Overview Terminology Aerobic Training Anaerobic training Case study Heart Rate Training Understanding heart rate will take you a long ways towards structuring your overall training program. You need to think of your heart rate as the rev counter for your body. To understand the importance of heart rate you need to first understand the inner working of the body and its hear rate zones and how to use them to your advantage. One of the reasons pure heart rate training is valuable is because if you train based on heart rate principals you will naturally progress, especially in the aerobic department. Overview The key thing that hear rate tell you is what energy system you are favouring during training. This is a very grey area and the best way is to separate them as if they are absolutes. Firstly you have the aerobic energy system. This energy system requires time and oxygen to metabolise fuel stored by the body. It implies that the body is using the slow twitch muscle fibres that burn energy rather than stores energy. Because the process takes time, the intensity of the exercise cannot be to high or the body will turn to the anaerobic fuel system. The anaerobic system relies on energy stored in the fast twitch muscle fibres to do the work. The intensity of the activity is too high to go through the process of creating energy form stores. Because the muscles only store a certain amount of energy, this system only works for short periods of time before the muscle energy is depleted. To understand the two systems think of a long distance runner that runs a slow pace or low intensity for long periods of time, compared to a sprinter that runs a short distance at very high intensity. Hear rate can be very helpful at telling you what your body is up to. Terminology Lets figure out some basic heart rate related terminology. Resting hear rate: This is a little ambiguous because some people say that it is the heart rate the moment you wake up in the morning and some people say it the general hear rate anytime you are not active. Maximum heart rate: Simple, the maximum hear rate your body will allow no matter what you do. The theoretical hear rate can be work out by the following formula: 220-age = max hear rate in beats per minute. For women you can add ten beats to maximum. Lactate turning point or anaerobic threshold: This is the point at witch your body shifts between using aerobic energy system and anaerobic energy systems to produce the work required. Typically around 80% of your maximum heart rate. Aerobic zone: This the zone typically from 60% of your maximum heart rate to 80% of your maximum heart rate or the anaerobic threshold. Anaerobic zone: from the anaerobic threshold to your maximum heart rate. Heart rate recovery: This is the time it takes to get your hear rate back to resting from a minimum of 80% of Max. The time is not as important as how it improves over time. Many people use this as a measure of fitness. Interval training: This is the type of training that focuses ion increasing the heart rate to a point and then allowing it to recover back to a lower point and then increasing it again and so on. Anaerobic threshold training: This type of training focuses on keeping the heart rate on around 80% for the duration of the session. Aerobic training Aerobic training using a hear rate monitor is defined as the hear rate zone spanning your 60% to 80% mark. (It varies in real life and shifts around as your fitness level changes). An example is a man of 40 years, max heart rate will be 220-40 = 180 bpm. 60% will = 108bpm and 80% = 144bpm so his aerobic zone will be 108 to 144 bpm. This is important when your goal is to increase your anaerobic fitness of burn fat for instance. The reason is that you are making sure your body stays within an intensity range that will allow it o use fat as a fuel source. If your intensity put you in the anaerobic zone, you will be burning stored energy in the muscles and once that is done you’ll be metabolising the muscle itself. Knowing what zone you are in also helps you structure the time you spend in that zone. Because you know your intensity you can reduce or increase the time you spend in the right zone. This means that your training becomes more focused and more effective. Imagine a long distance runner doing sprints for training and a sprinter doing marathons for training. It does not make a lot of sense, but if you knew what your intensity was you could make sure that you develop the two energy systems without working against the system. Anaerobic training Applying the same principals you can no understand anaerobic training as well but there are some consideration here. Because this fall into the realm of weight training I am only going to touch on the aspects that will really involve monitoring the heart rate. Firstly we need to dig a little into the anaerobic system. The body metabolises energy and them shunts that into the muscles that can store this energy. During high intensity training, the body uses this stored energy to do the work. Once the source is depleted the body will metabolise the muscle for energy. This is why the duration of high intensity training alas has to be kept short. During the rest phases the body will attempt to get more energy into the muscle, but this process becomes less efficient with time. In addition the muscle fibres are damaged during high intensity training. This is the reason why anaerobic training is short and very focused. Many factor affect it before, during and after training. Case study Joe wants to lose some weight, but more importantly fat. So he hits the treadmill and runs himself silly for 30 minutes. And he does this every day. Joe will see results for all sorts of reason but ultimately this practice will see him do more damage and end up worse than he was before. (I explain this in a case study I did on Spinning instructors some years ago). The smart way would have been to do the following; firstly you need to figure out your hear rate zones s above. Then Joe could have followed the natural heart rate progression strategy. This means that he would have kept his hear rate at a constant rate around 70% of maximum for the duration of his workout, say 30 minutes. Now what will happen is that Joe’s heart rate will get to 70% quickly because he is unfit. To keep it form increasing he would have to slow down and this will be the trend throughout the whole session. Eventually Joe finds that he is walking rather than running on the treadmill. Now Joe is frustrated but he sticks to the plan. As the session go by, Joe’s hear rate takes longer to get to 70% and he finds that he need to constantly increase the pace to keep it there because it want to drop rather than climb as it did when he started. What is happening to Joe is that his body is developing the aerobic system because he is forcing it to by training to a specific heart rate. His lungs are working more efficiently, his circulation has gotten better and his body is getting used to metabolize fat. His breathing is getting better and he sweats more and faster so his cooling system is becoming better also. You can see from this how in the medium term Joe is going to be better off.