I bet your asking yourself why you need a Polar Heart Rate Monitor. Well, I’m going to answer that question and explain why having one is a cooler weight loss gadget than a pair of running shoes or a gym membership.

Here are a couple of reasons Polar believes you should buy their watch:

1. A heart rate monitor is like a rev counter, giving a precise measurement of exercise intensity.
2. Training at your own ideal pace is made possible with a heart rate monitor.
3. Direct measurement of heart rate during exercise is the most accurate way to gauge performance.
4. Progress can be monitored and measured, increasing motivation.
5. It maximizes the benefits of exercise in a limited amount of time.
6. It introduces objective observation. Are you on the right track? Are you improving?
7. It is a tool for regulating frequency and intensity of workouts.
8. Because of the immediate feedback it provides, heart rate monitoring is an ideal training partner.

While I agree with all of those the first and fourth points are why I believe everyone should have a heart rate monitor.

Heart Rate Monitor as a Rev Counter

After you open the box and run through a couple of settings like entering the time, date, your height & weight and some other stuff you get to put on the chest strap and click the exercise button. This links the watch to the chest strap and it figures out your heart rate with ECG accuracy. So you look down and your (hopefully) loping along at under 90 or so beats per minute. Jump up and down a couple of times and the number should go up a little bit as your heart rate rises.

In a nutshell, your heart pumps blood from your lungs (where its oxygenated) to the muscles (where oxygen is used as fuel) and back to the lungs again. The more you jump around looking at your new watch, the more fuel the muscles require and the harder your heart has to work to pump oxygen-rich blood to your muscles. The Polar watch detects the electrical current in your heart to calculate the number of times it beats per minute. This gives you an increadibly accurate gauge as to what speed your heart is beating and thus how much energy you’re using.

We all know that losing weight requires us to burn calories. The watch uses your heart rate to calculate the number of calories burned. A faster heart beat translates to more oxygen and fuel (calories) being burned by your muscles. So keeping your heart rate up helps burn calories and ultimately fat faster. If you’re monitoring it you can ensure that you’re always in an effective heart rate zone.

Monitoring Progress

When you exercise you click the button and the watch starts doing its thing. It reminds you with soft chirps to speed up or slow down to stay in the desired heart rate zone. Meanwhile its tiny little brain is recording every beat, calculating how much energy you’re expending and making notes in a journal for you.

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Sunday morning I woke up at around 9:30 with a good hang over. I shuffled out to the living room where I saw the pizza box surrounded by a couple empty bottles of La Fin du Mond on the coffee table. It’s easy to convince yourself after a couple of cocktails that ordering a pizza in the middle of the night is OK because you deserve something good for dieting all week and you’ll work it off at the gym or on your bike. I remember making this rationalization to my wife as I dialed the number for Imo’s Pizza.

I plopped down on the couch and pushed the bottles aside so I could see the TV. My bike seemingly mocks my pain from the corner. I imagine that if it were actually alive it would jump on my chest and lick my face until it was taken outside to play. I flip through a couple of channels and don’t see anything appealing.

After digging around the closet I find shorts, a t-shirt and my cycling shoes I moved back to the couch thinking that I’ve completed one of the more difficult parts of going out for a ride.

I looked over at my bike and thought its now or never so I pumped up the tires and carried it down the stairs. I know what your thinking, he hasn’t ridden his bike in so long the tires are flat. Thats not exactly true, it just rolls faster with a touch over 100psi and road bike tires lose air pretty quickly.

So there I was on the street, I pulled out onto Grand and got in the bike lane. This hurts, I thought as I clicked into an easier gear, I’ll just ride to the 7-Eleven and get something to drink and loaf around the park for a bit.

I left the 7-Eleven after a few swallows of Gatorade and headed away from the park and towards the city. I went through a few neighborhoods and after I started sweating I felt a bit better. The fresh air and gorgeous temperatures paired with some exercise were doing wonders for my hang over.

