Heart rate monitoring describes various ways of determining how many times your heart beats per minute during exercise or other physical activities. Depending on your circumstances, monitoring your heartbeat can help protect your health during exercise, determine your eligibility for exercise and help you get an effective workout or reach specific exercise goals.
Protecting Your Health
If you place too much stress on your heart during exercise, you can significantly increase your risks for developing heart problems or injuries to your bones or muscles. Avoid overstressing your heart by monitoring your heart rate and staying within an acceptable level of exertion for your age. This safe, acceptable exertion level is commonly called your target heart rate, or your training zone. Stay within your target zone by regularly checking your pulse or using a strap-on heart rate monitor.
Reaching Exercise Goals
When you keep your heart rate at specific levels of exertion, you can gain specific benefits to your health. For instance, beginning exercisers and those seeking to lose weight typically exercise in a training zone that equals 50 percent to 60 percent of their maximum heart exertion. Experienced exercisers trying to further improve their fitness typically work at 60 percent to 70 percent of their maximum heart capacity, while trained athletes use even higher heart rates to make specific improvements in their competitive performances. Heart rate monitoring lets all of these groups of exercisers fine-tune their efforts according to their needs. You can approximate your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from the number 220.
Assessing Specific Risks
The presence of coronary heart disease, or heart-related symptoms such as shortness of breath or chest pain, can seriously increase your health risks during exercise. Your doctor can assess your heart-related exercise risks with a treadmill stress test, or exercise stress test. During this procedure, your doctor monitors your heart rate --- as well as your blood pressure, breathing patterns and your heart's electrical function --- under tightly controlled exercise conditions. In addition to determining safe levels of physical exertion, a stress test can help predict your chances of experiencing a heart attack or other life-threatening heart-related ailments.
An Alternative Approach
As an alternative to directly monitoring your heart rate, you can estimate your level of exertion by noting your ability to hold a conversation during exercise. Typically, if you can talk to another person with some effort, you're exercising at the lower end of your training zone. If you have enough breath to sing, you're probably not exercising vigorously enough to get the full benefit of your activity. If you can't hold a conversation without taking a breath, you may have exceeded your target heart rate. Consult your doctor and a fitness instructor for more information.
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