Rest your heart...

If you are anything like me and do a bit of reading about training you will see that there are three heart rates which figure heavily in most literature.

• Resting Heart Rate
• Training Heart Rate
• Maximum Heart Rate

Your resting heart rate is the base rate for your heart to pump blood around your body, the lower the rate, the more efficient your heart is at getting blood where it needs to be.

Maximum Heart Rate isn't what you think; it does not stand for the rate just below that which would make your heart explode. Instead it means the maximum rate during exertion. To measure it normally takes a lot of equipment but can be emulated by doing something like cycling for 10-15 minutes and increase the pace every minute for five minutes, at the end of it, sprint as fast as you can. Now measure your heart rate for a FULL 60 seconds, no cheating though because your heart will be slowing down gradually over these 15 seconds (unless you are having a heart attack in which case its probably going to resemble a 5-4 beat in a Jazz ensemble - I don't even know if that's possible or not but it gets the point across).

The Training Heart Rate is the most important for me, the resting heart rate will come down through training on its own, my maximum should stay level or fall too. The training heart rate is the rate at which your body is most able to provide oxygen to the muscles. Get the rate too high and your body is taking in more oxygen than it needs, get the rate too low and your body will turn all that aerobic exercise into anaerobic and start to tire out your muscles a lot faster. Getting the rate to between 50% and 85% of your maximum heart rate (see there was a reason for torturing you) will ensure you are able to work the muscles without unecessarily depriving them of the oxygen they need.

I am amazed at how little exercise it took to drop my heart rate from 80BPM to 60BPM at rest. I could imagine it being a lot lower if I trained more consistently. Maybe I should start taking a note of it.