Best Fitness Tracker with Heart Rate Monitor

Fitness trackers can be predominantly divided into two species. One is the kind that doesn’t have a heart rate monitor while the other obviously has heart rate monitoring as one of its main features. If you are investing in a fitness tracker, we highly recommend that you choose the best fitness tracker with heart rate monitor feature. Knowing your heart rate in conjunction with your other metrics like steps, running cadence, distance covered, speed, laps, or whatever it is that you are trying to track gives you a phenomenally intelligent way to analyze your fitness activity.

Besides giving you high performance insights into your fitness activities, heart rate monitoring can also help you analyze your stress levels, another fantastic way to put fitness trackers to use in this day and age where stress is pretty much everywhere you go. You will also be able to use heart rate data to understand if you have an efficient way of breathing, and if there is something you can do to change the very way you breathe, to let your heart perform better than it usually does.

Without much further ado, let’s get right into the rest of this post that will talk about various fitness trackers with the best wrist heart monitor.

Polar FT4 Heart Rate Monitor

Are you surprised that you are seeing a Polar fitness tracker first on the list of our recommendations for the most accurate heart rate monitor. You were expecting a Fitbit, weren’t you? The fact of the matter is that Polar makes some of the most accurate heart tracker devices out there.

But, please note that the Polar FT4 only tracks your heart rate and doesn’t count steps! This is a very important note to make about this product. In other words, this device is not a pedometer. Buy this device only if you need high quality continuous heart rate tracking and not anything else. Of course, using the heart rate tracking, it will calculate the amount of calories you burn, which is another very important metric to evaluate your fitness activities.

This Polar device gives you a count of smart calories. The smart calorie count is incredibly useful as it is calculated using your height, your weight, your age, your gender and your continuous heart rate reading. Polar even goes a step further to tell you if the calories you are burning are burning carbohydrates or fat in your body.

Every human has a fat burning zone and a carbohydrate burning zone. When you push your heart rate up too high, you don’t burn fat but instead burn carbohydrates that are easily metabolized. Lower intensity workouts might help you burn fat than carbohydrates, helping you lose those inches and pounds that you want to lose.

Either way, this Polar heart rate monitor will give you one of the most accurate readings of calories burned. There’s a reason why this device has almost 7,000 reviews at a site like Amazon. It is available in 4 different colors; silver, blue, pink and green.

Battery life is never a problem with this device as it uses a coin battery that lasts a good year, assuming you use it 30 minutes every day.

 

Fitbit Charge 2

The Charge 2 from Fitbit is Fitbit’s best-selling fitness tracker. That says a lot about this heart rate monitor as Fitbit has a lot of other devices that are all popular in their own right. The Charge 2 uses a large OLED screen that you can tap to touch, eliminating the need to press buttons on the side, which can get rather cumbersome.

Like the Polar FT4, it can be said that the Fitbit Charge 2 is one of the best wrist heart monitor your money can buy. What’s different about Fitbit Charge 2 is that it tracks steps, runs and even gives you your phone notifications on the fitness band, so you don’t miss out on calls, texts and calendar alerts that you can’t know of, when indulging in strenuous physical activity while away from your phone.

The Fitbit Charge 2 keeps track of something called PurePulse heart rate. This is trademarked and you will find this metric only on Fitbit devices. It is a continuous heart rate monitoring system that uses your personal details like age, gender, height and weight combined with the heart rate data to give you a very accurate calorie burn. Fitbit goes the extra mile to also give you guided breathing sessions at times of stress, so you can take a moment to bring down your heart rate when you are not exercising and when your heart rate is high because of induced stress.

The Fitbit Charge 2 also tracks your sleep, automatically, without requiring you to put it into sleep mode. The battery will last up to 5 days although heavy use will mean it will only last 3 days.

The Charge 2 can be configured to give you customized reminders when you are sedentary, so you are reminded to get up and get moving.

