Heart Rate Watch By Mio .

The Mio Watch company gave me a chance to test the watch shown here. I want to give my readers information on making wise choices when purchasing heart rate monitors and other related equipment.
I have been wanting to do an article on heart rate monitors for some time. I think they are very important to your workout routine. You aren't going to burn fat if you're not working hard enough. How can you tell if you're pushing it or not, unless you physically can feel your heart jumping out of your chest? You can also take your heart rate into a danger zone and need to start bringing it down a bit. This you won't know unless you have a monitor on.

You all know that I am doing the P90X program by Tony Horton and Beachbody (I am starting phase 2, week 5 right after Christmas, have to take a few days off for travel). Tony recommends a heart rate monitor when working out with his DVD's, as most of them can be pretty intense. My husband has a heart rate monitor in which he wears a chest strap. The chest strap has a transmitter which sends his heart rate to his watch. The Mio watch you see here is strapless and reads your heart rate with the touch of your fingers.

As Mio watch is the first watch I have tested, I did it side by side to my husband, doing the same workout, and comparing numbers. So here is my review on the Mio watch:

When I got the watch I was impressed with the look of the watch, even though it is quite big for my wrist as I am a smaller boned individual. Mio does offer a lots of different designs and this particular one may have just been too big for me. At first I thought it had a large instruction manual, until I realized it was a little calorie book and fitness guide. I really liked this as it could fit into your purse or bag and go anywhere with you. The best feature of this watch, in my opinion, is the calorie counter. You simply enter in your age, weight, and how many calories you want to consume in a day. This is then saved and remembered always. As you eat, you use the arrow keys on the side to enter in your calorie intake. When you have eaten too much it will not let you enter in anymore calories and will beep at you. Of course it doesn't know when your cheating, so be honest.

Now how did the heart rate monitor hold up to my workouts? I have to say first, my loyalty is to you my readers. So with that said,  I don't think it was very accurate (when it worked). I have had the watch for a while now and really gave it lots of tries. This is how it works: during a workout you start a timer. As your heart rate goes up, you put two fingers on the metal buttons and it reads your pulse through your finger tip. (If it reads it at all). Here are some numbers I had register. After working out for several minutes I checked my rate and it was at 60. Then I did it again and it went to 74. Several times, and I mean several, I got no reading at all. It just flashed the little heart at me and did nothing. My husband's is in constant contact with his heart as he wears a chest band, and it's always reading, so his numbers are very accurate. I had to keep stopping my workout to put my fingers on the watch and get a reading. One time after using it several days and starting to think I had the hang of it, and maybe it was just me not getting my fingers in the right spot, I got a 44 reading. I was working so hard, I think I would have been just about dead with that number. I waited about one minute and did it again and I was 134. The number jumping happened a lot.

From a rating of a 1 to 10 I would rate this around a 4-5 for heart rate monitor. But I do like the calorie counting part of the watch. That I rate an 8.  Thanks to Mio Watches for allowing me to give this a try and relate my experience to my readers. I will be trying other watches in the near future and hope I can help your decision process on a very important purchase.

Blessings, Taylor