Wahoo! Hotel room fitness

Tuesday evening: Business dinner. It was quite late when I arrived back in my hotel room. In the morning, I snoozed the alarm and prioritized an additional hour of sleep over a full workout.

Still, I was interested to explore use of my new Wahoo Tickr X heart rate strap in combination with the iPhone and a hotel gym/hotel room.

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First I headed to the gym on the 8th floor. It was very hot in the gym, but I grabbed a treadmill and opened the Wahoo app.

But which app? Wahoo has an entire suite of apps but to me they all seem to be very overlapping in functionality. First I tried “Wahoo Fitness” but I couldn’t even get the app to connect to the Tickr X. It saw the Tickr, but it got stuck on “connecting”. I tried Wahoo RunFit, with the same result.

Only when I stopped recording on my Garmin Forerunner watch, I succeeded in pairing the strap to the phone. That was a bit disappointing. With the SpeedCoach and with CrewNerd, I was able to successfully pair with the phone through Bluetooth and with the Garmin through ANT+.

Now I had the RunFit app open so I continued on the RunFit. I wanted to see the special running metrics that I was promised, stride rate and running smoothness. The values were “–“. Only when I picked up the phone from the treadmill and held it in hand, was I able to get some parameters. Apparently this works with the motion sensors in the phone, not the motion sensors in the strap.

It was very hot and I also wanted to do some strength exercises, so I headed back to the hotel room.

I changed the RunFit app to the “7 minute workout” (again, I struggled a bit with the connection but succeeded in the end), and got started.

But this was fun! I am the type of “athlete” who has no difficulty to run or row for hours, but I do have issues doing circuits or strength training on my own. I need supervision there. The iPhone gave me instructions, and using the motion sensor in the Tickr X counted the number of push-ups, lunges and other exercises. Also, I think the 7 minute circuit is a nice mix of body weight exercises. (The only think you need is a chair). I did the circuit twice, before I had to get ready to go to my meetings. In the second round, the app reminded me of my best effort (from the first round). I really feel the iPhone voice giving instructions and counting the repeats with me was enough “supervision” to get me to do these circuit trainings properly.

What was also neat was a color coding on the phone. The app background was blue if you did the exercise “so-so” and green if you did it better (deeper push-ups, less body movement during plank, etc). I like that.

I was excited to see sharing functionality with Strava in the FitRun app, but unfortunately it only syncs heart rate and time. I was hoping that the number of repeats for the different exercises would at least be captured in the Notes section.

Here are a few screenshots:

The March CTC effort (a full out 5143m on the erg) is at risk of not being done. It will depend on how Thursday goes, but as we have a visit of our CTO, so I have little hope of carving out time and being rested enough to do the CTC.