Try a Wrist Heart Rate Monitor – Your Best Fitness Supporter

Before using a wrist heart rate monitor, there are some crucial things you should know, so it doesn’t just become a “technical marvel” with a lot of features to play with. You should know what the key factors are by using the Wrist heart monitor. Below I have written a short blog about the heart and fitness and how you can use a Wrist Heart Monitor – Your Fitness Supporter.

Wrist Heart Monitors Manage Your Fitness Training 

When you train, you expose the body to a load that it has to react on. in short, training breaks down your body – you destroy the muscle fibers and empty your sugar depots. In the breaks between your training, the body regenerates and builds itself stronger, so it has a better starting point to cope with the next physical challenges you expose it to.

Fitness Training Makes The Body Stronger

However, the training only works to a certain limit, because if you strain the body too much without giving it a break, your cells will no longer rebuild themselves between the training sessions. They break down and you find it harder to recover or you get injured.

All forms of training are thus about keeping the focus on the goal, having the right mindset and listening to the body’s signals. This means that you should try to hit the load that makes your body respond as well as possible.

The physiological load depends particular on three factors:

1. Your fitness rating, i.e. your maximum oxygen uptake per. Kilo of body weight

2. Your movement economy – how far you can move per. Liter of oxygen absorbed

3. Your endurance – how close you can be to your maximum oxygen uptake in a certain period of time

A Wrist Heart Monitor Measure Your Progress 

The maximum oxygen uptake is an expression of how many liters of oxygen the body can absorb per. Minute. The more oxygen the body can absorb, the more work it can perform over time. By dividing your maximum oxygen uptake by your weight, you get the fitness rating that shows how good you are at transporting your own body weight. It is possible to improve the fitness rating in two ways.

• By increasing the maximum oxygen uptake.
• By minimizing bodyweight.

Large oxygen uptake and low weight will therefore give a high fitness rating. Some Wrist heart monitors can measure your VO2 and thus your fitness rating such as

Fitbit Charge 5 and Garmin Forerunner 245

Fitness Rating 

The fitness rating is stated in ml/kg/minute. So, if you have been lying on the couch for years and eating donuts and popcorn, your fitness rating can be as low as 20 ml/kg/minute, while male top athletes in endurance sports often lie above 70 ml/kg/minute.

Make A Decision to Improve your Fitness

Let’s say you’re tired of lying on the couch eating donuts and popcorn, so you decide to get up from the couch and throw the popcorn and donuts in the trash and start running, so you can get in shape and do what you really want.

You now know that you cannot just start running without a plan based on where your physical ability is now. But I can tell you, if you train in 8 -10 weeks you will really make progress in many ways as you probably cannot imagine from where you are now.

Best Wrist Heart Monitors Will Support You

Once you get started on the first runs and are persistent enough to continue, you expose your body as described in the first section. Your body responds by becoming stronger, your cardiovascular system develops, your lungs become more efficient, your muscle strength increases, you gain more confidence.

Also, in other situations you will experience that the body gets more capacity, more stamina and that breathing and heart rate gets back to rest level more quickly when you e.g. have just walked fast up a stair.

Your wrist heart rate monitor can be your pace holder

Your wrist heart rate monitor (HRM) can be your pacer, telling you when to speed up or slow down to achieve your desired results. You can type in your Personal training zones and manage the intensity of your running. In that way, the Wrist Heart Monitor works as your supporter.

The Heart Pumps More Efficiently

The heart’s ability to work and pump oxygen around the body has a big impact on how high your fitness rating can be. The stronger and more efficient the heart, the better is your fitness. Fortunately, your running training will help your heart to constantly improve.

The heart rate increases, of course, the more you exert yourself but as you get in better shape you clearly notice how you cope with the same load at ever lower heart rate. This is because the heart is trained to pump the blood more efficiently by:

• The heart becomes larger and can hold more blood (stroke volume increases)
• The heart muscle contracts more strongly
• the muscles become better at utilizing the oxygen in the blood.

The amount of blood that is sent out into the body every time the heart contracts (beats) is called the stroke volume. Just like other muscles, the heart becomes stronger when it works hard during training and thus the stroke volume increases.

In the untrained person, the heart may only move 15 liters of blood per minute (minute volume) during physical exertion, while the well-trained long-distance runner may have a minute volume of 20-30 liters of blood, i.e. significantly more.

This improvement is due to the larger stroke volume of the heart. The larger stroke volume is conditioned by two conditions: on the one hand, the heart muscle becomes stronger and contracts more strongly, so that not as much blood is left in the heart chambers after each contraction.

On the other hand, the heart chambers become larger and can hold more blood.

Your Heart Rate Drops

The increased stroke volume means that the heart, even at rest, only needs to beat fewer times to cover the body’s oxygen needs. Therefore, resting heart rate drops. The untrained person typically has a resting heart rate of 70 – 80 beats per minute.

The resting heart rate of a long-distance runner in good shape will be as low as 45 beats per minute or lower. Declining resting heart rate is a really good indicator of fitness rating progress and is both simple and instructive to follow during the training program.

The resting heart rate should be measured immediately after you wake up in the morning, a few days in a row, as it is affected by coffee, stress, food intake, movement and many other factors.

The wrist heart monitor shows your heart rate status

With your heart rate monitor on, you can read off the heart rate before you get up in the morning. It’s much easier than putting a finger somewhere where you feel the heart rate clearly and you can see the average heart rate during the day and much more as we have been through here.

Final Thoughts

As a rule of thumb, you can expect to burn 1 kcal per kg pr. km. If you weigh 70 kg and run 10 km, you have therefore burned 70 x 10 = 700 kcal on the training session. Your running training is also an investment in a better life without obesity and lifestyle diseases such as type 2 diabetes and blood clots.

So, your Wrist Heart Rate Monitor can be Your Fitness Supporter to manage and help you improve all the factors above in your training. When you come home after training, you can upload a lot of data and use a ton of features online to process- and measure your progress and results if you want.

I hope you like this blog and if you have any questions about the topic or want to leave your own Personal review, please leave a comment below.