he hickey on my chest merited some explanation to my wife, who had a lot of questions for me. Unbeknownst to her, I had put on a heart rate monitor before I climbed into bed for the night. Eight hours and one nice purple contusion later, I was being asked to explain the love bite on my chest. My electronic love affair had left a tell-tale mark.

	Wearing your monitor doing a repeatable task will speak volumes about your progress.

Tracking Your Fitness Baseline

The use of heart rate monitors has exploded in the past decade. With the rise in popularity of triathlon and marathon training, American culture has embraced this unique training tool. Heart rate monitors work by doing exactly what their name describes—they monitor your heart rate. Depending on the model you purchase, these personal coaches can do everything from record and monitor pulse rate, to providing downloadable feedback about your entire workout. Heart rate monitors can be tailored to calculate your ideal heart rate zone for the type of training you are doing. While your heart rate (pulse or beats per minute) is only one indicator of your fitness and certainly not comprehensive, the use of a heart rate monitor can give you a fitness baseline from which to measure your progress.

Anyone can use a heart rate monitor effectively. For the experienced athlete, a heart rate monitor can provide instant feedback during workouts to ensure energy expenditure is appropriate for the training session. For those looking to begin working out again, heart rate monitors can help you safely and progressively advance the intensity of your workouts. In addition, there have been many cases of heart rate monitors detecting pulmonary anomalies, so if you are at risk for this condition but like to be active, consider wearing a heart rate monitor during physical activity.

Measuring your Fitness with “Real Life”

Personally, I find wearing the monitor doing everyday activities to be the most insightful (only during waking hours). Instead of wearing your heart rate monitor only on your walk or run, try it when you’re food shopping, driving in the car, or making a stressful phone call. Given you are working out to actually improve your fitness and quality of life by being active or going to the gym, see what your heart rate actually does outside of it. Once a week, wear it doing something physically demanding in your "real life" to measure your relative fitness improvements. Just like using the same scale to measure your weight will give you relative feedback concerning gravity’s effect on you, wearing your monitor doing a repeatable task will speak volumes about your progress.

Heart Rate Monitor: An Electronic Coach

A heart rate monitor can help you moderate your workout. If you lack either self-control or motivation during a workout, the monitor can help stimulate both. If set properly, the heart rate monitor will keep you on track and let you know when you need to slow down or speed up. If you are off track, your watch starts beeping and you respond by accelerating or decelerating. It is an electronic coach.