You get into the zone during your workout, or at least you think you are. Your muscles get tighter and you breathe harder, sweat forms on your forehead. As you keep in motion you can feel your heart beating faster in your chest, but is your workout really giving your body the working out it needs for maximum health? Tightening muscles, labored breathing, sweating and a faster beating heart are not the best indicators of whether your workout is truly benefiting your fitness level and health. You could experience these symptoms if your body is not used to exercising and even fit bodies can feel these when switching to a new exercise program.
A faster beating heart does not necessarily mean your workout is offering you the greatest fitness and health benefits. However your heart rate is the best way to measure whether you are getting the maximum benefits for your fitness and health from your workout. The key is that your workout needs to cause your heart to pump blood in and out of the heart and throughout the body at sixty five percent of its resting rate, for at least twenty continuous minutes, for maximum benefits. How do you know this is happening with your workout when your heart will naturally beat faster when you are moving or exercising and not sitting or lying motionless? That’s where a heart rate monitor comes in handy.
You see people in the gym all of the time taking their pulse by pressing two fingers to the wrist or neck and counting heart beats for one minute or longer. Pulse rate can be used to calculate at what level the heart is being worked. This is the least accurate way of measuring whether your heart is getting a maximum workout because the potential for human error is so high here. This is because as you are working out it is easy to make mistakes like not using the correct fingers, not pressing at the correct points or not applying the correct pressure to the arteries to properly detect the number of heart beats. You could even under or over estimate actual heart beats as movement can sometimes make you think you just felt a beat while taking your pulse. In these cases it is most often either an unconscious movement or a split second slip of your fingers from the correct positioning.
It is not fair to ask your brain to count beats for a minute, record them in a memory file, and then use the resulting number to calculate the rate at which the heart is working out. Your brain is busy enough sending instructional messages to various muscles and organs throughout the body to instruct them on how to respond to the stimulus of exercising. Kinder to your brain and definitely a more accurate way to measure whether your workout is working your heart for maximum fitness and health benefits is to use a heart monitor to determine the rate at which your heart is being worked. Cardiosport, Fitwatch, Reebok and Sportline are premium brands of heart monitors that are affordable and dependably accurate. Net2Fitness.com is a trusted retailer carrying a wonderful assortment of the top brands in heart monitors and other fitness equipment. http://store.net2fitness.com/heartmonitors.html
Premium brands in heart monitors offer a multitude of useful functions along with heart rate scanning and measuring like, count down timers and stopwatch, alarms to alert you when you drop below your desired level, calorie counters, recording of heart rates and durations spent at high and low rates, calendars, time and alarm clock, and other functions. It is handy to have all of these features in one lightweight, affordable and durable product. It could get expensive real quick to buy products with these features separately. Not to mention the hassle of having to carry and keep track of several electronic devices. Your heart is a muscle that needs to get a regular workout to keep it fit and functioning properly. Heart monitors make it easy for you to monitor whether your workouts are providing your heart with the opportunity to maximize fitness and health benefits or not.
