Fit Mom's Blog

Heart rate monitors are an essential tool when it comes to serious training. I always work out with a heart rate monitor. The reasons for using a heart rate monitor include understanding how your body functions to stress- exercise. When I exercise without one it’s really hard to determine my effort level. I use it as a gage to decide if I need to go hard that day or take it easy. For example, if I’m tired or over trained my heart rate will shoot up to the 180′s early on in the workout, and then I know I need to back off. In a spin class, particularly, the idea is to be in the aerobic zone for 90% of the workout.

If you’re a beginning exerciser, you should wear it every time you workout for at least a month before attempting to crank up the intensity level. If you’re going out for a run with your heart rate monitor, you should be in your aerobic zone. A good indication of aerobic zone is that you can carry on a complete conversation. As the intensity goes up, the conversation should go down! At the completion of an interval- there is no talking!!

You can use the old formula 220-age= maximum heart rate and then calculate it to find your aerobic zone. If my maximum heart rate is 184, then my aerobic zone would be 60-70% of that, so 110-128.  (My heart rate is in the 120′s when I chase my kids down the street!!)  However, I’m a well-trained athlete and these numbers are really low- I tend to feel aerobic between 150-170 and 180+ is anaerobic. There’s a term “blow-up” or “puke” those terms I could associate with my heart rate above 180, I can’t keep it that high for very long and this is why it’s called anaerobic (without oxygen).

All that being said, I contacted Tara Roth-Sterger at Road Runner Sports for some information about the availability of Heart Rate Monitors and she gave me some great information to share with you!

Polar FS1 Heart Rate Monitor: heart rate, training zones, stopwatch and time of day- on sale for $49.99.

Polar F4: adds alarm, calorie count, and time spent in training zone- on sale for $89.99

TMX181 Timex Digital Fitness HRM: adds 27 lap memory, multiple HR training zones- also on sale for $89.99.

Finally, it’s important to determine your fitness category. Are you a beginner that just needs basic information and easy of use- such as the Polar FS1 or are you a performance nut like me that wants to track every workout, time spent in each zone, calories burned, etc- you might want a more advanced model, I use a Polar Heart Rate Monitor that has a function to download the workouts to the computer. (I have an older version that is not sold anymore).