Listen to Your Heart

February is the month of sweet hearts, beating hearts, candy hearts, and sometimes, broken hearts.
Do you know what your heart is telling you?

Heart rate is the best indicator of exercise intensity. When you exercise, your heart beats faster to meet the demand for more blood and oxygen by the muscles of the body. The more intense the activity, the faster your heart will beat. Therefore, monitoring your heart rate during exercise can be an excellent way to monitor the intensity of your workout.

There are a number of methods to monitor the heart rate.
Manually, a heart rate can be determined by finding the radial pulse at the base of the thumb of either hand. By using the first two fingers of one hand and locating the artery, count the number of beats in a 10-second period. To determine the heart rate in beats per minute, multiply the number of beats per 10-seconds by six. An accurate pulse count is crucial when monitoring exercise intensity manually.
If you do not want to count your heart beats, another way to determine your heart rate is by holding on to heart rate sensors which are located on some pieces of cardiovascular equipment.
I find that the easiest way to monitor heart rate is by using a heart rate monitor. That way you are free to move how you want and do not have to interrupt your workout to count your pulse, the monitor will do it for you.

The question is, What does your heart rate mean? Are you working out too hard, or not hard enough? There is a range of 5 heart rate intensity zones that are safe and effective for promoting cardiovascular benefits. In order to figure out at which intensity you should be working out at you need to be familiar with a few terms.

1. Aerobic
The body's ability to utilize oxygen and therefore obtain more energy through increased fat burning.

2. Aerobic Base (AB)
This is the number of beats per minute (bpm) at which you are the most efficient at burning fat calories.

3. Anaerobic
An increase use of sugar for energy due to lack of sufficient oxygen. The body can only store a limited supply of sugars in the muscles, therefore, sugar gets used up quickly and activity cannot be sustained for a very long time.

4. Anaerobic Threshold (AT)
This is the number of bpm at which you stop primarily burning fat for energy and start burning mostly sugars for energy.

As mentioned before, there are 5 different training zones. Zones 1-3 are the fat burning zones and zones 4-5 are the sugar burning zones. Typically ones AB is somewhere between zones 1& 2. The AT is the cut off point between zones 3 & 4. At what heart rate each zone begins and ends varies from person to person depending on one's conditioning. Just as no two people have the same fingerprints or DNA, no two people have the exact same response to exercise. Two people can be working out at the same heart rate, and depending on how fit they are, one person may be burning all fat calories, while the there person is working to hard and burning sugar calories. A simple exercise assessment, the MAP Test, can determine your unique metabolic response to exercise, including your AB, AT, and 5 training zones. The idea is to enhance your performance by getting your AB as close to your AT as possible and increase your AT by training in the correct heart rate zones. Thereby, maximizing your body's ability to burn fat. A positive side effect of this process is effective weight loss.

(For more information regarding MAP Testing and which heart rate monitor is best for your needs, please contact Amy Gilgenbach).