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In Heart Rate Training, Second Edition, authors Roy Benson and Declan Connolly combine decades of coaching experience, scientific research, and practical knowledge to help you understand the best way to make your heart rate monitor work for you. They will show you how to get reliable data from your device, dispel myths surrounding heart rate monitors, and make it easy for you to calculate your ideal target heart rate. Then you’ll learn how to customize your training by varying the intensity, duration, frequency, and mode of your exercise sessions as you work toward improving endurance, stamina, economy, and speed.
Information on heart rate variability (HRV) training further prepares you to individualize your training plan based on your personal goals. As a bonus, sample exercise programs will guide you in manipulating training components to design long-term training plans for walking, running, cycling, swimming, triathlons, rowing, cross-country skiing, and team sports.
When you are ready to take training and performance to the next level, turn to Heart Rate Training, and achieve your personal best.
Earn continuing education credits/units! A continuing education exam that uses this book is also available. It may be purchased separately or as part of a package that includes both the book and exam.
Chapter 1. Monitoring for Maximum Performance
Chapter 2. Evaluating and Customizing Your Zones
Chapter 3. Getting the Most From Your Monitor
Part II. Training
Chapter 4. Targeting Sport-Specific Fitness With Heart Rate
Chapter 5. Increasing Aerobic Endurance
Chapter 6. Raising Anaerobic Threshold
Chapter 7. Boosting Speed and Power
Part III. Programs
Chapter 8. Designing an Effective Training Program
Chapter 9. Walking
Chapter 10. Jogging and Running
Chapter 11. Cycling
Chapter 12. Swimming
Chapter 13. Triathlon
Chapter 14. Rowing
Chapter 15. Cross-Country Skiing
Chapter 16. Team Sports
Appendix: Heart Rate Training Zone Calculation Chart
Roy T. Benson, MPE, CFI, is an exercise scientist and distance-running coach. He ran competitively for 58 years and coached professionally for 56 years for military, club, university, and high school teams, including 10 years at the University of Florida. From 1993 to 2008, his boys’ and girls’ cross country teams at Marist High School in Atlanta, Georgia, won a total of 16 state championships, and his cross country and track runners won 21 individual state titles.
Benson was the owner and president of Running Ltd., a company that operated Nike-sponsored summer camps for both adult and high school runners since 1973. He sold the camps to US Sports Camps when he retired in 2014.
Benson has used his expertise in heart rate training as a consultant for both Polar and Nike, and he has written three books about effort-based training for runners. For over 25 years he was a special contributor to Running Times magazine and was a contributing editor for Running Journal magazine. His booklet Precision Running, published by Polar Electro, has sold over 200,000 copies and has been translated into seven languages.
Benson and his wife, Betty, live on Amelia Island, Florida, where he is a volunteer cross country coach at Fernandina Beach High School.
Dr. Declan Connolly, FACSM, CSCS, was a professor and exercise physiologist at the University of Vermont, where he was also the director of the Human Performance Laboratory. He was a consultant for numerous sports organizations, including the World Rugby Union Network, National Hockey League, National Football League, U.S. Rowing, and U.S. Skiing. He also served as a consultant to the International Olympic Committee on several occasions.
In addition to more than 300 publications in scientific journals, Connolly's work was widely quoted in the popular media, including stories in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, London Times, Runner’s World, Prevention, Health, and Self. His work appeared on more than 24,000 websites and has been the subject of news stories on Fox, BBC, CBS, and numerous other TV and radio networks.
Connolly was a lifelong exerciser and athlete, from several national cycling championships as a schoolboy in his native Ireland to triathlons and Ironman competitions. Connolly lived in Burlington, Vermont, with his wife and five children until his passing in 2020.
Improved heart rate monitor technology changes workouts
Heart rate monitor capacities have advanced dramatically in the last several years. They have improved in function, appearance, reliability, and accuracy. The new generation of wrist-reading monitors has proven reliable for the most part, and so much more practical than the chest strap systems. Modern monitors provide basic information on calorie expenditure, oxygen consumption, time in target zones, average and maximum heart rates achieved during the workout, and time in heart rate recovery zones, as well as offering audible signals, 24-hour heart rate measurements, and a whole lot more. All this information can be easily recorded and stored on your smartphone for later analysis, allowing you to fine-tune and individualize your program to a greater degree than ever before. This info can be downloaded and stored on your computer as well. You can also compare your heart rate response from day to day. If these workouts are at the same speed, you will be able to see your training heart rate response over time (i.e., Your heart rate should decrease when working at the same speed as you get fitter). The recordable and downloadable features allow you to see your daily data on a spreadsheet. When viewing your changes over time on this single spreadsheet, the data can greatly reinforce your determination to train smartly.
Data on calories expended, which is indirectly calculated from heart rate, is a helpful feature because it expands the use of the monitor to people who are less performance oriented and more interested in issues such as health improvement, weight loss, and cardiac rehabilitation. Often people will have a distinct caloric expenditure target per day or week that translates into weight or fat loss. For example, it is common to use the basic value that you must burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound (0.5 kg) of fat. Therefore, burning 500 additional calories per day through exercise equates to roughly one pound of fat loss per week.
For athletes, the 24-hour monitoring option provides an abundance of new information they can use to fine-tune their programs and monitor their intensity levels. This fairly convenient system tracks not only exercise heart rates but also recovery rates. This provides vital information related to adaptation and recovery. By tracking the heart rate over 24 hours, athletes get thousands of data points that are downloadable to a computer to create a graph or spreadsheet. These data can reveal not only the slightest signs of illness, overtraining, and fatigue, but also improvement in fitness levels. Having this data can allow an athlete to compare morning resting heart rates over time and potentially even detect early signs of overtraining or illness before it progresses too far.
Keep running until time runs out
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could continue running until you reach the real finish line at the end of life? No premature retirement required. Well, good news! No matter when you start running, whether at 7 or 77 years old, we believe that you can keep going for the rest of your life. The secret is to keep your legs from giving out long before your heart does because, ironically, runners' legs seem to age faster than their hearts.
Think about it: How many former runners have told you they gave it up because of knee problems? Or it was their hips? Or feet, ankles, or maybe their back? In contrast, how many people told you they gave up running because their hearts ached and pained from all the pounding? If you like to run, whether for health, recreation, or competition, we're here to convince you that you can do it for the rest of your life. So, do you run to stay young and good looking? Do you run to socialize and finish smiling? Do you run to push yourself to complete exhaustion in pursuit of peak performances? In short, what is your goal? Whichever one fits your current reason, we believe you can do it for a lifetime, as long as you don't overdo it.
Granted, you probably won't always be as fast as you were at the start of your running life, but you can absolutely keep running until it's toes-up time. We think that our accumulated wisdom, scientific data from heart monitors, and our training methodologies can help you to do this. Of course, we admit that biomechanical breakdown from overuse is not always what forces folks to retire from running. There are accidental orthopedic insults to the legs that not even the smartest training can overcome. Think about ligament or cartilage damage from soccer or football, or accidents such as tripping on a curb. We also admit that a heart damaged by poor lifestyle choices can put a runner on the sidelines. But seldom is the damage caused by well-regulated exercise such as running.
