Sunday, May 31, 2009

The GymBoss Review


I'm back into my busy season at work. Currently, I'm working outside of Carson City, Nevada and along with my busy season comes the time crunch that puts limitations on how long my workouts can go. That hasn't deterred me from getting a good workout. It just pushes me to explore different ways to make 20-30 of training time hurt more.

One such way that I've played around with lately is timing my circuits rather than doing pre-set rep counts. I've noticed that this really helps keep the intensity up. Unfortunately, this wasn't always feasible since there aren't many timers that are capable of being set to rounds, rest periods, etc. I'd tried to look for such timers in the past but many of them are for boxing gyms. I disqualified these because they're expensive and way too bulky for travel use.

Enter the GymBoss. I invested in this little timer about a year ago. There is simply no comparison to this timer and just about anything else out there for training. It's just the best timer for training. You can do things with this timer that you can't do with any others. It's also very small and it clips right to your pants. You can use it as a stopwatch, you can set the time for the length of the rounds, the length of time for the rest periods, and the number of rounds. Another thing that impresses the hell out of me is how long the battery lasts! I've left the timer on all night several times and I'm still using the very first battery it came with. Come to think of it, I think that they even INCLUDED the battery.

I do have complaints though. I think that the instructions are a little hard to follow. There is a lot of functions that are crammed into three buttons. I'd opt for just another button or two. I think that it would simplify things quite a bit more. Plus, I don't like the placement of the start button. If your shorts or pants don't have pockets, then you have to clip the gymboss to the waistband. I've started and stopped the timer inadvertently a few times. Plus, it would be nice if they put a clock on the GymBoss as well. A lanyard loop would be awesome too.

Still, this is an awful lot of timer for just $20.00. If you want a timer for training, then this is the only timer worth buying.

1 comment:

Matt said...

I've not had great success with the Gymboss. I'm on my third one presently, and it has started acting up as well. I will say their customer service is good, as a replacement is on the way. The problem I've seen is them dying when I push buttons. They tend to come back to life again in a day or two, but this can be inconvenient.