I clicked down a gear, stole a glance at the Polar CS600 cycling computer and realized I was cruising at around 18mph with a cadence of 90rpm. Hmm, I’m actually out on a ride, lets see where this goes. I peddled out of the neighborhood I was in and towards where I knew I’d run into some hills.

My heart rate is at 150bpm and I see a huge hill. I click the iPod Shuffle through a couple of songs and end up stopping at one of my favorite Mastondon songs: Blood and Thunder. It’s metal and excruciatingly heavy and fast but it sets the perfect cadence for a long climb. Half way up the hill my Polar is beeping at me because my heart rate has redlined. I can feel the lactic acid burning in my legs.

I click down a gear and jump out of the saddle. I’m enjoying this and making my legs suffer more for even thinking about complaining and slowing down. The song crescendos and my cadence picks up even more. I crest the hill and tapper the speed a little to help my heart rate go back to something manageable. I can feel the lactic acid in my legs being swept away as my breathing slows.

I’ve been out for over an hour now and decide to point the bike towards a series of hills that head back into the city. I figure I’m already out here and starting to feel pretty good so I should do some intervals on the hills.

I get to the first one and blow past the anaerobic threshold (AT) were my legs start burning energy without oxygen.

An all out sprint, which requires a great deal of power output in a short period of time, uses the anaerobic system. The energy is quickly available, but the anaerobic pathways are not very efficient; short term energy stores are rapidly depleted, lactic acid builds up, and exercise soon comes to a halt. After a brief rest, the system is recharged and ready for the next sprint. Distance work, which requires a steady power output over a long period of time, uses the aerobic system. These pathways can’t generate the speed of the anaerobic, but they do possess a great deal more efficiency and endurance. Depending upon the distance, and effort, the body can use different proportions of both of these systems.

Riding down the backside of the hill I spin quickly to help nice clean blood to flow to my legs. As soon as I’ve recovered I’m banging up the next hill again. I’m doing whats called HIIT or High Intensity Interval Training.

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) or sprint interval training is an exercise strategy that is intended to improve performance with short training sessions.

A HIIT session involves a warmup period, several short, maximum-intensity efforts separated by moderate recovery intervals, and a cooldown period. The period of alternating effort and recovery intervals typically lasts a total of 15 minutes.

Studies have shown this method to be more effective at burning fat and maintaining, or building, muscle mass than high-volume, lower intensity aerobic work-outs. A study by Gibala et al demonstrated 2.5 hours of sprint interval training produced similar biochemical muscle changes to 10.5 hours of endurance training and similar endurance performance benefits. According to a study by King, HIIT increases the resting metabolic rate (RMR) for the following 24 hours due to excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, and may improve maximal oxygen consumption (VO2 max) more effectively than doing only traditional, long aerobic workouts. Long aerobic workouts have been promoted as the best method to reduce fat, as fatty acid utilization usually occurs after at least 30 minutes of training. HIIT is somewhat counter intuitive in this regard, but has nonetheless been shown to burn fat more effectively. There may be a number of factors that contribute to this, including an increase in RMR, and possibly other physiological effects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_training

I’ll write an article on this soon that explains the weight loss advantages but for now back to my story.

After the hills I head towards a nice flat rolling road and I am on my way home. I’m feeling quite good and now longer have a headache. I make the turn onto Grand Boulevard and cruise slowly looking over my shoulder to see if my wife is on her way home. I’d hate for her to see me loping along at 12mph and think if I see her car I’ll crank it up and race her through the traffic.

She is already home and greets me at the door. I jump in the shower as I tell her about my ride. It was marvelous I say as I think about how much I thought it was going to hurt when I left.

Its amazing how just getting out there is the hardest part. But once I do its equally amazing how much fun it can be and how it can really make you feel better. Like Ellen, Laura and others here have said just lace up your shoes and go. I usually find that by the time your halfway to your original goal you start to feel energized and end up on a two hour ride instead of a twenty minute one.