Now is a good time to point out that your maximum heart rate will decline with age. In fact, much of the explanation for declining performance across the lifespan is attributed to a decreasing maximum heart rate. Yes, this is one cause of slowing as you age. But this slowdown is purely age related and is not caused by wear and tear from running. Even that age-related slowdown is thought to happen at a slower pace for active exercisers compared to people who are not active. So, the question is this: How can you keep your legs from giving out before your heart does? We believe there is a simple, scientific solution that will keep you moving: Use those principles of experimentation that we constantly refer to in order to manipulate the givens and variables of your workouts. If you want to avoid the accumulated wear and tear that can force premature retirement, run like a scientist who reads the feedback from his or her heart rate monitor to regulate intensity, control pace, and moderate microdamage to the legs.
Learn more about recovery with heart rate variability (HRV)
Thanks to new understanding of data about cardiac health, heart rate variability (HRV) is a new tool that can provide athletes and exercisers more insight into recovery. In the past, an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine was needed to measure HRV by tracing the electrical activity of the cardiac muscles to measure the actual interval between heartbeats. But now the cheaper technology of chest and wrist heart rate monitors and new apps for smartphones make measuring and using HRV possible and more practical.
Cardiologists have long used HRV, variation in the interval between heartbeats, as a measure of cardiac health. HRV scores range from 0 to 100, with low scores (little variation) indicating poor health, and high scores (greater variation) reflecting good health. HRV scores tend to peak between 20 and 30 years of age and decline thereafter. Average HRV scores for healthy individuals tend to be about 60, but again it is age specific.
So, what does this mean? Generally, HRV indicates the body's health, fitness, and ability to handle a workload. Low HRV indicates poor fitness and the body's inability to adapt to stress, whereas high HRV indicates fitness and that the body is able to tolerate stress or has recovered from a previous stressor. During your recovery periods, when you are not working out and while sleeping, you want to see variations in your resting heart rate response. Tracking this variation in the intervals between heartbeats provides useful data to be used in conjunction with your average resting heart rate. Measuring HRV is becoming widely used in both clinical populations and among competitive athletes and is helpful in determining how well the body has recovered from training. Although it requires a little more daily analysis, it is worth the effort because it allows you to more effectively adjust your training sessions depending on whether you are recovered or not.
Table 5.1 shows HRV across the lifespan. The data were adapted from several sources that include athletic and nonathletic populations. Calculating HRV is not straightforward, so we recommend investing in a system that will do the calculations for you (such as the Oura sleep and activity tracking ring).
Improved heart rate monitor technology changes workouts
Heart rate monitor capacities have advanced dramatically in the last several years. They have improved in function, appearance, reliability, and accuracy. The new generation of wrist-reading monitors has proven reliable for the most part, and so much more practical than the chest strap systems. Modern monitors provide basic information on calorie expenditure, oxygen consumption, time in target zones, average and maximum heart rates achieved during the workout, and time in heart rate recovery zones, as well as offering audible signals, 24-hour heart rate measurements, and a whole lot more. All this information can be easily recorded and stored on your smartphone for later analysis, allowing you to fine-tune and individualize your program to a greater degree than ever before. This info can be downloaded and stored on your computer as well. You can also compare your heart rate response from day to day. If these workouts are at the same speed, you will be able to see your training heart rate response over time (i.e., Your heart rate should decrease when working at the same speed as you get fitter). The recordable and downloadable features allow you to see your daily data on a spreadsheet. When viewing your changes over time on this single spreadsheet, the data can greatly reinforce your determination to train smartly.
Data on calories expended, which is indirectly calculated from heart rate, is a helpful feature because it expands the use of the monitor to people who are less performance oriented and more interested in issues such as health improvement, weight loss, and cardiac rehabilitation. Often people will have a distinct caloric expenditure target per day or week that translates into weight or fat loss. For example, it is common to use the basic value that you must burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound (0.5 kg) of fat. Therefore, burning 500 additional calories per day through exercise equates to roughly one pound of fat loss per week.
For athletes, the 24-hour monitoring option provides an abundance of new information they can use to fine-tune their programs and monitor their intensity levels. This fairly convenient system tracks not only exercise heart rates but also recovery rates. This provides vital information related to adaptation and recovery. By tracking the heart rate over 24 hours, athletes get thousands of data points that are downloadable to a computer to create a graph or spreadsheet. These data can reveal not only the slightest signs of illness, overtraining, and fatigue, but also improvement in fitness levels. Having this data can allow an athlete to compare morning resting heart rates over time and potentially even detect early signs of overtraining or illness before it progresses too far.
Keep running until time runs out
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could continue running until you reach the real finish line at the end of life? No premature retirement required. Well, good news! No matter when you start running, whether at 7 or 77 years old, we believe that you can keep going for the rest of your life. The secret is to keep your legs from giving out long before your heart does because, ironically, runners' legs seem to age faster than their hearts.
Think about it: How many former runners have told you they gave it up because of knee problems? Or it was their hips? Or feet, ankles, or maybe their back? In contrast, how many people told you they gave up running because their hearts ached and pained from all the pounding? If you like to run, whether for health, recreation, or competition, we're here to convince you that you can do it for the rest of your life. So, do you run to stay young and good looking? Do you run to socialize and finish smiling? Do you run to push yourself to complete exhaustion in pursuit of peak performances? In short, what is your goal? Whichever one fits your current reason, we believe you can do it for a lifetime, as long as you don't overdo it.
Granted, you probably won't always be as fast as you were at the start of your running life, but you can absolutely keep running until it's toes-up time. We think that our accumulated wisdom, scientific data from heart monitors, and our training methodologies can help you to do this. Of course, we admit that biomechanical breakdown from overuse is not always what forces folks to retire from running. There are accidental orthopedic insults to the legs that not even the smartest training can overcome. Think about ligament or cartilage damage from soccer or football, or accidents such as tripping on a curb. We also admit that a heart damaged by poor lifestyle choices can put a runner on the sidelines. But seldom is the damage caused by well-regulated exercise such as running.
Now is a good time to point out that your maximum heart rate will decline with age. In fact, much of the explanation for declining performance across the lifespan is attributed to a decreasing maximum heart rate. Yes, this is one cause of slowing as you age. But this slowdown is purely age related and is not caused by wear and tear from running. Even that age-related slowdown is thought to happen at a slower pace for active exercisers compared to people who are not active. So, the question is this: How can you keep your legs from giving out before your heart does? We believe there is a simple, scientific solution that will keep you moving: Use those principles of experimentation that we constantly refer to in order to manipulate the givens and variables of your workouts. If you want to avoid the accumulated wear and tear that can force premature retirement, run like a scientist who reads the feedback from his or her heart rate monitor to regulate intensity, control pace, and moderate microdamage to the legs.
Learn more about recovery with heart rate variability (HRV)
Thanks to new understanding of data about cardiac health, heart rate variability (HRV) is a new tool that can provide athletes and exercisers more insight into recovery. In the past, an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine was needed to measure HRV by tracing the electrical activity of the cardiac muscles to measure the actual interval between heartbeats. But now the cheaper technology of chest and wrist heart rate monitors and new apps for smartphones make measuring and using HRV possible and more practical.
