Training with the Heart Rate Monitor

By Kuno Hottenrott

Book Overview

Ever since the first portable heart rate monitors were made available in the 1980s, athletes and fitness enthusiasts have been using them to monitor and control training intensity to achieve maximum... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1841262137
• ISBN13: 9781841262130
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Meyer & Meyer Sport
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.6" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Review: Training with the Hear Rate Monitor

Has taught me a lot about how to use my Heart Rate Monitor to get more effective workouts. It's written simple enough for me, as a beginner to personal health and training to comprehend and kick-start me on a knowledgable track to working out more intelegently.

A Well-Produced Infomercial for Polar

This is definitely one of the BEST LOOKING books I have seen on the subject of heart rate monitors. The pages are heavy and stiff (easy to turn) and very colorful. There are lots of color photographs of people doing "sporty" things (which add nothing to subject matter, by the way) and numerous charts and tables in vivid shades, which truly enhance the subject matter. If one were to pick up this book for a quick browse at the bookstore, it would appear that the ultimate heart rate monitoring book has been discovered. Many of the other books on this subject drone on and on to explain certain concepts. This book rarely goes more than a page or two without inserting a colorful chart or table to illustrate its succinct text. The only obvious clue of its real intent is the Polar Electro logo in the lower left corner of the cover. Polar is the Finnish company that first developed personal heart rate monitors. They are still one of the premier sources for these devices. As you read through the book, you begin to discover that every workout situation is covered by a particular Polar heart rate monitor. The models have various combinations of Polar's proprietary feature set: OwnCal, OwnIndex, OwnCode, OwnOptimizer, etc. The book will focus on a particular feature, mention a model having that feature, and explain how to use that feature on that particular model. If you do not own that exact model, do not own a Polar unit at all, or really just want to learn how to make the best use of the heart rate monitor built into your new elliptical trainer (my personal situation), then this book is not quite as useful as it initially appears. This is not to say that there is nothing you can glean from the wonderful color charts and tables, just not as much as you would think after a quick leafing through the brightly colored pages. Many of the charts are quite serviceable, but unfortunately many are also made somewhat less-than-versatile by careless editing. Let me try to explain what I mean. Everything about Heart Rate Training is based on a Percentage of Maximum Heart Rate. Your Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) is based on your gender, fitness level, and age, with age being one of the most important factors. All MHR formulas include age in their calculation. For someone of a given gender and fitness level, the calculated Maximum Heart Rate will decrease as that person ages. Most books and articles use the following formula to compute a rough estimate of your MHR: MHR = 220 - (your age in years) So, for a 40-year-old male of average fitness, his MHR would be 180. His training would be tuned to various percentages of 180 depending on his goal for that training session. Example: The zone from 60-to-70% of MHR (108-to-126 beats per minute) is excellent for metabolizing fat and, if maintained for long periods of time, increasing endurance. What I found troubling is that many of the book's graphs use beats-per-minute (BPM) to label the vertical axis