When exercising whether it be to improve fitness or increase strength your body goes through a great deal of physiological stress. But of course if you train super hard in the gym you can always take one or two days rest to help you recover. But about your heart? Its a muscle also and it beats continuously without any really rest. How do you know if your over training or your heart and body is so stressed that it needs to take a break?
Measuring your heart rate is an ideal way to measure the amount of stress your body is going through. When something is too stressful, your heart rate goes up, when your body is relaxed, your heart rate is low. When I train clients and those more specifically with a cardiovascular disease, this method of stress measurement is great because its quite, real-time and I can tell how a client responds to a certain movement. But to be honest, when training a client I don’t really look at their heart in terms of beats per minute, that means very little to me.
To clarify, I look more specifically at the clients percentage of heart rate maximum. This to me lets me know exactly how hard they are working in respect to their maximum heart rate that they can (theoretically) achieve. For those of a healthy population (free of any cardiovascular disease) I can usually train them to within 5% of their maximum heart rate. However, those with a cardiovascular disease, this is where I have to be more specific and shorten the range that they work within. The maximum heart rate that can be achieved will differ client-to-client and will also depend on the exercise they are performing and the outcome that both the client and I want.
Those that have a more acute cardiac condition I will look more in-depth and work out the rate pressure product and energy demands that each exercise places on them but that’s for another blog. Overall, heart rate is great to measure because it can tell us many things when training. My big 3 I measure heart rate for are:
- Safety – Once an upper-range limit has been found you can comfortably find out how hard you can work without feeling absolutely drained after a session. For example, if you know your limit for training is 87% then you can always get a good quality training session in if you stay under this limit, on the other hand, if you go above this limit then you know you may need to take some additional rest later.
- Progression – Say your a distance/marathon runner, find out the average heart rate from a previous best run and start run whilst keeping that same average heart rate. You want to gradually increase the speed of your run over certain time-lengths but maintain the same heart rate. For example, I run 5km and average 75%. I would then go and run on the treadmill at 75% heart rate and gradually increase the speed but work on maintaining the same heart rate percentage. Once you become more efficient at transporting oxygen to the working muscles your heart rate percentage will stay the same but you will have increased your speed of the run.
- Targeted training – Say an athlete has to do a recovery session after a big weekend of games, I may only limit them to a 70% maximum heart rate. I can also use this in reverse too. Say I’m training a team of athletes how all have different positions and all have different roles in a game. I can measure their heart rate in a game and then find out where they are averaging for a session. I can then replicate that in the gym by making that athlete work at the percentage I want them to for a period of time to replicate game play and make their ‘game-related fitness’ increase. You’ll soon find out if an athlete is unfit or not working hard enough from this method too by looking at their heart after a game (or during) and how well they have executed their role in the game.
However, as good as heart rate is, its not always the best to measure. For cases where clients are on medication such as beta-blockers, heart rate is thrown out the window and I will use other ways of measuring their exertion in exercise.
Hope you found this blog interesting and informative, if you have any questions or comments in regards to heart rate whilst training you can email me.
Cheers,
Mitch.