Today I’m continuing our talk about heart rate monitors and heart rate zones. In this article I will be talking about equipment. Now, the first heart rate monitors that were commercially available to athletes were standalone devices. They were dedicated to which you had a chest strap with a sealed battery and an LCD watch, which is a liquid crystal display.
Those were great; you would just look at the watch on your wrist; you just have to run in the zone you knew in your head. Nowadays, you get a standalone Bluetooth or ant, another technology to connect to your phone device, strap it on your chest, and feed it into your phone. You can also use a wrist device, but what you’re going to find is the wrist device or optical.
There are many things that can go wrong with those devices. If it’s cold out, if you’re sweating a lot, there are many moving parts in your wrist. So if you’re very active, if you’re doing a CrossFit workout, a lot of the moving parts in your wrist are going to throw that device off.
So I personally prefer a chest strap that uses a bioelectric signal from your heart. And so it’s very accurate. The technology has been around for a long, long time. Polar H10 and I don’t get anything for pimping, this is my favorite right now. I connected to the app on my phone, then that app has the five zones we talked about that are set by your age from 220 minus your age, and it breaks it up into five zones by percentage.
