Cardiosport Heart Rate Monitor Armband, Bluetooth / ANT+

The Cardiosport Optic is a lightweight pulse monitor that supports Ant+ to work with gym equipment and Bluetooth to work with your phone or smartwatch. It isn’t a watch, and it isn’t smart. It measures your pulse accurately; and has a single LED to give you what band your pulse is in bands – Blue, Green, Yellow, Purple and Red.

Blue is normal pulse; red means slow down! If you make it into red, there is a vibrating alert to warn you if you are overdoing it.

The Optic is lightweight and has a comfortable, easy to wash, Velcro strap. The strap is long enough you can wear it on your wrist or bicep (there are two anchor points to help adjust it as needed.) The monitor is IP67 sealed; you can shower in it but not swim.

It charges up very quickly using a usb-a (which lost the star) to two pin charge port on the back of the monitor. When charged the LED on the front glows green. It worked with the rowing machines and treadmill in my building’s gym, relaying my pulse to them without me doing anything.

I was also able to pair it to my phone; and use it to track walks and runs. Cardiosport don’t have their own app; so, I used Polar Beat which was excellent for tracking my workouts. This is a downside for me; if you want to track your run you need to take your phone with you.

The pulse monitoring is great especially in the gym; if you are wanting to use it when you go for a run outside; needing to take your phone feels like a step backwards after using a smartwatch. In the gym I am not sure how it worked; maybe holding the handles as it started paired it to the treadmill; but it did — as my pulse went up and the colour went yellow the treadmill screen was displaying numbers in the 130s.