Category Archives: Bicycle Computers

Bicycle Heart Rate Monitors

Many people like to cycle for a good workout, some more serious than others. The heart rate monitor can help in many ways, it can help while training, measuring your personal BPM (beats per a minute). This form of training takes discipline but is worth it, you can greatly increase your endurance. Who wouldn’t want that? The key to using this form of training is to start off slow and to keep your heart rate in the right Zone. This may be torturous and boring when first getting started, but over time you will begin to see how much progress your body is making. Have you ever wondered who people zip past you on their bicycles and aren’t completely winded? Well, this is your answer, in order to go faster and have better endurance you need to be able to keep your heart rate steady and have control over it. This is the way that most professional cyclist train, it works on multiple skills at once. While building your capability to keep a normal BPM you are also building the muscle and powerful legs that every cyclist needs.

Each beat of your heart is blood being pumped around your body. The lower your heart rate the healthier and stronger your heart is, when the heart gets stronger it can pump more blood at once which means less pumping has to be done. This relates back to training because you are always trying to keep your heart rate as low as possible while still cycling as fast as possible. I know this all may sounds very confusing, so let me break it down for you. There is one main factor here, endurance, and we train in order to build this. The way endurance works while cycling is how tired you are after going a long distance in a short time, but in order to get there you have to build your hearts strength, and you do this through BPM training.

After all of this talk about going through this training, we still have to talk about where to get one of these, and which one to buy. Since heart rate monitors aren’t cheap you want to make sure that you are buying a good one that give you a completely accurate reading. The very high end monitors, can be three to four hundred dollars, for example the Garmin Edge 500 GPS Bundle with Heart Rate/Cadence is an amazing tool to have but is a bit pricy. Since we all know times can be rough and we don’t want people missing out on an opportunity to train like this there are ones that can go for cheaper prices on amazon. One very convenient thing that you can do is if you have an iPhone many devices come with an app that can track your history and will save all of your data about your previous rides. Not many people have the dedication to go through the vigorous process of BPM training, do you have what it takes?