Benefits of Using a Heart Rate Monitor

Heart rate monitors simply measure and record heart rate during exercise and provides feedback which is specific to your body at a specific time. Training using a heart monitor training is most effective when the information is used to design and implement an exercise regime relevant for your body and fitness level.

Proponents of heart rate monitors suggest using various heart rate zones and there numerous ways that these zones can be calculated. The most basic method uses an estimate for your maximum heart rate (MHR) which is based on your age (most commonly approximated as 220 - your age although the actual number will depend upon various factors). Training zones are then calculated as a percentage of the MHR.

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As an example:
Healthy Heart Zone (Warm up) --- 50 - 60% of MHR : Exercising in this zone may help reduce body fat, blood pressure and cholesterol.. 85% of calories burned in this zone are fats.

Fitness Zone (Fat Burning) --- 60 - 70% of MHR: This zone can provide similar benefits as the healthy heart zone, but the exercise is of a more intense nature and more calories are burned.

Aerobic Zone (Endurance Training) --- 70 - 80% of MHR: Exercising in this zone will improve cardiovascular fitness and is the preferred zone if for training for an endurance event. More calories are burned with 50% from fat.

Anaerobic Zone (Performance Training) --- 80 - 90% of MHR: Exercising in this zone provides a higher lactate tolerance ability, resulting in enhanced endurance and performance. This is a high intensity zone burning more calories, 15 % from fat.

Red Line (Maximum Effort) --- 90 - 100% of MHR: Highly intense and most people can only exercise in this zone for a limited period of time.

The Benefits of Using a Heart Rate Monitor

1) Accuracy And Ease: Heart monitors are an effective way to track and record heart rate during a workout. Stopping during exercise to physically count your pulse interrupts the workout and your heart rate.

2) Monitor Your Fitness: Being able to amend your workouts to meet cardiovascular goads can be extremely useful and this is best achieved by measuring heart work-rate to accurately assess how hard you are working to achieve a specific outcome.

3) Over-Training: Some trainers recommend that exercising in the Anaerobic Zone should be limited to a specific number of sessions a week (and never on consecutive days). For many competitve athletes training is a balance between optimal training and over-training. Heart rate monitors allow you to measure your performance, so particularly on rest/easy days you are exercising at a suitably low intensity.
In addition, there is a school of thought that considers that hard over-training exercise is a risk factor for developing injuries. Having hard data that you can use to back-off your training rather than running through the cardiovascular pain barrier can be a great advantage for those who believe that each training session needs to be at high intensity.
Use of a heart rate monitor will avoid you depleting your store of glycogen so that you can have energy to perform your high intensity workouts with vigour.

4) Under-Training: The converse of the previous information can also apply and the monitor will provide you with the tools to determine when you need to step-up in intensity levels.

Other advantages of using a heart rate monitor are to monitor performance during a training session (particularly important for cyclists and runners who are exercising on different terrains and environmental conditions) and to provide some variety/fun particularly during long boring sessions.


The most popular heart rate monitors incorporate a chest strap containing a sensor and transmitter along with a watch-type display (with receiver) which you can observe your current rate. Prices of the heart monitors vary depending on the number of features that are on offer. Probably for the majority of those who are considering using a monitor, a fairly basic monitor is quite sufficient although some users do like to have the facility to download information from their exercise.

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