Why You Should Wear A Heart Rate Monitor?

Why You Should Wear a Heart Rate Monitor
By Steve Edwards
Your heart is the most important muscle in your body. It delivers oxygenated blood from your lungs to the rest of your body and, as you're aware, oxygen is the primary ingredient keeping us alive. Like any muscle, the heart needs to be exercised, and monitoring your heart rate is an easy way to keep yourself working in the right "zone,"reducing your chance of injury and overtraining, and increasing the odds that you'll get the results you want.

Heart rate monitors measure your cardiovascular and physiological stress during training sessions. They provide you with an accurate gauge of how intensely you're exercising, which is reflected in your heart rate. The harder you exercise, the higher the heart rate goes. When your heartrate changes, it's a sign that something is happening. By monitoring your heart rate, you will learn to tell when your workouts are effective, when you are over or undertraining, and even when you may be getting sick and need to back off
How Do I Understand My Heart Rate Monitor?
These days, heart rate monitors come in many shapes and sizes. Some simply show your heart rate, time of day, andoffer a stopwatch function. Others measure the wattage you're pushing on your bike, count every step you take, and map and measure every place you go. Provided you learn to use these features, they all have potential to help you get fitter. Today we'll stick to the heart rate portion, which simply counts the number of times your heart beats.
Heart rates are measured in beats per minute (bpm). Yourresting heart rate indicates your basic fitness level and is defined by the number of times your heart beats per minute while your body is at rest. In general, the fitter you are the less effort, and fewer beats per minute, it takes your heart to pump blood to your body at rest. I say in general because part of this is genetic. We're born with varying genetic capacities for this process, so youshould measure your heart rate versus your own and not someone else's because you could be fitter than someone who has a naturally lower heart rate.
To gauge this, measure your resting heart rate immediately after waking up and before you get out of bed (so, yes, wear your monitor to bed until you understand the process—you can also count your pulse but it's less accurate). Take these measurementsfor five consecutive days and find the average. This average is your actual resting heart rate. Resting heart rate is dependent upon your living habits and a number of factors such as your quality of sleep, stress level, and eating habits.
Your average heart rate is the number of times your heart beats within a certain period of time, like over the course of a workout.
Your maximum heart rate(max HR) is the maximum number of times your heart can contract in one minute. An accurate max HR should be tested in a lab setting. In lieu of lab testing, we use this formula:
Women: 226 – your age = your age-adjusted max HR
Men: 220 – your age = your age-adjusted max HR
For example: If you are a 30-year-old woman, your age-adjusted maximum heart rate is 226 – 30 years = 196 bpm.
Theseformulas apply only to adults and have an error margin of +/–10 to 15 beats per minute, due to different inherited characteristics and exercise training. If you want to exercise/train at your most effective levels, your max HR should be measured. However, most of us are fine using the above estimates. When you need your training to be more specific, you'll almost certainly know it because you'll beobsessing over a race or event as opposed to simply trying to be healthy.
Your anaerobic threshold (AT) is the physiological point during exercise at which your muscles start using up more oxygen than the body can transport (the point where lactic acid accumulates and you get "pumped"), which forces you to stop. This point becomes obvious without any monitoring. It's why you can't do push-ups...