What Is Target Heart Zone?

Monitoring your heart rate during exercising

Monitoring your heart rate while working out can help you keep your fitness zone. WHOOP can help you keep track of your heart rate, and you can learn how to target heart rate zones. Your target heart rate zone is how fast your heart should beating.

Training based on your heart rate zone helps you identify how hard you want to push yourself so you can get the maximum payoff out of every workout. A wrist-worn heart rate monitor like WHOOP can be used to determine your personal max heart rate, since each of us has a different maximum heart rate. You can moderate your training days if you take in factors like heat and humidity.

Lower End of Your Target Heart Rate Zone

The lower end of your target heart rate zone is the part of your maximum heart rate that is not in high-intensity aerobic exercise. If you are 30 years old and have a maximum heart rate of 190, your lower limit is 95 beats per minute. The upper part of the range is 70 percent.

The upper end of your range is 133 beats per minute if your maximum heart rate is 190. You can use a heart rate monitor pulse ox to check your heart rate. To take your pulse, place your middle and index fingers on your opposite wrist.

Time 30 seconds on a watch and count the number of beats. Then you can use the number by two to get your heart rate. It's not always convenient to take your pulse while exercising.

You can use your perceived exertion in the talk test. You should be able to talk but not sing during moderate-intensity aerobic exercise. If you can sing but have trouble talking then you're doing a low-intensity exercise.

A VO2 max lab test for heart rate zones

An athlete may be tired, have a restless night or have a cold, all of which can affect the session. It will more likely cause harm than good if you focus on maintaining a certain speed or power. The most precise way to determine heart rate zones is to take a VO2 max lab test.

The test measures the speed of oxygen and lactate being taken during the exercise. The aerobic and anaerobic thresholds are established to be key reference points in determining heart rate training zones. High intensity training is more taxing on the body and should be avoided.

The athlete can be put into a plateau if too much progress is not made quickly. It does not provide enough intensity to make a difference in speed or power, but it is not difficult to recover from. Athletes feel tired all the time, but they don't necessarily get faster.

How fast can you measure your heart rate?

You have to either lose fat or improve endurance to do cardiovascular exercise. The best zone for fat loss is a little complicated. One way to measure your pulse is to stop moving, place your index and middle fingers on the inside of your wrist or windpipe, and count how many beats you detect in 10 seconds.

If you want to estimate your current heart rate, take that number and add it to 6. A lot of people want to know what a good maximum heart rate is. Your fitness history is one of the factors that play into this.

The Heart Rate of a Healthy Body

The fat-burning heart rate is a number of times your heart should beat a minute during exercise to ensure that you burn enough calories and keep your ticker in good shape. The ideal heart rate for weight loss is between 50 and 85 percent of MHR. According to the Johns Hopkins Medicine, working harder with a higher percentage burns more calories.

It doesn't matter if your body burns calories from fat or Carbohydrates during exercise. You burn calories, period. The Mayo Clinic says that you will burn more calories when you exercise at a higher heart rate.

I like to use anything within 60 to 85 percent max heart rate for as long as you can mix things up. Richards says that there are days you could do lower intensity for longer and other days you could do higher intensity for shorter days. If you want to exercise at a moderate pace, you should aim for a heart rate of 50 to 70 percent of your MHR.

Do you want to keep going at a vigorous pace? Your heart rate should between 70 and 85 percent. It takes a little bit of math to figure out your target heart rate.

You can figure out your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220. If you're 35 years old, your maximum heart rate would be 185. Make sure you stay on track now that you know the heart rate to aim for and the activities that will help you achieve it.