CATCH THE BEAT!
Measure your exercise intensity with heart rate monitoring. by Ken Clarke
G Ken Clarke Fitness Director 403-287-4169 kclarke@glencoe.org
40 glencoe.org
etting the most out of your exercise sessions means optimizing the time you put into it. If you lift weights, you can tell when you’re getting the results you want. You keep track of how much weight you lift and how many times you lift it. And you see it on yourself. Then you either maintain the weight and reps or increase them for gains. With cardiovascular exercise, it’s more difficult to know how “optimized” your workout is, because you can’t see your heart pumping toward better health and you probably aren’t counting the beats. If you want to determine whether you’re working at an appropriate level while exercising, measuring your heart rate is a great way to start. When you are active, your heart rate will increase directly in proportion to the intensity of the activity you are performing AND relative to your individual fitness level. Your appropriate intensity will depend on your fitness level, your activity type and your desired outcome.
Two people – same age, weight and gender; one fit, one not – will have very different heart rates doing the same exercise. The fit person’s heart does not have to work as hard to perform the same amount of work. Heart rate charts based solely on age, weight and gender are inaccurate at best. The fit person might use them to never work hard again, seeing no improvements, while the unfit person might work far beyond his or her current fitness level and collapse, seriously injure themselves or worse. That’s not optimization of time. Whatever your goals – improve your health, manage your weight or win an athletic competition – you can eliminate guesswork by exercising within a specific, personalized target heart rate zone. There are a number of formulas and methods that estimate that for you. At The Glencoe Club, we use an excellent, new system to determine personal maximum heart rates. We test your personal VO2 with our Cardio Coach metabolic testing system.
