A brief guide to heart rate monitors and their use.

Question: How does a heart rate monitor help you?
A heart rate monitor is the most important tool in cardiovascular health and an ideal training partner. It enables you to see and monitor results. This helps you assess your past performance, maximise your work out and adapt your future exercise program to achieve your desired goals in a safer and more effective way. Monitoring your heart rate and adapting your training intensity will ensure your training effort will be focused on maximising your fitness levels in the most efficient means, that are scientically poven.
\when you exercise, the chest belt picks up your heartbeat and sends it to the watch. Now you can view your heart rate and start monitoring your performance based in your heart rate readings. As you get fitter, your heart wll need to do lesswork and the speed of your heart rate will decrease.
The reason for this is that your heart pumps blood to your lungs to obtain oxygen. Then, the oxygen rich blood will travel to your muscles. The oxygen is used as fuel and the blood leaves the muscles and returns yo the lungs to begin the process again. As you get fitter, your heart is able to pump more blood with every beat. As a result, your heart dosn't have to beat as often to get the necessart oxygen to your muscles.

FitnessMonitors website opinion: A good heart rate monitor, that provides a range of features suitable for starting a personal fitness campaign is the Oregon SE211 Vibra Trainer. The Vibra Trainer product includes various features to assist you in your training, such as good upper and lower heart rate limit alarms including vibration alerts. Plus the Exercise Profiles, User Profiles and Smart Training programme make it easy to set the watch up and then be gudied through your training session with ease. Finally the training feedback memory provides you with good information for improving the training quality in your next work out.
FM's Product Rating of Oregon Vibra Trainer 8.5 out of 10 Good all round heart rate monitor.

Question: How do I gain the maximum benefit from my training program?
Start with a well-defined training goal, such as to lose weight, get fitter, improve health, but also give yourself a timescale by setting yourself a challenge to achieve by  certain date. It is essential to make this challenge realistic. You may wish to consult www.fitnessdaily.co.uk to help you set your fitness challenge.

You do need to select a training activity you can enjoy, it may be also a good idea to do various activities and vary your use of them. Such variation will also help to ensure the training of different muscle groups.

Start slowly, keep to very moderateheart rates, focused on increasing energy use in the first instance. Build up the time you exercise, then gradually increase the intensity indicated by the heart rate. To the point where you are not only burning up calories, but also the exercise is sufficiently vigorous to generate a cardiovascular training effect.


Training sessions do need to be conducted in a safe manner. To prepare for exercise and to avoid stiff and injuries always spend at least fibe minutes prior to the training session with a gradual series of warming up exercises and most training session, don't just stop the session ease down gradually and then stretch the muscles to help avoid stiffening of the limbs the follwoing day.

Monitoring fitness improvement is always a great motivator, try using a heart rate monitor to measure your heart rate recover after 1 minute from the finish of a sustained training exercise. Identify the number of heart rate beats you recover from the end of the session to the 1 minute post session marker. Repeat this test evry few weeks to monitor improvements. If you finish the session around the same heart rate level, as you get fitter you will recover b a greater number of heart rate beats in the minute recovery period. The fitest people will be recovering to close to their normal resting heart rate ater just one minutes recovery.

Prior to starting an exercise training program you should always consult your doctor.