Have you ever tried working out particularly hard to burn off those extra 400 calories you ate the previous night? But how do you know that you have worked out enough and have destroyed the calories from that indulgent lasagna? It is believed that Heart Rate Monitors can be used to count the calories you burn during a workout. But does it really?
There is no doubt that your heart rate corresponds directly to the effort you are putting in which correlates to the energy dissipated from your body or the number of calories you burn. And heart rate monitors can help you track the number of calories burned.
Heart Rate Monitors – How Do Heart Rate Monitors Work?
A heart rate monitor is a private observing gadget that helps in recording your heart rate in real-time. Heart Rate monitors are of two types: one uses electrical sensors and the other uses optical sensors to sense the heart rate.
The electrical sensor is usually present in the chest strap heart rate monitor, while the optical sensors in the form of LEDs or light-emitting diodes are found in the arm, wrist, and finger straps or watches. It’s believed that both of these sensors give a reasonably accurate heart rate.
How Do Heart Rate Monitors Work In A Fitness Tracker?
Fitness trackers or sports watches manufactured by companies like Apple, Fitbit, and Samsung have a heart rate monitor that uses an optical sensor that lights up and keeps blinking at the rear of the watch, the part that touches your skin.
For it to start counting the calories burned all you need to do is put in some information like age, gender, weight, and height in the mobile app tracker. The tracker puts this information coupled with the variant parament that is your heart rate through an algorithm present in these fitness trackers and gives you the number of calories you’ve burned.
How Accurate Are These Best Heart Rate Monitors
Chest straps are considered to be the most accurate heart rate monitor, however, due to the ease of wearing a fitness tracker is worn by a greater number of people and used frequently. Here we also need to remember that consumer gadgets cannot really be built to the standards of medical-grade devices.
Conclusion:
Now that you know how a heart rate monitor works let’s see what makes for a decent fitness tracker; it should have a heart rate monitor, a gyroscope, GPS to track your location, a magnetometer to detect your postures, and a barometer to determine your altitude. All the sensors mentioned here work together to provide you with accurate data of your calories burned.
Just to be on the safe side always opt for the top players in the sports watch or chest strap monitor industry, the reason for that is: it takes a lot of research to build a system that could accurately detect the calories burned and these companies go through a lot of trial and error processes to build a reliable Medical device. We recommend that the most accurate heart rate monitor in fitness trackers is either an Apple smartwatches or Fitbit.