Heart Rate Monitor

I recently got my first heart rate monitor. A Polar F-11. I love, love, love it! Definitely on my list of things that I wish I had bought a long time ago. I really love that you enter your height, weight, age, sex, activity level and resting heart rate and tell it whether you want to maintain, improve or maximize your fitness and how many days you want to work out and it sets up a schedule for you with how long to work out and at what heart rate. The website has a calendar it puts your schedule on, but you can click and drag the workouts to different days as your schedule permits. I think I've always avoided getting a heart rate monitor because I didn't want to have to figure out stuff like this, so it's cool that this gets done for you. Once a week it reminds you to re-do your resting heart rate and sets up your schedule for the next week. You can also enter any other workouts that you do on your calendar, biking, yoga, workout DVDs, etc, and transfer your heart rate data to that activity.

The most important thing I learned from wearing it the last few weeks is that while I was walking on the treadmill for a hour almost every day, I was walking way too slow. Now I can walk for less time and get a better workout!

I got it because I was stuck on a weight-loss plateau, and knew that even once I lost the last 10 pounds (already lost 25), I'd need something to motivate me to keep up the workouts.