TomTom Touch Fitness Tracker Review

Last year I started using the TomTom Spark fitness watch for recording my runs - I was really impressed. But I have to admit I'm not a great fan of wearing a watch throughout the day and found myself missing out on the step-counter feature because I'd leave the watch at home, or on my desk. I'd used a simple, compact and lightweight fitness tracker successfully in the past so I was very tempted by the TomTom Touch fitness tracker as an alternative way of simply measuring my activity levels throughout the day.

My TomTom Touch Cardio is a step counter, an activity timer, a sleep tracker, a heart rate monitor AND a body composition calculator all in one. It is much more than just a pedometer, it is an all-round health monitor which, if you want to, you could keep on all day to give you a picture of your overall health and fitness levels.

I've been using the TomTom Touch for about a month now. Largely I use it as a step counter and I find that wearing a step counter helps to encourage me to try and get out for a walk during my lunch breaks. During the day I wear it on my wrist so it can act as a watch but it is far more discrete and lightweight than wearing a fully-blown fitness watch. The default screen shows the time and a visual indicator of how close you are to your 10,000 step goal for the day. You can swipe through the screens to see a count of the number of steps, the distance you've walked today, the time you've spent active today, the time you spent inactive (asleep) last night, calories burned and then your heart rate.

The TomTom Touch has a a heart rate monitor built into it so you can monitor your heart rate all day. It actively tracks your heart rate when you are recording a fitness activity and you can ask it to tell you your current heart rate at any point during the day at the touch of the button; I found it particularly fascinating to watch my resting heart rate increase while I was on a call to an important client of mine the other day! Tracking your heart rate gives you a more accurate measure of calories burned during an activity because each of us is different in the way our bodies respond to exercise.

Starting an activity is easy - press the button to start recording. I've used this for a walk with a friend but in general, I prefer to use my fitness watch for tracking walks and runs because my watch can also give me GPS location data. I actually find it too easy to accidentally start an activity on the TomTom Touch and have ended up with quite a few 3 second activities by accident! I had my TomTom devices linked to automatically upload to Strava when it completes and activity but because I kept sharing 3 second activities, I had to switch it off!

One of the most appealing features of the TomTom Touch was the body composition monitor as this is something I'd only ever had measured at a gym before. As long as you wear the device tightly on your wrist for at least 15 minutes, it can capture a measurement of your body fat percentage and muscle percentage. As I've been marathon training I was interested to see the impact that the training was having on my body composition and I'm sure that if you were on a diet or a fitness training programme this would be really interesting and helpful data to monitor.

I have two bugbears with the TomTom Touch - the first is that I have to touch the button in order to wake up the screen so I can see the time, or my current step count. I'd really like to be able to do this just by moving my wrist.  The other is that it seems to drain battery - I've found myself having to recharge it about every two days and charging doesn't seem fast.  I ended up charging it through my computer overnight so didn't get the benefit of the sleep tracking. I think you can turn off the constant heart-rate monitoring which may save battery life but for me, every 2 days is far too often. I tried to take it away for a long weekend and found it to run out of battery half way through a family walk.

The TomTom Touch connects to your phone via Bluetooth so that you can synchronise all your data with the TomTom Sports app; it also means you can receive notifications on the screen of your fitness tracker for new calls or messages on your linked phone.  The TomTom sports app is very new and it is a significant improvement on the previous app - massively faster and feels far more intuitive - I think it looks great and has all the stats I want to see in one place. I like the fact I can see how my body composition is changing over time, and I can see my heart rate behaviour during my runs, walks or gym sessions.

The TomTom Touch with cardio costs around £129.99. Mine is black but you can customise it with a range of different coloured straps.

TomTom Spark + Cardio + Music - A Runner's Review

I'm running again - yay! I'll admit that I'm still struggling to rediscover my running mojo after injury earlier this year but I do at least get out for a run once a week as I lead a running club on a Tuesday night so I've no excuse.  For the past couple of week's I've been using the TomTom Spark as my running watch during these sprint and hills training sessions with my friends and neighbours - putting it's heart rate monitor and running features through their paces.

