Timex T5G941 Heart Rate Monitor Watch: To Get Fit, You May Need This

When you are young and are interested keeping fit, you can just lace up your tenneys and go out and start running. No sweat. Kick out three to five miles and you’re cookin’. But when your body starts to add a few years, it’s not as easy. While a young person’s body can be forgiving, when you move on up into your fifties or sixties, all those muscles and bones inside are a lot more fragile and the tolerances of the organs are narrower. If your aging body’s metabolism has slowed down and you’ve added on some unwelcome pounds of fat, that doesn’t help. Under such conditions, your cardiovascular system gets overtaxed very easily if you unknowingly overdo it, which can lead to pain, physical stress illness, or even a myocardial infarction, better known as a heart attack. Which is why older exercisers, and some young ones, should consider using a heart rate monitor when exercising.

We all have a maximum and a minimum optimum heart rate and the range between them is your target heart rate. This is the “Goldilocks” rate at which your heart is “just right” when you are doing sustained aerobic exercise. The target rate depends on your age, your weight, and your level of conditioning. Let’s say that you have established that your target heart rate is 110 beats per minute and your maximum heart rate is 120 beats per minute. You are on a treadmill and you decide to go 5 miles per hour. This pace produces a heart rate in you of 130 beats per minute. If you have a heart monitor on, you know to move your pace to 3 or 4 miles per hour so that you are not overtaxing your heart as you train and you can get it into the target rate zone.

This is the advantage of the heart rate monitor: to let you exercise hard but to exercise smart and safely, whether it is for jogging, walking, pumping iron, or whatever. It is good to know how your heart is responding and what it is doing.

Personally, I use my heart rate monitor when mountain climbing. When I climb, I am normally in a high altitude environment so the thinner air taxes my heart and lungs. I am carrying the weight of a pack, so my muscles get taxed. I am walking or scrambling, so my whole body is much more active than normal. All of these factors make your heart rate go up. And if you go too fast, you can “redline” or suffer physical burnout after a while of sustained climbing, and you say “I’ve overdone it,” and you quit and surrender. On the other hand, if you find a heart-rate target zone that matches your oxygen intake rate, you can often keep climbing until you achieve the summit, and you won’t overtax your body. And the way to find that heart-rate target zone is with a serious heart-rate monitor.

The beauty of the Timex T5G941 Heart Rate Monitor Watch, which retails from amazon.com and other vendors for about $33.00, is that you get a serious heart rate monitor with the basic features you want at a reasonable price. Yes, you can pay $100-$300 for a heart rate monitor, but why pay for a lot of bells and whistles you will seldom use when you can get the basics for far less?

The Timex T5G941 has the “Timex” name behind it, so you know that you have a product of reasonably good quality. That in itself is a good start.

Next, this particular device comes with a chest strap, like any serious heart rate monitor should. There are watches on the market for this purpose which simply use a finger sensor or some other means of heart rate detection, but nothing is as reliable in this venue as the chest strap method. The strap itself is made of an adjustable elastic material which fits next to the skin just under the breast area, under your shirt, and after it has been in place for a few minutes you do not notice it. It contains a small watch-type battery and it monitors the heart rate and transmits a signal to a range of three feet, allowing the receiver in the watch on your wrist to pick up the heart rate signal wirelessly.

The watch itself is set for time like most digital watches. If you want to check your heart rate, you press a button right below the display dial, whose numbers are large and easy to read. After the watch acquires the signal, it begins to continuously display your heart rate and will do so throughout the rest of your activity. Of course, you can switch back and forth from your time display to your heart rate display at various internals in your activity. At the end of your activity, you will get a record of what happened with your heart rate, showing your maximum heart rate during the activity, the average heart rate, and the duration of the activity. The watch even has Timex’s Indiglo night-light so you can view the time or the heart rate data in the darkness.

Such a unit should never be substituted for getting a good physical examination from a qualified physician before you embark on strenuous physical activities. But once a doctor has cleared you for working out and/or taking on an exercise program or engaging in sports like mountain climbing, a heart rate monitor like this can help you achieve your fitness goals through the normal means such as burning fat, maintaining a healthy heart, improving your health, and losing weight. In my own case, it means staying in the cardiovascular zone whereby I can continue hiking and climbing up a mountain without wimping out and red-zoning to the point where I have to stop and go back.

Serious sports-fitness persons who want to upload their heart rate data onto their computers along with their weight, calories burned, and other data inputs for long-term comparisons are going to want a heart-rate watch with many more bells and whistles than this one and coming with a price-tag to match. But for the other 95% of us that just want a basic but effective unit to do the job, this fills the bill. It will get you to the top, and it will get you through your workout in good order as well.

Five Stars/ *****