SPORT WALK

We’re big advocates of using tech in Sport Walking for a number of reasons but mostly because it gives you real hard facts to help you progress and develop. Training for a challenge or simply following a fitness plan can be really hard, psychologically. It can be difficult to maintain motivation after the initial rush of excitement wears off and the very fact that this is, necessarily, a repetitive process tests your determination and resilience to destruction.

Without the data that sports tech can give you, you’re flying completely blind on this journey and have to rely on feel to guide your sense of progress. But the thing is that progress always shows itself in training data before you feel it within yourself. So if you don’t have any means of translating the work you do into hard numbers, you can easily think that you’re not getting anywhere, when in fact you may be perfectly on track.

For the majority of people, their primary contact with tracking comes in the shape of their step count for the day and it’s at least encouraging that so many people pay attention to this number in these times of rising obesity and lifestyle induced ill health. The trouble with this though, is that step counts are just an indication of the number of steps you take, not the way you take them and that leaves a critical gap relating to the level of effort you’re making.

So while it’s good that people pay attention to their step count, as a baseline indicator of whether they’re moving enough, that’s where the value of this form of tracking ends. To be fully informed about your progress and level of activity, you need more specific and detailed data and that comes from sports or fitness trackers.

The rapid growth in the adoption of fitness trackers and in tracking our activities and then sharing them on platforms like Strava has also given rise to a kind of counter culture, rejecting activity tracking because it apparently makes you focus too much on your performance and the data, rather than on enjoying that activity in the moment. But this is missing the point a little.

Tracking activities is of immense value if you’re seeking to make structured progress towards an end goal. Likewise, if you’re pursuing a goal but don’t track your activity on principle then how are you ever going to know if you reach it or not? Tracking everything you do regardless of whether it fits a higher need is pointless and, probably, rather obsessive. Refusing to track on principle is just as flawed.

And this is, to be honest, where we sit at Sport Walk, on the use and benefits of sports trackers. It’s all about using them for a clear purpose – to feed your knowledge about how your body is performing, improving, developing, so that you can adapt your activities to maintain and increase that growth.

They say knowledge is power and in the context of Sport Walking, knowledge of your actual physical condition and capability truly is invaluable. You want to have that power – to improve yourself, to be able to do more, go further, faster. That’s kind of the whole point. 

So what exactly are we looking to capture and why is it helpful? Well, first of all, it’s worth reminding ourselves that when you start Sport Walking, you’re looking to achieve something, you’re doing it for a purpose because that’s where the sport lies. It could be fitness, it could be to complete a challenge but the whole point of Sport Walking is to achieve something by walking.

Regardless of your motivation, you’ll need to know if you’re doing things in the right way, that will give you the progress you need to achieve your goal. If you’re looking to get fit, you’ll need to know that you’re walking at the right speed to make improvements to your fitness and then, as you progress, you’ll need to know that you’ve also walked the right distance to keep progressing. This is the ‘why’. Why we track our walks and acquire data.

You could, of course, just drift along in the knowledge that walking is good for you and assume that, at some point in the future, you’ll have a light bulb moment when you’re out walking and realise that you feel fit. Job done, mission accomplished? OK, but how long is that going to take? How will you know if what you feel in that moment is truly fitness or just the glow of getting a good nights sleep the day before? How will you know, as you go along, if the speed you’re walking at is actually making any difference at all to your functional fitness?

If you don’t have actual data to inform your knowledge of your physical transformation, how will you know that what you think you feel is actually what you aspire to feel? How will you know for sure that you’ve achieved the fitness you want? So, we capture and record specific data that helps us read our progress, that reveals if we truly are getting there, even slowly. 

In terms of the ‘what’, the most important measure is pace, both average pace for the whole walk but also live pace, as you’re moving along. Walking to a pre-defined pace is one of the best ways to ensure that you’re making the right amount of effort to get the results you’re looking for. This applies both for fitness and for challenge preparation.

Pace is the gold standard in Sport Walking, it’s our guiding light if you like. If you’re out walking and you can see from your tracking device that your live pace is on target, you know for sure, that you’re doing the right thing in that moment to get the outcome you want.

