A heart rate monitor is a device for measuring your heart rate whilst exercising. It's made up of a band that fits round your chest and a wrist device that looks like a wrist watch. The chest band uses electrodes to measure your heart rate and transmits this information to the wrist device using radio waves.

A heart rate monitor is useful if you suffer from blood pressure or have any heart related problems and want to exercise safely.
It's also good for anyone who wants to monitor their progress as you can control your heart rate by simply adjusting the settings on your exercise machine.

You can monitor your fitness by monitoring your resting heart rate.

Find your resting heart rate by putting on your heart rate monitor and then lie down for about 20 minutes so that you are completely relaxed. Look at the recording and make a note of it.

As you become fitter with your exercise training sessions you will notice a drop in your resting heart rate.

The Polar heart rate monitor was the first to be produced in 1977 for the Finnish national cross country ski team and are still one of the most recognised and widely used today. The Polar S120 Heart Rate Monitor has lots of useful features that include Exercise Set to save your training sessions for easy recall, along with average heart rate, maximum heart rate, time in target zones, percentage of maximum heart rate, 3 heart rate limit settings, 60 laps with average heart rates and a recovery calculation based on time or heart rate

Heart rate monitors are also available as strapless. The Reebok strapless heart rate monitor gives you the lowest and highest heart rate readings.

You can use your Reebok strapless heart rate monitor for monitoring your heart rate during running. It also has a Chronograph/stopwatch mode, and countdown timer, as well as a heart rate memory and recall and many other features.

Kathy Joyce publishes informative articles on weight loss, fitness and nutrition.
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