Heart Rate Monitoring and Monitors

Your heart rate is the amount of times your heart beats per minute. It is the same as your pulse. When engaging in cardiovascular exercise it is important to give your heart a good workout, but you don't want to overdo it either. Keeping track of your heart rate is a good way to measure how hard you are working your heart. Heart rate monitors are an excellent way to do this.

Why Measuring Your Heart Rate is Important

As mentioned before it is important to give your heart a good workout. That is the whole point of cardiovascular exercise. To do it properly it is necessary to make sure you exercise with enough intensity, but not to overdo it. The rate at which your heart beats during activities of different intensities is an indicator of how hard you are working your heart.

Resting Heart Rate

Your resting heart rate is the number of times your heart beats per minute when you are resting. For most people it is between 60 and 90 beats per minute. This can vary due to genetics, stress medication, etc. How fit you are is also involved. The more fit you are the lower your resting heart rate tends to be. Some really fit athletes have a heart rate that is 40 or less beats per minute when resting. But that is not typical.

It is lower in people who are more fit because when doing cardiovascular exercise regularly you make your heart stronger so that it can work more efficiently. It then doesn't need to beat as many times a minute to be able to pump the same amount of blood through your body.

How Do You Know If You Are Exerting Your Heart Enough?

So - it's important to give your heart a good workout but not to overdue it - but how do you determine if you are working too hard or not hard enough? By exercising within your target rate zone.

Your target zone is a range of beats per minute that it is best to work out in. There is also a maximum heart rate. Your maximum heart rate is the maximum number of times your heart can beat in a minute. And your target zone is usually measured to be between 50% and 85% of your maximum rate.

Your target zone can be calculated pretty simply, based on your age and gender using one of the following formulas:

For women:
226 - (your age) = your maximum heart rate

For men:
220 - (your age) = your maximum heart rate

For example, if you are a 32 year old woman: substract 32 from 226

226 - 32 = 194

Then take that number and multiply it by .5, to get your lower end of your target zone. And then multiply that same number by .85 to get the upper end of your zone. For example:

194 x .5 = 97

and

194 x .85 = 164.9

So, for a 32 year old woman an estimate of her maximum heart rate is 194. And her 'target heart rate zone' is between 97 and 164.9 heart beats per minute.

Heart Rate Monitors

Heart rate monitors give you a very accurate measurement of how fast your heart is beating. Many even come with timers, alarms to let you know when you are in your target zone and other helpful features. The following is a chart listing many common brands and models of heart rate monitors:
(Price range is just an estimate, may change at any time.)

Brand	Model	Price Range	Comments
Polar	F1 Series	$45-$65
Polar	A3 Series	$65-$90
Polar	A5 Series	$85-$100
Polar	S150 Series	$115-$140
Polar	S-810i Series	$115-$140
Ekho		(not yet available)
Timex		(not yet available)
Reebok		(not yet available)
Impulse		(not yet available)
Mio		(not yet available)
Predator		(not yet available)
Oregon Scientific		(not yet available)

Other methods exist for calculating your maximum and target zone heart rate, including the Karvonen method. (More about that later)

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