Fun & Fitness over 50

I've needed a new Heart Rate Monitor for some time now. The old one broke where the strap is fastened to the watch. I tried super gluing it but it didn't last. Too bad 'cause it still worked.

So my new one, a Sigma Onyx Pro, just arrived today from Bike Nashbar. It was a good deal, they had a 15% off sale and it had good user reviews. So far I'm happy with it. We'll see how it holds up.

It records max heart rate which my old one didn't and has a nifty mount for my bike handlebars! Also the menus and setup are much more intuitive and consistent than my old one.

The only beef I have so far, and it's a beef I've had with just about every fitness product I have bought, is with the documentation. Specifically with installing the batteries. Now admittedly this turned out to be really minor but c'mon, even a can of soup has directions that say, open can, dump contents into saucepan, heat while stirring occasionally. Now if they can provide instructions for something that obvious, Sigma should be providing instructions on installing the batteries. The chest strap battery is already installed, fine. But the watch battery is out as well as the cover. The installation instructions say to be mindful of the polarity. That's it. And the kicker is, they don't indicate the proper positioning for the polarity anywhere on the watch or battery cover (that I can find). Ha, ha. Joke's on you.

I opened up the battery cover on the chest strap reasoning that they will orient the battery the same as for the watch (not necessarily a safe assumption but it's all I had to go on.)

As it turned out, I was right.

The other thing is they tell you is to open the watch "with tool". I assume I would need "tool" to fasten the battery cover on the watch as well. They don't tell you if the tool is something special that they provide, something special that you'll have to get somewhere else and they're not telling you specifically what it is or just use any old tool you have lying around that you can get to work (hammer, drill, sawzall, ?)

Like I said, it turned out to be minor after a little inspection of the pieces that came with it. They do provide a special tool. But why can't they do a better job with the docs?

Is it something particular about fitness products? My camelback was the same way. They didn't have anything at all in the way of documenation. I had to guess at everything. I even thought it was frozen on one ride because they said absolutely nothing about there being a shutoff valve on the mouthpiece. No information about how to clean it or what can safely be disassembled and what can't. This drives me crazy. It's totally unnecessary!

End of rant.