Heart rate monitors are an absolute god send for those who appreciate life. From those who are serious exercise fanatics to those who just try their best at keeping on top of the on-going battle of healthy lifestyles, heart rate monitors allow you a little more insight into your progress.

It’s easy to see muscles toning and fat reducing. It’s easy to see the benefits of more stamina and better sleep after a pattern of regular exercise has been kept up. But it’s not so easy to see if these benefits are reaching your major organs that are doing all the work. It’s also impossible to know if organs such as your heart are responding and keeping a pace with your exercise regime and not suffering.

Heart disease is no longer attributable to old people but is prevalent across the board of age groups. Atrial fibrillation is one such condition that affects as many as one in every two hundred middle aged people in the UK. High blood pressure and coronary artery disease interfere with the way electrical signals are transmitted through the heart and this often won’t be picked up until something drastic happens.

Heart rate monitors can save lives by picking up on problems before the symptoms manifest themselves into something more severe. They can give you a good indication of how your heart is performing during exercise and these heart rate monitors can be worn continuously.

When heart problems are detected, it’s nice to know that medical advancements are constantly being made to overcome them. Heart problems are no longer an automatic death sentence. The latest tool to come on the market for heart specialists is a multi-directional robot that can snake its way through the heart to placed that are usually beyond reach by conventional methods.

The CardioArm is no thicker than a straw and is about a foot long. It will carry a miniature camera and light and will be guided by a surgeon using a joystick and hand held console. A thin, hollow, flexible tube will be pulled right into the heart and tiny surgical instruments such as scalpels can be passed down these tubes and operated.

It is hoped this new device will revolutionise heart surgery, drastically cutting down recovery time and reducing the risk of infection. The only signs of surgery afterwards are a pea size opening on the abdomen as opposed to the type of scar that looks like your entire torso has been taken apart.

The heart is quite obviously the most crucial part of our anatomy that we need to look after. It’s no good exercising the bits that we want to look good if our hearts are not up to it. And we don’t really have much measure of how our hearts are coping when we are pushing ourselves to extreme.

On top of that, if we push our hearts to the extreme, our body will use all its resources to cope with keeping the major organs going and the full benefit of the exercise will not be felt where we want it. It’s much better to keep the heart working at the optimum rate, making health improvements speedier.

With a heart rate monitor, you can keep an eye on what’s going on inside and rest assured that everything is tickety boo.

health expert catherine harvey looks at how useful heart rate monitors are in the fight against heart disease.

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