Benefits to Monitoring Your Heart Rate

Visit me on Facebook or Twitter @FitFadFan

It's difficult to get an accurate calorie counter and it's not fun or easy when you need to strap things on you, wrap yourself up, or pinning other bizarre items to your body to get a calorie read. And, tracking the calories you burn plays a key role in successful weight loss plans. Did you know that you lose approximately 1 lb for every 3,500 calories burned in excess of the number of calories required to maintain your current weight. 

So if it takes 1,500 calories to maintain your weight that means you must consume 10,500 calories each week to stay the same. Say you move to a 1,200 daily caloric intake, that's 8,400 calories each week in food. This leaves a difference of 2,100 and means you need to burn 1,400 calories in one week to lose that 1 lb. Spreading this out across 7 days equals only 200 calories each day to burn. That's simple! 

But to help make it easier, the New Balance HRT Fit Komen Heart Rate Digital Watch can help track your calories burned based on your heart rate. I'm big on giving back, so the fact that a portion of my purchase was donated to the Susan G. Komen Foundation made this little gadget more interesting to me :) What's cool about this watch is that is has an ECG-accurate fingertip sensor, which means you don't have to strap yourself in! So once you enter in details like resting HR and active HR, the watch will beep if you go above your active rate to let you know you should slow it down. Periodically throughout your workout, you touch your pointer finger and thumb to the HR sensors to keep you heart rate accurate. 

Men's New Balance Watch

They also have the same watch in a men's style. This would make a perfect belated Father's Day gift for that special man in your life! (wink, wink)

So here are some more features to this nifty little gadget:
Calorie counter keeps track of calories burned during your workout. Displays time, day, date, month and two time zones, and functions as a stopwatch, countdown timer and alarm clock. Backlight makes reading the display easier in low-light conditions.

• Heart Rate Touch
• On demand heart rate reading - ECG accurate HRT
• Buttonless HR touch bezel
• No chest strap needed
• Auto or custom set heart rate zones
• Visual and audible alerts in target heart rate zones
• Heart rate reminder alarm
• Resting heart rate mode
• Pedometer / Data
• Step counter / Goal meter (up to 99,900 steps)
• Data recall: Total exercise time, calories burned, total distance, average speed
• Chronograph
• Range: 100 hours
• Measures elapsed time
• Exercise Timer
• Range 100 hours
• Countdown-stop timer
• Time / Alarms
• 12 hour or 24 hour format
• Time/Day/Date
• 1 daily alarm / hourly chime
• Other
• Displays in metric or imperial units
• Stainless steel bezel
• EL backlight
• 50M water resistant