Heart Rate

If you are serious about cardiovascular fitness, it is often helpful to invest in a heart rate monitor. Although many running machines are equipped with heart rate detectors on their handles, it is unsafe to run whilst holding these. For example, if you wish to develop aerobic cardiovascular endurance you would want to run at an intensity to maintain your heart rate between 70-80% of maximum. To do this you need to know your:

• Resting heart rate (HR_rest)
• Maximum heart rate (HR_max) and
• Target heart rate (THR) for your fitness goal

Your resting heart rate is the rate that your heart beats when you are not doing any physical activity and are in a relaxed state. It is important to know as, generally the younger or fitter you are, the lower your heart rate and this needs to be factored in to the calculations for your target heart rate.

There are various ways of calculating HR_max. The simplest and most widely used is based on the following formula:

HR_max = 220 – Age

This formula, however, can be quite inaccurate. According to recent research (Gellish et al, 2007) a better one is the following :

HR_max = 207 – (0.7 x Age)

Once you have calculated your HR_max, you can calculate your target heart rate using the following formula:

THR = ((HR_max – HR_rest) x %Intensity) + HR_rest

So, for example, the %Intensity is entered as 70-80% for an aerobic fitness goal. From this you can see how useful a heart monitor will be for your exercise programme, especially if you want to use HIIT, as you will need to make sure that you push your heart rate up to an intensity of 90% maximum for brief periods in order to get the full benefits from HIIT.

If all this seems far too complicated, why not just enter your age and resting heart rate into our online

Heart Rate Calculator

and we’ll do the work for you!

The other advantage of investing in a heart rate monitor is that you will get instant feedback regarding your improvements in fitness. You will find that your resting heart rate falls and that you can run faster at any given heart rate.

If you can’t invest in a heart rate monitor a quick way to determine if you are exercising in any given heart rate zone is to use the CR-10 scale that rates how strong you perceive your exertion to be on a scale of 0-10 and compares this with an estimate of percentage HR_max. It has been shown to correlate quite well with heart rate during exercise. You can print off the card shown below and attach it to your running machine, cycling machine etc to monitor your effort: