heart rate monitor : Gay & Black Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1997-2008 Canadian Mind Products
index page for letter ⇒ punctuation 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (all)

heart rate monitor

The best thing you can do to help you get laid more frequently is go to the gym. As you pound away on the treadmill, the Stairmaster or the aerobics class, it won’t do you much good unless you are pushing yourself sufficiently. On the other hand, if you push yourself too hard you can harm yourself. A heart rate monitor is a wrist watch that beeps if you are being too slack or too vigorous. You have to wear a band around your chest against your skin, under your shirt, that picks up electric signals from your heart. It transmits the information through the air to the watch. One such beast is the Cardiosport Autozone. The cheapest place I found to buy them is WellQuest. The monitor looks like a watch and the chest strap is thin enough it creates no bulge. It is not obvious to anyone looking at you that you are using a monitor.

The Cardio sport is very susceptible to electronic interference. You can’t put you hand within 2 feet of the Control Panel of a Stairmaster for example or it stops working. Perhaps other brands use transmission techniques that are more immune.

Feature	Utility
Low Alarm	Not that useful since on a Stairmaster or during an aerobics class there are deliberate cool down breaks. You can effectively turn it off by setting the low limit to 0. You don’t want to be beeping away when you are exercising with others. It might be more useful in cycling.
High Alarm	Is more useful since you are likely to be too involved in the exercise to be looking at the watch when you get up into that territory.
Watch	Having the monitor also act as a wristwatch might be a useful feature, say to time pauses between reps, or to keep an eye on closing time.
Autozone	Not an important feature. It is just as easy to enter the low and high alarm bounds as to have the watch compute them.
Percentage display	I like watching the percentage of maximum heart rate display. It is somewhat more meaningful that the raw heart rate, at least at first.

The Fitness Quest Gym people tell me you compute your MHR Maximum safe Heart Rate as (220 - age). Your target rate is then 80 to 85% of the maximum heart rate. For example, someone 53 years old should aim for a heart rate of 134 to 143.

The CardioSport people compute the MHR the same way. However, they suggest five different target zones, depending on your current level of fitness: 50 to 59%, 60 to 69%, 70 to 79%, 80 to 89%, 90 to 100%.

I discovered that my heart rates goes up as I tire, even when the actual amount of work I am doing stays the same. It also stays high for a while after a bout of vigorous exercise. I break into a sweat long before I get into the danger zone. The danger zone is quite a bit higher than I thought it would be. Bodies are not as fragile as I thought. It turns out it is safe to push myself quite a bit harder than I have been.

	Please email your feedback for publication, errors, omissions, broken/redirected link reports and suggestions to improve this page to Roedy Green :
	Canadian Mind Products
	mindprod.com IP:[65.110.21.43]
	Your face IP:[38.103.63.59]
	You are visitor number 5,834.
	You can get a fresh copy of this page from:	or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/mindprod.com website mirror)
	http://mindprod.com/ggloss/heartratemonitor.html	J:\mindprod\ggloss\heartratemonitor.html