Sunday, August 16, 2009

Heart Rate Monitors While You Walk

By Henry Calhoun

A very beneficial way of exercising is walking and if you are a walker then there is a good chance that you will take along a pedometer. A heart rate monitor is a great partner and it helps you to get the full benefits of your walk.

For those who don't know how heart rate monitors work, it is really not complicated. Generally, strapped around the chest are transmitters which act in much the same way as an ECG, or electrocardiograph. To adjust it to the point you want there are elastic bands. Today strapless models are available, also.

Although you can just take your pulse manually, heart rate monitors are convenient and much more accurate since the rate is continuously taken. The readings taken are sent to the monitor that is in most cases attached to the wrist or bike handle.

Heart rate monitors you will find to be a useful device for exercise and workouts. An example of activities are swimming, skating, skiing, rowing, biking, running and of course walking.

A heart rate monitor can also help you to determine what the right amount of exertion during a walk is. This especially applies to those who want to train for speed. If you exert yourself during walking for a certain amount of time, then the wrong muscles will be worked and this is not something you may notice on your own. The opposite is too little exertion, which means you are not doing anything to improve your physical fitness. Working out too much is also detrimental and it means you will need to take a break every other day.

A heart rate monitor can be used tell you when you train too much or too little, as well as too fast or too slow. Maintaining a moderate level of training will only increase your level of physical fitness.

Another benefit of a having heart rate monitor with you is that it is like having a personal trainer at all times. It can tell you, for example, to walk faster if you are going too slowly or it can tell you to slow down if you are over exerting yourself. This is nothing different than what a real personal trainer would tell you to do.

Other features of heart rate monitors are built-in watches, stopwatches, and lap timers, target zone monitoring, alarms, memory, recovery rate tracking, calories burned counter, and more. You might think that heart rate monitors are merely for the purpose of, well, monitoring your heart rate, but they also have functionalities that are useful during trainings and workouts.

Indeed, heart rate monitors are techie health gadgets that will always put your training on the go. In walking, the pedometer's significance is undeniable, but for the ultimate walking exercise, you should get yourself a heart rate monitor to have a wonderful walking and workout experience.

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