Listen to your heart

Terry Hershey Park is a great park like area which runs for miles and miles along Houston's Buffalo Bayou. It's a great place to walk, run, take your dog, mountain bike and just generally enjoy the outdoors and we're fortunate to have such a large open space within the city limits of Houston for exercise and fresh air. As I was finishing up a run this morning in this park and passing a group of walkers, one called out to me asking what time it was. I called back that I was sorry but I didn't know the exact time. The group seemed suspicious of my answer and then I noticed that they were staring at the watch like appendage on my wrist. Then it sunk in: they reasonably thought that my heart monitor was a watch and I was just being uncooperative in not answering them. I raised my wrist and pointed at the monitor and pleaded with them that it was just a heart monitor, not a watch. They still seemed put off and weren't buying my explanation. So it seems there are still a lot of people out there who aren't familiar with a heart monitor. But you should be. This is a simple device, which normally consists of an elastic band that wraps around your body near the rib cage and holds a device that snuggles close to your heart to read your beats per minute and then sends a signal to a watch-like device on your wrist. Strap into the device and put on the wrist receiver and you have a continuous digital readout of your beats per minute by just glancing at your wrist. The heart monitor is an extremely useful piece of exercise equipment and if you are serious about exercising you will want to wear one during your various exercise routines. Listening to your heart will tell you a lot about your fitness level. What heart rate range are you normally training in? What is your standing or resting heart rate? How many beats per minute do you drop as you recover from strenuous exercise in the first minute, and thereafter? The list of useful functions of a monitor could go on. A rough guide to your maximum heart rate is to subtract your age from 220 and some suggest that you should use a slightly higher figure than 220, say 225, if you are a man. This is only a rough guide and there are more sophisticated ways to gauge your estimated personal maximum heart rate. Once you have a feel for your max heart rate, a monitor is going to tell you how strenuous a workout you are getting at any one point in time. This is incredibly valuable information. The heart monitor is invaluable for circuit training and interval training. Generally speaking, getting your heart rate up is going to give you a more complete workout and burn more calories. As always, check with your doctor before starting a workout program and discuss your target heart rates with her. Listening to your heart will pay huge fitness dividends. Money quote: "The results [from the study] suggest that frequent and moderate exercise can limit sudden-death risk. The heart profile least associated with sudden death -- a low resting heart rate that slowly rises to a high level during exercise, then drops quickly to normal after activity stops -- is commonly found in athletes in prime physical form."