Cardiologists have long used HRV, variation in the interval between heartbeats, as a measure of cardiac health. HRV scores range from 0 to 100, with low scores (little variation) indicating poor health, and high scores (greater variation) reflecting good health. HRV scores tend to peak between 20 and 30 years of age and decline thereafter. Average HRV scores for healthy individuals tend to be about 60, but again it is age specific.
So, what does this mean? Generally, HRV indicates the body's health, fitness, and ability to handle a workload. Low HRV indicates poor fitness and the body's inability to adapt to stress, whereas high HRV indicates fitness and that the body is able to tolerate stress or has recovered from a previous stressor. During your recovery periods, when you are not working out and while sleeping, you want to see variations in your resting heart rate response. Tracking this variation in the intervals between heartbeats provides useful data to be used in conjunction with your average resting heart rate. Measuring HRV is becoming widely used in both clinical populations and among competitive athletes and is helpful in determining how well the body has recovered from training. Although it requires a little more daily analysis, it is worth the effort because it allows you to more effectively adjust your training sessions depending on whether you are recovered or not.
Table 5.1 shows HRV across the lifespan. The data were adapted from several sources that include athletic and nonathletic populations. Calculating HRV is not straightforward, so we recommend investing in a system that will do the calculations for you (such as the Oura sleep and activity tracking ring).
Improved heart rate monitor technology changes workouts
Heart rate monitor capacities have advanced dramatically in the last several years. They have improved in function, appearance, reliability, and accuracy. The new generation of wrist-reading monitors has proven reliable for the most part, and so much more practical than the chest strap systems. Modern monitors provide basic information on calorie expenditure, oxygen consumption, time in target zones, average and maximum heart rates achieved during the workout, and time in heart rate recovery zones, as well as offering audible signals, 24-hour heart rate measurements, and a whole lot more. All this information can be easily recorded and stored on your smartphone for later analysis, allowing you to fine-tune and individualize your program to a greater degree than ever before. This info can be downloaded and stored on your computer as well. You can also compare your heart rate response from day to day. If these workouts are at the same speed, you will be able to see your training heart rate response over time (i.e., Your heart rate should decrease when working at the same speed as you get fitter). The recordable and downloadable features allow you to see your daily data on a spreadsheet. When viewing your changes over time on this single spreadsheet, the data can greatly reinforce your determination to train smartly.
Data on calories expended, which is indirectly calculated from heart rate, is a helpful feature because it expands the use of the monitor to people who are less performance oriented and more interested in issues such as health improvement, weight loss, and cardiac rehabilitation. Often people will have a distinct caloric expenditure target per day or week that translates into weight or fat loss. For example, it is common to use the basic value that you must burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound (0.5 kg) of fat. Therefore, burning 500 additional calories per day through exercise equates to roughly one pound of fat loss per week.
For athletes, the 24-hour monitoring option provides an abundance of new information they can use to fine-tune their programs and monitor their intensity levels. This fairly convenient system tracks not only exercise heart rates but also recovery rates. This provides vital information related to adaptation and recovery. By tracking the heart rate over 24 hours, athletes get thousands of data points that are downloadable to a computer to create a graph or spreadsheet. These data can reveal not only the slightest signs of illness, overtraining, and fatigue, but also improvement in fitness levels. Having this data can allow an athlete to compare morning resting heart rates over time and potentially even detect early signs of overtraining or illness before it progresses too far.
Keep running until time runs out
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could continue running until you reach the real finish line at the end of life? No premature retirement required. Well, good news! No matter when you start running, whether at 7 or 77 years old, we believe that you can keep going for the rest of your life. The secret is to keep your legs from giving out long before your heart does because, ironically, runners' legs seem to age faster than their hearts.
Think about it: How many former runners have told you they gave it up because of knee problems? Or it was their hips? Or feet, ankles, or maybe their back? In contrast, how many people told you they gave up running because their hearts ached and pained from all the pounding? If you like to run, whether for health, recreation, or competition, we're here to convince you that you can do it for the rest of your life. So, do you run to stay young and good looking? Do you run to socialize and finish smiling? Do you run to push yourself to complete exhaustion in pursuit of peak performances? In short, what is your goal? Whichever one fits your current reason, we believe you can do it for a lifetime, as long as you don't overdo it.
Granted, you probably won't always be as fast as you were at the start of your running life, but you can absolutely keep running until it's toes-up time. We think that our accumulated wisdom, scientific data from heart monitors, and our training methodologies can help you to do this. Of course, we admit that biomechanical breakdown from overuse is not always what forces folks to retire from running. There are accidental orthopedic insults to the legs that not even the smartest training can overcome. Think about ligament or cartilage damage from soccer or football, or accidents such as tripping on a curb. We also admit that a heart damaged by poor lifestyle choices can put a runner on the sidelines. But seldom is the damage caused by well-regulated exercise such as running.
Now is a good time to point out that your maximum heart rate will decline with age. In fact, much of the explanation for declining performance across the lifespan is attributed to a decreasing maximum heart rate. Yes, this is one cause of slowing as you age. But this slowdown is purely age related and is not caused by wear and tear from running. Even that age-related slowdown is thought to happen at a slower pace for active exercisers compared to people who are not active. So, the question is this: How can you keep your legs from giving out before your heart does? We believe there is a simple, scientific solution that will keep you moving: Use those principles of experimentation that we constantly refer to in order to manipulate the givens and variables of your workouts. If you want to avoid the accumulated wear and tear that can force premature retirement, run like a scientist who reads the feedback from his or her heart rate monitor to regulate intensity, control pace, and moderate microdamage to the legs.
Learn more about recovery with heart rate variability (HRV)
Thanks to new understanding of data about cardiac health, heart rate variability (HRV) is a new tool that can provide athletes and exercisers more insight into recovery. In the past, an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine was needed to measure HRV by tracing the electrical activity of the cardiac muscles to measure the actual interval between heartbeats. But now the cheaper technology of chest and wrist heart rate monitors and new apps for smartphones make measuring and using HRV possible and more practical.
Cardiologists have long used HRV, variation in the interval between heartbeats, as a measure of cardiac health. HRV scores range from 0 to 100, with low scores (little variation) indicating poor health, and high scores (greater variation) reflecting good health. HRV scores tend to peak between 20 and 30 years of age and decline thereafter. Average HRV scores for healthy individuals tend to be about 60, but again it is age specific.
So, what does this mean? Generally, HRV indicates the body's health, fitness, and ability to handle a workload. Low HRV indicates poor fitness and the body's inability to adapt to stress, whereas high HRV indicates fitness and that the body is able to tolerate stress or has recovered from a previous stressor. During your recovery periods, when you are not working out and while sleeping, you want to see variations in your resting heart rate response. Tracking this variation in the intervals between heartbeats provides useful data to be used in conjunction with your average resting heart rate. Measuring HRV is becoming widely used in both clinical populations and among competitive athletes and is helpful in determining how well the body has recovered from training. Although it requires a little more daily analysis, it is worth the effort because it allows you to more effectively adjust your training sessions depending on whether you are recovered or not.
Table 5.1 shows HRV across the lifespan. The data were adapted from several sources that include athletic and nonathletic populations. Calculating HRV is not straightforward, so we recommend investing in a system that will do the calculations for you (such as the Oura sleep and activity tracking ring).
