Marion Freijsen A blog about Sports, Fitness & Health

Heartrate monitoring

When you are looking to improve your fitness, you will at some point need to invest in a heart rate monitor.

Many people train for years without them of course, they tend to be reasonably expensive if you want to get a good one and most of the recreational sports enthusiasts don’t really know what they offer. However, I absolutely think they are essential at almost any level – since they are a way of measuring WHAT you are actually doing and will help you gain more from the same workout.

Remember my blog about energy? It talks about the different sources of energy you have at your disposal and how each is used differently by your body at the time you need it. Working without a heart rate monitor leaves you guessing at what point you use what energy source, doing it with a monitor allows you to pinpoint exactly the right level of effort. See it as your compass on a wide ocean. You need to know where you are heading if you want to get anywhere at all.

The first basic thing is to find out what your maximum heart rate is. You can do this in a test – which is not very pleasant but will give you the most accurate results. The test involves you working at increasing pace or effort (on a bike, by increasing the resistance every 2 mins., or on a treadmill increasing the gradient) – until such a time that you simply can’t keep going anymore and are about to throw up! I told you it was unpleasant Just before you throw up though, you will see on a heart rate graph that your heart rate will have levelled briefly before hitting the highest point. That’s where your max. is.
Now, there is a general rule that you can take if you don’t want to do the above (which you should never do without supervision in any case!). You take 220 minus your age. That would be your average max. heart rate. You should also know your resting heart rate – which is fortunately a lot simpler and enjoyable. Lie down, relax completely for about 10 mins. and then take your pulse. You now have your range from rest to max.

Now, you will find that you have different heart rate levels for different sports. My own resting heart rate is low anyway, so my max is also lower then average, for cycling it’s about 155, whereas on a run it’ll be 165 (and no, I am not actually 65 for those of you reversing the calculation!!). I don’t actually work at that level though – I would be passing out after 1 minute flat. But it’s my MAX and now I can work back to what levels I should be working out at to optimize my performance.

Once you have a maximum heart rate, you can work out your optimal output based on the following guidelines:

For overal endurance improvement and carbohydrate burning: 75-80% of the max.
For long duration activity/fatburning: 65-75%

You’ll also see that anything below the 65% level isn’t really going to help you improve much. And this is exactly why I say that a heart rate monitor is worth your investment. You could be sitting on that bike all day and not loose weight necessarily if you are not at least achieving 65% effort.

Any good fitness centre, or personal trainer can help you find your max. heart rate. Never do it on your own or without medical advice if you are just starting to work out.

Have a great work-out today!!