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| Pamela Hsieh Rehhab Revolution |
I was talking to a fitness-savvy friend one day when he advised, “You should get a heart-rate monitor.”
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| My personal gym essentials. |
Well, turns out, gym machines don’t always have an accurate read of your pulse while you’re working out, and based on your heart and its current standing with the rest of your body, what you need “cardiovascularly” really depends on your state of fitness. Work out too hard, and you could be doing more harm than good (e.g., burning muscle rather than fat, and who wants that?), and work out not enough, and we all know where that leads.
Since the heart is such a vital organ in health and fitness, I took advantage of a flash sale at my gym not long before I started working with my personal trainer Debbie (look out for her great guest post coming up Thursday!) and invested in a magenta Polar FT60 heart rate monitor (I have it on in my YouTube video).
I now almost never work out without it — to tell you the truth, I find it more motivating than Gym Pact alone. (I should write Gym Pact and tell them to team up with Polar so you can get credit for home workouts! Which is, by the way, my biggest annoyance with the Gym Pact requirements.) It keeps track of your fitness goals, how often and intensely you exercised, and keeps actual records of the data to track your progress.
Debbie and I are seriously dependent on the info that my monitor gives me — what my current heart rate is during whatever exercise gives her an indication of how hard she’s working me, and at the end of the week when the monitor awards me with a star or a trophy, I know I’ve done well.
This is, however, only a great tool if you a) remember to use it, and b) supplement your physical and occupational therapy with cardio. When you do isolation exercises that are not particularly aerobic, the monitor will hardly credit you with much cardiovascular accolade, but your brain will of course thank you. I have integrated regular aerobic exercise in with my routine because I want to take good care of my entire body, and not solely focus on the neurological aspects of my healing. It’s mostly preventative so as to up my chances of a healthier future, a decision I encourage all people, not only rehab patients, to make.
Don’t forget to do some fine motor training post-cardio, as they teach in Spark! (Those new neurons need to learn something!)
I’ve just begun using Instagram, as you can see above — my gym essentials: a water bottle, athletic shoes, and my monitor. Taken yesterday post-workout. What can’t you exercise without? Anything else you want to know about heart rate monitors? Leave a comment!
To our healing,
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