Sports watches are special types of wristwatches designed to assist you with a specific outdoor activity such as walking, bush walking, triathlon or deep water diving. Sport watches differ in many ways. When you shop for a sports watch you will find significant varation in terms of features, price and design. Prices can range from under $10 into many thousands of dollars.
Recreational sportsmen and women are typically tempted to go for a cheap sport watch with only a basic timer feature which is perfectly fine, if this is all that you need, but a lot are more ambitious about their intentions and can benefit considerably from the sports modes and value of a mid to higher-range sports timepiece. The better quality watches tend to be both more proven and offer better features and performance, especially when applied to particular pursuit.
Some examples of the different types of sports watches include:
Fitness Sports Watches
Fitness watches are designed to assist the wearer in obtaining measurement and feedback on fitness activities (usually endurance based). The most basic type of fitness watch is a basic stopwatch timer. More upmarket watches are capable of recording multiple laps, heart rate, speed & distance, virtual coaching and provide the features to perform structured training sessions. The most popular producers of fitness watches are Timex Casio Garmin Nike Suunto and Polar.
Camping Sports Watches
Camping watches provide a toolkit of features. Some feature-laden camping watches would impress even MacGyver! These types of watches are useful to campers, bushwalkers and general outdoors folk. Some standard features include thermometer flashlight barometer,altimeter tidal tracking and compass. The main makers of camping sports watches are
Casio, Timex, Suunto, Tech 4 O, Dakota and Suunto
Diving Sports Watches
Divers sports watches are a tough type of sports watch that must pass ISO 6425. All divers watches must be water proof to adepth of 100 meters or more. Dive watches that comply with ISO 6425 are allowed to print the word “DIVER’S” on the watch which marks them them as a divers watch. ISO compliant dive watches must also feature a unidirectional bezel, be readable at 25 cm even in absolute darkness, be impervious to magnetic forces, severe shocks and chemicals. The most popular diving watch manufacturers are Seiko, Stuhrling, Citizen, Casio, Invicta, Lumiox and Suunto.
Choosing the right sports watch is not always easy, when you do not have knowledge about what you’re looking for. Amazon currently providesover 6000 products on their website in the “sports watch” category. As we have said, it is easy to get persuaded by a sport watch that is inexpensive or is visually attractive. For most inexperienced sports men and women, there is no harm buying a cheap watch, but serious sporting folk should take time to consider what precicely they need. Then they should take the time to find a watch in their chosen pursuit that will deliver the quality and features they require for their individual goals.
