Im-Pulse Purchases

Almost all heart rate monitors work the same way. You wear a thin plastic chest belt around your torso, just above the top of your rib cage. At the same time, you wear a wristwatch receiver. (These receivers can double as a chronometer.) The belt picks up your heart rate and sends that signal to the receiver. There, your current heart rate is displayed.
When you run with a monitor, it’s tough not to constantly look down at the receiver to see what the readout is, even when you can sense that you’re working at the same level of effort as the last time you checked it. To keep you from having to do this constant checking, many monitors have a feature that enables you to program in a floor and ceiling rate. If you go above or below these rates, the monitor will beep, and you’ll know that you’re out of the heart rate zone that you want to be in. For example, if 60 percent of your maximal heart rate is 108, and 70 percent of it is 126, then you could program the monitor to beep when you go below or above this range. Then you would know either to pick up the pace or to slow down. If you’re going to buy a heart rate monitor, I think you should get one with this feature. This feature makes you more likely to do your normal run without checking the receiver all the time, and it helps to build that ability to listen to your body instead of always relying on signals from the monitor.
Expect to pay between $100 and $180 for a good heart rate monitor. Each works a little differently, so be sure to read the owner’s manual carefully. If you want to read more on heart rate training in general, a good book on the subject is The Heart Rate Monitor Book by Sally Edwards, Polar Electronic, 1993.