Your maximum heart rate is pretty much the fastest rate at which your heart can beat.

An interesting query I received simply read: “How do I know if I’m training hard enough?” To this simple query, I will attempt to provide an equally simple and straightforward reply.

You might go out walking or jogging or maybe have a piece of home-use fitness equipment like an airwalker or light treadmill. Maybe you’re putting the time in but you’re not quite sure if you’re getting your just returns.

Perhaps someone has told you that another style of training will serve you better and now you’re just confused. This happens a lot, but don’t worry, there is a relatively easy system for gauging intensity of effort.

Whatever style of training you choose, you can leverage the principle of overload to bring you more bang for your buck. To lose weight and get fitter, we need to overload the cardiorespiratory system, or in other words, the heart and lungs. The style of training you choose will not be as important as the intensity you exploit.

As you read this, you are probably relatively relaxed, sitting down, maybe even enjoying Sunday tea or treats.

If you’re like most people, your heart is probably beating right now at a rate of about 75 beats per minute. This is known as resting heart rate. It is the work rate of your heart beats, sufficient to facilitate basic life-sustaining functions.

To check your heart rate, place your index and middle fingers on your Adam’s apple at the centre of your neck and slide them to the side of it and into your neck.

Here, you should be able to feel your pulse. If you can’t, then try placing the same fingers at the base of your opposing thumb. Count the beats you feel over the course of exactly 15 seconds and multiply that figure by four. This is your resting heart rate in beats per minute.

Now if you get and move around, your muscles will require more fuel and oxygen to work. Fuel and oxygen are transported around the system by the blood, and the blood itself is pumped around by the heart, so the physiological response to this increased activity will be an increase in heart rate. Your heart will have to beat more often to supply the working muscles with the fuel and oxygen they need, so the more vigorously you move, the more your heart rate will speed up.

This fact gives us quite a reliable method for measuring intensity of effort during training. If you can measure your heart rate in beats per minute, you can always monitor how hard you are working each time you train, thus optimising your investment of time.

We normally measure heart rate intensity as a percentage or, to be more precise, percentage of maximum heart rate. Your maximum heart rate is pretty much the fastest rate at which your heart can beat.

If you jumped on a treadmill right now and gradually increased the speed and incline to a point where you absolutely couldn’t take it anymore, we could measure your heart rate at the precise moment you had to stop and rest, plus on about 10 beats per minute to whatever reading that was, and come up with a pretty reliable estimate of your maximum heart rate.

Your maximum heart rate at birth was approximately 220 beats per minute. This decreases by one beat per minute, per year

Any activity we perform therefore, whether it’s running, cycling, or even jumping up and down on the spot, can be measured off a set of guidelines that stipulate minimum heart rates required to actually achieve some sort of benefits from our workout.

But before we get to that, don’t worry, you don’t need to torture yourself on a treadmill to establish your maximum heart rate. We can estimate it with a simple formula.

The most basic formula assumes that your maximum heart rate at birth was approximately 220 beats per minute. It also assumes that maximum heart rate decreases by one beat per minute, per year. So if you subtract your age from the number 220, then you should get a rough estimation of your maximum heart rate.

If you’re 20 years old, your maximum heart rate will be 200, if you’re 30, 190, and so on. This is only a theory and a rough guide, but it’s a starting point and gives us some real numbers to work on.

Now we can go back to our original question: how do we know if we’re working hard enough? To quantify our answer with a real-world figure, we know we’re working hard enough to get benefit from our sessions if our heart rate is 70 per cent of the maximum.

If you’re 20 years old, this will be exactly 140 beats per minute. If you’re 30, 133, and so on. To work out your own ‘70 per cent’ right now, subtract your age from 220, and multiply your result by 0.7.

On your next walk, check your heart rate by counting off your heart beats over a 15-second period and repeat periodically for continual monitoring against your own 70 per cent.

If you’re 30 years old, for example, then you know you should be working hard enough to cause your heart to beat at least 133 times per minute.

Any less than that, you know you have to push a little harder. If you’re walking, then speed up. If you’re already walking fast, try breaking into a light jog.

By monitoring activity in this way, you can push or ease up whenever required.

matthew.muscat.inglott@mcast.edu.mt