Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live. – Jim Rohn
When I started to focus on my fitness and health, I realised a few things about myself. Firstly, I love numbers. I love all the numbers of weight-loss. When I’m cycling I see the distance numbers climbing and it motivates me to move faster! When I swim I get to go back to a sport I loved as a kid and get a great calorie burn.
I also realised i wasn’t going to be someone who could do this with only a vague idea of what I was burning. I couldn’t just get in the pool and hope I’d burn 500 calories in an hour. So I started looking for heart rate monitors.
I needed something that was waterproof and multi-sport and at a good price for my student budget.
I found the Polar FT4.
The Positives:
1) Tells you if you’re in the target fat burning zone (the most useful info of the lot in my opinion).
2) Tells you how many calories you’ve burnt.
3) Tells you how long your exercise lasted for and how much of that time was spent in the fat burning zone.
4) It gives you a maximum heart rate for training period, as well as an average.
5) can be worn as a regular watch
6) Perfect for swimmers, runners, gym-goers and for group classes.
7) The battery lasts! I’ve used it on average 3 times a week for about a year and it’s only just starting to wear out and need replacing.
8) The watch is a good size for the wrist, it’s comfortable and you don’t notice the straps. Plenty of holes for any size wrist.
The Negatives:
1) It doesn’t tell you the distance you’ve covered.
2) it isn’t designed for 24/7 monitoring of your exercise.
3) It doesn’t come with software that you can use to sync your results to your computer. However, you can go to the Polar training website and input your results manually, which is what I do; and you’ll still get a record and chart of your results over a period of time.
Overall, this is a good starter heart rate monitor, a decent price for everything that it offers.
