The benefits of wearing a heart rate monitor during your sweat session

20 Mar The benefits of wearing a heart rate monitor during your sweat session

As some of you may already know and some of you will soon find out, clients who participate in RiPT’s interval-based cross training workout, wear handy gadgets called heart rate monitors.

These heart rate monitors are worn around your chest, close to your heart and allow trainers at RiPT to keep trackof your heart rate.

How? By wearing the heart rate monitor, your heart rate will appear on a television screen in the RiPT workout room, providing visual feedback to you and the trainer.

Why would a trainer want to do that? Well, when a client wears a heart rate monitor, the trainer can assess and appropriately motivate that client based off of that clients’s individual needs and heart rate, ensuring they get the absolute best workout possible.

Sometimes, just getting a visual of how you are performing during a workout can instantly provide extra motivation. With the recent barrage of modern-day fitness trackers and technology, the heart rate monitor has risen to the top as THE gadget to have — popping up in group fitness classes like at RiPT Fitness, at the gym and even during solo training runs.

Heart rate monitors can help you take your fitness to the next level by tracking your heart rate, calorie burn, calculating your approximate maximum heart rate, and thus calculating your relative intensity (the percentage of your maximum heart rate).

Other factors heart rate monitors may take into account include height, weight, age and gender to give a more accurate reading of how you perform during your workout. By tracking your heart rate, a heart rate monitor is able to help you find and reach your exercise intensity goals.

Heart rate monitors are able to measure actual effort during a workout rather than perceived effort. Since heart rate monitors are able to calculate your maximum heart rate, they can help ensure you get a safe workout and still continue to push yourself. If you use them consistently, heart rate monitors can also help you evaluate your progress.

Over time, as your fitness improves, your resting heart rate will decrease and exercises that were once difficult will start to become easier.

Most heart rate monitors on the market are pretty affordable and user-friendly. Some even have the added capability of communicating with apps on cell phones, computers and watches, making it that much easier to save data collected from your workout — including calories torched, heart rate levels achieved during your workout and other useful tidbits of information allowing you to compare previous workouts to more recent workouts. By keeping track of your heart rate during workouts, you get constant feedback, making it that much easier to tell how well your workouts are going and IF you are working hard enough.

With this feedback, it is easy to make adjustments to your current workouts and maximize the benefits. As an added bonus, using a heart rate monitor can prevent overtraining and injury. If you notice that your heart rate is elevated more so than normal while wearing a heart rate monitor, especially in the morning, it could be a sign you need to back off that day and take it a little easier. Tracking your heart rate is just another piece of the fitness puzzle that can ultimately aid in successful weight loss and a healthy lifestyle.

The bottom line? Heart rate monitors provide useful, accurate feedback, allowing you to take your fitness to the next level. When it comes to using a heart rate monitor, knowledge can really be power.