Improved heart rate monitor technology changes workouts
Heart rate monitor capacities have advanced dramatically in the last several years. They have improved in function, appearance, reliability, and accuracy. The new generation of wrist-reading monitors has proven reliable for the most part, and so much more practical than the chest strap systems. Modern monitors provide basic information on calorie expenditure, oxygen consumption, time in target zones, average and maximum heart rates achieved during the workout, and time in heart rate recovery zones, as well as offering audible signals, 24-hour heart rate measurements, and a whole lot more. All this information can be easily recorded and stored on your smartphone for later analysis, allowing you to fine-tune and individualize your program to a greater degree than ever before. This info can be downloaded and stored on your computer as well. You can also compare your heart rate response from day to day. If these workouts are at the same speed, you will be able to see your training heart rate response over time (i.e., Your heart rate should decrease when working at the same speed as you get fitter). The recordable and downloadable features allow you to see your daily data on a spreadsheet. When viewing your changes over time on this single spreadsheet, the data can greatly reinforce your determination to train smartly.
Data on calories expended, which is indirectly calculated from heart rate, is a helpful feature because it expands the use of the monitor to people who are less performance oriented and more interested in issues such as health improvement, weight loss, and cardiac rehabilitation. Often people will have a distinct caloric expenditure target per day or week that translates into weight or fat loss. For example, it is common to use the basic value that you must burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound (0.5 kg) of fat. Therefore, burning 500 additional calories per day through exercise equates to roughly one pound of fat loss per week.
For athletes, the 24-hour monitoring option provides an abundance of new information they can use to fine-tune their programs and monitor their intensity levels. This fairly convenient system tracks not only exercise heart rates but also recovery rates. This provides vital information related to adaptation and recovery. By tracking the heart rate over 24 hours, athletes get thousands of data points that are downloadable to a computer to create a graph or spreadsheet. These data can reveal not only the slightest signs of illness, overtraining, and fatigue, but also improvement in fitness levels. Having this data can allow an athlete to compare morning resting heart rates over time and potentially even detect early signs of overtraining or illness before it progresses too far.
Keep running until time runs out
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could continue running until you reach the real finish line at the end of life? No premature retirement required. Well, good news! No matter when you start running, whether at 7 or 77 years old, we believe that you can keep going for the rest of your life. The secret is to keep your legs from giving out long before your heart does because, ironically, runners' legs seem to age faster than their hearts.
Think about it: How many former runners have told you they gave it up because of knee problems? Or it was their hips? Or feet, ankles, or maybe their back? In contrast, how many people told you they gave up running because their hearts ached and pained from all the pounding? If you like to run, whether for health, recreation, or competition, we're here to convince you that you can do it for the rest of your life. So, do you run to stay young and good looking? Do you run to socialize and finish smiling? Do you run to push yourself to complete exhaustion in pursuit of peak performances? In short, what is your goal? Whichever one fits your current reason, we believe you can do it for a lifetime, as long as you don't overdo it.
Granted, you probably won't always be as fast as you were at the start of your running life, but you can absolutely keep running until it's toes-up time. We think that our accumulated wisdom, scientific data from heart monitors, and our training methodologies can help you to do this. Of course, we admit that biomechanical breakdown from overuse is not always what forces folks to retire from running. There are accidental orthopedic insults to the legs that not even the smartest training can overcome. Think about ligament or cartilage damage from soccer or football, or accidents such as tripping on a curb. We also admit that a heart damaged by poor lifestyle choices can put a runner on the sidelines. But seldom is the damage caused by well-regulated exercise such as running.
Now is a good time to point out that your maximum heart rate will decline with age. In fact, much of the explanation for declining performance across the lifespan is attributed to a decreasing maximum heart rate. Yes, this is one cause of slowing as you age. But this slowdown is purely age related and is not caused by wear and tear from running. Even that age-related slowdown is thought to happen at a slower pace for active exercisers compared to people who are not active. So, the question is this: How can you keep your legs from giving out before your heart does? We believe there is a simple, scientific solution that will keep you moving: Use those principles of experimentation that we constantly refer to in order to manipulate the givens and variables of your workouts. If you want to avoid the accumulated wear and tear that can force premature retirement, run like a scientist who reads the feedback from his or her heart rate monitor to regulate intensity, control pace, and moderate microdamage to the legs.
Learn more about recovery with heart rate variability (HRV)
Thanks to new understanding of data about cardiac health, heart rate variability (HRV) is a new tool that can provide athletes and exercisers more insight into recovery. In the past, an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine was needed to measure HRV by tracing the electrical activity of the cardiac muscles to measure the actual interval between heartbeats. But now the cheaper technology of chest and wrist heart rate monitors and new apps for smartphones make measuring and using HRV possible and more practical.
Cardiologists have long used HRV, variation in the interval between heartbeats, as a measure of cardiac health. HRV scores range from 0 to 100, with low scores (little variation) indicating poor health, and high scores (greater variation) reflecting good health. HRV scores tend to peak between 20 and 30 years of age and decline thereafter. Average HRV scores for healthy individuals tend to be about 60, but again it is age specific.
So, what does this mean? Generally, HRV indicates the body's health, fitness, and ability to handle a workload. Low HRV indicates poor fitness and the body's inability to adapt to stress, whereas high HRV indicates fitness and that the body is able to tolerate stress or has recovered from a previous stressor. During your recovery periods, when you are not working out and while sleeping, you want to see variations in your resting heart rate response. Tracking this variation in the intervals between heartbeats provides useful data to be used in conjunction with your average resting heart rate. Measuring HRV is becoming widely used in both clinical populations and among competitive athletes and is helpful in determining how well the body has recovered from training. Although it requires a little more daily analysis, it is worth the effort because it allows you to more effectively adjust your training sessions depending on whether you are recovered or not.
Table 5.1 shows HRV across the lifespan. The data were adapted from several sources that include athletic and nonathletic populations. Calculating HRV is not straightforward, so we recommend investing in a system that will do the calculations for you (such as the Oura sleep and activity tracking ring).
Improved heart rate monitor technology changes workouts
Heart rate monitor capacities have advanced dramatically in the last several years. They have improved in function, appearance, reliability, and accuracy. The new generation of wrist-reading monitors has proven reliable for the most part, and so much more practical than the chest strap systems. Modern monitors provide basic information on calorie expenditure, oxygen consumption, time in target zones, average and maximum heart rates achieved during the workout, and time in heart rate recovery zones, as well as offering audible signals, 24-hour heart rate measurements, and a whole lot more. All this information can be easily recorded and stored on your smartphone for later analysis, allowing you to fine-tune and individualize your program to a greater degree than ever before. This info can be downloaded and stored on your computer as well. You can also compare your heart rate response from day to day. If these workouts are at the same speed, you will be able to see your training heart rate response over time (i.e., Your heart rate should decrease when working at the same speed as you get fitter). The recordable and downloadable features allow you to see your daily data on a spreadsheet. When viewing your changes over time on this single spreadsheet, the data can greatly reinforce your determination to train smartly.
