If you train with a heart rate monitor, you may gain important statistical information about your exertion and performance. Your heart rate is a measurement of the frequency of your heart's contractions needed to pump blood throughout your body. At higher exercise levels, your muscles need more oxygen and your heart pumps faster to compensate. As you become more aerobically fit, your heart pumps more blood with each beat, allowing your heart rate to lower, but still pump the same amount of blood. This gives you an increased exercise capacity.
Benefits
A heart rate monitor can be a motivational tool that helps a beginner learn to identify his body's signals about overtraining and helps a more advanced athlete pace herself during workouts and competitions. Many athletes like tracking their performance and progress through statistical measures such as heart rate and workout time.
Problems
Heart rate monitors don't measure the effort you put into your workout from day to day, which may vary even if you achieve the same heart rate. There's no evidence using a heart rate monitor during workouts or processing its data afterward improves performance. Watching the heart rate monitor intently can even be a safety hazard during road rides, especially in a group of cyclists.
Measurement Strategies
Richard Rafoth, writer of the website Cycling Performance Tips, recommends the following maximum heart rate measurement method. Bicycle at a warm-up pace for about 15 minutes on a flat area. Then ride up a long steady hill, increasing your effort each minute for at least five minutes. Sprint for 15 seconds, stop and measure your heart rate to learn your maximum heart rate. You may also use the heart rate measuring feature on your monitor, or subtract your age from 220 for a very rough estimation.
Factors
Dr. Jesper Bondo Medhus, a Danish medical doctor specializing in clinical physiology, notes that your heart rate can change because of caffeine intake, water balance, temperature or emotional stress, not just the intensity of your workout. Illness, overtraining, medications, time of day, food intake, altitude, weather and length of workout can also affect your heart rate. You can use a heart rate monitor to compare your heart rate to your usual measurements and determine if particular known factors are affecting your performance.
Training
To train for competition, construct workouts with target heart rates as percentages of your maximum heart rate. Riding at 65 percent of your maximum heart rate is a recovery speed, 65 to 72 percent is an endurance-building speed, 73 to 80 percent is a high-level aerobic speed, 84 to 90 percent is a training level for time trials and 91 to 100 percent is for sprints and anaerobic training.
Between 80 and 84 percent, you are exercising too hard to build endurance but too slow to increase your top speed, according to Rafoth. He recommends that each week you complete interval training workouts based on your heart rate levels as well as workouts devoted to high intensity and recovery level riding. Non-competitive cyclists can target their heart rates to 60 to 70 percent for low intensity workouts, 70 to 80 percent for medium intensity and 80 percent or more for high intensity. Dr. Medhus states that you should adjust your target heart rates for the workout intensities if you feel that they are too high or too low for you.
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