Cardiovasvular fitness, keeping the heart healthy

In general, the higher your resting heart rate, the less physically fit you are, and the lower your heart rate, the more physically fit you are. Some fit athletes will resting heart rates in the 40s. One way to determine if your fitness workout is effective is to check your resting heart rate over a few months. See if it has increased, decreased, or remained the same. If your workouts are effective, your resting heart rate will slowly decrease, or at least remain constant. Your body has many ways of telling you when enough is enough, and if your resting heart rate has increased, you should start listening to your body by decreasing your workout frequency or intensity.

Resting heart rate

The resting heart rate is a person's heart rate at rest in beats per minute (bpm). The best time to find out your resting heart rate is in the morning, after a good night's sleep, and before you get out of bed.

The heart beats about 60 to 80 times a minute when we're at rest. Resting heart rate usually rises with age, and it's generally lower in physically fit people. Resting heart rate is used to determine one's training target heart rate. Athletes sometimes measure their resting heart rate as one way to find out if they're over-trained. The heart rate adapts to changes in the body's need for oxygen, such as during exercise or sleep.

EXERCISE AND HEART DISEASE

The American Heart Association has now added " lack of exercise" to the list of major risk factors for heart disease. The other risk factors are smoking, high blood pressure, and high blood cholesterol. Diet alone cannot therefore maintain optimal health.

Exercise not only helps fight heart disease. Including exercise in your daily routine reduces the risk of high blood pressure, osteoporosis, breast and colon cancer, depression, anxiety and stress. Ideally, you should exercise three to five times a week for 20-50 minutes within your target heart rate. However, your health can benefit simply by accumulating 30 minutes of moderate activity per day, such as stair climbing, walking to work, or gardening.

Also, it is not just aerobic exercise such as walking, cycling, jogging and swimming that is recommended. Resistance training, or weight lifting, is an important component of a good fitness program because it increases your strength, leads to decreased body fat and helps improve blood cholesterol levels.

Benefits of Regular Exercise

• Improves heart and lungs
• Decreases resting blood pressure
• Decreases body fat
• Decreases total and LDL cholesterol ("bad cholesterol")
• Raises HDL cholesterol ("good cholesterol")
• Increases energy level
• Increases tolerance to stress and depression
• Controls or prevents the development of diabetes
• Decreases risk of orthopedic injury

Guidelines for Safe Exercise

• Frequency - 3-5 times a week
• Duration - 20-60 minutes
• Intensity (how hard) - within your target heart rate

Calculating Your Target Heart Rate or Exercising Heart Rate

1. Male 220 - age = MHR in beats per minute

   What is a Exercise Heart Rate Zone? This is approximately where your heart rate should be when performing aerobic exercise, such as fat burning, especially if you are unfit or a beginner to exercising.

   
   Female 226 - age = MHR in beats per minute
2. MHR x 0.6 = _____ (this is the low end of your target HR)
3. MHR x 0.8 = _____ (this is the upper end of your target HR)

Example:

If you are a 40 year old male, your MHR is 220 - 40 = 180.
180 x 0.6 = 108
180 x 0.8 = 144
Therefore, your Target Heart Rate is between 108 and 144 beats per minute.

It is important to calculate your MHR as it is used when calculating intensity of effort. i.e 65% of MHR for 20 minutes. You should note that your current fitness level does have an impact on your actual MHR. People new to exercising should avoid trying to reach their theoretical MHR. The only accurate (and safe) method of measuring MHR is through a clinical graduated exercise test.

Recovery heart rate

This is the heart rate that our body will decrease to after an exercise session. For example, you exercise for a 30 minutes at 155. Two minutes after you stop exercising, your heart rate decreases to 95. The 95 would be your recovery heart rate. It is used to evaluate your fitness level after exercise. It is good to set a two minute time frame and see how many beats you recover in that time frame. Compare this recover heart rate between exercise sessions.

The heart rate should be below 120 after 2 to 5 minutes after exercise stops depending on fitness level. If the heart rate is higher, insufficient cool-down or low fitness level may be the cause. Slow heart rate recovery can also be due to illness or exercising too vigourously. If this is the case, reduce the intensity of the exercise thereby adjusting the heart rate. Final heart rate check at the end of the aerobic workout should be below 100 bpm.

Heart rate reserve

The “Heart Rate Reserve” is the difference between your Maximum Heart Rate and your Resting Heart Rate. If your maximum heart rate is 196 bpm (beats per minute) and your resting heart rate 63 bpm, your heart rate reserve is 196 bpm - 63 bpm = 133 bpm.

The greater the difference, the larger your heart rate reserve and the greater your range of potential training heart rate intensities.