The Importance of Knowing Your Heart Rate For Exercise

The most effective way to measure how hard you can exercise and also when you should lighten up is based on knowing various aspects of your individual heart rate patterns. If you want to exercise effectively and prevent injury, you need to understand certain basic terms and concepts surrounding how your heart beat reacts to stress.

To design and implement any sort of serious exercise program it is essential to understand your own heart rate, maximum heart rate, anaerobic thresholds and your resting heart rate.

Your heart rate, as might be obvious, is the speed at which your heart is pumping. When your muscles require more blood, your heart pumps faster, when you are at rest, your heart pumps slower. However, a higher heart rate doesn't always mean you are doing good things to your body. Your heart also pumps faster when it is stressed, sick, or working very inefficiently.



While maximum heart rate appears to be more related to age than fitness, your resting heart rate shows a direct correlation to your improved health and fitness. It is the speed at which your heart beats when there are no other demands made of it. If you are healthy and fit, your heart will be able to move more blood with less effort, and so will have a lower resting heart rate.

Therefore, it is important to measure at the beginning of a program what your current resting heart rate is, which lets you know how fit you are now, and gives you a basis to see if you are improving later.

It is very simple to measure your resting heart rate. All you need is a clock that counts seconds. The best time to take your resting heart rate is as soon as you wake up, before you have gotten out of bed. However, it can also be taken after any extended period of lying down with no movement, such as watching TV.

Your pulse can be easily found in two places, but the strongest pulse is in your carotid artery, on either side of your throat. Place your index finger and middle finger on the pulse point, but try not to push too hard as you can cut off the flow to your brain and make yourself pass out.

Once you have found the pulse and can count it, time yourself for ten seconds and count the number of beats, starting at 'zero'. Multiple this number by 10 and you have the beats per minutes. You can also use other divisions of 60 such as 10 seconds and multiple by 6, or 30 and times by 2 etc.

It is suggested that: 60 or below beats per minute: = a fit athlete. 60- 80 bpm = average. 81-100 bpm = is high, but ok. 101 bpm = not so good, think about seeing your doctor.

In order to get the most reliable number, you should consider trying to take it every morning for about a week. This will average out any miscounting or unusually high rates from nightmares etc.

Further, if you are serious about a new exercise program, particularly if you are an athlete, it is highly recommended that you take your resting heart rate every single morning. The major reason for this is that your resting heart rate will generally go up about 10 bpm if your body is starting to fight an illness, and is a good indicator that you should cut down on your training until it returns to normal. This is an excellent way to avoid over-training.