Everyone experiences those days where you just don’t have the motivation to really push yourself in your gym or running session. It’s always good to train with someone who will push you to do that little bit extra who offers you morale support once things start getting tough. Problem is you can never always rely on a friend and there’s nothing more demoralising than being ready to work out, bags packed and you’re all g’d up, then you get that call or more likely that cowardly text to say your gym partner can no longer make it for one reason or another.
The next best thing to a training buddy or in my opinion better as it’ll never let you down and gives you much more detailed feedback on how effective your session was, is a heart rate monitor. What’s that? I can almost hear you say…….. A heart rate monitor does exactly that, it records your heart rate throughout your workout measuring the beats per minute. It’s the most effective way of measuring how hard you’re working as it also summarises the average heart rate of the session also telling you the calories expended during the workout.
Leading the market in these gadgets is POLAR and through their support of The STONEiMAGE Experiment they were good enough to send me one of their models to aid the effectiveness of my 4week training programme (email info@stone-img.com to receive the STONEiMAGE 4wk training programme). The particular model the FT7
does a little bit extra than giving you your maximum and average heart rate, but also tells you your calorie expenditure for the workout and lets you know what training zone you’re in whether that be fat burning or fitness based. All the data from my training sessions were logged and I could view a weekly summary of my training to see which days were more effective than others and highlighting the bad days. All this in a watch, just put on the additional strap just underneath your chest, press start on the watch and away you go. Once you train with one you’ll never want to train without a POLAR monitor again and that’s exactly how I feel. This is my best training buddy.
Retailing for £99.50 you can find this particular model and the vast variety of others at www.polar.fi/
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