|
Amateur and recreational athletes all have one goal when exercising: to raise their fitness level and make progress in sports. Many athletes use devices that measure heart rate. In addition to pulse measurements on devices in fitness studios, fitness watches and heart rate belts are now indispensable. However, a large proportion of athletes do not know exactly what insights can be gained from the measured heart rate values and how to effectively design their training. That’s why in this article we want to give you a few tips and tricks with which you can make your training a little more effective. In particular, we want to bring you a little closer to training with pulse control.
First of all, what exactly is a pulse? Your pulse describes how many times your heart pumps blood into your body per minute to ensure it’s adequately supplied. There are different types of pulses. The most commonly discussed are resting and maximum heart rates. A resting heart rate refers to your heart rate when your body is at rest. Typically, a healthy adult’s resting heart rate is around 60 to 80 beats per minute. Your maximum heart rate is the highest possible heart rate your body can achieve. There’s a rough formula for calculating your maximum heart rate, which will be explained later in this article. A good rule of thumb is: the higher your exertion, the higher your heart rate. Since everyone is an individual, heart rate values vary from person to person. With the help of your heart rate, you can monitor how hard your body is working, allowing you to optimize and tailor your training effectively.
In today’s world, heart rate is central to designing a workout. This means that when planning your training, you need to consider several factors that influence your heart rate. Among other things, it’s important to properly manage your exertion and choose the right intensity. By skillfully challenging your body, you can make progress in your training. However, you should be careful not to over-challenge your body to avoid overtraining. This could lead to you putting yourself in a dangerous heart rate zone, which in the worst case could lead to permanent heart damage.
However, by measuring your heart rate, you can assess your current fitness level and adjust your training accordingly. To explain more precisely how fit you are, imagine two different people covering the same distance with the same resistance level on a rowing machine. One person measures a heart rate of, for example, 125 beats per minute with a heart rate monitor. The other person measures a heart rate of 165 beats per minute. From this, we can conclude that the person with the lower heart rate is better trained than the person with the higher heart rate. However, in addition to fitness level, the age and health status of the individuals should also be considered. These factors also influence heart rate. Roughly speaking: the lower the heart rate, the less strenuous and less intense the stimulus for the person concerned.
In order not to overexert yourself during training, you should determine the maximum pulse for you so that you can estimate in which pulse range you should train. For an exact determination of the maximum pulse, a visit to a performance diagnostics center would be most useful. Since this involves a lot of costs and effort, you can also simply remember with an approximate rule of thumb that the maximum pulse should be approximately 220 minus age.
Example: 30-year-old man, 220 – 30 = 190. The maximum heart rate should be approximately 190. Since heart rate is individual for each person, you should note that larger deviations may occur.
With your maximum heart rate, you can now properly control and effectively design your training. Depending on your fitness goals, you can choose a heart rate zone that suits you. There are different training zones, which have varying stimulus intensities and consequently different effects on your body. This is illustrated in the following table.
Table 1: The table shows five different training zones with a corresponding pulse range and the associated effect on the body
If you want to promote your health through exercise, you can train in the less strenuous health zone. Here, your body gains energy by metabolizing oxygen. Here you stabilize your cardiovascular system and can train in this zone if you want to regenerate your body.
If your goal in exercising is to metabolize fat reserves, this zone is ideal for you. It’s important to note that training in the active metabolism zone alone is not enough for weight loss. To achieve this goal, you should ensure you optimize your diet in addition to exercise.
If you are a trained athlete and want to increase your endurance and overall athletic performance, you can best train in the aerobic or anaerobic zone. The training load in the anaerobic zone is perceived as more strenuous. Aerobic roughly means energy production with the help of oxygen. Anaerobic is the exact opposite: energy production without the help of oxygen. That’s why it’s harder for the body to train in the anaerobic zone. These two zones are the best areas to acquire effective adaptations to training stimuli.
However, the correct training heart rate alone is not enough to make progress in training. Another important factor influencing training results is the proper periodization of training sessions. Too much training can quickly lead to the training effect not delivering what you hoped for. Our tip here is to take one to two days of rest between sessions before exposing your body to a new stimulus. This gives your body enough time to regenerate and replenish its energy resources. If you don’t want to stagnate in training, it helps to gradually increase your training loads over time to avoid a decrease in the effectiveness of the training stimulus. In addition to the principles just mentioned, nutrition is also an important factor, which, however, goes beyond the scope of this article.
Disclaimer:
These are just tips and tricks and do not replace professional training advice. For professional training advice, you should undergo performance diagnostics with a suitable doctor.
Have fun training!
|
|
You are currently viewing a placeholder content from Vimeo. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationYou are currently viewing a placeholder content from YouTube. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationYou need to load content from reCAPTCHA to submit the form. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationYou are currently viewing a placeholder content from Facebook. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationYou are currently viewing a placeholder content from TrustIndex. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationYou are currently viewing a placeholder content from Typeform. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationYou are currently viewing a placeholder content from Google Maps. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More Information
