If you’re interested in taking up running seriously, then a running or fitness watch can be highly advantageous.

There are many reasons for this too. For starters, a fitness watch will allow you to track the number of calories that you burn on a run and how high your heart rate goes.

This not only allows you to do things like running to meet a set objective (calories burned, max heart rate etc.) but even to use particular types of running – like zone runs or interval training.

There’s more too. The right watch should also track your runs, so you don’t need to take your phone to monitor your route.

It should be able to count your steps throughout the day too and then show you metrics like how your daily step count impacts on your performance when running.

But to benefit from all these features, you’re going to need the right fitness watch.

Read on and we’ll take a look at how you can go about selecting that to ensure you’ll get the very most from your new device.

Heartrate Monitor

One of the first things you absolutely need for your fitness tracker or running watch is an effective heartrate monitor.

This will track your heartrate as you are training, which in turn will give you the most accurate picture of how hard you are working and how many calories you are burning.

Going on steps alone is simply not very accurate!

But of course it’s not sufficient to just get any heartrate monitor – you need to make sure that it is a good one too.

That means it needs to be accurate (which you can find from reading reviews) and ideally, it should also be one that checks your heartrate regularly.

GPS

Not all running watches have GPS. So if you want to make sure yours can track your runs, this is also going to be very important.

Data Points and Use

The more data you collect, the fuller the picture you can paint of your health.

The Microsoft Band 2, for instance, allows you to see an estimate of your VO2 max once it has collected data from enough runs.

Workouts

Another useful function is a band that can provide pre-designed workouts, like interval sessions.

These help you to burn a certain amount of calories in a set amount of time and to discover new ways to train.