Heart rate monitor article very interesting

Heart rate monitors can take your fitness up a notch.
Straight from the Heart
By Meghan Rabbitt


Turns out a heart rate monitor can pay off big when it comes to helping you make the most of your workouts—no matter what your fitness level. Here are four good reasons to strap one on.



You can’t trust the puddle of sweat under your bike or your achy muscles during a long run. You can’t trust the time or even the intensity level on the elliptical machine to tell you how hard you’re working. There’s only one true, reliable measure of how much effort you’re putting into your workout, and that’s the number of times your heart beats each minute.



Heart rate monitors are designed to help you make your training work harder for you. “The only accurate measurement of how hard you’re actually working during a workout is to measure your heart rate,” says Louis Torres, a trainer at the 24 Hour Fitness in Rancho Cucamonga, California. “They’re a great tool for people at all fitness levels.”



John Lally, a personal trainer and training category manager for Suunto heart rate monitors agrees. “A heart rate monitor gives you evidence-based data that describes the intensity you’re bringing to the exercise you’re doing,” he says. “Knowing this helps you train more efficiently and intelligently—and it can be the missing link if you’re working out and eating right but not achieving your goals.”



Sound simple? Here’s how a heart rate monitor can transform the way you exercise:



Kill Calories, Not Time

Just finding the time to get to the gym regularly is a battle, but you want to make sure you are getting what you need from your workout to get the desired results. “Despite our best intentions and time-crunched lives, too many of us are spinning our proverbial wheels in spin class,” says Torres.



In fact, Torres estimates that nine out of 10 people are working out at an intensity that’s not high enough to lose weight or tone up. “If you’re not pushing yourself hard enough to bring on lactic acid build up and muscle soreness, you’re probably not stimulating your muscles enough to achieve gains,” says John Faczak, assistant fitness manager and trainer at the Parker Arapahoe Super Sport in Parker, Colorado.



But before you throw up your hands, there’s a solution to help you maximize your workout: A heart rate monitor can help you be sure you make every second of your sweat sessions count. “If you see that you’re 10 beats per minute below where you should be, you know you have to pick up your pace or the resistance on the machine you’re on,” says Faczak. “It’s like having a little personal trainer on your wrist—you can use your heart rate to push yourself to the point where you know you’re actually burning calories and fat.”



Keep It Fresh
Whether you’re a weekend warrior or a runner trying to shave a minute off your 10K mile pace, knowing your heart rate during your workouts can keep you from pushing too hard (a surefire way to sideline yourself with an injury). “The human body is designed to adapt, and it does so quickly,” says Faczak. “In fact, we can adapt to a new workout routine within 3 weeks. But this also means 3 weeks after you start a new routine, the resulting gains begin to diminish.”



But if you’re using a heart rate monitor, it will clue you in that you’re not working hard enough by showing that your heart rate has dropped. “The more fit you get, the less your heart has to work to pump blood through your body when you exercise,” says Torres. “Watching your heart rate go down over time when you do the same exercise is a great indicator that you’re building fitness—and that it’s time to switch up your routine.”



Faczak suggests changing the type of machine you’re using, for one. “You effectively change the demand on your body, making it work harder and helping you achieve both your heart rate numbers and results.”



Beat Burnout
There are those days when you gear up to go an hour on a machine and are toast after just 20 minutes. You can avoid that by knowing how hard your body is working throughout the workout. If you know you’re hitting 85 percent of your maximum heart rate 5 minutes in, you can take it down to a number that you can sustain. The beauty of this, says Lally, is it not only helps you finish your scheduled workout, but it’ll enable you to build a base that’ll ultimately help you train harder, for longer periods of time.



“At 65 or 70 percent of your maximum heart rate, you should be able to crank at a good clip for 40 minutes or so—this is the intensity at which you’re burning 50 percent of your fat calories as fuel,” he says. “But get into this zone too fast, and you won’t be able to keep up this effort, which prevents you from developing a good base in this fat-blasting zone.”



With heart rate monitors that give you info about how many calories you burned during a workout and what your average heart rate was, it can be a great way to track your progress over time. And the more positive that progress is, the more likely it is you’ll be excited to go back to the gym for more.



Know Your Numbers
Of course, before you start using a heart rate monitor you need to know what numbers to look for when you’re working out—and there are a couple steps you need to take to get these:



1. Take your resting heart rate. For the most accurate reading, wear your heart rate monitor to sleep for three consecutive nights and see what your heart rate is when you wake up. Average the numbers you get each morning and if you can, do this test during a time when you don’t have to set an alarm clock, which can spike your heart rate.



2. Determine your maximum heart rate. This is how many beats per minute your heart pumps when you’re working your body as hard as you can. To get this number, Lally suggests wearing your heart rate monitor during an intense training session. Look at how many beats per minute you’re at when you reach a 10 on a scale of one to 10—10 being the best performance you’ve ever had.



3. Know your training zone—or what percent of your maximum heart rate you should be working in during a given workout. There are three zones most trainers recommend:

55 percent of your max: This is the minimum you should reach, particularly during cardiovascular exercises. Anything below this and you’re not getting much out of your workout in terms of calorie and fat burn.
65 percent of your max: This is where you start to maximize your aerobic capacity, and it’s where you burn the highest percentage of body fat during a given time, which is why it’s often dubbed the “fat burn zone.”
85 percent of your max: This is where you’re working at an intense enough pace that you’re not able to carry da conversation. Referred to as the “cardio zone,” it’s also where you burn the most calories.



To know how many beats per minute you should see when you’re in these training zones, you’ve got to do some simple math: Take 220 and minus your age; subtract your resting heart rate from that number; multiply that number by the percentage of your max in which you want to work (for example, multiply by .55, .65, or .85); now add your resting heart rate to that number. This is the beats per minute you’ll want to make sure you’re hovering around during your workout to know that you’re in the right zone.

Your both welcome. And when you get your HRM enjoy it. You will be really suprised on the cals that you burn when you wear it while excercising.