SUUNTO HEART RATE MONITOR T 6
TRAINING TIP – THE MORE INFORMED YOU ARE ABOUT YOUR TRAINING, THE MORE INFORMED DECISIONS YOU CAN MAKE TO IMPROVE YOUR PERFORMANCES.
In nearly all sports, skill is required to do well. The skill in Cross training is nearly all in the training and preparation. The emphasis on this area is greater than in all other sports as they require other added skills as well. Because of that, cross trainers need to be at the forefront of technology when it comes to measuring and analysing their training performances. At the heart of this is heart rate technology. Precision in this area is critical and the more accurate information and feedback you get can get, both during and after your workout, the more you will enhance your level of overall fitness.
Why this important is all around the nature of goal setting. We set our goals well in advance and plan and prepare as we head towards the targets and dates we have in mind. However just like the pilot of an aircraft sets a course for a foreign destination airport with a direction and an altitude, they also have to make minor corrections along the way as they encounter differing weather conditions. Information of all sorts coming in all the time on their journey is assessed and analysed, decisions are made and then changes if necessary are put into operation. That way they ensure that they will reach their destination and be on time. In just the same way an athlete reaches their goals, they have a (flight) plan, but they need to make adjustments along the way depending on how their performances are going. It is feedback during and after ones workouts that allow us the make these adjustments. The more accurate this feedback, the more likely the following training programs will give us the improvement we are looking for.
Reliability is also crucial, no one wants to lose heart rate data in the middle of a training program because of interference from other heart rate monitor users.
With the increase of knowledge around training for improved performance, it is now known that training programs must be set to very specific heart rate levels of between 1-2 beats accuracy. Your monitors must be able to give you this level of accuracy if they are to be of any use.
At even higher levels of training performance is the need to have a variety of data to cross reference in order to learn from your work. The more information you have, the more informed decisions you and your coach can make about your next and future training programs. Having graphs that include your running speed and distances, your altitude, the temperature of the area, your breathing rate, alongside your heart rate data will allow you to make these informed decisions.
To have the best chance of winning or to just bring out the best in your performance, you not only need to have the best technology around, you also have to have the best understanding of how effective your workouts are. More specifically you need to vary the intensity of your workout over periods of time leading up to an event and you need to have a good indicator of how to measure those intensity levels. Variation of workout intensity, rest and recovery periods and perhaps the most important things to get right in the lead up to an event and are often an area where the over eager athlete gets it wrong. Many of us use subjective perceived levels of exertion (RPE – Rate of Perceived Exertion) to gauge how intense our workouts are, whilst this is satisfactory to some, it is by no means accurate as we can fool ourselves with our own perceptions, especially if we have a mild cold or illness that we are unaware of. Anything that can give us more of an objective view of our workout intensity, with actual performance data, will improve how we prepare and plan our future training sessions
One of the best indicators of this is how much extra oxygen your body needs in order to recover after exercise. Your body consumes more oxygen after exercise than during rest. The more strenuous the exercise, the higher this extra consumption of oxygen is as the more your body’s homeostasis is disturbed. Analysis of this data will tell you how intense your work out was and over time it will show you how you are varying your work out intensities.
These days all top athletes do some form of altitude training. At higher altitudes the body produces more red blood cells and this means the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood is increased. The more oxygen in your blood will mean the greater your capacity to compete before going into your anaerobic zone (The zone at which your muscles cannot get enough oxygen from your blood to flush out all the lactic acid that has built up from repeated use. Training performances vary greatly depending on where you are doing your training (with regards to the altitude of the venue). Knowledge of this in and amongst your data will allow you to compare and contrast your performances and it will allow you to understand how to set programs to make the most of where you will be working out.
THE
SUUNTO T6 HEART RATE MONITOR
The T6 is the first instrument in the world that measures the real effect of your training. It captures 7 body parameters with laboratory accuracy and has interference free transmission of heart rate, speed and distance data.
