Exercise heart monitors are used by keep fit enthusiasts and athletes who use them to monitor their heart rate as they exercise. Heart monitors are electronic devices that provide an easy to read numerical display of your heart rate. As you exercise you can aim for a target heart rate to be certain that the training session is really effective. Fairly simple heart monitors can be used for this purpose, physicians will use more complex ones which allow them to monitor various heart problems.

Nowadays fitness heart rate monitors are can be purchased on line and in the shops and are made to be used for a variety of purposes. They could be made primarily for losing weight or for use during fitness training. Individual monitors can be worn like a wrist watch or or they can be an integral part of fitness machines such as exercise bikes or rowing machines.

Basic exercise heart rate monitors that are straightforward to use, with large displays and a timer can be bought from around $45. Make sure it is easy to change the battery. You cannot do this yourself for some heart rate monitors. Many fairly basic heart rate monitors also give your average heart rate as well as maximum and minimum rates throughout your workout session.

Some of the costlier monitors have more functions including workout intensity, monitoring how many calories you have burned and how much time you spend in each heart rate zone. Some may provide summaries each week of your workouts. These more sophisticated heart rate monitors are in the region of $120.

The very best models are heart monitors such as the Garmin Forerunner Sports Watch and the Polar FT60 which have USB ports for transferring data to the computer. You can also add a Garmin foot pod to the Garmin Forerunner Sports Watch to to make a combined heart rate monitor and pedometer and keep track of calorie burned, speed and distance. The Polar FT60 can be set to include weekly targets and track your progress. If you are a serious athlete these sophisticated, multi-feature heart rate monitors are excellent but pricey at around $200.

There are two ways to monitor heart rates, a chest strap or a fingertip pulse detector. Heart rate monitors using a chest strap are more accurate as long as the strap is securely fitted and at all times it remains close to the body. The heart rate is monitored similarly to an ECG machine and the results transmitted to the output device, generally worn as a wrist watch. A number of heart rate monitors provide an audio message using earphones.

For an effective workout your target heart rate needs to be found. This can be found from an online heart rate calculator. Once you know your target heart rate zone you can use your monitor to to keep your heart rate within the zone during your training session. Keeping within the zone is important to stop you working to hard and cause an injury or getting no benefit because you didn't work hard enough. An exercise heart rate monitor can be an efficient method to make certain you obtain the most benefit from your training program.