So You’re Ready to Take Your Training Seriously? As you hopfully know, carefully monitoring your heart beat is essential. When you engage in physical activities, your heart rate becomes a powerful indicator of your body’s response to the exertion. Monitoring your heart rate serves a range of purposes that elevate your fitness experience
Why it’s important to monitor your heart rate
Zone Training
Imagine having a personalized fitness coach guiding you through every step of your workout. Heart rate zones do just that – they help you tailor your exercises to different intensity levels, ensuring you’re targeting specific training goals, whether it’s fat burning, endurance improvement, or cardiovascular conditioning.
Effort and Progress Tracking
Your heart rate offers valuable insights into how hard your body is working during exercise.
Safety for Individuals with Heart Conditions
Do you have an underlying heart condition? Are you just getting older? Engaging in physical activities can be a balancing act between staying active and safeguarding heart health, which becomes particularly true during long and intense activities like running.
Why watches are not the best at heart rate reading
If you are into sports, there is a good chance that you are using a sports watch. From counting steps to estimating calories burned, these wrist companions have become an integral part of our fitness toolkit. One of their most sought-after features is the ability to monitor heart rate, which provides a glimpse into our body’s response to exercise.While sports watches do offer a level of convenience for tracking heart rate, they are not the best at doing it.
Where is why:
1. Optical Sensors: Most sports watches use optical sensors to measure heart rate. These sensors rely on the detection of blood flow through the skin by emitting and sensing light. While this technology has come a long way, it’s still inherently more prone to fluctuations due to factors like motion, skin tone, and ambient light.
2. Motion Artifacts: During exercise, your body moves, and your skin experiences various degrees of motion. This movement can lead to inaccuracies in heart rate readings obtained from optical sensors. Activities involving rapid movements, like running or high-intensity interval training, can result in distorted readings due to motion artifacts, impacting the consistency and reliability of the data.
3. Contact Pressure and Skin Tone: For optical sensors to work optimally, the sports watch must maintain consistent contact with your skin. However, factors such as sweat, water, and varying skin tones can disrupt this contact, leading to inaccurate readings.
4. Performance Intensity: As your exercise intensity increases, the accuracy of optical heart rate sensors can decrease. During high-intensity workouts, the blood flow is redirected to muscles and away from the skin, making it harder for the sensors to detect heart rate accurately.
What is a Chest Strap Heart Rate Monitor?
At the heart of accurate heart rate monitoring lies the chest strap heart rate monitor – a technology designed to offer a deeper understanding of your body’s cardiovascular response during exercise. Unlike traditional sports watches that rely on optical sensors, a chest strap heart rate monitor takes a different approach, leveraging the body’s own electrical signals to provide unparalleled accuracy and consistency.
A chest strap heart rate monitor consists of two main components: the chest strap itself and a transmitter. The chest strap is designed to be comfortably worn around your chest, positioned just below the chest muscles. It is equipped with small electrodes that come into direct contact with your skin. These electrodes detect the electrical signals produced by your heart’s contractions, transmitting this data to the attached transmitter.
The transmitter, typically equipped with wireless technology like Bluetooth or ANT+, communicates the real-time heart rate data to a compatible device of your choice, such as a fitness watch, smartphone, or dedicated fitness tracker,replacing the optical reading with the data provided by the strap. It’s like having the best of both worlds!
The beauty of the chest strap heart rate monitor lies in its accuracy. By measuring the heart’s electrical signals directly, it minimizes the influence of external factors like motion, skin tone, and environmental conditions. This accuracy is particularly valuable when engaging in activities that demand precise heart rate tracking, such as interval training, endurance exercises, and heart rate zone-based workouts.
Why Chest Strap Heart Rate Monitor are better than your sports watch
1. Optical Sensors vs. Electrical Signals: Instead of an optical sensor like a watch, a chest strap heart rate monitors utilize electrodes that directly detect the electrical signals generated by the heart’s contractions, providing a more reliable and accurate reading.
2. Contact Pressure and Skin Tone: Contrary to a sports watch that can move around you arm, a chest strap heart rate monitors snugly fit around your chest, providing a constant and secure connection to accurately capture your heart’s signals.
3. Performance Intensity: Chest strap monitors, with their direct measurement of electrical signals, are less affected by these shifts in blood flow distribution. Train as intensively as you want, the chest strap will not be bothered.
What Chest Strap Heart Rate Monitor should you buy?
Without going into the specifics, Garmin produces the most highly rated and accurate Chest Straps, and Power Lab offers reliable ones for people who are more on a budget.