Another very strong selling point for Fitbit is the excellent app ecosystem that you get access to, when you purchase a Fitbit device. The app does a phenomenal job of giving you history, comparison periods, summaries and customized reports so you can find out everything there is to know about your own fitness activity and performance.

If you like to switch up the look of your fitness tracker, you can buy a variety of aftermarket bands for the Fitbit Charge 2, to quickly swap out the default straps for something that will match your clothing for any given day.

 

Garmin Vivosmart HR Activity Tracker

No list of watches with pedometer and heart rate monitor will be complete without the mention of a Garmin product. The Garmin Vivosmart HR is that model that takes that spot on this list.

Available in 5 different colors, the Vivosmart has a very accurate wrist based heart monitor that keeps a continuous reading of your heart rate. Like the Charge 2, it is also capable of notifying you of incoming calls, texts, social alerts, with vibration alerts.

Besides heart rate, it will track steps, distance, calories, floors climbed and also your activity intensity levels. All Garmin fitness trackers have what is called a Move bar. The Move bar is a reminder that you are being too sedentary. Your first Move bar appears after one hour of sedentary time. If you continue to remain sedentary, another bar gets added on every 15 minutes. Then, you begin to receive vibration alerts to stop being so sedentary.

People who use Garmin fitness activity devices swear by the Move bar as it is an extremely simple visual cue that tells them that they are being lazy.

The battery on the Vivosmart HR lasts about a year.

If you want the Vivosmart HR with an added GPS feature, you can purchase the Vivosmart HR +.

Purchasing the Garmin Vivosmart HR will give you access to Garmin’s connect app. The Connect app does a fantastic job of giving you insights into your fitness habits, with very intuitively designed reporting screens. Connect will also put you in touch with the Garmin fitness community with hundreds of thousands of users against whom you can compete or compare yourself with, to see where on the bell curve you and your fitness levels fit in.

 

Coffea Fitness Tracker with HR tracking

Odd name aside, the Coffea Fitness tracker with heart rate monitoring capability is an incredible device, considering that it retails for less than $40, almost half as cheap as any other device mentioned on this list!

Besides heart rate monitoring, this device will track steps, distance, calories burned, speed, and active minutes and also something called a physical index, a general metric fitness score to give you a quick idea of where you stand in terms of fitness level, at any given time of the day. It is also a sleep time tracker.

Battery life for this device is about 7 to 10 days. When fully drained, it will take an hour to fully charge this device.

A nice touch with this device is that it will use your phone’s GPS data to give you a quick snapshot of the local weather. This can be very useful if you are out on a field without your phone, with the weather becoming inclement. Using your heart rate readings, the device has the ability to give suggestions on your breathing, so you can regulate stress levels or simply just take a deep breath when stress is spiking up your heart rate. It has several specific sport modes that you can manually initiate to allow for very accurate calorie count tracking. The 14 sport modes include walking, hiking, running, biking, treadmill running, basketball, tennis, spinning and even yoga, and a few others.

 

Polar FT60 Heart Rate Monitor

Like the Polar FT4, the FT60 is one of the best heart rate trackers that you can lay your hands on. Though it doesn’t have as many heart rate monitor reviews as the FT4, it is a device you must consider if you need a heart rate based fitness tracker that can also assist you with workouts. With this device, Polar have tried to give you a tracker that can motivate you like a personal trainer, to push more and hit desired intensity levels, to produce the results you want, all in a much quicker manner than when you should do it alone, without the use of a tracker.

Aside from heart rate tracking, the Polar FT60 also shows you calorie burn information, fat burn percentage and also stores 100 training files for quick access. What’s nice about all the suggested training programs is that you can constantly evaluate yourself in real time when doing these suggested training programs, to know where you can improve.

The watch also gives you fitness tests to constantly help you monitor your fitness performance levels, to see if you are actually making progress will all your workouts.

