Ok, so this Polar S410 heart rate monitor is pretty cool. I wear a band around my chest when I work out that has electrodes on it and also a watch. The watch receives the heart rate measurements as I go and stores them in its very limited memory. I think a higher end model must have orders of magnitude more memory than this one, but that’s ok. It serves fine for my purposes.

Anyway, I come back to my computer after the exercise and download the data into the software that came with the watch. The download process is pretty weird. The watch sort of chirps into the computer’s microphone.

The software, Polar Precision Performance, is pretty cool. Attached are some screenshots. I don’t know a good way to format images on this MSN spaces thing yet, but here they are.

The calendar mode is pretty neat. You can see what exercises you did on what days. I included two samples of exercise heart rates and histograms. They’re pretty self-explanatory. The heart rate history one shows average heart rate over exercises from various days. This would probably be more useful to people doing serious endurance training and repeating the same exercise each time. With me I vary my exercises so much my heart rate bounces around alot. But one interesting thing to note is that it tends to be higher on days I’m doing individual exercise than on the days I see my trainer. There’s also a screenshot of the time in HR zones history that shows the total time spent in pre-defined (as a percent of max heart rate) heart rate zones.

Anyway, as for the title of the post: the second and third screenshots are from today, where as an experiment I played Dance Dance Revolution on my X-Box for an hour instead of going to the club. As you can see from the heart rate measurements (and compare them with the ones from my workout with my trainer yesterday) DDR is a pretty high intensity video game. It’ll add some nice variety into my workouts when I don’t feel like going to the Pro Club for whatever reason.