Please recommend wearable tech
 

Not a watch. Something for bike rides (OK, spin class) and intervals done in the gym. Not a heart rate monitor or a pedometer. Also, I don't think an Oura Watch is going to measure fitness either.

Thanks!

Not sure what you're getting at. What physiological metric do you want to capture? You don't want a watch or a HRM. Do you want to monitor your blood glucose? Muscle oxygen? Something else?

Since we're having to guess at just what you're hoping to monitor, here's my shot at it...

Wearable Fertility Trackers

:lol:

Average watts, max watts. Calories burned, energy used. That sort of thing.

You can't measure power output with wearable tech. There have been a few attempts at power-meter shoes, but they've all been failed efforts. You need to measure power on the bike: at the pedals, the cranks, or the rear hub. DC Rainmaker has a huge roundup of these. Note: they're expensive, and probably not worth it unless you're ready to invest the mental effort to understand power-based training and the physical effort to put that into practice.

Smart trainers also have built-in power meters, and he has a roundup of those too, if you are OK with riding without moving.

Calories burned is a function of work, which is a function of power.

If you train with a power meter and HRM for a while, you can work out rough equivalences between the two, so you can kinda-sorta use heart rate to approximate power output, but it's not reliable. And you can do some math to figure out the approximate power output for a ride, after it's over, but again, this will be approximate.

You can use wearable tech to guess those things, but specifically for the stuff you're talking about, companies got so good at actually measuring it, that nobody is really interested in not very accurate guesses, and that market never developed much for cycling. So (as far as I know) there's nothing wearable that can tell you more about bike watts than Strava, which is free. There's a thriving market for wearable running watt meters, but that's because they don't have a better option.

I don't know what your spin setup is. Common recommendation would be to use an outdoor bike on a smart trainer, and then your phone can collect the watt data.

It's unlikely that your spin class bike will be broadcasting power via an open Bluetooth channel (or at all).

I guess if you have a set of powermeter pedals, you could pop them on the spin bike. Then with a Garmin head unit or wearable you could view and record your power data.

This is all much too complicated for me. thanks all, for responding.

I find riding a bike outside and actually getting somewhere and not worrying so much about data is healthier, I don't need more gizmos and gadgets beeping at me. Being in an enclosed space with a bunch of half naked sweaty people being stationary just isn't my thing, I would rather be with those sweaty people outside moving.

You do you though.

Tell me more about these half-naked sweaty people.

Did you think this was helpful?

What about the half naked sweaty people out doors? Heck, in a very gross looking way, I'm sometimes one of them during hot summer days.

:p :winter:

Sure why not...more helpful than I want something but I don't want what I want.

I've taken to displaying the time of day, distance traveled, and ambient temperature on my Garmin. I collect the data for future analysis and to log the ride, but I try not to obsess on it in real time. I try to enjoy the ride. I admit that this is cheap and easy for me to do since I basically suck.

I agree with the last 2 posters who basically said "enjoy the ride". When I first started spin class, I did enjoy getting sweaty and climbing the hills and doing the sprints. As bikes got more technical, I kept meticulous logs and details about when I rode, which bike I got, and how I felt and did.

In the summertime our bikes ceased to yield this data and I went into panic mode. At some point I realized I could just enjoy the music and the ride and it would be good enough as I too, suck!!!