The interest in heart rate monitors has exploded over the last few years.

Whether you are a fitness enthusiast, a budding professional athlete, or on a weight management program, you can maximize the benefits of any training program with a heart rate monitor.

To lose weight, your goal should be to burn the most amount of calories possible per exercise session. this means balancing your exercise intensity with the length of your work out. Finding your correct target heart rate zone is an effective way of achieving your results.

As an athlete, or if you're training for a competition, it's important to improve your fitness consistently while avoiding the risk of injury or overtraining. This is something that needs to be measured objectively, which is only avaialable with a monitor. For example, for long distance runners or cyclists, heart rate monitors are the most effective tool to help measure and align the anaerobic threshold.

With so many varieties of heart rate monitors, which one is the right one to choose? Here are a few standards to consider when making your decision...

For a full review on Polar's Heart Rate Monitors, click here

Do you know what your Exercise Objectives are?

The large variety of heart rate monitors will considerably reduce itself once you know what your exercise objectives are going to be. Is your objective to lose weight? Improve your fitness level? Or do you strive to become a serious athlete?

Unless you're going to be doing some serious training, you won't need to spring for the most expensive and sophisticated monitor on the market as you won't use 80% of its offered features.

Features... Pros and Cons...

Using a heart rate monitor consistently, with every work out, is key. If the monitor that you choose takes too much effort to work out, or too complicated, it's very likely that you won't use it very often.

However, a few additions can help to keep you motivated and can sometimes offer an actual purpose. To give you an idea, some heart rate monitors offer a built in fitness test facility. These monitors will predict and measure your level of aerobic fitness, with which you can build and monitor your fitness program.

If you're a seasoned athlete, you probably already know what you are looking for. One thing to consider is whether you need a heart rate monitor that is able to link, directly, to your PC. Are you looking to analyse and track your heart rate data, and to what extent? This feature obviously costs a little more, but knowing whether you need this option will help to narrow down your selection further.

Pricing

Heart rate monitors generally range anywhere between $50 to $400. For most people, the ideal monitor will fall somewhere in the mid price range. Even serious athletes purchase mid priced heart rate monitors for $200.00 to $250.00. But for the most part, if you're paying more than $150.00, you may be paying too much.

Look at heart rate monitors like runners. Even though no one wants to buy the cheapest pair on the market, they're still more than adequate to do the job. It's really only the priviledged few that really require the best. The rest of us settle for what we can afford.

There is quite a number of manufacturers such as, Acumen, Reebok, Freestyle, Heart Talker, and Cardiosport. These are just a few of the heart rate monitor creators available. However, without a doubt, Polar is the most sought after and largest retailer around.

According to an article, from 1998, in the Journal of Sports Sciences,

"Polar Heart Rate Monitors have for fifteen years, been recognized as the most accurate tools for heart rate monitoring and registering in the field."

Comparing prices, for heart rate monitors, can be difficult because of the sheer volume of different brands and models. All with varying features and options. Polar heart rate monitors are no more and no less expensive than another brand.

If you are looking to buy a heart rate monitor, we suggest that you give serious consideration to Polar. They are the professionals choice of most commercial fitness equipment retailers, coaches, and athletes.

For a full review on Polar's Heart Rate Monitors, click here

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