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The Practical Uses for Heart Monitors
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.
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