A Heart Rate Monitor consists of a watch worn on your wrist, and a transmitter that you comfortably wear against your skin and around your chest. The transmitter picks up the signal from your heart, and sends it wirelessly to the watch you wear on your wrist.
Understand how monitors work. Most look like wristwatches and combine timekeeping functions with heart monitoring. For constant heart rate readout, purchase one with a chest strap transmitter that sends heart data to the wrist unit. Devices without a chest strap provide heart rate data but only when you are touching the unit with your hand.
Heart rate monitors are perhaps the single most important tool for measuring intensity of workouts. There are a wide variety available, and many of them are inexpensive (depending on features youd like), easy to use, and accurate.
They also offer the following additional benefits:
1) They allow you to systematically go about your workouts and gradually see improvement. Youll notice a gradual decrease in working heart rate on comparable effort as you get stronger; youll also discover that youll have the ability to work for longer and longer periods of time at higher heart rates as your cardiovascular system gets stronger.
2) They allow you to work at a given intensity and know that youre at that intensity, thus taking the guess work out of cardiovascular programming. When your trainer suggests you work out at 75%-80% of MHR and tells you that number is about 150, youll have a way to tell when youre at that intensity.
3) They can help provide feedback that you may be verging on the edge of overtraining.
4) During interval training, they allow you to get a really good feeling for when youre verging on the anaerobic threshold, so that when youre participating in other activities without your heart rate monitor handy, you will know your limits and understand how much harder youre capable of working.
5) During circuit training, they can help you know when to begin the next station by giving you a visual read on when your heart rate has dropped to a certain level.
6) They actually encourage you to push your limits a little more making workouts more interesting, fun, and challenging.
7) Use a monitor while doing an exercise video or DVD such as Karen Voight’s Energy Sprint, and pay close attention to what your heart rate does as you increase your fitness. You’ll be able to recovery more quickly not only from the workout itself, but also between each timed interval.
In short, if youre curious about heart rate monitors and how they might work for you, or it you are feeling like youre in a rut and would like some immediate feedback on your workouts, whether strength training, intervals, or cardiovascular, we highly recommend use of a heart rate monitor
About the author:
Jon Robinson has been a personal trainer for over 10 years. He has a master’s degree in sports medicine and runs his own successful gymnasium. He has written numerous articles for leading fitness magazines for the past 5 years. You can find further information about the pro’s and con’s of the different types of heart rate monitors available from his following website
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