Hearts and Minds

Did something a little different at training last night.

I wore a heart monitor, and had an app on my iPad recording how things went. It is strictly for fun and interest.

I've been investigating fitness monitors for a while. Seems there are two general categories.

The first are devices like the Fitbit. You wear it on your wrist, and it acts like a space-age pedometer. It has an accelerometer that keeps track of how much your arm is moving about. These seem to work really well for walking and running, but not much else. They interpret bike riding as no exercise at all, as the wrist barely moves. They would also be useless for Jiu-Jitsu.

I was hoping that some of them would allow you to switch them to some similar activity and that they would compensate for this lack of movement, but none do.

The other type of monitors are heart rate based, or use accelerometers and heart rate combined.

The expensive ones look like wrist watches, but apparently can only measure pulse when the wearer isn't moving. They don't typically do a record of a session, but are used rather to gain an immediate snapshot. Workout, stop, check heart rate, go back to workout.

The device I chose is a chest-strap heart rate monitor. All it does is measure heart rate, and sends the data via low-energy Bluetooth to a phone or tablet. Entire sessions get recorded. This is what I was doing last night.

The class was 1 hour, 9 minutes and 43 seconds long. My average heart rate was 99 beats per minute (my resting heart rate is under 50), and I burned 326 calories.

I didn't stay for sparring, so these figures are about what one would expect.

Cool.

Tonight I'll be packing a monitor again. There will be less sitting time, as it is a review night. Things won't be getting demonstrated. I predict more calories burned, and a higher average heart rate.

This time I'll stay for the rolling, and here there should be some really significant changes. I expect that my heart rate will spike when we're sparring. My heart rate just might max out in spurts. It should be interesting.

At least to me.