Your heart beats faster when you’re working hardthen It’s a good way to know if you’re exercising enough…right? Well not exactly. Your heart rate is just a good indicator of effort in certain types of exercise. And it can even throw you off course if the numbers are miscalibrated.
Don’t rely on heart rate tracking to burn calories
If your fitness tracker tells you that you’ve burned a certain number of calories in a workout, you’re basing that number on your heart rate (plus some personal details, like how big you are).
Is mainly It’s true that the higher your heart rate when doing cardiovascular exercise, such as running, the more calories you’ll burn during that exercise. But your watch can’t tell when your heart rate is high for another reason (you’re nervous or overheating, for example) in addition to their level of effort.
This measure is also notoriously inaccurate for some activities. Running and biking are pretty easy. since you’re doing the same movement over and over again, and since the way your legs move the pedals is probably not that unlike any cyclist the app’s creators used to calibrate their formulas. But if you’re doing a barbell workout, or cross fit, or you’re enjoying a day on the ski slopes, how is the watch supposed to know exactly what you’re doing and how hard it is? spoiler: meit doesn’t
Adding to the confusion is the fact that our calorie burn during exercise doesn’t tell us much about our total burning calories, which is what really matters to us. our bodies are good for conserving energy in daily life when we are burning a lot of calories during exercise. So you might burn 500 calories in a run only to be so tired afterward that you burn 400 fewer calories for the rest of the day.
Bottom line, if you care how many calories you’re burning, you shouldn’t worry so much. about what a heart rate tracker tells you. A better method is to simply adjust the number of calories you eat depending on whether the scale goes up or down.
Don’t worry about your heart rate while doing strength training.
If you do a lot of cardio, you may be used to thinking of your heart rate as a good measure of intensity. The higher your heart rate during training, the harder you’ll be working. But that’s not true for strength training.
Think about this: IIf you have a light weight and you lift it over and over again, you will get your heart rate up and keep it up. For example, here is the heart rate graph of me doing a series of kettlebell cleans and pulls for ten minutes straight:
That’s a tough workout and it’sI’ll build some strength, but it’s nothing compared to one of my normal weightlifting workouts. where I did barbell cleans and pulls, clean pulls (a sort of explosive deadlift), pull recoveries, and some basic floor exercises for a total of over an hour. Most of these lifts were short efforts that were heavy enough to make me gasp afterward. Those are the peaks on the graph. But then I’d sit down for a few minutes to recover, and that’s where you see my heart rate drop again.
From the heart rate graphs, we can see that the 10-minute set was a consistent, relatively high-effort workout from a cardiovascular perspective. I couldn’t have gone much faster or heavier, as my cardiovascular system couldn’t get enough blood and oxygen to my muscles to withstand much greater exertion. From the point of view of my lungs, this is a lot like going for a run.
On the other hand, the barbell training wasn’t very taxing on my heart and lungs, and it’s not doing much to build my cardiovascular endurance. If you were to only judge these workouts by their heart rate graphs, barbell training would seem pointless.
But the cardiovascular benefit is it’s not the reason we strength train. Strength training challenges our muscles to get stronger. Heart rate does not reflect how heavy or difficult the lift really is. Just by looking at the chart, I can’t tell which set was 90 pounds and which was 100 pounds; I have to look at my training diary to see that. And if I were to compare this workout to one I did a few years ago when I was less strong, it would probably look similar even if the weights had been much lighter.
It is important to understand this distinction, because if you only judge your strength workouts by your heart rate, you’ll be tempted to increase your average heart rate by doing more reps with a lighter weight, basically turning it into cardio. (That ten-minute kettlebell workout I used as an example? It’s really a happy medium between cardio and strength, providing a hard workout for my heart and lungs and only a medium one for my muscles.) If you want to become strong, you have to lift heavy thingswhich necessarily means taking time to rest—and let your heart rate drop—between sets.
Use heart rate to measure cardio intensity, with caveats
Now we come to what the heart rate does it Get it Right, which measures the intensity of cardiovascular exercises like running and cycling.
So how do you convert that beat count into a measure of intensity? The easiest way is to use an app that converts your heart rate into a set of heart rate zones. In a five zone system, if you go for a LISS (Low Intensity Steady State) run, you should expect your heart rate to be in Zone 2 most of the time.
These zones are useful in training because each zone has a slightly different training effect. Zone 2 training is great for building aerobic capacity without overly fatiguing you. Zones 3 and 4 teach your body to work a little harder, but it’s hard to do as much work in these zones. So if you’re heading out for a long run, you may want to wear a heart rate monitor to ensure you stay in Zone 2 to get the benefits you’re after; orOn another day, you can do a shorter workout that walks the line between Zone 4 and Zone 5 to train your body to handle hard efforts.
you do not need However, measure your heart rate to be able to train at these levels of effort. Before smartwatches and heart rate monitors were commonplace, trainers would tell runners to do an “easy run” and recreational runners would try to keep their “conversational” pace, literally the level of effort at which you breathe easily enough that you can hold it. a conversation. Meanwhile, if you’re doing high-intensity intervals, you don’t need a heart rate monitor to tell you when you’re sprinting. YYou can feel it.
How to train with heart rate, if you still want
If you’ve just started biking or running or other steady cardio activity, you can train by effort level instead of relying on heart rate. And if you want to pay attention to your heart rate, I encourage you to simply look at what heart rate you see at each subjective exertion level:
- What number do you see when you walk or warm up and still don’t really push yourself?
- What number do you see when you’re exercising at a pace where you could still easily carry on a conversation?
- What number do you see when you’re working at a level of effort that’s hard to maintain, but could be done for half an hour, or even longer if Really I had to?
- What number do you see when you go all out? (Probably no numbers at all, because you’re too exhausted and distracted to look at your watch, but you can check later.)
Those numbers respond approximately to Zsome 1, 2, 4 and 5, with Zone 3 is somewhere between that easy pace and that strenuous pace but I can hold on.
The reason why I ask you to warning and not calculate is that when you are new to exercise, your calculations will probably be wrong. The standard description of heart rate zones is a percentage of your maximum heart rate, bBut if you’ve never put in a full, vomit-worthy effort on race day, you have no idea what your max really is.
There are several formulas to find its maximum; the simplest is to subtract your age from 220, so a 30 year old would have a maximum heart rate of 190. The problem with that approach is that is a unique formula that suits almost anyone.
Here is an example: I am 41 years old and my real max heart rate is somewhere north of 205. If I go by the formula, a heart rate of 152 would fit into Zone 4, when in fact I know that’s a good easy Zone 2 pace for me. When I did that ten-minute set of kettlebells, I spent half of it at a heart rate above what the formula thinks is physically possible for me. And then some people have maximum heart rates that are lower than the formula would predict, and they have the opposite problem. They’ll be out of breath, panting, legs on fire and their watch will say they’re in Zone 3. That’s not right either. Training with poorly calibrated zones can leave you exhausted or undertrained.
Your heart rate will also change with your body position, such as the way you I’ve noticed that I can’t get my heart rate as high when I’m cycling as I can when I’m running. (Swimming, where your body is horizontal, tends to have even lower numbers.)
So don’t worry about your exact heart rate at first. Higher means your cardiovascular system is working harder; lower means you are in an easier effort. Control how your exertion feels at a given heart rate and adjust your “max” in your app settings to whatever number the zones make sense for. And remember that heart rate is just a tool to help you dial in your training. Your body knows how hard it is working whether you are wearing a smartwatch or not.
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