Exercise – Heart Rate Monitors and Why You Would Benefit From One

If you are into exercise, heart rate monitors will prove to be an excellent addition to your kit bag. Together with your trainers and other kit the HRM will take you to the next level with your exercise. It will mean that you will have, literally at your fingertips, all the information professional athletes use to reach world class performance standards. Perhaps you don’t have aspirations to become world class but if you exercise with a monitor it will enable you to get the very best out of your training effort.

The very earliest monitors were introduced in the early eighties and since then they have continued to evolve. Features that cost hundreds only years ago are now fitted as standard on even the most basic monitor.

Exercise heart rate monitors measure and display your heart beats. Why is this important you may ask. Your heart is a muscle and like any muscle the more it is exercised the stronger and fitter it becomes. If you correctly exercise your heart it means that it will pump blood around your body without having to overwork and cause stress.

What is the best way to exercise? A simple formula to work out your maximum HR that you should go up to is taking your age from 220. Lets say you are 30 years old by. You maximum heart rate would be 220 -30=190. Now this does not mean that you must exercise so that your rate is 190 beats per minute, It is a very simple calculation of the maximum permissible HR that you should reach during exercise. This is just a rough guide.

The benefit of using a heart rate monitor to record your heart beats is that you know instantly when you reach this peak level. Many monitors allow you to set a Zone for your heart rate. This will let you exercise between a specified range or zone. Usually the zone is a percentage of your maximum hearts rate, and will vary depending on your fitness. So going back to our example a 30 year old who has never exercised would be advised to set their zone to 50 to 60 %. So in this example you would be exercising and trying to keep your heart beats to within 90 and 100 beats per minute. If whilst you are working out you exceed or under achieve you will be warned either with an audible alarm or via the display. You will then know that you should either increase or decrease your effort to stay within your zone. This will give you heart the most beneficial work out for the exercise or effort expended.

Want to accurately determine your heart rate? Do you need to know how many calories you burned while doing a 30 minutes workout? Like to be able to chart your progress as you become fitter? Well now you can.Read on to take your exercise to the next level.A heart rate monitor that will take you to the next level can be found here.