For many people, exercise can be a challenge. However, in order to gain cardiovascular fitness and strengthen your heart, aerobic exercise is a vital component in a healthy lifestyle. To make the most of your workouts, consider using a heart rate monitor while you exercise. A heart rate monitor tracks your heart rate, or heart beats per minute, at any given time throughout your workout. This can help make sure you are working out at the correct intensity, can help you determine how many calories are burned in each fitness session, and can help improve your stamina in sports like biking and running. Before using a heart rate monitor, it is important to understand the correct heart rate level you should be working out at. If you have no history of recent exercise, check with your doctor before beginning a new workout routine. Otherwise, find your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 225. This will be your personal maximum heart rate, and you should never exceed that in exercise. Working out at 60% of that maximum is considered easy, or appropriate for warming up or cooling down. At 65%-75% of your maximum heart rate, a workout is considered moderate, and 75%-85% is an intense interval or speed workout. For beginners, it is important to keep your heart rate somewhere in the easy of moderate categories. Wearing a heart rate monitor makes it easy to keep track of the intensity of your workouts, and make sure you are not working out at too easy or too difficult of an intensity. Advanced fitness enthusiasts can also get great benefits from wearing a heart rate monitor. By making sure runners or cyclists are training in the correct heart zones, they can recover faster, and gain speed in their respective activities. One of the biggest benefits to wearing a heart rate monitor is that you can accurately tell how many calories are being burned over the course of your workout. In order to successfully lose weight, you need to expend more calories than you are consuming. A heart rate monitor can be a helpful part of that equation by revealing exactly how many calories and burned, and therefore how many calories can be eaten later on.