Battery can easily last for a year with normal usage or several months with even heavy usage.

 

X-Cheng Fitness Tracker with heart rate and blood pressure tracking, with IP67 Waterproof protection

At under $50, this new X-Cheng fitness tracker has been making waves in the fitness industry not just for its accurate heart rate tracking but for its ability to track blood pressure as well! Besides heart rate and blood pressure monitoring, it is also an excellent sleep tracker as well.

The device is also very different in the sense that it has a full smartwatch like watch face that can show off a lot of information. It has an IP67 waterproof rating which means you will never have to take it off in the rain. Besides all its fitness tracking capabilities, it can inform you of incoming calls and messages as well, with an option to send out messages as well!

Please however note that blood pressure monitoring is not a continuous process. You will have to manually put the fitness tracker into blood pressure monitoring mode to see your blood pressure readings. To get an accurate reading of your blood pressure, put it into blood pressure mode and then raise the device until it is level with your heart, and then stay still until the reading is registered.

Battery life is about 4 to 7 days, depending on usage.

 

Letsfit Fitness Tracker HR

This is another excellent product that tops the list of watches with pedometer and heart rate monitor, with a price tag of under $50. In fact, this model currently retails for less than $40. For an extremely affordable price, you receive a tracker with an OLED full touch screen with almost a one inch size. It even has GPS connectivity should you want to track your running trails. However, please note that the device itself doesn’t have GPS. It only uses GPS data collected by your phone. So, you must have your phone on your person if you want to track GPS location.

You can use the multi-sport mode to manually put it into modes like biking, badminton, tennis, spinning and running to track calorie consumption in a very accurate manner.

The device is smart enough to understand when you go to sleep, to then enable sleep tracking. You can also custom set up sedentary alerts to let the device let you know when you have been sitting around for too long.

Like most fitness trackers that can monitor heart rate, this device can give you suggested breathing lessons to help you cope with stress or simply learn how you can breathe better, to give your body more oxygen than it is used to.

Besides all of the above features, this neat little Letsfit tracker also notifies you of SMS and call notifications. By default, the device will show steps, the current time, date, messages and other notifications along with your calorie count. There’s even a neat little design element where the screen automatically brightens up to show you all collected or tracked stats, when you bring your wrist up towards you, like how you will check the time on a watch.

The rechargeable battery lasts about 4-7 days depending on usage and will attain a full charge in one or two hours.

 

Waterproof Fitness Activity Tracker

This neat little gadget costs less than $20 and is easily the best wrist heart monitor if you need a wearable for very little money. To be exact, this device currently costs just $19.99 at Amazon! That is an incredible price to pay for a heart rate fitness monitor, easily making this device the best budget pedometer out there.

What it will track on the OLED screen are metrics like calories, distance, sleep quality, notifications, sedentary alerts, steps and of course, your heart rate.

When you connect this device to the app, you will be able to see your heart rate charts that you can then analyze to see how well or how poorly you are pushing your heart during exercise.

The device even allows you to remotely operate your phone’s camera, allowing you to take some selfies that you can otherwise never, ever do. The 0.96’ screen can show who is calling or texting. You can even play music using this wearable, skipping or going back to your last played song, while also obviously being able to control the music volume.

If that wasn’t a long list of features for a device that costs less than $20, here’s another surprise. The device has an IP67 water resistance rating which means it can handle splashes and rain, but cannot be immersed in water, like when in a swimming pool.

So, there you have it. A quick roundup of heart rate monitor reviews or summaries that have introduced you to the best budget pedometer models as well as the best performance fitness trackers, all enabled with heart rate tracking capabilities. If you have only used a fitness tracker without HR monitoring capability or haven’t used a fitness tracker at all, you are going to be blown away by the wealth of information that is provided by tracking your heart rate. How your heart performs when subject to various kinds of physical and mental activity will give you great insights into your lifestyle choices, thereby helping you change for the better.

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