Paul Graham Personal Health and Fitness Training

Heart rate monitors have two main components. A strap that generally wraps around the upper mid chest area and a wrist unit not unlike a standard watch.
The chest strap contains two sensors each in contact with the skin 'picking' up the electrical beat pattern of the heart plus a transmitter that sends the pattern to the wrist unit.
The wrist unit is not unlike a standard wrist watch, most can display time and date, but unlike a normal watch, HRM wrist units display extra HR data sent from the transmitter on the users chest strap.
Many aspects of fitness, weight loss and strength can be gained from the calculations of your heart rate at specific times in your training routine. It is clear then how, if read correctly, important the HRM tool can be.
Now you know how the HRM gets to know how many times your heart beats each minute, in the next section I will discuss how best to use this very important data to achieve your particular goal. more..




	Heart rate monitors have two main components. A strap that generally wraps around the upper mid chest area and a wrist unit not unlike a standard watch. The chest strap contains two sensors each in contact with the skin 'picking' up the electrical beat pattern of the heart plus a transmitter that sends the pattern to the wrist unit. The wrist unit is not unlike a standard wrist watch, most can display time and date, but unlike a normal watch, HRM wrist units display extra HR data sent from the transmitter on the users chest strap. Many aspects of fitness, weight loss and strength can be gained from the calculations of your heart rate at specific times in your training routine. It is clear then how, if read correctly, important the HRM tool can be. Now you know how the HRM gets to know how many times your heart beats each minute, in the next section I will discuss how best to use this very important data to achieve your particular goal. more..			The heart does not pump blood in a continuous fashion it is a muscle, so acts like a muscle, contracting and relaxing. It is this contracting and relaxing we feel as a beat. The contraction part of the heart action is called the systolic phase, the relaxing part is called the diastolic phase. When your blood pressure is measured the systolic phase is measured over the diastolic phase, for example a person may have a blood pressure of 120 over 70. Broken down, this equates to a measurement of 120 mmHg when the heart is contracting, pumping blood into the arteries and 70 mmHg when the heart is in the relaxed, non-pumping state. Measurements are taken in terms of millimetres of mercury (mmHg) using a device called a sphygmomanometer.
				At rest the average healthy adult heart beats an average 70 to 80 times every minute. The timing of each heart beat is taken care of by many body systems. The system that concerns us here is the electrical activity the heart and nerve systems produce to induce contraction of the heart muscle. It is the electrical activity sent through the heart helping create and maintain a rhythmic beat that the 'general user' more popular heart rate monitors use as the system to calculate heart rate figures. Heart Rate Monitors Page One
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