I Love My New Heart Rate Monitor!

For Christmas this past year, the #1 thing on my list was a heart rate monitor.  Why did I want a heart rate monitor, you might ask??  Because they are TOTALLY awesome for working out!

Well, I didn't end up getting one for Christmas, but due to a bonus that Jeremy recently got at work (yay!), he let me get one for myself!  This is the heart rate monitor that I got, it's a Polar F6 and it's so cool.

Now I bet your thinking, "But Sara, it's not pink!  Why wouldn't you get a pink one?"  Good question!  This model does come in pink...but it's a pretty lame pink and doesn't compare to my pink standards.  (I hope the people from Polar come across my blog and create a Hot Pink one in the future.)  So, I went for the black one with cute swirls around the frame. 

The heart rate monitor consists of the wrist unit, which is also a watch and a transmitter band that goes around your chest.  I played with it last night at the gym, and I even wore the transmitter band to work today in order to keep on playing with it!  My handy-dandy F6 measures my heart rate, calories burned, and time exercised.  It's quite possibly the coolest piece of exercise equipment that I've ever seen.  Here is the official description from the Polar website:

For effective training

Depending on your body’s daily condition, you might benefit from either a low or high intensity training session. This monitor checks your daily condition, and guides you to a suitable intensity. If you want to be sure that you are training at the right intensity, this is the right product for you.

• Get guidance for optimal training intensity based on your daily condition
• See how many calories you have burned
• Get interference-free data with coded heart rate transmission

  Neat, huh?!  When you set up the F6, you enter in your height, weight, gender and birthday, so it can correctly calculate the correct heart rate zone for you.  Since you enter in this information, it also makes for a very accurate calculation of your calories burned.  In fact, when I went to the gym tonight and ran/speed walked on the treadmill for bit and my F6 said that I had burned 300 calories, while the treadmill said I had burned about 480!!  Stupid treadmill, you've been tricking me all these years!  I'm sure the treadmill probably thinks I'm a 165lb, 6 ft tall man, which would result in a high calorie burn... but my F6 is smarter than that...it knows me.

Another cool feature is that you can upload your workouts (since the F6 records them) to a website and analyze them.  Plus, I just figured out (really, like 5 minutes ago and I'm still excited about it) how to upload a cute logo to my F6.  My F6 now has three little hearts on the watch screen!  Cute! 

  

So, I've own my F6 for 2 1/2 days and I LOVE it.  I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in getting/staying in shape or just being healthy!