Data on calories expended, which is indirectly calculated from heart rate, is a helpful feature because it expands the use of the monitor to people who are less performance oriented and more interested in issues such as health improvement, weight loss, and cardiac rehabilitation. Often people will have a distinct caloric expenditure target per day or week that translates into weight or fat loss. For example, it is common to use the basic value that you must burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound (0.5 kg) of fat. Therefore, burning 500 additional calories per day through exercise equates to roughly one pound of fat loss per week.
For athletes, the 24-hour monitoring option provides an abundance of new information they can use to fine-tune their programs and monitor their intensity levels. This fairly convenient system tracks not only exercise heart rates but also recovery rates. This provides vital information related to adaptation and recovery. By tracking the heart rate over 24 hours, athletes get thousands of data points that are downloadable to a computer to create a graph or spreadsheet. These data can reveal not only the slightest signs of illness, overtraining, and fatigue, but also improvement in fitness levels. Having this data can allow an athlete to compare morning resting heart rates over time and potentially even detect early signs of overtraining or illness before it progresses too far.
Keep running until time runs out
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could continue running until you reach the real finish line at the end of life? No premature retirement required. Well, good news! No matter when you start running, whether at 7 or 77 years old, we believe that you can keep going for the rest of your life. The secret is to keep your legs from giving out long before your heart does because, ironically, runners' legs seem to age faster than their hearts.
Think about it: How many former runners have told you they gave it up because of knee problems? Or it was their hips? Or feet, ankles, or maybe their back? In contrast, how many people told you they gave up running because their hearts ached and pained from all the pounding? If you like to run, whether for health, recreation, or competition, we're here to convince you that you can do it for the rest of your life. So, do you run to stay young and good looking? Do you run to socialize and finish smiling? Do you run to push yourself to complete exhaustion in pursuit of peak performances? In short, what is your goal? Whichever one fits your current reason, we believe you can do it for a lifetime, as long as you don't overdo it.
Granted, you probably won't always be as fast as you were at the start of your running life, but you can absolutely keep running until it's toes-up time. We think that our accumulated wisdom, scientific data from heart monitors, and our training methodologies can help you to do this. Of course, we admit that biomechanical breakdown from overuse is not always what forces folks to retire from running. There are accidental orthopedic insults to the legs that not even the smartest training can overcome. Think about ligament or cartilage damage from soccer or football, or accidents such as tripping on a curb. We also admit that a heart damaged by poor lifestyle choices can put a runner on the sidelines. But seldom is the damage caused by well-regulated exercise such as running.
Now is a good time to point out that your maximum heart rate will decline with age. In fact, much of the explanation for declining performance across the lifespan is attributed to a decreasing maximum heart rate. Yes, this is one cause of slowing as you age. But this slowdown is purely age related and is not caused by wear and tear from running. Even that age-related slowdown is thought to happen at a slower pace for active exercisers compared to people who are not active. So, the question is this: How can you keep your legs from giving out before your heart does? We believe there is a simple, scientific solution that will keep you moving: Use those principles of experimentation that we constantly refer to in order to manipulate the givens and variables of your workouts. If you want to avoid the accumulated wear and tear that can force premature retirement, run like a scientist who reads the feedback from his or her heart rate monitor to regulate intensity, control pace, and moderate microdamage to the legs.
Learn more about recovery with heart rate variability (HRV)
Thanks to new understanding of data about cardiac health, heart rate variability (HRV) is a new tool that can provide athletes and exercisers more insight into recovery. In the past, an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine was needed to measure HRV by tracing the electrical activity of the cardiac muscles to measure the actual interval between heartbeats. But now the cheaper technology of chest and wrist heart rate monitors and new apps for smartphones make measuring and using HRV possible and more practical.
Cardiologists have long used HRV, variation in the interval between heartbeats, as a measure of cardiac health. HRV scores range from 0 to 100, with low scores (little variation) indicating poor health, and high scores (greater variation) reflecting good health. HRV scores tend to peak between 20 and 30 years of age and decline thereafter. Average HRV scores for healthy individuals tend to be about 60, but again it is age specific.
So, what does this mean? Generally, HRV indicates the body's health, fitness, and ability to handle a workload. Low HRV indicates poor fitness and the body's inability to adapt to stress, whereas high HRV indicates fitness and that the body is able to tolerate stress or has recovered from a previous stressor. During your recovery periods, when you are not working out and while sleeping, you want to see variations in your resting heart rate response. Tracking this variation in the intervals between heartbeats provides useful data to be used in conjunction with your average resting heart rate. Measuring HRV is becoming widely used in both clinical populations and among competitive athletes and is helpful in determining how well the body has recovered from training. Although it requires a little more daily analysis, it is worth the effort because it allows you to more effectively adjust your training sessions depending on whether you are recovered or not.
Table 5.1 shows HRV across the lifespan. The data were adapted from several sources that include athletic and nonathletic populations. Calculating HRV is not straightforward, so we recommend investing in a system that will do the calculations for you (such as the Oura sleep and activity tracking ring).
Improved heart rate monitor technology changes workouts
Heart rate monitor capacities have advanced dramatically in the last several years. They have improved in function, appearance, reliability, and accuracy. The new generation of wrist-reading monitors has proven reliable for the most part, and so much more practical than the chest strap systems. Modern monitors provide basic information on calorie expenditure, oxygen consumption, time in target zones, average and maximum heart rates achieved during the workout, and time in heart rate recovery zones, as well as offering audible signals, 24-hour heart rate measurements, and a whole lot more. All this information can be easily recorded and stored on your smartphone for later analysis, allowing you to fine-tune and individualize your program to a greater degree than ever before. This info can be downloaded and stored on your computer as well. You can also compare your heart rate response from day to day. If these workouts are at the same speed, you will be able to see your training heart rate response over time (i.e., Your heart rate should decrease when working at the same speed as you get fitter). The recordable and downloadable features allow you to see your daily data on a spreadsheet. When viewing your changes over time on this single spreadsheet, the data can greatly reinforce your determination to train smartly.
Data on calories expended, which is indirectly calculated from heart rate, is a helpful feature because it expands the use of the monitor to people who are less performance oriented and more interested in issues such as health improvement, weight loss, and cardiac rehabilitation. Often people will have a distinct caloric expenditure target per day or week that translates into weight or fat loss. For example, it is common to use the basic value that you must burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound (0.5 kg) of fat. Therefore, burning 500 additional calories per day through exercise equates to roughly one pound of fat loss per week.
For athletes, the 24-hour monitoring option provides an abundance of new information they can use to fine-tune their programs and monitor their intensity levels. This fairly convenient system tracks not only exercise heart rates but also recovery rates. This provides vital information related to adaptation and recovery. By tracking the heart rate over 24 hours, athletes get thousands of data points that are downloadable to a computer to create a graph or spreadsheet. These data can reveal not only the slightest signs of illness, overtraining, and fatigue, but also improvement in fitness levels. Having this data can allow an athlete to compare morning resting heart rates over time and potentially even detect early signs of overtraining or illness before it progresses too far.
Keep running until time runs out
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could continue running until you reach the real finish line at the end of life? No premature retirement required. Well, good news! No matter when you start running, whether at 7 or 77 years old, we believe that you can keep going for the rest of your life. The secret is to keep your legs from giving out long before your heart does because, ironically, runners' legs seem to age faster than their hearts.