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Features
Heart rate data – The T6 has a digital operating functionality and works on over 45,000 different channels of frequencies. The advantage this gives it over its ‘analogue’ competitors is that there is no interference from other users in the gym and the accuracy of the data captured is much more accurate as it will pick up all your heart beats. The benefits are many, including not losing vital data to having a very accurate live transmission of data to your monitor that is accurate to within 1 beat per minute even at high heart rate levels. You will not find your heart rates jumping wildly up and down unless that is exactly what your heart is doing!. The live transmission of the data will mean that whilst you are exercising you can vary your speed in a far more exact manner in order to train at exactly the pre-planned and desired heart rate limits to within 1-2 beats per minute.
Easy to use menu for all the functions - When you pick up the T6 and start to use it, even the ‘technophobes’ will be happy to find out that the easy to use menu will allow a user to navigate between all the functions without doing your head in!. Instructions on the face are helpful and it will not take weeks of study to learn how to make the most of your investment.
Altimeter/ Barometer, thermometer – No other heart rate monitor that we know of has this extra function in it. On its own, it is no more than something of a curiosity value, but when downloaded and alongside all the other training data, it will give the athlete and their coach new meaning and understanding if they train or even compete at differing venue altitudes. For the top athletes that travel to compete and train, it is something that becomes invaluable.
Memory capacity for over 100,000 heart beats- Nothing is more annoying than finding you have reached your limits of storage of heart rate data and when you find that instead of recording heart rates every 30 seconds, you can only download data taken every 2 minutes. This added vagueness makes your data more useless (4 times in this case). For cross trainers who do varying exercises you need to record data almost every 2 seconds in order to get something really useful to analyse at the end of the training. The T6’s advantage over all other heart rate monitors is that with its huge memory capacity it will give you that degree of accuracy which means you will be able to see a far more accurate picture of your workout. The real benefit here for the cross trainer is the ability to see their precise recovery heart rates in between exercises. If you do the course several times over a period of weeks, you will be able to see not only improvements in your fitness as your heart rates come down faster after periods of exertion, but also you will be able to plan your race with even better strategies. Everyone knows that they must race using their own strategy and not to be influenced by others. That is exceptionally hard when others have taken a short lead. However if you have prepared well, it is critical to stick to your race plan as you know that will bring out your best performance. One of the strange things here that all top cross trainers know is that a few seconds rest at a certain point in a race, along with a set heart rate target on a particular exercise early on in the race, will enable you to actually produce a faster time for the whole course. Where to take these short rest periods and when to rush the transitions and when to put yourself under heart rate restrictions for certain exercises, can really only be properly determined with accurate data and the T6 is the only monitor that can give you that.
Captures up to 100 laps/splits – As you start the race or your training, you want to be able to concentrate on what you are doing without worrying about your heart rate data. However you also want to capture useful data and with the T6’s ability to capture up to 100 lap/split times, you will be able to work out your exact times for each exercise. It is extremely easy as you just hit one button every time you end and start an exercise. Another advantage is that sometimes your coach cannot be present at your training sessions and with this data, the both of you can still have constructive conversations after your training session has ended. The benefits to this are easy to see for all levels of athlete from Beginner to Experienced. For the Beginner, they will be able to see improvements all over the place, as opposed to just an overall time. This is far more motivational than anything else and will help you keep up your training. For the Experienced athlete the benefit will be the outcome of an extremely precise race strategy that is guaranteed to get the best out of you and produce your best time.
Wireless compatibility – Downloading data after your exercise can be fraught with difficulties with some heart rate monitor models, especially the analogue versions. The wireless compatibility of the T6 ensures all the data is captured and it can even displayed in real time. A lap top next to your exercise equipment will give the serious athlete all the detail they need to make on the spot decisions in speed alteration in order to train at the optimum heart rate. The main benefit here is that you will be able to train to precise lactate thresholds and these are recorded and traceable over time to build a good history of improving fitness. One of the challenges in cross training is to know when one should move over from VO2 training to Threshold training in the lead up to a main event. If you move across too soon, your VO2 base can get eroded too much before the race. Move over too late and you will not peak in enough time as you will not have been able to have put in enough threshold sessions. The precision T6 offers you, along with its real time accessibility of the data, will help you determine exactly when to make these changes to your training.
