Heart Rate Monitors

In freshman PE, every student will wear a heart rate monitor during fitness day activities. Here are some reasons why we choose to wear HRMs at NHS:

1. Improve your health: HRMs can help you find and maintain the right exercise intensity to reach your goals. If you are working to attain the 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise (50-70% of maximum heart rate) 5 days per week recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the device will tell you whether you are doing that.

2. Measure your effort: Measuring the work-rate of the heart is the most accurate method of determining how much benefit you are deriving from your workout, and using a HRM is more accurate than interrupting your workout to take your pulse manually. Apart from user-error (e.g. the strap falling off, or accidentally stopping the training computer during a workout), HRMs are pretty dependable, as long as you always remember to use it!

3. Exercise safely: Feedback from HRMs can help prevent you from exercising too hard in a single session (and thus burning yourself out for several days), and from over-training in general. A heart rate that is higher than you expect it to be before, during, or after a workout, can be a signal that your body needs more rest.