Sunday, October 4, 2009

Use A Heart Rate Monitor When Walking

By Henry Calhoun

Walking is a great exercise and many walkers own a pedometer. Those that have a step counter should consider adding a heart rate monitor, too, since it can also help to improve the fitness level. There are many good reasons to own a heart rate monitor and to enjoy the benefits owning one will have on your attempts to get or stay healthy.

To start off with you should first know what heart rate monitors are. They are devices that aid in fitness which have transmitters that are strapped around a person's chest. This is basically the same as how an ECG works. The bands to strap these devices on with are elastic and adjustable so that the best contact is made. However, nowadays there are also strapless heart rate monitors available.

The heart rate monitor is worn on your wrist just as you would wear a watch. If you are a biker it can be placed on the handlebar. Many think taking the pulse manually is enough but the heart rate monitor is more accurate.

Heart rate monitors can be used for just about every indoor and outdoor activity, such as biking, rowing, skiing, walking or skating. Regardless of the activity, these devices are helpful and are a great tool to use in order to ensure the right amount of activity is being done.

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.

So where does a heart rate monitor come into use during such trainings? Simply put, they remind you whether you are training too little, training too much, training too fast, or training too slow. It helps you to moderate your training, thereby ensuring better physical fitness for you.

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.

When it comes to walking, there is no question of the usefulness of the pedometer. That said, the heart rate monitor will only maximize your efforts in your training or workouts. The added bonus is it is your personal trainer you can take with you at any time.

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