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How to Use Heart Rate to Optimize Your Exercise Routine
Heartbeat monitoring could help achieve your more ambitious fitness goals
With roughly one in five American adults regularly wearing a smartwatch or a fitness tracker, people are becoming more and more familiar with their own heart rates — a simple measure defined by the number of heartbeats per minute. When measured at rest, heart rate can be an important health indicator (generally speaking, lower resting heart rates are associated with longer lives). And when measured during exercise, heart rate is becoming a widespread tool to plan and monitor physical activity.
Exercise programs like the one created by Orangetheory, a large chain of fitness studios, are heavily based on achieving certain heart rate zones by measuring heart rate during the workout. Their promise is that, if your heart beats fast enough, your body will continue to burn calories even after the end of the training session. Orangetheory’s heart rate–based interval training, they say, “burns more calories post-workout than traditional exercise.”
If you want to make the best out of your workout using the heart rate data on your wrist, you first need to get familiar with the concept of maximum heart rate — the fastest your heart manages to beat during an intense workout.
