u/AuneJasten

Thinking of getting a watch, probably a Coros Apex probably in the upcoming REI sale. I've been shopping around and I lust after it, want the gadget, looks cool, looks like fun. But ...

How best to use it? I don't want to try to "please the watch" but there will be some occasions when it will tell me something useful. Like "am I really too tired to keep running or is that an inaccurate emotion?" type questions.

I'm pretty much a beginner at running, and my performance is quite low. I'm not necessarily un-fit at a variety of sports, and I've been a veteran exercise enthusiast all my life. But I've recently learned that I lack an aerobic base so I am just trying to build up my weekly workout totals to be able to do this roughly daily. I'm 60 y.o. male, recently lost 50 or 55 pounds down to right where I want to be between 160 and 165, moving toward retirement (not there yet!) and doing all this for longevity and "healthspan." I currently use free Strava on my phone, nothing more. It of course doesn't have body metrics like heart rate or cadence, it just tells me how far I've run and roughly how fast. Do I want to integrate Coros (or Garmin or whatever I get) with Strava? Do I want to use the basic Coros (or ...) app? Strava, Runna, Nike Run Club, something else? Do I use their suggested routines or just stick to my preferred lame ill-considered workouts? I don't actually know what the watch will tell me, what the interface and website will look like. It's quite the rabbit hole. Your advice appreciated.

How to include so much exercise into the week? It seems to be so much time commitment?

I've turned 60 (male, single no kids, near retirement, lost 50 pounds over the last year and a half, down to good weight, 5 foot 8 inches 160 pounds give or take) and am upping my exercise toward goals of lifetime longevity and health. I've always had a good relationship with the gym and outdoor sports but haven't always been regular, but as I work less I intend to take better care. I like running, but I am not adept at it (I lack some degree of endurance presently) and want to build up to 5 km and 10 km community races (I'm not currently considering longer, but ya know I might eye a marathon some day ...). I am comfortable with running twice or three times a week but I need the rest days in between!

So I'm trying to plan my exercise schedules. Now that I look up what I "should" be doing for lifetime health benefit, I see that I need to put in some running-oriented strength training, some long runs, some short runs or interval work, and it's going to need to be somewhere near five days a week for running, maybe as much as seven if you count the strength training as one of the days. Plus, I want to engage in upper-body weight training, maybe twice or three times a week. And I intend to do flexibility in the form of yoga, maybe Pilates, and either of those (so people claim) would ideally be daily, right? or less often? Plus there should be plenty of work for mental fitness, and specifics for grip strength, balance, proprioception, other typical weak links.

Yeesh! That's a lot! I'm going to need nine or ten days in every week! How do you include all the different exercises into a normal life? Does anyone have a split week example that I can build off of?

What's with all the negative customer service stories I see on this sub? I was thinking of buying a Coros watch (Nomad? Pace Pro? Apex?), I have the budget and was just trying to decide how much more of a watch would be worth how much more of a price, but now that I've seen the fact of corporate sludge-type delay preventing people from getting germane replies from customer service I'm distrusting the whole company. Why so many negative stories here? Just reverse-survivorship bias (is that a term?) in which people who have something to complain about are more likely to post than people who are happy? Or legit problems with Coros, perhaps due to change from human-powered to AI-powered customer service?