you can get a Bluetooth heart monitor and link it to an gps app like endomondo. That will allow you to look at heart rate, speed, distance, calories,etc you can also look at what your heart was doing at any specific time eg. How many beats per min you were at as you climb your biggest hill, etc

No smart phone?……….garmin or polar hr monitor/watch

Basically all HRM’s will include the current time, and allow you to start a stopwatch and check out the current heart rate (OK, there might be really cheap models which only show HR, but spend 25gbp and that shouldn’t be an issue). I’m not aware of any accuracy issues, I think all HRMs on the market correctly measure HR.

Beyond that, the following features may or may not be of interest:

* Fabric chest band (more comfortable, but the plastic ones aren’t that bad)
* Changeable chest band battery (the cheaper Polar transmitters won’t let you change the battery, meaning you have to buy a complete new band… not cheap!)
* Waterproof
* Min/Max intervals (with some kind of audible alarm when you’re not within that range)
* Encoded transmitter (useful if you go to a gym, it means you’re not receiving someone else’s data)
* Bluetooth monitor can be connected to phone, but won’t be compatible with gym running machines (etc.)
* Data upload to a computer
* GPS, temperature, ant+ compatibility, etc. etc.

If all you want is the most basic stuff, the Decathlon ones are fine. I’ve had problems with them in gyms, despite supposedly including encoded data transmission, but I might just have got a flaky model. The Garmin models are well thought of, too.

I currently use a Polar, but I’m not too happy with it as it won’t show the stopwatch and the current HR on the same screen, which is a pain when you’re doing intervals. That said, Polar has an excellent reputation and it’s a user-interface issue, apart from this niggle the HRM has been fine.

Mine cost about £12 from Aldi and does all of the above. It doesn’t save data though if that’s a requirement. It does display stopwatch, HR and % at the same time – not all display % I think in which case you need to be good at sums.

garmin 305 – the cheaper end of the garmin range at c£100 but perfectly good for training. You can arrange your training schedule on the garmin software and then upload the sessions to the watch giving you the schedule on your hrm and then when exercising alarms for when to start sprinting, rest, etc. The display can be customized and the data including the route you’ve been can be uploaded as well. You can get a cadence meter for them as well but I only have that on my tt bike and tend not to use it anyway. Should you get uber geeky you can upload from the 305 to strava as well

Mine cost about £12 from Aldi and does all of the above. It doesn’t save data though if that’s a requirement. It does display stopwatch, HR and % at the same time – not all display % I think in which case you need to be good at sums.

Forgot about the % bit, that is quite handy for zone training as otherwise you need to work it out beforehand, and remember it while you’re out riding… Not sure you need to be able to see HR and % at the same time, just % would be enough.

Oops, also forgot to say the Polar I’ve got that I’m not too happy with is the FT4.

should also add the 305 has alarms if you drop out of the required hr bands which is handy when your slowly dying on a turbo trainer

should also add the 305 has alarms if you drop out of the required hr bands which is handy when your slowly dying on a turbo trainer

Just remember to switch the alarms off if you wear it to a race, I didn’t and spent most of a 10K run listening to the bloody beep beep beep of the watch telling me I was over the max rate 🙄