Suunto Training Manager software with USB interface - Perhaps the most useful facet of the Suunto T6 package is the training manager software that comes with the Heart rate monitor. This unique and patented piece of software has been under design for the last 15 years. It takes 7 body measurements and calculates the training effect on your body at the end of your training session. No other monitor will pick up all these 7 parameters:- Heart rate, training effect, ventilation, oxygen consumption, energy consumption, respiration rate, EPOC. Its main advantage is that it produces an indication of ones Excess Post exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC). This will give the coach and their athlete an indication of the intensity of their workout. The benefit here is that this will allow you to plan and prepare for the next workout so that a planned training intensity variation can take place. In other words, at a time when the variation of intensity of your workout is critical due to rest and recuperation and the need to build up to a peak level of performance, you can gauge what levels of your workouts have been over the last few sessions and make adjustments accordingly. This will avoid you setting two intense workouts in a row at a time when you really needed a more of a lighter session. Get this part of your training wrong and, with too much of an intense session, you can dig too deep into your energy reserves. This can lead to lowering the efficiency your immune systems to keep out viruses and bacteria. This means that if you get the intensity of your training sessions wrong, you could catch illnesses. This could lead to severe training difficulties and even missing an important event (How often do we know people who have been at extreme levels of fitness only to find they miss the event due to an illness). Working with the T6 will greatly reduce the risk of these things happening and on the plus side will help you peak at just the right time for your event.
T6
Accessories
The Foot pod – The foot pod measures your running speed, distance and your stride path with 2 acceleration sensors. It does this up to 98% accuracy and can be calibrated personally. It is easily attached to ones foot strap and it can even be used indoors on Treadmills. It is light at 45g and used with the T6 it becomes a wireless running computer. The main advantage to cross trainers again comes when analysing heart rate data after a training session. You will not get a read out from your Treadmill of your speed and distance alongside your heart rates from many gyms. The T6 with the Foot pod will give you the ability to make better training decisions as your analysis will be better informed. The benefit to the cross trainer is that this will help with the planning of how to best do the treadmill part of the course. Questions like what is the best speed to start at and when should I reduce speed are all made far easier to answer with the build up of accurate data that you can collect over time. This in turn will lead to better performances.
The Bike Pod – This measures speed and distance when on a Bike outdoors. It can be calibrated to your wheel size to give a 99% accuracy. It only weighs 22g. Although it can only be used on an outdoor bike only, it offers cross trainers who do long VO2 bike sessions outdoors a greater amount of feedback to begin to know when to move across to do more interval work.
The PC Pod – This wireless USB link to your computer provides convenient downloading of data recorded with T6 and all of its PODS. It gives an added advantage to coaches who are training up to 3 people at a time, in that it will record all their heart rate data on a computer screen in live real time. These can be displayed on a graph as a percentage of maximum heart rate so that precise training of more than one person at a time becomes a very real possibility. It also comes with the added advantage of being able to pick up the transmissions from these athletes heart rate belts from all around the room. It also comes with the Suunto team software that allows coaches to create logs and profiles for different people and a history of their training is also easily accessible. Any combination of the 7 parameters can also be selected for viewing and this is a huge boost for coaches wanting to get the best out of their team.
But these are just our thoughts on why you should invest in a T6. Have a look at what others have said in this Press Release
PURCHASE DETAILS
The UKXTA felt that this was such a good value for money heart rate monitor that we have opened an account with them so that we can sell them to cross trainers and to those people who have visited this site and found the information helpful enough to them to want to purchase one through us. Unfortunately we are not yet able to operate an electronic purchasing facility so if you would like to buy one, please send us a cheque payable to J.Macquisten to the following address:- 69 Sutherland Crescent, Chippenham, Wiltshire, SN14 6RS
The Suunto T6 comes with Interference free transmitter belt, Training Manager software, replaceable battery and PC interface and retails for £300. For all UKXTA members who are purchasing a T6, via ourselves, their membership renewal will be free for the following year after the July event (Value £10). The first six people to order a T6 will also receive a free copy of the 2005 Cup event DVD worth £20. This is a total potential saving of 10%.
The Foot pod and the PC Pod retails at £60 and the Bike Pod retails at £50
These prices include postage and packaging and are the same as you will find in the shops. As these are new, they may be hard to find and we would rather you buy from us to support the association in a small way.