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Hobby and recreational athletes all have one goal when doing sport: To raise their fitness level and make progress in sport. Many athletes use devices that measure their heart rate. In addition to heart rate monitors in gyms, fitness watches and heart rate belts have become indispensable. However, the majority of athletes do not know exactly what they can learn from the measured heart rate values and thus organise their training effectively. That's why we want to give you a few tips and tricks in this article to help you make your training a little more effective. In particular, we want to introduce you to training with heart rate monitoring.
First of all, what is the pulse rate anyway? The pulse describes how often your heart pumps your blood into your body in one minute to ensure that it is adequately supplied. There are different types of pulse. The most common are the resting and maximum pulse rates. We speak of a resting pulse rate when the body is at rest. As a rule, the resting pulse rate of a healthy adult is around 60 to 80 beats per minute. The maximum heart rate is the maximum possible heart rate of your body. There is a rough formula for calculating the maximum heart rate, which will be explained later in this article. You can remember this: The greater the effort for you, the higher your heart rate. As each person has to be considered individually, heart rate values vary from person to person. You can therefore use your heart rate to check how hard your body is exerting itself and thus optimise and target your training.
In today's world, heart rate is at the centre of training design. This means that when planning your training, there are a number of factors to consider that influence how high your heart rate is. Among other things, you need to make sure that you manage your exertion correctly and choose the right intensity. By skilfully stimulating your body, you can make progress in your training. However, you should make sure that you don't overstimulate your body so that you don't end up overtraining. This could lead to you getting into a dangerous heart rate range, which in the worst case could lead to permanent heart damage.
With the help of heart rate measurement, however, you can start here and check how good your current fitness level is and organise your training accordingly. To explain more precisely how fit you are, imagine two different people travelling the same distance at the same resistance level on a rowing ergometer. One of the two people measures a value of, for example, 125 beats per minute with the heart rate monitor. The other person measures a value of 165 beats per minute. From this you 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 the fitness level, the age of the person and their state of health should also be taken into account. These factors also influence the heart rate. Roughly speaking, the lower the heart rate, the less strenuous and the less intense the stimulus for the person concerned.
In order not to overdo your training, you should determine your maximum heart rate so that you can assess the heart rate range in which you should train. The best way to determine your maximum heart rate accurately is to visit a performance diagnostics centre. As this involves a lot of cost and effort, you can also simply use an approximate rule of thumb to work out that your maximum heart rate should be around 220 minus your age.
Example: 30-year-old man, 220 - 30 = 190 The maximum heart rate should be approximately 190. As the heart rate varies from person to person, you should bear in mind that larger deviations may occur.
By specifying your maximum heart rate, you can now control your training correctly and organise it effectively. Depending on your sporting goals, you can choose a heart rate range that suits you. There are different training zones, which have different stimulus intensities and therefore different effects on your body. This is illustrated in the following table.
Table 1: The table shows five different training zones with a corresponding heart rate range and the corresponding effect on the body
If you want to promote your health while exercising, you can train in the less strenuous area of the health zone. This is where your body gains energy by metabolising oxygen. You stabilise your cardiovascular system here and can train in this zone if you want to regenerate your body.
If your goal in exercising is to metabolise fat reserves, you are best off in this zone. Please note that training in the active metabolism is not enough to lose weight. To achieve this goal, you should make sure that you optimise your diet alongside your sport.
If you are a trained athlete and want to increase your endurance and general athletic performance, you can train best in the aerobic or anaerobic zone. The training load is perceived as more strenuous in the anaerobic zone. Roughly speaking, aerobic means generating energy with the help of oxygen. Anaerobic is the exact opposite: energy production without the help of oxygen. This is why the body finds it harder to train in the anaerobic zone. These two zones are the best areas for acquiring effective adaptations to the training stimuli.
However, the right training pulse is not enough to make progress in training. Another important factor that influences the training result is the correct periodisation of the training sessions. Too much training can also quickly lead to the training effect not being what you expect it to be. Our tip here is to take one or two days off between sessions before you expose your body to another stimulus. This will give your body enough time to regenerate and replenish its energy resources. If you don't want your training to stagnate, it helps to increase your training loads over the course of your training to prevent the effectiveness of the training stimulus from diminishing. In addition to the principles just mentioned, nutrition is also an important factor, although this is beyond the scope of this article.
Disclaimer:
These are just tips and tricks and are no substitute for professional training advice. For professional training advice, you should carry out performance diagnostics with an appropriate doctor.
Have fun with your training!
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