Healthy Choices

Ty Milford/Masterfile

When three-time U.S. Olympic race walker Philip Dunn takes to the track these days, he often trains without a heart-rate monitor. He regularly used one when he trained for the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games, but for the 2008 Olympics, Dunn decided to spend less time number-crunching.

“You can start to lose perspective and start micromanaging training based on data points rather than the big picture,” Dunn cautions.

In other words, what the numbers are doing over time—not one single reading—is critical for personal health monitoring, says Judy Heller, an American Council on Exercise-certified personal trainer in Portland, Ore. Focusing on trends offers insight into overall health, she says, whether you are tracking blood sugar, blood pressure, body fat or heartbeats per minute.

THE HEARTBEAT GOES ON. Today’s health monitors increasingly provide more data, but, as Dunn and others point out, that might be too much of a good thing. No product category demonstrates this more clearly than heart-rate monitors. Units range from $50 to $700, and as the price increases, so does the sophistication. But features that a dedicated athlete might welcome actually might push beginners to exercise less.

For example, three heart-rate models have GPS tracking so you can, for instance, compare your performance on a training run with that of a previous run based on where you are along a regular route. Cool, but that information doesn’t come cheap: Although GPS is standard on Garmin’s Forerunner 405 ($350), it’s a $140 add-on armband for Polar’s FT60 and FT80 models, putting them at $380 and $490, respectively.  

“Simplicity is key,” Heller tells Consumers Digest. “The less complicated something is to use, the more likely it can be used correctly.”

Wrist-only versions, also called pulse monitors, speak to simplicity: They are easier to put on and faster to program than their chest-strap counterparts. Plus, chest straps might not fit obese people and can be uncomfortable for women. We’ve noticed an increase in the number of wrist-only units offered in the past 5 years while prices have dropped, starting at about $50.

But Jeff Padovan, president of Polar Electro, which makes chest-strap monitors, says that a chest strap is essential because of the accuracy it provides. “A heart-rate monitor measures intensity level,” he says. “You need a transmitter belt [chest strap] to get continuous, accurate heart-rate measurements.”

The closer to the heart that the transmitter device is located—in this case, a chest strap versus a wrist monitor—the more accurate the heartbeat count will be, notes Ellen Glickman, a professor of physiology at Kent State University. But she says that variation is acceptable while exercising. A number of factors (for instance, pausing briefly to look at your wrist monitor or your chest strap slipping out of position) can change your reading. The point is that you wear the device.

SQUEEZING BLOOD. For another type of monitor—those that measure blood-sugar (or blood-glucose) levels—accuracy is more crucial. Blood-sugar monitors have undergone a number of improvements that make data collection easier and that result in the required amount of blood to register a test to be, thankfully, smaller.

Abbott, Bayer, Roche and Sanvita introduced models in the past 4 years that have automatic coding, or automatic calibration, which synchronizes the meter to the test strips and guarantees accurate results every time. For manual blood-sugar monitors, you must do the synchronizing yourself every time a new packet of strips is opened. If you forget to do this, test results aren’t calibrated and are less accurate as a result, says Ruth Breitenbach, a nurse and certified diabetes educator with Madonna Rehab Hospital in Lincoln, Neb. Expect to pay about $60 for a blood-sugar monitor with automatic coding.

Know that the cost of test strips adds up, and cross-brand and generic strips won’t work with other companies’ models. Diabetics might test from once a week to several times a day, so, with test strips averaging 98 cents each, testing can cost between $50 to more than $1,000 per year. With automatic coding, you’ll waste fewer strips, because forgetting to manually recalibrate means that you must start over with a fresh strip to get an accurate result.