Pace serves two purposes – it ensures you’re moving fast enough to achieve what you want but also it ensures that you’re not going too hard and too fast, which would put everything at risk because if you go out too fast, you could ‘blow up’ later on, having invested too much effort early on. So this is why pace is such an important measure for Sport Walkers.

The ‘average pace’ read out you get at the end is really beneficial because it shows you that despite all the little fluctuations along the way, despite your pace dropping off as you climbed that slope, you still achieved that specific average pace and this is a great measure to hold as a target. If you can bring your average pace down over time for the same distances, then you know for sure you’re getting faster and the most likely reason for that is that you’re getting fitter.

But there’s also the live pace readout that you can often set on your home screen of your device, which tells you the exact pace you’re walking at in that moment and, although it’s always fluctuating, it’s still very useful. Let’s assume you have a target pace of 9 minutes per kilometre for your walk. If your live pace is showing 9:00 or under, then you know you’re on track. Of course when you go uphill, this pace will drop but you know why that’s happening.

You can conduct our ‘Speed Tests’ to reveal what your pace potential is and then you can set yourself pace targets to meet every time you go out. It’s not just guess work anymore, by doing this you’re bringing certainty into play. You’ve worked out how fast you need to walk or can walk and you’re then simply using your tracker to make sure that you do walk that fast. Without a tracker, you can know how fast you need to go but have no way of knowing whether you are or not!

So tracking your pace is invaluable. It starts by showing you what you’re capable of, which then lets you set accurate targets that will really deliver progress. Then, you simply walk to that target pace each time and by seeing that you’re achieving that target while you’re walking, you have complete certainty that this workout is going really well! Even if, perhaps, on that day it doesn’t feel like it.

The other key elements we’re tracking are speed (not as useful in the moment as pace but it reveals just how fast you can walk), distance – because if you have set a training objective to complete a certain distance when you go out Sport Walking, you need to know you’ve actually done that. And lastly, elapsed time, which is also helpful in comparing pace targets with time goals. If you can see that on a training walk, by following a pace target you completed the walk in a particular time, you can have confidence that you can achieve a time goal in a challenge.

It is true that you can work out your time if you know the distance you travelled and your speed but let’s face it, it’s better if you can just get a summary of your key stats presented at the end, rather than needing to work stuff out.

Which device?

Often, the basic idea of using a fitness tracker isn’t what people struggle with, it’s which type to use. This is a valid point because different brands put emphasis on different things but for Sport Walkers there are some core functions that are the most beneficial and these, generally speaking, can be found on most, if not all, tracker types.

The core elements that you should look for when looking at a device and which will be the most beneficial to you are, as we’ve outlined, pace, speed, distance and elapsed time. Now these are not unique or specialist measures. All trackers should give you this data but some will be able to display it live, while others may only capture it for display after the session has ended.

So checking that you can view your live pace, speed, distance and elapsed time is important when looking at a tracker. Other functions like heart rate can be useful but for Sport Walking, heart rate isn’t as valuable as it is for runners, purely because walking is generally a lower intensity activity than running – your heart rate is likely to remain at a comparatively lower level while walking than if you were running.

There are other elements which will shape your choice of device, the main one being its form factor. Is it a watch, an app on your phone, a smart wrist band or a smart watch etc etc? Different products have different benefits, so let’s start with the simplest, easiest way to track your Sport Walking.

Phone App

There are a number of different apps you can get for your phone that are often available for free and which will give you the basic requirements you need, to be able to see and track your pace, speed distance and elapsed time.

The one we use is Strava, mainly because that’s our social sports platform of choice and we also have our Strava Club on there. We’ve not used other apps, so we can’t say whether they provide that data collection mix we’ve described above but let’s assume they all do.

The benefit of using a phone app is that you’re likely always to have your phone with you when you work out or train, so it’s there already and you don’t need to use a second device.  The only downside is that you might want to keep your phone clear for taking photos, shooting video clips, navigating with mapping software etc or, heaven forbid, taking or making phone calls!

If you do want to preserve the sanctity of your phone for other things though, you are going to need to have a second device, most likely a watch or wrist band that can perform the tracking function and that means additional cost. The phone app is, without question, the cheapest, simplest way of gathering data when you’re starting out and it also keeps the process really simple.

