Fitness Accessories that Optimize Your Exercise Effort

The appropriate analogy would be to cameras: you’d get along just fine with a basic lens and a good working camera body. However, in order to truly take great pictures, you’ll have to make use of other complementary accessories. The same is true about fitness equipment.

There are some fitness accessories that are built into the equipment, such as those found on elliptical trainers and treadmills. These built-in fitness accessories often would increase the total cost of the machine by a price much greater than if you could buy a separate accessory, all the while without the promise of having high quality.

One such fitness accessory, for instance, is the heart monitor.

Heart monitors are at times built into treadmills, either into the handles or as a strap attached to the chest. These built-in features are more or less able to raise a treadmill’s selling price by more than a few hundred dollars. On the other hand, a heart monitor designed like a wristwatch can go for as little as $69.

Many of the heart monitor models, in fact, are designed just like a regular digital wristwatch that tells the time. Instead, the built-in sensors are found either on the heart monitor strap or underneath the face of the digital reader, depending on the method of how the heart rate is measured. It is operated just like a wristwatch — by wearing them on the wrist, and turning them on by pressing a button or two.

An additional benefit of these stand-alone, wristwatch-type heart monitors is that they are far more effective than those built into these treadmills or trainers. Even stand-alone chest-strapped heart monitors, attached to the top portion of the rib cage, provide a precise reading of one’s pulse.

Most fitness equipment will tell you the time, but there are others that also have a timer that will allow you to specifically time the period you spend on a particular exercise set. Memory settings that allow you to store previous readings to be recalled later are good added features. This is especially true now, as greater stress has been put in comparing a pulse rate from before and after an exercise so as to gauge endurance and physical stamina.

Another fitness accessory to consider is the body fat gauge.

Weight is easily measured with a scale. However, an approximate measure of body fat content is used using the formula for body mass index, or BMI. The BMI is able to imply a lot about a person’s physical conditions. However, the exact body fat percentage is a far more direct and useful indicator.

There are a lot of available variations when it comes to body fat gauges, some of which appear like LCD displays attached to calipers. These gauges are operated in a way that the calipers are used to squeeze the folds of the skin, and the LCD displays a reading of the body fat measurement.

These gauges must be appropriately adjusted for both gender and age in order to make the body fat measure more appropriate and useful. Storing previous readings is useful, so as to help identify changes in body fat percentage.

There are a couple of other fitness accessories that you can integrate into your regular fitness equipment to help you maximize the value you get out of your fitness equipment. The end goal is to get as healthy as possible, and using the right tools is one of the most important things.

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