Think about it: How many former runners have told you they gave it up because of knee problems? Or it was their hips? Or feet, ankles, or maybe their back? In contrast, how many people told you they gave up running because their hearts ached and pained from all the pounding? If you like to run, whether for health, recreation, or competition, we're here to convince you that you can do it for the rest of your life. So, do you run to stay young and good looking? Do you run to socialize and finish smiling? Do you run to push yourself to complete exhaustion in pursuit of peak performances? In short, what is your goal? Whichever one fits your current reason, we believe you can do it for a lifetime, as long as you don't overdo it.
Granted, you probably won't always be as fast as you were at the start of your running life, but you can absolutely keep running until it's toes-up time. We think that our accumulated wisdom, scientific data from heart monitors, and our training methodologies can help you to do this. Of course, we admit that biomechanical breakdown from overuse is not always what forces folks to retire from running. There are accidental orthopedic insults to the legs that not even the smartest training can overcome. Think about ligament or cartilage damage from soccer or football, or accidents such as tripping on a curb. We also admit that a heart damaged by poor lifestyle choices can put a runner on the sidelines. But seldom is the damage caused by well-regulated exercise such as running.
Now is a good time to point out that your maximum heart rate will decline with age. In fact, much of the explanation for declining performance across the lifespan is attributed to a decreasing maximum heart rate. Yes, this is one cause of slowing as you age. But this slowdown is purely age related and is not caused by wear and tear from running. Even that age-related slowdown is thought to happen at a slower pace for active exercisers compared to people who are not active. So, the question is this: How can you keep your legs from giving out before your heart does? We believe there is a simple, scientific solution that will keep you moving: Use those principles of experimentation that we constantly refer to in order to manipulate the givens and variables of your workouts. If you want to avoid the accumulated wear and tear that can force premature retirement, run like a scientist who reads the feedback from his or her heart rate monitor to regulate intensity, control pace, and moderate microdamage to the legs.
Learn more about recovery with heart rate variability (HRV)
Thanks to new understanding of data about cardiac health, heart rate variability (HRV) is a new tool that can provide athletes and exercisers more insight into recovery. In the past, an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine was needed to measure HRV by tracing the electrical activity of the cardiac muscles to measure the actual interval between heartbeats. But now the cheaper technology of chest and wrist heart rate monitors and new apps for smartphones make measuring and using HRV possible and more practical.
Cardiologists have long used HRV, variation in the interval between heartbeats, as a measure of cardiac health. HRV scores range from 0 to 100, with low scores (little variation) indicating poor health, and high scores (greater variation) reflecting good health. HRV scores tend to peak between 20 and 30 years of age and decline thereafter. Average HRV scores for healthy individuals tend to be about 60, but again it is age specific.
So, what does this mean? Generally, HRV indicates the body's health, fitness, and ability to handle a workload. Low HRV indicates poor fitness and the body's inability to adapt to stress, whereas high HRV indicates fitness and that the body is able to tolerate stress or has recovered from a previous stressor. During your recovery periods, when you are not working out and while sleeping, you want to see variations in your resting heart rate response. Tracking this variation in the intervals between heartbeats provides useful data to be used in conjunction with your average resting heart rate. Measuring HRV is becoming widely used in both clinical populations and among competitive athletes and is helpful in determining how well the body has recovered from training. Although it requires a little more daily analysis, it is worth the effort because it allows you to more effectively adjust your training sessions depending on whether you are recovered or not.
Table 5.1 shows HRV across the lifespan. The data were adapted from several sources that include athletic and nonathletic populations. Calculating HRV is not straightforward, so we recommend investing in a system that will do the calculations for you (such as the Oura sleep and activity tracking ring).
Improved heart rate monitor technology changes workouts
Heart rate monitor capacities have advanced dramatically in the last several years. They have improved in function, appearance, reliability, and accuracy. The new generation of wrist-reading monitors has proven reliable for the most part, and so much more practical than the chest strap systems. Modern monitors provide basic information on calorie expenditure, oxygen consumption, time in target zones, average and maximum heart rates achieved during the workout, and time in heart rate recovery zones, as well as offering audible signals, 24-hour heart rate measurements, and a whole lot more. All this information can be easily recorded and stored on your smartphone for later analysis, allowing you to fine-tune and individualize your program to a greater degree than ever before. This info can be downloaded and stored on your computer as well. You can also compare your heart rate response from day to day. If these workouts are at the same speed, you will be able to see your training heart rate response over time (i.e., Your heart rate should decrease when working at the same speed as you get fitter). The recordable and downloadable features allow you to see your daily data on a spreadsheet. When viewing your changes over time on this single spreadsheet, the data can greatly reinforce your determination to train smartly.
Data on calories expended, which is indirectly calculated from heart rate, is a helpful feature because it expands the use of the monitor to people who are less performance oriented and more interested in issues such as health improvement, weight loss, and cardiac rehabilitation. Often people will have a distinct caloric expenditure target per day or week that translates into weight or fat loss. For example, it is common to use the basic value that you must burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound (0.5 kg) of fat. Therefore, burning 500 additional calories per day through exercise equates to roughly one pound of fat loss per week.
For athletes, the 24-hour monitoring option provides an abundance of new information they can use to fine-tune their programs and monitor their intensity levels. This fairly convenient system tracks not only exercise heart rates but also recovery rates. This provides vital information related to adaptation and recovery. By tracking the heart rate over 24 hours, athletes get thousands of data points that are downloadable to a computer to create a graph or spreadsheet. These data can reveal not only the slightest signs of illness, overtraining, and fatigue, but also improvement in fitness levels. Having this data can allow an athlete to compare morning resting heart rates over time and potentially even detect early signs of overtraining or illness before it progresses too far.
Keep running until time runs out
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could continue running until you reach the real finish line at the end of life? No premature retirement required. Well, good news! No matter when you start running, whether at 7 or 77 years old, we believe that you can keep going for the rest of your life. The secret is to keep your legs from giving out long before your heart does because, ironically, runners' legs seem to age faster than their hearts.
Think about it: How many former runners have told you they gave it up because of knee problems? Or it was their hips? Or feet, ankles, or maybe their back? In contrast, how many people told you they gave up running because their hearts ached and pained from all the pounding? If you like to run, whether for health, recreation, or competition, we're here to convince you that you can do it for the rest of your life. So, do you run to stay young and good looking? Do you run to socialize and finish smiling? Do you run to push yourself to complete exhaustion in pursuit of peak performances? In short, what is your goal? Whichever one fits your current reason, we believe you can do it for a lifetime, as long as you don't overdo it.
Granted, you probably won't always be as fast as you were at the start of your running life, but you can absolutely keep running until it's toes-up time. We think that our accumulated wisdom, scientific data from heart monitors, and our training methodologies can help you to do this. Of course, we admit that biomechanical breakdown from overuse is not always what forces folks to retire from running. There are accidental orthopedic insults to the legs that not even the smartest training can overcome. Think about ligament or cartilage damage from soccer or football, or accidents such as tripping on a curb. We also admit that a heart damaged by poor lifestyle choices can put a runner on the sidelines. But seldom is the damage caused by well-regulated exercise such as running.
