How do I Use My Heart Rate Monitor?

So, you got a new Heart Rate Monitor for Christmas, well here are some tips on what to do with it:

Heart Rate Training

• Monitoring your heart rate is a useful way of measuring the intensity of your training sessions. As exercise intensity and duration progresses, so does the number of heart beats per minute.

• The higher number of beats per minute, the harder your session is likely to be. The heart beats faster in order to deliver oxygen in the blood to the muscles that are working during exercise, including the heart itself, and to other vital organs such as the brain.

• Wearing a heart rate monitor can help you measure your heart rate, alternatively count the number of beats manually in a 10 second period and multiply by 6.

• The manual pulse can either be measured at: the wrist (radial), turn your palm face up, place two fingers from your opposite hand on the outside part of your wrist, just below the hand; or the neck (carotid), place two fingers below the jaw next to wear the Adam’s apple is in men.

• Try to measure your heart rate at rest (RHR), most athletes will range from 40bpm to 70bpm. With training your RHR will decrease due to an increase in the amount of blood pumped by the heart during each beat.

• At what speed should your heart rate be beating, when training? This is commonly expressed as a percentage of your maximum heart rate (MHR) So 50% of your heart rate would be expressed as 50%MHR.

• The commonly used formula to estimate Maximum heart rate (220 –age) is only that, an estimate. Using this formula and adhering to it without checking yourself what your MHR is, could lead to training too hard or too light.

• An alternative method is to measure your HR over a few training sessions, record it and also write down how hard you felt that you trained. This will give you a correlation between your HR and the intensity of the training session that is specific to you. For example: if your HR is 180bpm and the session is hard, you will be able to use that information to program interval training sessions, where you might want to work until your HR reaches 185bpm for 30 seconds, then recover until it drops to 150bpm, then work hard again.

• Another method is to complete a regular training session several times, recording your HR at peak effort, at the end of the session and also 2 minutes and 4 minutes after the session. If HR is lower during the session, you are better able to cope with the work, if it is lower after the session, your recovery ability is improved. You can then look to increase the intensity, duration or distance of the training session, to provide your body with new stimulus.

• At what HR should you be training to achieve various goals such as fat burning? Predicting so-called ‘fat –burning’ zones is prone to error, as each individual as a different metabolism, and different Maximal Heart Rates. High intensity, anaerobic work outs should generally be at 85% plus of your MHR. But aerobic benefits can be gained from training at a level as low as 50% of your MHR.

• In summary use your HR to gain an objective record of your improvements and reactions to specific training sessions over time. It will be a useful measure of intensity, and then you can plan future sessions based on your own results.