Monitoring the Heart Rate During Training - Part 1.

At one point or another most of us join a gym, not all of us keep it up but that's another matter.

Anyhow, while there we almost certainly used cardiac trainers of some kind which measured our heart rate while we were exercising. On the machine there's a graph telling us what the acceptable ranges are for our age group, and we all very sensibly adhered to the graph. Right?

Well, whether we're sensible or not, and I'm a definite not, it got me wondering about how accurate these machines are, and how realistic are the ranges they publish. And more to the point, just how dangerous is it to exceed them. I've also wondered about the two bands they always publish, you know, the "cardio" band and the "fat burning band". Can it really be useful to barely exercise? Common sense says no, scientists say otherwise, and to an ageing sceptic like me that's an unmissable challenge.

I started by scouring the web for info on the accuracy of heart monitors, and came up blank. But then thinking about it, I realised it really doesn't matter anyway as long as you use the same machine, because right or wrong the readings will always be consistent. It's just like dieting, you have to measure yourself on the same scales every time to know how much weight you're losing.

So here's the first obvious conclusion - get your own personal heart monitor and then you're not at the mercy of uncalibrated machines. There's a pretty good range available at Fitness Options, but Argos or any of the high street sports shops also have them.

So having got your machine, how do you work out what heart rate to exercise at? Well the first step is to establish your Maximum Heart Rate (MHR), and there's a set of three quasi-scientific formulas to do it:

Subtract your age from 220.
Subtract half your age from 225.
For men, subtract 80% of your age from the number 214. For women, subtract 70% of your age from the number 209.

Well you don't need the brain of Einstein to spot the flaws in that one. Essentially it assumes everyone is equal and will have hearts of the same size and capacity. If our other organs aren't like that why should the heart be.

Fortunately the real way to establish your MHR is dead easy; exercise till you're right at your limit, take a reading and that's your MHR. That won't change no matter how hard you train, it's the limit! And strangely enough it will vary tremendously for different people. My beloved has an MHR 50 points (yes fifty whole points) below mine and we're both pretty much equally fit. Just how badly screwed up would we have been if we'd exercised together using the silly formulas above.

Part 2

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