No matter if you are just starting an exercise program or already working out on a daily basis, monitoring your heart rate is an accurate way to gauge your effort. Your body can accomplish some amazing things for you when you exercise, but sometimes you can push it too hard or not hard enough. Using heart rate training is a precise way to achieve your exercise goals, and keep your body in the correct zone of effort.
Maximum Heart Rate
No matter what your age or level of exercise, the best place to start is figuring your maximum heart rate. You can use one of the many target heart rate calculators available online, or you can simply subtract your age from 220. This is a standard formula for men, but the American Heart Association now has a new gender-specific max heart rate formula for women: 206 minus 88 percent of your age. Once you have this number, you can become more precise with your heart rate training.
Moderate Exercise/Recovery Zone
It doesn't matter what form of exercise you are doing when it come to using heart rate training. Coach Brian Mac, with 40 years of training British athletes, says to start with a heart rate range of 60 to 70 percent of your max heart rate for a moderate effort workout and recovery mode from a hard workout. This is a good range to not only burn fat as fuel, but also to allow your body to warm up or cool down progressively before and after a hard effort.
Aerobic Zone
Mac notes that the next step up in your heart training is the aerobic zone. This is the zone that you use for achieving a harder, more demanding physical effort as you become more fit. In this zone your heart rate is now working in the 70 to 80 percent range of your max heart rate. If you are a 40-year-old male with a max heart rate of 180, your aerobic zone low end is 126 beats per minute, and your high end is 144 bpm. Using the women's formula, if you're a 40-year-old with a max heart rate of 171, your aerobic zone is 120 to 137 bpm.
Anaerobic Zone
Once your physical fitness and cardiovascular fitness levels have increased sufficiently, you can now train in the anaerobic zone. This is a very hard exercise effort at 80 to 90 percent of your max heart rate. In this zone you are working so hard that your body can't supply enough oxygen to your muscles, and depends on the use of glycogen or complex carbohydrates for fuel instead of fat. This effort can be sustained for a long period, but only through progressively training harder over several weeks.
VO2 Max Zone
At the peak of your training effort is the VO2 max zone, or maximum oxygen uptake zone; Mac calls it the red line zone. Now you are maxed out at 90 to 100 percent of your heart rate and physical effort. This zone and effort can only be sustained for short periods of time such as when doing sprint repeat workouts on a track. This high level of physical effort and heart rate should only be performed after many weeks and even months of progressively building up your body to handle the physical demands and stresses of such intensity.
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