Now is a good time to point out that your maximum heart rate will decline with age. In fact, much of the explanation for declining performance across the lifespan is attributed to a decreasing maximum heart rate. Yes, this is one cause of slowing as you age. But this slowdown is purely age related and is not caused by wear and tear from running. Even that age-related slowdown is thought to happen at a slower pace for active exercisers compared to people who are not active. So, the question is this: How can you keep your legs from giving out before your heart does? We believe there is a simple, scientific solution that will keep you moving: Use those principles of experimentation that we constantly refer to in order to manipulate the givens and variables of your workouts. If you want to avoid the accumulated wear and tear that can force premature retirement, run like a scientist who reads the feedback from his or her heart rate monitor to regulate intensity, control pace, and moderate microdamage to the legs.
Learn more about recovery with heart rate variability (HRV)
Thanks to new understanding of data about cardiac health, heart rate variability (HRV) is a new tool that can provide athletes and exercisers more insight into recovery. In the past, an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine was needed to measure HRV by tracing the electrical activity of the cardiac muscles to measure the actual interval between heartbeats. But now the cheaper technology of chest and wrist heart rate monitors and new apps for smartphones make measuring and using HRV possible and more practical.
Cardiologists have long used HRV, variation in the interval between heartbeats, as a measure of cardiac health. HRV scores range from 0 to 100, with low scores (little variation) indicating poor health, and high scores (greater variation) reflecting good health. HRV scores tend to peak between 20 and 30 years of age and decline thereafter. Average HRV scores for healthy individuals tend to be about 60, but again it is age specific.
So, what does this mean? Generally, HRV indicates the body's health, fitness, and ability to handle a workload. Low HRV indicates poor fitness and the body's inability to adapt to stress, whereas high HRV indicates fitness and that the body is able to tolerate stress or has recovered from a previous stressor. During your recovery periods, when you are not working out and while sleeping, you want to see variations in your resting heart rate response. Tracking this variation in the intervals between heartbeats provides useful data to be used in conjunction with your average resting heart rate. Measuring HRV is becoming widely used in both clinical populations and among competitive athletes and is helpful in determining how well the body has recovered from training. Although it requires a little more daily analysis, it is worth the effort because it allows you to more effectively adjust your training sessions depending on whether you are recovered or not.
Table 5.1 shows HRV across the lifespan. The data were adapted from several sources that include athletic and nonathletic populations. Calculating HRV is not straightforward, so we recommend investing in a system that will do the calculations for you (such as the Oura sleep and activity tracking ring).
Improved heart rate monitor technology changes workouts
Heart rate monitor capacities have advanced dramatically in the last several years. They have improved in function, appearance, reliability, and accuracy. The new generation of wrist-reading monitors has proven reliable for the most part, and so much more practical than the chest strap systems. Modern monitors provide basic information on calorie expenditure, oxygen consumption, time in target zones, average and maximum heart rates achieved during the workout, and time in heart rate recovery zones, as well as offering audible signals, 24-hour heart rate measurements, and a whole lot more. All this information can be easily recorded and stored on your smartphone for later analysis, allowing you to fine-tune and individualize your program to a greater degree than ever before. This info can be downloaded and stored on your computer as well. You can also compare your heart rate response from day to day. If these workouts are at the same speed, you will be able to see your training heart rate response over time (i.e., Your heart rate should decrease when working at the same speed as you get fitter). The recordable and downloadable features allow you to see your daily data on a spreadsheet. When viewing your changes over time on this single spreadsheet, the data can greatly reinforce your determination to train smartly.
Data on calories expended, which is indirectly calculated from heart rate, is a helpful feature because it expands the use of the monitor to people who are less performance oriented and more interested in issues such as health improvement, weight loss, and cardiac rehabilitation. Often people will have a distinct caloric expenditure target per day or week that translates into weight or fat loss. For example, it is common to use the basic value that you must burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound (0.5 kg) of fat. Therefore, burning 500 additional calories per day through exercise equates to roughly one pound of fat loss per week.
For athletes, the 24-hour monitoring option provides an abundance of new information they can use to fine-tune their programs and monitor their intensity levels. This fairly convenient system tracks not only exercise heart rates but also recovery rates. This provides vital information related to adaptation and recovery. By tracking the heart rate over 24 hours, athletes get thousands of data points that are downloadable to a computer to create a graph or spreadsheet. These data can reveal not only the slightest signs of illness, overtraining, and fatigue, but also improvement in fitness levels. Having this data can allow an athlete to compare morning resting heart rates over time and potentially even detect early signs of overtraining or illness before it progresses too far.
Keep running until time runs out
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could continue running until you reach the real finish line at the end of life? No premature retirement required. Well, good news! No matter when you start running, whether at 7 or 77 years old, we believe that you can keep going for the rest of your life. The secret is to keep your legs from giving out long before your heart does because, ironically, runners' legs seem to age faster than their hearts.
Think about it: How many former runners have told you they gave it up because of knee problems? Or it was their hips? Or feet, ankles, or maybe their back? In contrast, how many people told you they gave up running because their hearts ached and pained from all the pounding? If you like to run, whether for health, recreation, or competition, we're here to convince you that you can do it for the rest of your life. So, do you run to stay young and good looking? Do you run to socialize and finish smiling? Do you run to push yourself to complete exhaustion in pursuit of peak performances? In short, what is your goal? Whichever one fits your current reason, we believe you can do it for a lifetime, as long as you don't overdo it.
Granted, you probably won't always be as fast as you were at the start of your running life, but you can absolutely keep running until it's toes-up time. We think that our accumulated wisdom, scientific data from heart monitors, and our training methodologies can help you to do this. Of course, we admit that biomechanical breakdown from overuse is not always what forces folks to retire from running. There are accidental orthopedic insults to the legs that not even the smartest training can overcome. Think about ligament or cartilage damage from soccer or football, or accidents such as tripping on a curb. We also admit that a heart damaged by poor lifestyle choices can put a runner on the sidelines. But seldom is the damage caused by well-regulated exercise such as running.
Now is a good time to point out that your maximum heart rate will decline with age. In fact, much of the explanation for declining performance across the lifespan is attributed to a decreasing maximum heart rate. Yes, this is one cause of slowing as you age. But this slowdown is purely age related and is not caused by wear and tear from running. Even that age-related slowdown is thought to happen at a slower pace for active exercisers compared to people who are not active. So, the question is this: How can you keep your legs from giving out before your heart does? We believe there is a simple, scientific solution that will keep you moving: Use those principles of experimentation that we constantly refer to in order to manipulate the givens and variables of your workouts. If you want to avoid the accumulated wear and tear that can force premature retirement, run like a scientist who reads the feedback from his or her heart rate monitor to regulate intensity, control pace, and moderate microdamage to the legs.
Learn more about recovery with heart rate variability (HRV)
Thanks to new understanding of data about cardiac health, heart rate variability (HRV) is a new tool that can provide athletes and exercisers more insight into recovery. In the past, an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine was needed to measure HRV by tracing the electrical activity of the cardiac muscles to measure the actual interval between heartbeats. But now the cheaper technology of chest and wrist heart rate monitors and new apps for smartphones make measuring and using HRV possible and more practical.
