Heart rate monitors, once expensive items used by professional coaches and health professionals, are now relatively cheap and a popular training items for the average fitness enthusiast. Used correctly, heart rate monitors provide a wealth of information to help you plan and analyze your workouts. Used incorrectly, they can provide false information about your workout benefits or even endanger your health.
Heart Rate Measurements
Monitoring your heart rate allows you to better plan training sessions and workouts, to maintain the correct heart rate during activity and to determine how beneficial the activity was after you have finished. For example, during an aerobic workout, you can look at your monitor to help you keep your exercise pace between 70 and 80 percent of your maximum heart rate. After your workout, you can check to learn your average heart rate during your workout, the minutes spent in your target heart rate and the maximum heart rate you achieved during your workout.
Types
Heart rate monitors have a variety of features, with more complicated monitors requiring you to enter more data to provide accurate results and to wade through many different data types to get to the information you want. For example, if you just want to know how many calories you burned during your workout, you might be better off buying a less-complicated monitor. Otherwise, you may pay for data that includes cycling time splits, workout data storage, download capabilities and so on. Another drawback is that if you do not correctly enter your personal information, such as resting heart rate or maximum heart rate, you may get incorrect data.
Calorie Measurements
Many heart rate monitors provide you with data on the amount of calories you burn during activity. They do this using a formula that estimates how many calories a person of your age, gender, weight, maximum heart rate and resting heart rate would burn, based on your heart rate during your workout. If your goal is weight loss, you can use this data to change your workout intensity or duration to meet your calorie-burning goals.
Subjective Information
Because heart rate monitor companies use different formulas to estimate data, you may not get accurate information about your workout. For example, if you perform the exact same exercise at the same intensity for the same duration using two different heart rate monitors, you may get two different calorie results.
Additionally, if a monitor requires you to calculate your target heart rate and enter it, but you calculate your target heart rate incorrectly, your results will be inaccurate. This can be dangerous if it causes you to exercise at a heart rate higher than is safe for you.
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