Follow your heart. Touching advice but sadly, rarely particularly helpful. How do we know exactly what our heart is telling us? And even if we did, can we trust it?
The heart rate declines with fitness because the heart becomes more efficient- Matthew Muscat Inglott
I cannot say I vouch for the reliability of this popular decision-making process, as I have certainly gotten myself into enough pickles this way.
When we get into trouble by following our hearts, logically speaking, the chances of following our hearts back out of it again are pretty slim.
Follow your heart? Employing the much more dependable faculty of reason is the far more sensible choice. But what if we could listen to our hearts through a more scientific veil?
Fortunately, there happens to be at least one context in which we can: when we exercise.
What useful information could our hearts possibly provide us during physical activity?
Let’s see what happens the moment we start moving in a little more detail.
To do almost anything physical, movement is generated by the activity of muscles. When muscles contract, they employ the various skeletal leverages of the body to produce whichever actions we desire.
Muscles require fuel and oxygen for that, and also generate waste products in the process. Fuel, oxygen and waste products must therefore be transported to and from the muscles on a constant basis to support continuous activity, so this is where the heart comes in.
Blood is the great transport system of the body. It is pumped around by the contractions (beats) of the heart. When the heart beats, it squeezes blood through the arteries and veins that service all our muscles.
Increase your muscular activity therefore, and the heart is going to have to pump more blood, faster. This phenomenon is entirely measurable and well worth following.
The basic rate of heart activity is known simply as ‘heart rate’, and is measured in beats per minute (BPM).
Here’s a little test you can perform right now. Ensure you are relaxed and place two fingers on your Adam’s apple or roughly the bony centre of your throat.
Now gently slide these two fingers round the bone and straight into your neck. Here, at the carotid pulse, you should feel the magical rhythm of your heart beating.
Look at a clock and count the beats you feel within exactly 15 seconds. Now multiply this number by four and you will have your heart rate at rest in BPM. If you calculated anywhere between 65 and 85, fret not, for you are entirely normal.
A score over 85 might suggest you should consider a more active lifestyle and strive to improve your health and wellbeing. If you are physically active and scored under 65, then rest assured you are in good cardiac health.
If you are extremely active and scored lower than 50, then consider yourself supremely fit.
The best time to test your resting heart rate is first thing in the morning, so if you need to double check your finding, repeat the test tomorrow morning as soon as you wake up.
The athlete sporting the lowest resting heart rate ever recorded was a top cyclist registering only 28 BPM.
The heart rate declines with fitness because the heart becomes more efficient. As we get fitter, it grows and beats more forcefully, able to store and pump more blood with every beat.
This ultimately means more fuel and oxygen is delivered to the muscles in need, resulting in a more productive output, just like state-of-the-art machinery in a production factory churning out a higher quantity of goods.
So let’s see exactly how following our hearts can help us get anywhere near this fit.
Repeat the pulse test at regular intervals throughout your workout, use the sensors on your gym’s cardiovascular machines, or better still, get hold of a dedicated heart rate monitor.
These are very useful in or out of the gym, or if you perform alternative methods of training like circuit training or outdoor activities. They strap around the chest and communicate with an associated wrist watch, keeping you constantly updated on your heart rate reading in variety of pre-programmable ways.
Whichever method you choose, calculate your average heart rate throughout the course of your entire workout to see how you stack up against the following figures:
For an effective workout, your heart rate should average at least 140 BPM if you are in your 20s, 133 BPM if you are in your 30s, 126 BPM if you are in your 40s, 119 BPM if you are in your 50s, or 112 BPM if you are over 60.
Anything lower and you might consider ratcheting up your intensity a notch or two.
If you are a beginner, then try to hit these targets but avoid hovering much higher than 15 BPM above them as this would represent unnecessary strain for the time being.
The fitter you are, the higher the heart rate you will be able to tolerate, and the higher your output will also be.
For extreme fitness buffs, follow your heart even closer and refine our benchmarks with the following variation of the Karvonen method.
First calculate your resting heart rate. Now subtract your age from 220. Also subtract your resting heart rate; we will call this the heart rate ‘reserve’.
Calculate 70 per cent of the reserve, and add your resting heart rate back on for a more accurate target heart rate.
info@noble-gym.com