The TomTom spark is a GPS Fitness Watch for running, walking, swimming, cycling, gym and more. With the Cardio option, the TomTom Spark comes with a built in heart rate monitor so you can track your effort as you run, or you can choose to workout in your heart rate zones.  I've tried using a heart rate monitor in the past and I enjoy seeing the stats but I've previously only ever used a chest strap which is uncomfortable and easy to forget to put on when you go out for a run; having the HRM built into the back of the TomTom is a luxury that means I can see heart rate stats every time I run.  This is particularly useful to me when I'm running a club session with intervals as I can use my watch to see when my heart rate is recovering after an interval. I've been really pleased with how accurate the heart rate monitor is, and despite needing to make sure the strap is quite firmly done up around your wrist, the watch strap is very comfortable.

Perhaps the biggest selling point for me of the TomTom Spark + Cardio + Music is in fact the music!  I hate having to run with a phone for music so I gave that up some time ago.  Recently I'd been really missing my music (and wanted to listen to the Couch to 5k tracks again) but the Bluetooth on my phone had died.  Thankfully the TomTom Spark comes with the option to wirelessly connect to a pair of headphones.  I've chosen to connect mine to my Aftershokz wireless headphones but you can choose to buy TomTom in-ear bluetooth headphones included with your TomTom Spark.  The watch can hold upto 500 songs on it and you transfer them onto the device as playlists from iTunes or equivalent using the TomTom MySports app.  I've packed mine full of fast dance music to get my feet moving at 180 strides per minute!

I've found the Spark really easy to configure. Using the touch-sensitive button on the watch I can set up pretty much all of the running sessions I'd want to using either time or distance intervals.  It took me a while to get used to the fact that the watch didn't beep at me when I'd come to the end of each kilometer but I've now got used to the gentle buzz that it gives my wrist when I reach the end of an interval.  I find the screen modes simple and easy to move between when I run - as you go you can see heart rate as a graph, % of time spent in different heart rate zones, time, distance and if you're running intervals, the time left until the end of that interval.

I use my TomTom Spark for running sessions mostly - I've hooked it up to automatically post my runs to Strava so that I can monitor routes and segments when I run.  I also tried using the TomTom spark as a general purpose activity tracker to track my steps and sleep but as an active member of Bounts, I really want an activity tracker that will upload my steps to Bounts for me to earn rewards so I've defaulted back until TomTom can built an integration with Bounts (hint, hint).  It's a shame though because the little fuel-gauge to indicate steps progress towards your goal is pretty neat and it would be good to have everything in one place so that my watch did everything, especially if I buy a pretty, colourful replacement strap!  In it's default black it doesn't feel very sexy to me - not something I'd wear all day as my main watch (although, much sportier types might find it perfect).

The TomTom spark is perfect for running - I think that without music, the battery will get me through my 5-6 hour marathon I've got planned for next spring!  I'm genuinely impressed. From the speed of the GPS signal location (no hanging around waiting to find a satellite!) to the ease of connection to my headphones, there's nothing complicated about the TomTom Spark, and yet it does pretty much everything you need it to.

But aside from running, I've also tested it out in the pool. I was very impressed by the accuracy of the distance and laps that it measured in the pool without a GPS signal.  I don't often swim any more but it is nice to take a look at how my performance changes over time.  And if you like stats...

...the TomTom MySports website has all the stats you can need!  I think its a fabulously clean and simple user interface that allows me to understand my runs and my progress.  If you are using your Spark as an activity tracker you can set goals and see how you're progressing towards them.  With the heart rate monitor data I can see effort against the different points in my run as a coloured indicator. I'm really pleased with the functionality available in both the desktop app (for synching the watch) and the website (for viewing stats).

The TomTom Spark costs from £109.99 to £229.99 (with cardio, music and bluetooth headphones).

