HRM, calories burned, and exercising

jogdog

I currently have a HRM that was fairly cheap a couple years ago. It served its purpose and has been causing me a lot of problems lately (the battery always goes out all the time and the watch doesn't always make a connection with the chest band). When I bought it, it was mainly for running/jogging/walking. I now do a few different types of exercising with biking being the major one. My questions are, are there HRM that will measure different exercises and give calories burned based on activity and if so which ones, and if they don't give different exercising choices, what is a good one for a decent price (I'm on a major budget).

Thanks ahead of time for responses.

mrmanmeat

I currently have a HRM that was fairly cheap a couple years ago. It served its purpose and has been causing me a lot of problems lately (the battery always goes out all the time and the watch doesn't always make a connection with the chest band). When I bought it, it was mainly for running/jogging/walking. I now do a few different types of exercising with biking being the major one. My questions are, are there HRM that will measure different exercises and give calories burned based on activity and if so which ones, and if they don't give different exercising choices, what is a good one for a decent price (I'm on a major budget).

Thanks ahead of time for responses.

Sounds like you're making it way more complex than you need too.

It's based of your heart rate, so if you're doing something that increases it then it'll monitor that. If you're lifting, it's gonna be lower but it'll still show you the burn.

brocantrs

The HRM will give you the calories burned. It doesn't make a difference in the type of exercise.

deathstarclock

The thing to consider the most with aerobic training and maybe anaerobic training if you're pushing it to that intensity is the consistency of your heart rate. Having said that, maybe not so much the exercise but the fact that you're elevating your heart rate into certain ranges is what's important. When monitoring heart rate, you need to establish a few things. You'll need to find out your maximum heart rate, because then you can set a workout range using a percentage of that maximum heart rate. That's one way to attack it. Another method is using heart rate reserve, which involves determining your resting heart rate and factoring that in. In the end it all comes down to keeping your heart rate within a certain level of intensity and keeping it consistent.

There's other methods of training to consider like HIIT and Fartlek aside from steady-state, but in the end it still comes down to keeping your heart rate consistent in a certain level for a certain amount of time.

I've heard of some heart rate monitors that have been designed to monitor certain exercises but this is a new area for me. You can use a simple HRM with biking, so long as you take into account what I mentioned before. Because anyone can strap on an HRM and go for a jog, but what good are the numbers if you don't know how to interpret them correctly? I could jog for a half hour with my heart rate at 133. Sure I burned a good amount of calories from that, and maybe that's the most common reason we wear HRMs, but what does that say about my heart's economy?

There's an equation to figure out caloric expenditure from sustained activity using METs (metabolic equivalents), time, and weight. HRMs just do the calculations for us.

Just some things to consider. Feel free to attack me if I'm wrong.