Watches With GPS – Garmin Forerunner Advanced Workouts

Watches with GPS are possibly one of the more sophisticated innovations in performance and fitness tools to have hit the market recently. Sports Watches that features GPS are useful for any athlete who is involved in running, cycling, rowing and other motion sports.

GPS watches can track your pace, speed, distance traveled and can plot your course on a map. The most advanced offer a suite of fitness functions that cater to almost any athlete's claims.

The most popular GPS sports watches are currently Garmin's Forerunner line.

Garmin has just released two new upgrades to their most popular models, the Forerunner 405CX (supersedes the Forerunner 405) and the 310XT (supersedes the Forerunner 305).

Perhaps one of the reasons why the forerunner watches have become such a hit amongst athletes is the strength of it's fitness features. Forerunner sports modes like "Workouts", allow athletes the ability to create just about any combination of structured training session one can imagine. The watch's display can also be heavily customized to show read-outs that include just about any real-time field possible, with the option of cycling through several pages of data-fields in mid session.

The Forerunner workout types include advanced and simple workouts, heart rate and interval workouts. The workouts allow the creation of a structured work out including warm-up, cool-down and in some cases intervals.

The Advanced workout feature is very much like the feature name suggests – it is a watch mode that allows the creation of complex sessions. Unlike the other types of workouts, Advanced workouts structures the workout in a series of steps. Goals at each stage can be configured and the sessions scheduled in the watch's calendar. The watch will issue a reminder when your schedule for the day is due.

The advanced workout features is handy in the gym, when you might be switching between a number of different apparatus or could be used to create a loosely structure Fartlek running sessions.

The Forerunner will display the name of each step during a current workout, your goal if you have set one and all other relevant workout data. As you near the end of a step, an alarm counts down until the next step begins. The LAP / RESET button can be pressed to end an advanced workout early.