Get Ready, Get Set, Go –with Your Heart Rate Monitor
Get Ready
Whether you received your new heart rate monitor as holiday gift or you retrieved your heart rate monitor from your drawer, now is the time to use this wonderful tool of fitness and health. A heart rate monitor gives you real time, continual, factual, physiological feedback anytime and all the time. Many heart rate monitor watches include stop watches, calorie counters, zones, and other helpful features that help you collect data; thus providing you information to help you track your progress. Whether you dance your way to fitness or train for an Ironman, you benefit from wearing a heart rate monitor to observe, assess, and change your personal plan based on your individual heart rate data.
How do you start your fitness revolution with a heart rate monitor? Keep it simple. Here’s how, Autumn, a college student and new to distance running, began to use her heart rate monitor. “I study a lot. When I workout, I need to get the most benefit for my time. My goal is to run a 10K. At first, I observed my heart rate during workouts. Then I learned three zones from ZoneX™. I use these zones to monitor my heart rate while running flats, hills, and longer distances. My downloadable heart rate monitor is now part of my routine and helps me record data about my workouts. In less than one month, I went from a college student, worried about my thighs, to a runner – confident that I can finish my first race.”
Get Set
As a coach, I developed ZoneX™ – a simple, quick, athlete-friendly method to use a heart rate monitor. ZoneX™ works with all modalities of exercise – running, cycling, swimming, or favorite cardiovascular equipment. If you change sports, retest and set your anchors for each sport. For example, swimming zones will vary from running zones.
Your zones are personalized based on a simple test, the Easy, Moderate, Hard Test. When taking the test, you will progress from an easy to moderate level. Give yourself one minute to attain the moderate level. Then hold moderate for three minutes. Use another minute to progress from moderate to hard, then maintain hard for three minutes. If you cannot maintain hard for three minutes, then you may be setting your zones too high or you are not physically ready to work at the hard level. Don’t despair; use only the easy and moderate zones. Retest in one month.
Record your test results. The heart rate at each level is your anchor. Each zone is 20 beats – 10 beats below the anchor and 10 beats above the anchor.
Fill in the chart with your anchors and zones.
If the zones slightly overlap (usually the Moderate to Hard Zone), subtract 5 beats from the Hard anchor point; thus, your Hard Zone may be a 15 beat range.
Go
Get going with the following Fresh Start workout. Apply this workout to any cardiovascular equipment, running, cross country skiing, or exercise you chose. Try to hold your heart rate within 2 beats of the designated heart rate. This workout increases your endurance base and improves your ability to recover within the workout.
Fresh Start Workout
Approximate 45 minute workout. Individuals vary on the time needed to reach each designated heart rate.
You and your heart rate monitor are ready to start your new approach to more energy and improved results. I hop you will enjoy ZoneX™ – Sensible Heart Rate Training.
Keep Moving,
Coach Alinda
copyright 2009 ZoneX™ Sensible Heart Rate Training
For the most comfortable and accurate heart rate monitoring try NuMetrex. NuMetrex heart monitoring apparel provides a comfortable alternative to the traditional heart monitoring strap. The seamless NuMetrex heart sensing garments have sensors knit directly into the fabric. A small transmitter snaps into the front of the garment, captures your data and sends it to your watch or cardio equipment. Heart rate is a great motivator that enables you to monitor your fitness goals and calories burned.
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Please let me know what specials you offer to health club facilities! Thank You!
Chrissy Viola ~ Jan 21, 07:36 AM
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Recent Questions
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Evaluating Marathon Perfomance with Heart Rate and Pace
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Dr. Alinda, I am 47 and my heart rate is usually higher than charts after exercising for about 30 min. My comfort HR is about 153-155. After about 45 minutes it shoots to 160 and continues a gradual upward topping at about 168 when I run 5 or more miles
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I am 50 and when I exercise on treadmill or eliptical, I usually cross my target heart rate which is 168 and sometimes for a very long period of time.
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As a heart rate monitor beginner, is it true your pace is slow in the beginning and then gets faster as you train with a consistent HR (145 bpm)?
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How do I use a Heart Rate Monitor for the Long Runs in my training plan?
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