You have your running shoes on, your Fitbit is charged, but now what?
When you exercise, your heart and breathing rates increase, delivering greater quantities of oxygen from the lungs to the blood, then to exercising muscles.
Determining an optimal heart rate for exercise depends on your exercise goal, age, and current fitness level.
Heart rate and exercise intensity share a direct, linear relationship: the more intense the exercise, the higher the heart rate.
When you exercise at the highest possible intensity, your heart will reach maximal heart rate (HRmax), the fastest rate it is capable of beating.
Exercise Makes Hearts More Efficient
Typical resting heart rate can vary quite substantially between people and even within an individual. Around 60 to 80 beats per minute (BPM) for adults is common.Improving your aerobic fitness reduces your resting heart rate, as the heart becomes more efficient with each beat. An athlete’s resting heart rate, for instance, is typically around 40 BPM.
Calculating Maximal Heart Rate
There is substantial variation in HRmax. The only true method of determining HRmax is to conduct a maximal exercise test. But HRmax can be estimated using formulas based on age.HRMax = 208 – (0.7 x age)
This means a 45-year-old would have a predicted HRmax of 177 BPM.
When assessing heart rate, it’s also important to take into account the effects of emotions such as excitement or fear, stimulants like caffeine, and circulating hormones like adrenaline, all of which can increase heart rate.
Is exercising at maximal heart rates unsafe?
In short, the answer is no. For most adults, the risk of not doing enough exercise is far greater than that of doing excessive endurance exercise.
What Happens When We Go ‘All Out’
Muscle cells require two key ingredients to function: fuel (glucose) and oxygen.Muscles rely heavily on blood vessels to deliver the necessary nutrients and oxygen around the body, and also to remove by-products such as carbon dioxide.
The more muscles used in exercise, the more blood is distributed toward the active tissues.
When the intensity of the exercise is particularly high, the muscles start to produce another by-product called lactate.
Cells also can use lactate as a fuel although if production rate exceeds metabolism, lactate starts to accumulate and can interfere with cellular function.
The point at which this by-product starts to accumulate is termed the “lactate threshold”.
Best Exercise for Heart Rate?
While interval-style exercise training is a popular choice for people who are time-poor, the intermittent nature of the exercise means heart rate will fluctuate, providing not much more benefit than traditional steady-state exercise.From a scientific perspective, athletes typically use heart-rate ranges to train at specific intensities during aerobic exercises, like cycling or long-distance running.
Exercising at certain intensities are known to elicit adaptive responses from the body, for example, exercising at or below the lactate threshold.
These intensities are called training zones and are expressed relative to HRmax. For instance, a light aerobic training session would be prescribed below 75 percent HRmax, while training at threshold (around 95 percent HRmax) will induce physiological change.
Overall, some exercise is better than no exercise for your cardiovascular health. Accumulating 150 minutes of exercise per week is the minimum requirement for health benefit. Exercising at your maximal heart rate is not necessary to achieve these benefits. Athletes can use training zones, relative to HRmax, to achieve optimal adaptation and enhance endurance performance.