Heart Rate Monitor

A heart rate monitor is a great tool to have. This saves you having to manually work out your heart rate training zones. While you exercise, if you drop below or above the set training zone, the monitor will beep to inform you to either speed up or slow down. This ensures you work hard enough during your workout and at the right intensity. You don't have to keep grabbing on to the handles of the cardio machine you are using to get a read out. If you are out running or cycling, you don't have to stop to take your pulse to see if you are in the training zone. It is all automated.

I must admit I am huge fan of heart rate monitors. I am a little obssessed. If I don't have mine with me for my cardio workouts I become frustrated. You see at the end of the workout, it also tells me exactly how many calories I have burned and how long it took me. If for example I burned 400 in 30 minutes. I now have some information to improve on. One option is to go faster and see if I can beat that and perhaps aim for 420 calories in 30 minutes next time. Stripping body fat is a result of using up more calories through exercise and consuming less calories through eating. It becomes a powerful tool. A calorie counter tells me how many calories have gone into my body and a heart rate monitor tells me how many have come out.

Many heart rate monitors have a feature that can determine your training heart rate for you. This requires you enter data such as your age, sex, height, weight, and activity level. You begin exercising at a slow rate for a minute and each minute you increase your heart rate. This is easy to do as it is displayed on the screen and guides you through the process

Let's say you are going for a run. Start the own zone feature. It will tell you to start your run very slow for 1 minute, after 1 minute it will ask you to increase your beats per minute by 10. So if the first minute displayed 90, bump it up to 100. Then the 3rd minute add another 10 beats etc. This can go up to 5 minutes until it determines your training zone. It will then determine your training heart rate. So there is no need for you to try and work it out yourself.

The lower end heart rate monitors, do not have a calorie burn feature, so be aware of this when buying. Be sure to get this feature as it will display how many calories you burned for your session. Some of the more expensive ones come with software that allow you to download all the details of your session into it and view on your computer. A good monitor will also keep a record of your workouts, total time spent exercising and total calories burned.

There are many brands on the market, if you shop around you can pick up a good one for less than $200. It is well worth the investment

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