Heart Rate Monitors for Fitness Testing
Heart rate monitors can be a very useful exercise training and testing device, with many extra features enabling them to be used for much more than to monitoring your heart rate. For fitness testing, heart-rate monitors can make collecting heart rate response data easy to collect, particularly for endurance testing.
Features to Look For
- Accurate — foremost you need a heart rate monitor that will be accurate, and particularly during exercise when there may be large fluctuations in heart rate, and where excessive movement may affect the measurement.
- Lightweight and Comfortable to Wear — as the monitor needs to be worn during exercise, you do not want it to interfere with normal exercise activity.
- Easy to Use — as with all technology you want it to be easy to use, so you avoid spending extra time setting it up while the athlete is waiting, and having problems recording data because you could not get the settings right.
- Low cost — without compromising on quality and accuracy, you never want to spend too much of your budget. The cheapest heart rate monitors will most likely struggle to get accurate measurements during exercise.
- Downloadable data — being able to download the data from the watch, in a format you can insert into a spreadsheet for analysis, will save a lot of time and also avoid and transcription errors.
- Save multiple activities — the ability to save multiple athletes and multiple activities will be useful for fitness testing sessions with many athletes.
- Heart Rate Alarms — some heart rate watches will have settable alarms for reaching particular heart rate levels, which can be useful for some endurance tests which have target heart rates.
measuring heart ratePlease note that we don't sell heart rate monitors directly, though we provide links to some heart rate monitors available for sale on Amazon.
Related Pages
- Polar BodyAge — fitness assessment
- Polar Fitness Test — assessing fitness using the Polar heart rate monitor
- The Future of Fitness Testing — technology helping assess the athlete
Similar Products
- Heart rate monitors in the online store.
- Activity Trackers — can track location, heart rate, monitor sleep, calories burned, steps taken and flights of stairs climbed.
- ECG (EKG) Monitors in the online store.
- More in the Fitness Testing Store
Any comments, suggestions, or corrections? Please let us know.
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