What our heart rate shows about our health

If you are wearing any Smart watch or fitness trackerYou probably already have access to a constant stream of data about your health. heart For you. In addition to monitoring your basic heart rate, smartwatches and fitness trackers can also measure and track your heart rate zones, variability, and trends.

This information can be important to your health and fitness if you are willing to experiment with different levels of intensity during exercise and if you understand the limitations of the data.

To make this data useful, Katherine Larson, MD, a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic’s Sports Cardiology Clinic in Rochester, Minn., asks patients about their health and fitness goals. “The conversation changes a lot depending on what the patient or athlete wants to do with the data,” she says.

For those looking to incorporate exercise into their daily routine, heart rate monitoring is a great tool for understanding how their fitness is developing over time. For more experienced athletes, belt training Heart rate It can help improve speed and endurance.

count the hits

To measure your heart rate without a wearable device, find your pulse on your neck or wrist. Count the number of beats you detect in 15 seconds and multiply that number by four.

Your resting heart rate is the number of times your heart beats in one minute when you’re not exerting yourself. Your maximum heart rate (HR), which can be roughly estimated based on your age, is the maximum number of beats during vigorous exercise.

Most fitness trackers, GPS running watches, and Apple Watches measure your heart rate using a small light to detect changes in blood flow through the vessels on your wrist throughout the day. Chest straps can be a little more accurate than watches, but they’re usually only worn during exercise.

A normal resting heart rate ranges from 60 to 100 beats per minute, although there can be significant variation between individuals. Athletes and people with high fitness levels typically have lower resting heart rates.

Training in 5 regions

Zone training involves building your workout plan around five heart rate zones, which range from comfortable effort to maximum intensity. This training can help you plan workouts with specific goals, such as building endurance or improving performance.

Each zone is based on a percentage of your MF: In Zone 1, for example, you should be at 50% to 60% of your MF, while Zone 5 requires 90% to 100% of your MF. Many fitness trackers can estimate your heart rate zones and show you which zone you’re in during your workout. But you can also repeat your zone workout based on how you feel about the effort.

“The best way to really understand these zones is to understand effort and purpose,” says Tamanna Singh, MD, a cardiologist and associate director of the Cleveland Clinic Sports Cardiology Center, adding that different levels of exercise intensity activate different physiological processes in the body.

• Zone 1 should be easy, like a warm-up or cool-down. You should be able to “sing or read something without interruption,” Singh says.

• Zone 2 should be a little more demanding. You should be able to hold a conversation, but you may need a break every now and then, Singh explains. Training in this zone is key to building endurance and developing your aerobic capacity. During endurance sports like running and cycling, you should spend most of your training time in this zone.

• Zone 3 isn’t as walkable as Zone 2, and you may feel the need to take more breaks between runs, Singh says. Many runners refer to this level of effort as “cadence.”

• Zone 4 is what runners and cyclists call threshold training, “something you can sustain for maybe 45 minutes or an hour at most,” Singh points out.

• Zone 5, the all-out maximum effort, is performed at an intensity that Singh calls the “red line.” There’s no room for debate as your body works to maximize its ability to perform with less oxygen.

Volatility

Many wearables also measure a user’s heart rate variability, or HRV. This measurement tracks how your heart rate naturally fluctuates from beat to beat, and in general, can be used to monitor recovery or fatigue between workouts.

Values ​​higher than your baseline typically indicate a healthier cardiovascular system that has recovered well. (Most fitness trackers and smartwatches can estimate your baseline once they’ve collected enough data.) Lower values, especially after a strenuous workout, can indicate that your body needs more time to recover. However, as with other heart rate measurements, your heart rate can also fluctuate based on factors unrelated to exercise, such as illness or alcohol consumption.

Good print

Although heart rate data can provide useful guidance for your health, experts warn against relying on it too much.

Using the conversation test—trying to have a conversation, even with yourself, while you exercise—can be just as helpful as checking your heart rate. Paying attention to how refreshed or tired you feel can be just as helpful as tracking your heart rate.

Larson says some people can get too “stuck” in data. In those cases, he urges them to look at the big picture: “How useful is this data actually? Or how much is it distracting us from the more pressing issues we need to address?”

source: Kathimerini.gr

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