Cardiologists have long used HRV, variation in the interval between heartbeats, as a measure of cardiac health. HRV scores range from 0 to 100, with low scores (little variation) indicating poor health, and high scores (greater variation) reflecting good health. HRV scores tend to peak between 20 and 30 years of age and decline thereafter. Average HRV scores for healthy individuals tend to be about 60, but again it is age specific.
So, what does this mean? Generally, HRV indicates the body's health, fitness, and ability to handle a workload. Low HRV indicates poor fitness and the body's inability to adapt to stress, whereas high HRV indicates fitness and that the body is able to tolerate stress or has recovered from a previous stressor. During your recovery periods, when you are not working out and while sleeping, you want to see variations in your resting heart rate response. Tracking this variation in the intervals between heartbeats provides useful data to be used in conjunction with your average resting heart rate. Measuring HRV is becoming widely used in both clinical populations and among competitive athletes and is helpful in determining how well the body has recovered from training. Although it requires a little more daily analysis, it is worth the effort because it allows you to more effectively adjust your training sessions depending on whether you are recovered or not.
Table 5.1 shows HRV across the lifespan. The data were adapted from several sources that include athletic and nonathletic populations. Calculating HRV is not straightforward, so we recommend investing in a system that will do the calculations for you (such as the Oura sleep and activity tracking ring).
Improved heart rate monitor technology changes workouts
Heart rate monitor capacities have advanced dramatically in the last several years. They have improved in function, appearance, reliability, and accuracy. The new generation of wrist-reading monitors has proven reliable for the most part, and so much more practical than the chest strap systems. Modern monitors provide basic information on calorie expenditure, oxygen consumption, time in target zones, average and maximum heart rates achieved during the workout, and time in heart rate recovery zones, as well as offering audible signals, 24-hour heart rate measurements, and a whole lot more. All this information can be easily recorded and stored on your smartphone for later analysis, allowing you to fine-tune and individualize your program to a greater degree than ever before. This info can be downloaded and stored on your computer as well. You can also compare your heart rate response from day to day. If these workouts are at the same speed, you will be able to see your training heart rate response over time (i.e., Your heart rate should decrease when working at the same speed as you get fitter). The recordable and downloadable features allow you to see your daily data on a spreadsheet. When viewing your changes over time on this single spreadsheet, the data can greatly reinforce your determination to train smartly.
Data on calories expended, which is indirectly calculated from heart rate, is a helpful feature because it expands the use of the monitor to people who are less performance oriented and more interested in issues such as health improvement, weight loss, and cardiac rehabilitation. Often people will have a distinct caloric expenditure target per day or week that translates into weight or fat loss. For example, it is common to use the basic value that you must burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound (0.5 kg) of fat. Therefore, burning 500 additional calories per day through exercise equates to roughly one pound of fat loss per week.
For athletes, the 24-hour monitoring option provides an abundance of new information they can use to fine-tune their programs and monitor their intensity levels. This fairly convenient system tracks not only exercise heart rates but also recovery rates. This provides vital information related to adaptation and recovery. By tracking the heart rate over 24 hours, athletes get thousands of data points that are downloadable to a computer to create a graph or spreadsheet. These data can reveal not only the slightest signs of illness, overtraining, and fatigue, but also improvement in fitness levels. Having this data can allow an athlete to compare morning resting heart rates over time and potentially even detect early signs of overtraining or illness before it progresses too far.
Keep running until time runs out
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could continue running until you reach the real finish line at the end of life? No premature retirement required. Well, good news! No matter when you start running, whether at 7 or 77 years old, we believe that you can keep going for the rest of your life. The secret is to keep your legs from giving out long before your heart does because, ironically, runners' legs seem to age faster than their hearts.
Think about it: How many former runners have told you they gave it up because of knee problems? Or it was their hips? Or feet, ankles, or maybe their back? In contrast, how many people told you they gave up running because their hearts ached and pained from all the pounding? If you like to run, whether for health, recreation, or competition, we're here to convince you that you can do it for the rest of your life. So, do you run to stay young and good looking? Do you run to socialize and finish smiling? Do you run to push yourself to complete exhaustion in pursuit of peak performances? In short, what is your goal? Whichever one fits your current reason, we believe you can do it for a lifetime, as long as you don't overdo it.
Granted, you probably won't always be as fast as you were at the start of your running life, but you can absolutely keep running until it's toes-up time. We think that our accumulated wisdom, scientific data from heart monitors, and our training methodologies can help you to do this. Of course, we admit that biomechanical breakdown from overuse is not always what forces folks to retire from running. There are accidental orthopedic insults to the legs that not even the smartest training can overcome. Think about ligament or cartilage damage from soccer or football, or accidents such as tripping on a curb. We also admit that a heart damaged by poor lifestyle choices can put a runner on the sidelines. But seldom is the damage caused by well-regulated exercise such as running.
Now is a good time to point out that your maximum heart rate will decline with age. In fact, much of the explanation for declining performance across the lifespan is attributed to a decreasing maximum heart rate. Yes, this is one cause of slowing as you age. But this slowdown is purely age related and is not caused by wear and tear from running. Even that age-related slowdown is thought to happen at a slower pace for active exercisers compared to people who are not active. So, the question is this: How can you keep your legs from giving out before your heart does? We believe there is a simple, scientific solution that will keep you moving: Use those principles of experimentation that we constantly refer to in order to manipulate the givens and variables of your workouts. If you want to avoid the accumulated wear and tear that can force premature retirement, run like a scientist who reads the feedback from his or her heart rate monitor to regulate intensity, control pace, and moderate microdamage to the legs.
Learn more about recovery with heart rate variability (HRV)
Thanks to new understanding of data about cardiac health, heart rate variability (HRV) is a new tool that can provide athletes and exercisers more insight into recovery. In the past, an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine was needed to measure HRV by tracing the electrical activity of the cardiac muscles to measure the actual interval between heartbeats. But now the cheaper technology of chest and wrist heart rate monitors and new apps for smartphones make measuring and using HRV possible and more practical.
Cardiologists have long used HRV, variation in the interval between heartbeats, as a measure of cardiac health. HRV scores range from 0 to 100, with low scores (little variation) indicating poor health, and high scores (greater variation) reflecting good health. HRV scores tend to peak between 20 and 30 years of age and decline thereafter. Average HRV scores for healthy individuals tend to be about 60, but again it is age specific.
So, what does this mean? Generally, HRV indicates the body's health, fitness, and ability to handle a workload. Low HRV indicates poor fitness and the body's inability to adapt to stress, whereas high HRV indicates fitness and that the body is able to tolerate stress or has recovered from a previous stressor. During your recovery periods, when you are not working out and while sleeping, you want to see variations in your resting heart rate response. Tracking this variation in the intervals between heartbeats provides useful data to be used in conjunction with your average resting heart rate. Measuring HRV is becoming widely used in both clinical populations and among competitive athletes and is helpful in determining how well the body has recovered from training. Although it requires a little more daily analysis, it is worth the effort because it allows you to more effectively adjust your training sessions depending on whether you are recovered or not.
Table 5.1 shows HRV across the lifespan. The data were adapted from several sources that include athletic and nonathletic populations. Calculating HRV is not straightforward, so we recommend investing in a system that will do the calculations for you (such as the Oura sleep and activity tracking ring).