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In yesterday’s blog on the first month on my weight loss journey, I mentioned that I switched from an Excel spreadsheet to the Tomtom Mysport app to record my progress.

The decision to switch to this app happened as a result of my purchase of the Tomtom Spark 3 with heart rate monitor. Part of the benefits of buying such a device is that it also provides you with tools that would normally cost you money.

At first I was attracted to the fact that it would give me a running heart rate during exercise and will buzz me if I exceed a certain number of beats. I became concerned initially when I developed heart palpitations after exercises. Not because I worried that I would die a premature death, but because I didn’t know how far I should push myself during exercise. At the time I started riding better and even challenging my riding partners at times and to be honest I think it was pushing it a bit.

TomTom provided me with the formulae to calculate the heart rate for my age and also gave me the zones where I should keep my heart rate for optimizing weight loss, power or speed. The watch is also an activity tracker that monitors your sleep patterns, resting heart rate and weight. Later on they also started providing workout plans which is very handy for interval training.

My fears of training too hard therefore had the benefit of assisting me with some handy tools to manage my journey and kept me motivated.

Very soon after I started off on this journey my brother told me about Strava and I downloaded this free app from the Apple appstore. I started recording all my trips on Strava as it gave me a good record of all my rides and importantly allowed me to measure my improvements against my own performance. I could also measure myself against the other riders in the massive Strava community or against other people in my age group. You can see how many people tackled a specific segment and how you feature against them. Strava also allows you to create your own segments and will then pull in information from every other athlete that previously or later tackled that segment.

Because mountain biking involves some obstacle riding at times and exposes you to the risk of  falls, I decided not to use my expensive smart phone as a bike computer and continued to use my bike computer to see what was happening while I am riding. Because I became more competitive and wanted to see if I was improving against myself, I needed to see things like my average speed and current speed while riding and although the Tomtom could provide that, it sat on my wrist and had limited display options. For a runner this would work absolutely fine but not for cycling on rough terrain.

So with this set of tools to my disposal, I ended up using my cheap cycling computer to see what happened on the trail, while I used the Tomtom watch to keep an eye on my heart rate and to upload my activities directly to Strava and the Tomtom Mysport app to manage trends like weight and resting heart rate.

This worked well for me until I achieved my set goal to lose 40 kilograms.

In follow-up blogs, I will look at other apps that I evaluated as well as devices like bike computers and watches because no app or device is perfect or complete and it took me a long time to decide which apps and devices I prefer and I can save you a lot of time going through the same trouble unless you really want to do it so that you can form your own opinion. In the groups that ride with me we have a wide variety of these devices and apps and we will look at why the people started using them and how they work for them.