Learning
to accurately assess your heart rate can help you get more from
your workouts.
MANY PEOPLE take
their own resting and exercise heart rates, either with a heart
rate monitor or by feeling their pulse. Your resting heart rate
provides information about stress and overtraining levels, while
your exercise heart rate provides a good estimate of exercise intensity.
Both of these variables may change over time if you continue to
exercise, and provide good markers of physical conditioning.
Resting heart rate
Take your resting heart rate while you’re most relaxed. For
most people, this will be lying in bed, either before falling asleep
at night of first thing in the morning-but not after waking up to
a loud alarm clock! Find your pulse and count it for 30 seconds,
then multiply that by two to get your beats per minute (bpm).
Your resting heart rate will vary somewhat from day to day. This
is normal, and, over time, you will get a sense of what a normal
range is for you. In general, resting heart rates range from 60
to 80 bpm. Some people have resting heart rates higher than this,
while athletes may have resting heart rates as low as 40 bpm.
Many factors affect your resting heart rate. Anything that stimulates
the fight-or-flight stress response will speed up your heart rate,
including emotions such as anxiety, stress and excitement. Drugs
such as nicotine, caffeine, pseudoephedrine and ephedra do the same
thing. Fever, illness, overtraining and large meals also elevate
resting heart rate.
If you haven’t been exercising regularly, you may see a slight
decrease (5 to 10 bpm) in your resting heart rate after a few months
of training. This is a healthy sign that means your nervous system
is, well, less nervous and more balanced. You may find you are also
feeling a little less irritable and anxious.
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Exercise
heart rate
The harder you exercise, the more blood you must circulate to deliver
nutrients and oxygen, and to remove heat and waste products. This
is why your heart rate increases in proportion to exercise intensity.
Taking heart rate during exercise tells you how hard you are working.
Your heart rate
increases in
proportion to
exercise intensity.
Your health providers or exercise instructors may have recommended
certain target heart rates for your exercise program. They want
to be sure you are working hard enough to get all the wonderful
health benefits possible from your exercise program. If you have
health problems, you may have been told to keep your heart rate
below a certain level to be sure you are exercising safely.
Target heart rate zones may be calculates in many ways. Your recommended
target heart rate zones may have been calculated from an exercise
test that measured your heart during exercise. The test may have
measured your maximum heart rate. (Maximum heart rate is taken while
you exercise at maximal effort.) The test may have linked your heart
rate to your perception of exertion – how hard the work felt
to you. Target heart rates based on exercise testing tend to be
the most helpful.
Target heart rate zones calculated from age-predicted maximum heart
rate estimates may not be accurate for you. Predictions of maximal
heart rate have a standard deviation of 10 beats per minute. This
means that at least one-third of all exercisers will have heart
rates higher or lower than a 20-beat range around the maximum heart
rate predicted for their age. While your age-predicted maximum heart
rate might be 170bpm, only two-thirds of exercisers your age will
have a true maximum heart rate of 160 to 180 bpm.
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As you work with target heart zones, you will become accustomed
to what certain target ranges feel like. If you have to work like
a maniac to get your heart rate high enough to reach your recommended
zone, talk to your exercise instructor. Maybe you have a naturally
lower heart rate. Similarly, if your heart rate always seems very
high, even with a fairly light workload, you may have a somewhat
higher-than-average heart rate.
With regular exercise training, you may find that your exercise
heart rate for your standard workload (for example, running on
the treadmill at 6 mph) decreases. This is a sign that your body
is getting better at producing energy. In order to exercise in
your target zone, you will need to increase the exercise intensity.
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