I’ve tried two cheap pedometers and both seem to overcount my steps by varying degrees. I’m loath to buy one of the more fancy, tricked-out models because I don’t know if the actual counting mechanism will be any better. Advice?
I have an Omron and I was curious about this same thing. I used a GPS to cross check my pedometer. I picked a point .7 miles from home. The pedometer showed .69 miles when I walked it. (The Omron stores the length of your stride.)
I never found a good one until I got a personal gps.
I’ve owned several, and it’s possible to make the better ones, which aren’t all that expensive, pretty accurate, although it takes a little doing.
A problem I noticed in some of the cheaper ones is that, for one reason or another, they don’t count your steps accurately. They overcount or, more often, undercount. This is not a particularly big deal if you’re going for accurate distance because you can compensate with the step length adjustment.
But if you want to count steps, as many people do with these 5,000- or 10,000-steps-a-day programs, it’s a bit of a pain. You have to count your steps for, say, 100 steps, then see what the pedometer reads, and mentally adjust all subsequent counts to compensate for the over- or undercount.
Some pedometers allow you to adjust the sensitivity to get a more accurate step count, but I’ve found that some weren’t able to give me an accurate step count no matter what.
But, as I said, this isn’t important if you’re focused on distance, as long as you can set the step length. Start by taking ten regular steps, measuring that distance, and dividing by ten. Enter that step length into the pedometer, then go some place you can walk an accurately measured distance. I used my local high school track. I walked around it, and saw how close the pedometer got to .25 miles, adjusting the step length to increase the accuracy. I found that within three or four laps I could make it very accurate.
Of course, I imagine that relatively few buyers of $10 pedometers go to this trouble. And I found that it was generally hard to get $10 units to be very accurate. But those in the $20-30 range were usually quite reliable. Oregon Scientific was my favorite brand.
Of course, these days, you can probably get a GPS for about that price.
Last fall I trained for (and completed) the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, which has a 26.2 mile walking marathon the first day and a 13.1 walking half-marathon the second. I got a $12 electronic pedometer which measured steps and mileage (and for which you could set you pace length).
Jokingly, I usually called it the “incorrect-o-meter” when I was doing training walks with my team. However, I was slandering it somewhat.
After a little while, I got the pace length set correctly for when I was walking alone with my normal stride. Often, I would check what the pedometer said with my route as measured out by Gmap-Pedometer, a Google Maps overlay that allows you to carefully map out a walking/running route and measure the distance. I found that it was pretty good, with the distance equaling what I got on the computer +/- 5%. There were times, however, when I didn’t have it set right on my belt where it just didn’t pick up my strides and was totally off.
On the other hand, when I was walking with the team, it would read substantially higher than the actual distance walked by some seemingly random percentage. My guess on this was that I varied my stride to match the group, and the group’s average stride/speed itself varied much more than when I was walking alone.
In short, even the cheap ones can be a decent tool to help you to get an idea how far you’re walking, but they always have to be checked against some measure of reality.
You might try always clipping it to the same place (e.g., your waistband by your right hip). I’ve noticed that they register steps better when they’re pretty vertical, and that clipping them inside the pocket results in more over/under count errors.
Not a pedometer, but I’d look at a nokia gps equipped phone with sports tracker. It’ll show you charts for your workout, pace, elevation along the route, speed, overlays to google maps etc.
You can check out others workouts on sportstracker.nokia.com. The circles are live updated workouts, as in you can follow someone around as they are running, walking, cycling and so on. The little icons with a person are non-live. I belive the phones with gyroscopes support step tracking also.