In the days of fitbit, iPhone apps, and all sorts of fancy gadgetry, the most effective thing you can invest in is a heart rate monitor. It will it keep you honest in terms of how hard you are working, allow an accurate estimate of calories burned, and real time feedback on your performance. One measure of fitness is how rapidly your heart rate drops after a high intensity interval. You have the benefit of the instant feedback of watching your heart rate decrease during recovery and increase with intensity, but you will also have a record of your performance and caloric burn for each workout that can be downloaded to your computer. I can't tell you how effective it's been just to wear it twice in the past week while teaching spin.
Good news is basic models can be had for under $30. Mine is actually part of my GPS watch, which ironically when I used for running I never used the heart rate monitor, but now I don't run very much and only use the HRM.
I even found a way to set it to read both heart rate and %max heart rate to know how hard I'm exercising with respect to the heart rate zone charts. Of course this requires entering info about age, weight, gender, and resting heart rate. Definitely informative for estimating calories burned when inputting exercise into myfitnesspal.
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