You don’t have to be an elite athlete to wear a heart rate monitor!
That’s right – heart rate monitors are not just for serious athletes!
They are for anyone who wants to improve their health and fitness. You might want to train for a 10k race, lose some weight, keep up with the kids or beat your mate up the stairs at work. A heart rate monitor can give you the confidence that you are working at the right intensity to achieve your own personal fitness goals.
Monitor Your Level Of Fitness
Heart rate monitors are not gimmicks or fads – they are important tools that provide feedback specific to your body. This information can help you design, start and follow a workout routine that is personalised to your body and level of fitness. Measuring your heart rate is the most accurate and objective way to determine the benefit you get from your workout.
In the process of achieving your improved fitness goal, the direct outcome is increased efficiency of your heart. By improving your heart efficiency you will be able to exercise for longer and faster with a lower heart rate. And training will feel easier because your heart doesn’t have to work as hard!
Make Your Training More Efficient, Effective & Safer
Using a heart rate monitor assures you that you are training at the right intensity to gain benefits from the exercise. A heart rate monitor can
indicate if you are exercising too hard or not hard enough. Many heart rate monitors have alarms on the upper and lower heart rate limit.
Your heart rate taken during your training gives you an objective assessment as to how hard you are training or in other words, your training intensity. And you will quickly be able to determine if you are wasting time at too slow or too fast a pace, thus keeping you on track to achieve your fitness goals.
A heart rate monitor can also confirm that you are exercising at a safe intensity. When your heart rate is too high (Anaerobic Zone) your muscles become acidic due to lactic acid build up and you will have to slow down or stop until the body has metabolised the lactic acid. When you avoid overstressing your body this maximises the efficiency of your training and reduces the risk for injury.
To get started in using your heart rate monitor to achieve your fitness goals you need to firstly workout a couple of things – your Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) and Resting Heart Rate (RHR).
Knowing your MHR will enable you to calculate your various personal training heart rate zones and use these zones to guide your workout.
And your RHR is a great measure of your improving fitness during an exercise program.
