Heart rate monitors are a great way to measure your heart rate and monitor intensity during exercise. They can help you get a better understanding of your heart rate zone and provide insights on how to improve your fitness. They can also help you monitor your fitness training and improve your workouts. If you’re new to heart rate monitors, you might be wondering how to train using a heart rate monitor to get the most out of your workouts.
In this post, you’ll learn how to use a heart rate monitor to get the most out of your workouts. We’ll also cover the different training zones, the best methods for improving your heart rate, and how a heart rate monitor can improve your workouts.
How a Heart Rate Monitor Works
Heart rate monitors measure electrical signals from your heart by transmitting them to a data centre or a wristwatch. Some heart rate monitors enable you to analyse your data from a computer. After a workout, you can interpret the data and understand the different benefits of your workouts.
Measuring your pulse, the old-fashioned way, on your neck or wrist, can help you get an estimate. However, this can be disruptive to your workout. Using an electronic heart rate monitor can provide you with accurate, real-time information.
Using a heart rate monitor is simple. An effective model will measure your heart rate using a transmitter over your heart. You can hold the transmitter with an adjustable strap around your check. The transmitter then detects any electrical activity just like an electrocardiogram.
All electrical activity is then transmitted over to your wristwatch through the available graphic display.
Nowadays, there are plenty of heart rate monitors in the market. The most common options will only display your heart rate. However, the more advanced options will have additional features like alarms that notify you when you are above or below a pre-programmed number.
Additional features of heart rate monitors include:
- Calories burned
- Countdown timer
- Pre-programmed workouts
What You’ll Learn from Using a Heart Rate Monitor
If you opt to use a heart rate monitor, you will discover that it always measures the times your heart beats per minute. On average, the heart rate should be between 60 to 100 times per minute. However, fitter people’s heart rates, especially athletes can drop to 40 beats per minute.
That’s because they function more efficiently. During workouts, your muscles will start pumping. This will be apparent when conducting aerobic activities like swimming, biking, or swimming. That’s because your body needs more oxygen.
This also results in you breathing harder and you note that your hard will begin pounding. Every beat helps pump oxygenated blood through your body. Therefore, by tracking your heart rate, you get to know how hard you have been working out.
When working out, you get to know the volume of oxygen that you are consuming. This helps measure your fitness capacity and helps you know which exercises are the best for your health. It also enables you to ensure that your body is functioning normally.
Why Track Your Heart Rate When Working Out
If you are just beginning to exercise or are sedentary, you should focus more on being active. This isn’t the time to start tracking your heart rate. Instead, your goal should be on how to increase your activity level. It helps you avoid the health risks associated with just sitting.
After you are comfortable with your exercises, you can begin working towards hitting your fitness targets. You can achieve this with moderate-intensity exercise. At this point, tracking your heart rate can help reach your intensity level.
Moderate exercises will have lots of health benefits. That’s because these exercises can also turn out to be vigorous depending on their frequency. Likewise, incorporating additional vigorous workouts into your routine will help increase your athletic capacity.
On the other hand, measuring your heart rate can help understand your workouts. It helps you know how a workout should feel and the different areas to improve on. As a serious athlete, tracking your heart rate can ensure that you are training at your appropriate intensities.
Measuring your heart rate can encourage you to push towards vigorous fitness intensities. During the exercise, you can measure your oxygen level and know what you need to improve on. Besides, you will detect that after you begin with your exercises, you can begin sweating after 10 minutes.
Heart Rate Training Zones
These training zones help you gauge the effectiveness of your workouts. Using the five heart rate training zones will ensure that you get to know whether you are pushing too hard. More so, it guarantees that you do end up attaining your fitness goal.
Zone 1 Training: Warm up/recovery zone (50-60% of max heart rate)
This zone enables you to warm up. You can do so with aerobics because the intensity ought to be low. These exercises help to release synovial fluid in your joints & warm up your muscles. This type of training should start to raise your pulse above your resting heart rate, prepare your body for the workout ahead and prevent injury.
Zone 1 training helps promote blood flow to your muscles. You may also recover in this heart rate zone during an interval training session or at the end of a workout.
Zone 2 Training: 60-70% of your max heart rate
In this zone, breathing should start to become slightly laboured. You’ll feel your breathing pick up above your normal level but should still be able to maintain a conversation without pausing for breath.
Zone 2 training is important for everyone because it improves your endurance. Training in this zone helps build your mitochondria.
Zone 3 Training: Aerobic training zone, 70-80% of your max heart rate
In this zone, you’ll be slightly above your normal comfortable level and starting to sweat. You’ll still be able to talk, however you should start to pause for breath a little more frequently in this zone.
Zone 3 training engages your muscle fibres and builds more mitochondria in your muscles. Furthermore, this training helps develop the capillary network in your body. This helps transport oxygen efficiently to all your working muscles. In return, you get to have a better muscle economy.
Zone 4 Training: Lactic (anaerobic) training zone, 80-90%
Okay, now you’re training hard! In this zone, you’ll struggle to speak without pausing for breath & should struggle to maintain this intensity for long periods.
During Zone 4 training, you’ll work in the anaerobic threshold. Here, the lactic acid begins to build up quickly thus making it hard for your body to produce enough energy. At this stage, you might be unable to say a couple of words at once.
This level of training helps build power within your muscles. It enables you to maintain speed for longer. Besides, it helps utilize your muscle fibres while building your mitochondria. The zone is benefcial for:
- Burning body fat
- Increasing endurance
- Improving recovery time
Zone 5 Training: 90%+, maximal effort
When you reach 90% and above of your maximum heart rate, you’ll be working close to your maximum output and should really be feeling the burn! The zone is hard for most people because it’s the maximum of what your muscles can produce and your body produces lots of lactic acid.
This is a tough zone to train in for a sustained amount of time, however if you can spend enough time in this zone you’ll experience the ‘after-burn effect’. Essentially, the after-burn effect increases the amount of calories your body will burn for the next 24 hours after training. This is known as NEAT, or Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. This is a fancy way to describe the calories that your body burns through just to function properly & maintain its current composition. By spending the optimal time training at over 90% of your max heart rate you’ll increase your ‘NEAT’ calorie output for the next 24 hours, meaning that whatever you’re up to the day after training you’ll be burning more calories while you do it!
So, I’m sure you’re asking ‘whats the optimum time to train at 90% of my max heart rate?’. In short, during a 45 minute workout you want to spend 9-18 minutes at 90%, and 12-21 minutes for a 55+ minute workout. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do all these minutes all in one go! As long as you achieve the optimal Zone 5 minutes cumulatively by the end of your workout, you’ll enjoy the after-burn effect.
Types of Heart Rates
Besides measuring your heart rate, it’s essential to know the different types of heart rates. It enables you to understand the condition of your body. Nonetheless, it’s an effective way of ensuring that you can know when you are pushing too hard or when you need to push harder. The different types include:
- Resting heart rate – These are the normal beats per minute. You will get an accurate reading when you are well-rested.
- Training heart rate – This is the rate you ought to maintain during your workouts. It should be between 50 to 70%.
- Maximum heart rate – This includes the maximum beats that your heart can reach. It’s only attainable after you have pushed your heart and body.
- Recovery heart rate – This is the rate that you bring the heartbeats down after a workout.
Christian Scott is the founder and director of MindBodyFit, a website dedicated to providing the latest information on fitness, health, and mental well-being technology. With over six years of experience in the health and fitness industry, Christian is a passionate fitness enthusiast who combines his love for technology and wellness to help others achieve their best selves.
