Review by K. Carisi for Timex T5H881 Zone Trainer Digital Heart Rate Monitor
Rating:
This is my second Timex heart rate monitor and I would never buy anything else. I’ve experimented with Polars and was highly disappointed. This watch fits nicely and I recommend the black color so that dirt doesn’t change the color. I wear it all day and then throw on the chest strap when exercising. I love checking how many calories I have burned and its easy to use. I highly recommend this heart rate monitor!!

Review by Gaji for Timex T5H881 Zone Trainer Digital Heart Rate Monitor
Rating:
This watch makes it easy to do zone training – exercising so that your heart is in one particular “zone” (a percentage of your maximum heart rate). For example – if you are exercising in Zone 3 (70-80% of maximum heart rate) you will get 3 points for every minute exercised and the idea is to accumulate a certain number of points per week. The watch tells you how much total time you exercised, and how much time you spent in your target zone. It doesn’t tell you how much time you spent in any other zone or for that matter, points accumulated per exercise – two data points that would have made it much easier to follow the zone training suggested in the manual provided with the watch. Given all the data the watch provides, it would have been trivial to provide these data points as well and it’s really beyond me why Timex didn’t bother. Seriously guys – time to hire product managers with a functional brain. The heart sensor is, as far as I can tell, pretty accurate and the watch is easy to read. The heart monitor strap can be uncomfortable – being a guy I have all of a sudden, newfound sympathy to women who decide to burn their bras.

Review by John M for Timex T5H881 Zone Trainer Digital Heart Rate Monitor
Rating:
I weigh 190lbs with a 34 in waist and the chest strap just fits. I have a small frame (albeit somewhat overweight) so I can see how larger men would have a problem with the chest strap. But, it fits me so I went ahead and gave the watch five stars.

The more I use this thing the more I like it. I wear reading glasses or bifocals at 2.0x power. I can still read the time (the instructions were a different story) without my glasses. In the chronometer function the HR range is displayed above your elapsed time. Your current HR is a little black cursor above the HR range. You can see this in the product picture. This is cool because (even without my glasses) I can see if I am starting to get out of range as the cursor approaches either the high or low end of the range (while still being able to see the chronometer). If you would rather just watch your HR you can switch to make that the dominant display with the chronometer in a small font above it.

You can set an alarm tone to sound when you get out of your HR zone, too.

It will calculate your HR recovery over a 1 min or 2 min period. And, when the recovery period ends the watch is smart enough to stop sounding the HR TOO LOW alarm. However, if your HR goes out of range during recovery the alarm tone keeps sounding. The watch also starts the recovery period as soon as you press stop on the chronometer.

There is a review function so that you can see AVG HR, peak HR, min HR, etc. If you enter your weight in the setup then it will estimate calories burned, too. It just keeps the stats on one session.

After you put in your values for low and high HR for your HR range, you also select your fitness “zone” by selecting if you want to loose weight or work on aerobic fitness, etc. The watch then uses a different percent of max HR to calculate your target HR range depending on the zone you have selected. This “zone” is in the setup so if you want to switch your workout goals everyday then it might be a pain to switch that every day… but at least you wouldn’t need to enter values for HR or figure the percent of max that you want to use for that day.