Hip factor - 10!
Function factor - 7!
Apple and Nike have joined forces to bring sports + fitness fanatics a new way to train. A wireless piece plugs into your ipod, and a wireless sensor for your shoe. Everytime you step, it transmits that information to the ipod. It will also use that information to adjust your music accordingly, to get you to workout harder and so on. It’s quite a cool concept.
The new device, available at the apple store, and partnered with Nike, is basically a very hip and cool pedometer. There are many available, take a look over at Amazon. How a pedometer works is it clicks and increments a counter everytime you take a step. What good is that you ask? Well you input the LENGTH of your stride after various estimations. The problem is that your stride varies dramatically depending on how hard you’re working out, if you’re going up or downhill, if you’re tired, at the end of your workout, and so on and so forth.
Normally you measure your stride by say running 1/10 of a mile, and counting the number of strides in your head, and then dividing. Really this is just an estimate, and an average of that moment of time. Suppose it’s off by only one inch (2.5 cm). A stridge might be 1 meter (3 feet). Now if you run, and the device calculates you ran 5000 strides, that is 5km (3.1 miles). But it is then off by +/- 12500 cm (5000 inches) which is 125 meters (417 feet). If you just train casually you might not care, but if you’re training hard, and really pushing your times, it is difficult to get really accurate numbers with a pedometer.
But if your aim is to make workouts more fun, and to have a useful tool to help you, this is a great one. If you’re looking for a more all-purpose training partner, I would highly recommend the Garmin Forerunner 305.