As technology develops, we believe that all advancements need to develop together through great collaboration. For example, with your treadmill and Kinni we envisage you being able to connect any app, device or accessory so you can best utilise your treadmill to a high level of accuracy. Firstly, we need to understand what the possibilities and limitations are with certain devices or accessories.
Foot pods are a great way to measure your running speed by measuring both vertical and horizontal acceleration of the foot. Depending on which type of foot pod you choose there are varying degrees of accuracy and information available. They can provide additional data compared to treadmills or smart watches.
Benefits
- Easy to attach to your footwear and easily portable
- Understand your running statistics in more depth
- Help to calculate running load to reduce overtraining risk
- You can replicate a workout on your treadmill using collected foot pod data
Converting your foot pod workout
Do you want to replicate the fast track session you did the other week but on your treadmill? As long as you wore your foot pod you can!
The way to do this would be to do the following:
- Connect the Kinni app to your foot pod
- Use the Kinni app to run a session outdoor using your foot pod
- Convert that session into a workout
- Then, you have your workout ready to control your treadmill
Or if you want to create your own workout using the route you have in mind for inspiration, follow this article for how to create a workout.
Limitations
Foot pods don’t record elevation or gradients that we could use to calculate an incline for your custom treadmill workout. To overcome this, follow the converting your foot pod workout instructions and then manually add incline to each split. It may seem a little long-winded but it works well!
Also, foot pods are sometimes not as accurate as you may think and there may be deviations between different wearables. For example, if the foot pod isn’t fastened tight enough or correctly it could read very differently on different days!
Smartwatch vs foot pod data
By comparing results from two very different “wearable devices” mismatches can occur as neither uses the highly accurate measurement tools.
Comparing results from your foot pod and your watch is difficult because they both are making their best guess at the data whilst doing exercise e.g distance, cadence, moving time, stride length, etc.
Additionally, to point out the obvious, your watch sits on your wrist, and your foot pod sits on your shoe. As your stride length varies, so does your arm swing, which means that the watch and foot pod have to adjust their estimates all the time. Therefore they are bound to be slightly inaccurate!
With regards to highly accurate data, the best way to collect this for pace and distance is actually the treadmill with the Go app! By all means, use your foot pod for added data but maybe just as estimates.