Ozeri WeightMaster II Bathroom Scales Review

Since I started running last spring I have lost two stone but when I injured myself at Christmas, I found that my weight plateaued and furthermore, ever since I ran my half marathon in March, some of the bad habits have crept back in and my weight has started to creep up.  This week I've decided to do something about it and I have a new set of bathroom scales to help me keep track of my progress and to monitor my BMI.

I am a big fan of Ozeri's kitchen equipment and have used their kitchen scales in the past but this is the first time that I've tried their bathroom scales.  The Ozeri WeightMaster II is a digital bathroom scale which can measure your weight (cough... mass) and calculate your BMI.  It can also maintain user profiles so that you can monitor your own weight over time.

Whether you are trying to lose weight, maintain weight or gain weight, the fact that the WeightMaster II can maintain a history of weight measurements means that you can track your progress.  You program in upto 8 different user profiles and from then on, when you step on the scale, it recognises you... measures you... then tells you how things have changed in the last 1, 3, 7 and 30 measurements.

Mr. B. and I have struggled a bit with the automatic user profile recognition.  Although we are different heights, we have quite similar weights at present and so the WeightMaster seems to umm and aaah when I step on the scale and will cycle through the user profiles before making a decision.  Mr. B. doesn't use the scales very often so I can't tell if he is having the same problem but in the short term, I deleted his profile (mwah ha ha) and this sped things up a bit and reduced the confusion.

One of the features I really like about the Ozeri WeightMaster II is that the display will turn green or red depending on whether you have lost or gained weight since your last measurement.  Ordinarily I only measure once per week but to test out the scales I have been trying them several times a day to learn how my body weight fluctuates throughout the day - its very interesting to see the times of day when it tends to turn red, compared to green and really goes to show why, if you are tracking your weight, you should always measure at the same time of day and week to get a good comparison.

I think that the immediate BMI calculation is a great idea as, really, this is more important than overall weight.  Again, because Mr. B. and are are different heights, it is interesting to see that currently he is officially classed as "overweight" based on his BMI result but as I am taller, I am classed as "healthy".

The Ozeri WeightMaster II scales can be switched from kg to lbs easily.  It comes in either white or black and is on offer at Amazon at present so costs around £30 (plus postage) from Amazon.  At present the Ozerio Touch II scale is on offer for £35 on Amazon and this model includes Body Fat, Hydration and Muscle/Bone Mass.

  

SwimShop - A Review for Mummy and Lara!

As part of my half-marathon training plan, I'm supposed to cross train at least once a week.  At present, my cross-training consists of me joining Holly for her mother and baby swimming lesson for half an hour every week!  Once my first half marathon is out of the way, later this month, I have made a promise to myself that I will go swimming, for myself, once every week and so Swimshop got in contact to ask me to try out one of their items of swimwear as part of my new training regime.

You know me, I'm not one to go with plain colours or something subtle so I chose this Speedo Women's endurance muscleback swimmng costume which comes in a set of colours that they call adriatic blue, papaya yellow and ecstatic pink!  Despite being colourful and fun, it is actually a dedicated sports suit which can withstand speed and is designed to be resistant to damage from chlorine (something that my swimwear always succumbs to, sooner or later).  I love this suit although I would say that I always struggle with Speedo costumes as a tall woman... it is phenomenally hard to find swimwear which has a long enough body shape.

I paired my new costume with a brand new pair of goggles - the Keifer Raptors.  I was sorely in need of a new pair of goggles having discovered that it was so long since I had last been swimming that my old pair had perished!  Woops.

Oh well, I'm back in the zone now and I'm really looking forward to adding a new dimension to my training.  Swimming is an entirely different discipline to running.

But it isn't just Mummy who gets to go swimming regularly now.  Lara, who is nearly 6, is also swimming at least once a week, sometimes more.  Despite a wobble at the start of the new term, Lara is now LOVING her swimming lessons and I am so proud when I see her swimming breast stroke and butterfly confidently in the pool.  Lara is now sporting one of these very grown-up looking Slazenger Girls Racerback swimming costumes from Swimshop which start at age 7 and cost from just £4.49.  When I see her swim, I can't quite believe how grown up she looks.  She is my little swimming superstar.