Don’t miss a beat, with heart-rate-monitored workouts!
Your heart rate is one of the best indicators of the intensity of your workouts. So let’s find out how you can benefit from an HR monitor and maximize your HOLOFIT VR Fitness workouts.
Benefits of using a heart rate monitor
A better insight into your workout and overall health is always welcome, and not many things to this as well as a heart rate monitor does. Using one seriously improves the quality of your workouts.
Smarter training
No pain no gain? Although a very famous fitness saying, it should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Over-training is an actual thing and going too hard at it can be more detrimental than beneficial for your health and fitness.
Using an HR monitor lets you ensure your heart rate isn’t at its maximum for long periods of time, and follow your progress over time.
Protip: Your progress is best indicated by how quickly your HR returns to its resting rate. You shouldn’t see increasing your HR maximum as an indicator of your fitness.
Faster recovery
Again, if you overexert, you risk a longer recovery time.
You may be exercising at a higher intensity than your fitness level if you are breathless, in pain, or unable to exercise as long as you had planned.
The longer you need to recover, the slower your results will come. Monitoring your heart rate, in this case, can help ensure you don’t overexert.
Maximum calorie burn
Want to burn the maximum amount of calories? The orange zone is where the magic happens!
If you stay in the orange zone (84-91% of your maximum heart rate) for 12+ minutes during a 60-minute workout, you’ll achieve “EPOC” (Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption).
This means that your body will continue to burn calories even after you’ve finished your workout. Isn’t that neat?!
High-intensity cardio training like Interval, Fat Burn, and HIIT in HOLOFIT CardioGoals mode is the perfect workout choice for the training of this type.
Maximize your HOLOFIT workouts
No matter which type of workout mode you opt for, the HR information will be visible on the HUD in front of you. You can use this to maximize the effectiveness of your HOLOFIT workouts:
Journey mode in the orange zone – the funniest fat-burn workout
With an HR monitor, you can even use the Journey mode to have a structured workout.
Just choose the environment, start collecting trophies, and try to keep your heart rate in the orange zone: the holy grail of fat burn.
As mentioned above, the orange zone is around 84-91% of your maximum heart rate. And if you stay in this zone for at least 12 minutes during a 60-minute workout, you get to claim the benefits of Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption, meaning that your body continues to burn calories even after you’ve finished your workout.
HIIT and HR monitors – a perfect combo
With HIIT, you work out at alternating periods of high and low intensity.
Your maximum heart rate is the key here. Thanks to an HR monitor, you’ll track your heart rate during the high and low-intensity intervals of the workout mode, making sure you are not over/underexerting yourself.
An HR monitor will help you identify the ideal difficulty level for your workouts, as well as follow your progress in a structured, smarter way.
Combo Workouts – stop and take a deep breath
Stop skipping the breathing exercises! Yes, we know it’s more fun to have a sword fight with fruits galore, but the cool-down task is there for a reason.
In the absence of a cool-down period, you’ll start breathing more rapidly and your heart rate will soar, sometimes ending up counterproductive to what you’re looking for.
Race mode – slow and steady wins the race
We’ve all been there. The race is about to begin, and you are ready to leave a blaze in your wake.
And what happens near the end? You’ve exerted yourself and as your opponents begin closing in, you can’t find it in you to go faster.
Before each race, make sure to do a warm-up exercise, start slow and steady, and build your stamina throughout the race, ready to give it all you’ve got near the end, and not at the beginning. Keep your heart rate in the orange zone at max, and you should be good to go.
How to integrate HR monitors into your HOLOFIT VR fitness workouts
Thanks to our latest update, you can now pair an HR monitor with HOLOFIT!
Your live heart rate will be displayed in your workout, and you’ll see your average and maximum heart rate at the end of your workout, on the results screen.
To pair an HR monitor, your first need to activate/wake it up. Open HOLOFIT Settings and navigate to the Bluetooth settings. There, you’ll see an option to pair a Bluetooth device (your FTMS fitness machine or a cadence sensor) and an HR monitor. You can save up to 5 HR monitors.
Bare in mind that this is only Phase 1 of our HR monitor integration.
HR monitors will not yet work for HOLOFIT Freestyle or non-Bluetooth rowing, but this should be enabled in one of our soon-to-follow updates. Additionally, we will be working on enabling other wearables, like the Apple watch, to connect with HOLOFIT. Stay tuned!