Say you’re using Strava, which would be our recommendation. You record your activity on the app and then when you save it, it automatically goes into your feed and you have that record of performance that you can refer back to and compare with later activities to see how you’re progressing.

Smart Watch or Wrist Band

Smart watches and bands are really popular, understandably so, and they can provide a good data gathering option for you that also leaves your phone free for other things. Initially, their accuracy was considered a weak point but huge improvements have been made in comparison to some sports watches and for a lot of people now they can be more than good enough for what they need.

Apple Watch is probably the most widely adopted smart watch while Fitbit is the most well known band style, although they also make more recognisable watch models.

You may need to use a third party app to gain greater reach with your activities through social sharing and that will mean syncing your watch and phone to that third party app, so that the data automatically updates both in the native app for your watch and phone and on the third party app but this isn’t difficult and any decent tracking app should give clear and precise information for syncing with the smart watch that you have.

Sports Watches

Sports watches were the original trackers. Before smart watches, wrist bands, phone apps or even the word tracker was created, sports watches were gathering performance data and logging it under your personal account on the brand’s website. The watch you’d buy would come with an account on the brand’s website that was your own personal storage base for all your data.

This is a setup that’s remained largely unchanged, it’s just that lots of users then also like to sync this data with their social or activity sharing site of choice – in our and thousands of others’ case – Strava. Arguably the best aspect of a sports watch is that it’s dedicated to recording data, it’s not trying to do other things as well, which is why, often, the actual data you get from a dedicated sports watch can be more accurate.

However, increasingly, these same sports watches are taking the smart watches on at their own game, by adding other functional tech to let you control music on your phone, receive texts and other things previously the domain of the phone. Essentially, there’s a pot of useful functions that we all benefit from and the sports watch manufacturers are attacking them from one angle while the phone/smart watch manufacturers are attacking them from another angle.

So who’s best?

Our problem now is not the lack of beneficial tech that we can deploy to help us improve our fitness, endurance and to keep track of all the amazing things we do, it’s the polar opposite – there’s so much choice it’s hard to know what to go for.

It would be really easy to recommend the specialists – the sports watch makers – because they are giving us specialist tools designed precisely for our needs but that approach falls at the first hurdle if you don’t have the money to buy one and they can be really expensive. A good sports watch can be upwards of £300, more for the really top flight models.

In a way, the key determining factor is how important truly accurate data is to you and what benefit are you seeking from having it. If you simply want to know that you’re in the ballpark zone to achieve functional fitness that will make a difference to your life, then your needs are going to be very different to a Sport Walker who aspires to post strong times in ultramarathons or even to try and set some Trail Records.

For the latter, accuracy of time, pace and distance are what counts, for the former, being able to see progress in the numbers is what matters, the accuracy of the numbers isn’t so critical because less is at stake. So, in this instance, the first person could do fine using the Strava app on their phone and simply seeing how their pace is improving, while the second really does need to invest in a sports watch that will give them rock solid data because that’s integral to what success will mean to them.

Tech gives you a range of different options all of which could be enough for you, it all depends on what your objectives are and how accurate you need the data to be. For instance, if you want or need total accuracy in relation to height, then you’d be looking to get a watch with ‘barometric pressure’ altitude measurement because that uses air pressure to accurately measure height. 

If your watch doesn’t use the barometric method for measuring altitude, it may not give you as accurate a height reading and that can translate into distance inaccuracies, if you’re in hilly or mountainous terrain. Accurate hight readings are also mission critical when navigating dangerous mountain environments, where you need to understand if your actual heigh corresponds with the height readings on your map. If you’re 100m lower than the point on the map where you think you are, then you’re in trouble!

So, the functionality of your device is key to it providing you with what you need. For a great many people the level of accuracy you’d get with a high end sports watch isn’t necessary and so, for them, a smart watch or phone app could be enough.

The key thing though is to use tech in the first place because it transforms your knowledge of what you’re truly capable of and reveals the progress you’ve made, to keep you enthused. Whether you just use a phone app or invest in a sports watch, adopt the principle of tracking and recording your activities and you’ll be swimming in information that’s immensely beneficial to you. Once you have that data, you won’t want to fly blind again!