How often your heart beats is a great measure of fitness and it needs to be accurately measured if you want to see your fitness improve. When you are at rest we want to achieve a lower heart rate. A well conditioned ticker can pump less to get your body the O2 that it needs. A corresponding drop in the resting heart rate can result for consistent aerobic exercise. Like any muscle the heart gets stronger as you exercise it. There are two types of workouts: aerobic and anaerobic. Aerobic training is what is required to improve your fitness because you are using many muscle groups for a long period of time at a steady pace. Aerobic training is what is required to improve your fitness because you are using many muscle groups for a long period of time at a steady pace. In either type of workout your muscles will demand oxygen. The harder you workout the more oxygen your muscles require. The heart pumps faster during a workout in an effort to deliver the additional oxygen that your muscles demand. This makes the heart the engine driving the car as it supplies this vital fuel to the body. Staying within a range that keeps you below redline and yet doesn’t have you driving like grandma is the goal here †we want good steady sustained output. There are four basic measurements a heart rate monitor watch will give you that will help improve your fitness. Heart rate at rest Your heart rate at rest occurs when you are at rest and under no stress, like after an evening of sleep and upon waking. A quiet period of inactivity or meditation at any point during the day will achieve a similar effect. Measure this when you have been at rest and are feeling no outside stresses. For the gals it is 70 to 90. A highly trained athlete can have beats per minute in the 40's at rest. This resting beats per minute serves as a benchmark and should be observed over time to measure improvement. Maximum heart rate Maximum heart rate is the highest number of beats that your heart can reach, but do not try this at home. The maximum heart rate should not be attempted but rather calculated using the following formula. the fitness community has developed a baseline formula to measure your maximum heart rate. Subtract your age from the number 220. If you are 45 years of age than you theoretical max is 175 beats per minute. This measurement is not perfect but it is a good approximation. Training heart rate or zone training heart rate Your zone heart rate range is a range of beats per minute that you attempt to stay within for your workout. A heart rate monitor watch with beeper alarms is really good for this because it alerts you when you have gone outside your zone range of 50% to 80% of max heart rate. Which end of this range you use will depend upon your fitness level as we shall see below. Those new to exercise should start at 50% to 70% of their maximum heart rate. When working out in a tighter range of 10 percentage points it is very useful to have an alarm set up to notify you when you are outside the zone. It is best to have a heart rate monitor watch with a beeper system that beeps at both the low end and high end of your target zone to keep your workouts honest. Some individuals work out too hard while others go to easy so this type of monitoring system keeps everyone honest. Experienced athletes can go above 70 percent and will often train as high as 80 percent of their maximum heart rate for sustained periods. Of course such athletes have established a huge base of fitness, likely workout year round and have been doing so for several years so it only makes sense that they have a lower resting pulse and a heart that is sufficiently strong to take these higher levels of sustained effort. Recovery heart rate How fast can your heart recover from a sustained effort once you have stopped and you are resting? This best explains the concept of recovery heart rate. A heart rate monitor watch will enable you to take a pre-workout measurement. Remember this number and add 20 to it. When you have been working out for 20 minutes or longer stop and see how fast you can recover to 20 beats per minute greater than your pre-workout heart rate. As you get more fit the time it takes to come back to 20 beats per minute over your pre-exercise heart rate will go down. A lot of times if you are not recovering well you may need a rest day. For someone with a pulse of 70 before a workout you will want to see how fast you can recover to a pulse of 90. Once you reach 90 beats per minute resume your exercise. A heart rate monitor watch and the correct way to use it Using a heart rate monitor is very simple. Working out without a heart rate watch is like racing a car without knowing the RPM's of the motor. The best and most accurate heart rate monitor watches typically have chest straps that work like an EKG device. This activity is relayed wirelessly to a wristwatch that displays your pulse. For heart rate monitor watches that require no strap and allow you to measure your heart rate via sensors checkout Mio and Pro-Form. While you can't get your heart rate on the fly with these types of systems they still work quite well for the critical recovery measures, resting heart rate measures, but they lack the capability to give you target zone feedback during your exercise. The upside is no strap that feels uncomfortable and quite frankly many women prefer this. Some heart rate monitor watches even come waterproof, like Garmin's new FR60, which is excellent for triathletes because you can wear one watch from start to finish and no watches under the swim cap. You can go real basic and just get a continuous display of your pulse. Other models include GPS devices and even alarms that chime if you go outside your pre-set range. I'd strongly recommend that you get one of the more advanced watches because they contain features that automatically give feedback, like alarm beepers for your target zone, that immediately reinforces the likelihood that you will stay in your most effective range of heart rate. As time goes by most purchasers of the basic units will wish for other features which is why it is not a bad idea to begin with a more advanced model. Some will even let you gather your workout data on your computer to track your entire workout and measure them against previous workouts.
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