Forums >Gears and Wears>Garmin foot pod and treadmill
not lazy, just tired
Does anyone use a Garmin foot pod when running on a treadmill? If so, do you calibrate it running outside or on the treadmill? I usually avoid treadmills at all cost, but may break down and use one some this winter. I think my son has a foot pod that he's not using, so I may swipe it and try it out on the treadmill.
Not if it makes sense.
If your treadmill is well-calibrated, you can calibrate the foot pod with the treadmill. Otherwise, you'll simply transfer the error in a poorly calibrated treadmill onto the foot pod. On the other hand, you can calibrate outside and calibrate either by distance (at a track) or any other place via GPS.
One thing I noticed is that my cadence (and probably my stride) is different when I run outside compared to the treadmill. Not sure if that has an impact if you calibrate outside and then use the foot pod on the treadmill.
Foot pods are usually very sensitive to foot strike. If your form is different on the TM compared to outside, the calibration may be significantly off.
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I wear mine on the treadmill. I calibrated it on the track. D.C. Rainmaker also has an article about some fancy software you could use to manually enter the calibration factor based on past workouts.
Edited to add: it looks like you would have needed to have worn the footpod before to use that tool. So, nevermind.
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If you are using a Garmin foot pod on a treadmill and have an ANT+ stick, you might want to check into http://outsideinteractive.net/
I started playing around with that last weekend since iFit started having website troubles. It costs money, but it might be worth it during winter treadmill running.
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I was wondering about this. I've run on treadmills so rarely, I don't if my stride is different. I do know that I'm slower on the treadmill than outside, maybe because it's so tedious. That outsideinteractive app really looks interesting.
I calibrated my foot pod outside on a track, and only use it outside for cadence info although I don't really care what that is. I use it on the treadmill and find that at easy / recovery paces it reads a little fast and on faster runs it reads a little slow so it kind of evens out in the end. Honestly I don't care very much how accurate it is because it is slightly different on most of the treadmills at the gym anyway.
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