One of the most effective ways you can improve your workout results is to monitor your heart rate. Aerobics instructors have advised us to take our heartrates for as long as there have been aerobics classes. We used to take our carotid pulse for 60 seconds, multiply it by 10 and we would get an average approximation of our heartrate. It was a way to measure how hard we were really working. Well now you can use a heart rate monitor to get a continuous readout and a much more accurate reading than taking your own pulse.
By monitoring your heartrate you will know if you are exercising at an effective intensity. You can also tailor your workout to your own specific goals, be it weight loss, cardiovascular endurance, or just cardio and heart health.
To get a rough idea of your maximum heart rate, take your age and subtract it from 220. Then take that number and multiply it by 60% and 80%. This would give you a target heart training zone. Try to stay within that zone for at least 20 minutes, 4 to 5 times a week. There are other variables, like for instance your resting heart rate and your recovery heartrate that you can take into consideration for a more detailed and specific to you heart rate analysis. There are about a million websites that will calculate this for you, take a look at them for more information.
After you are familiar with monitoring your heart rate you can manipulate your heart rate depending upon your goals. For example, it is very difficult if not impossible to maintain a heartrate of 95% of your maximum for very long, but getting your heartrate that high for short bursts, as in interval training, can build cardiovascular endurance and can increase weight loss.
There have been studies that have confirmed that our bodies burn the most fat at the lower end of our target heart rate zones and at the higher levels we are burning more glucose. So it is often recommended that we stay on the lower end of our zone for longer durations if we want to burn fat. However, if you manipulate your heart rate in intervals, bringing it up to the higher levels and then bringing it back down to recovery, you will actually end up burning substantially more calories which will result in more weight loss. The key is likely to be spending some of your workouts in the lower levels of your target rate and some of your workouts in the higher levels.
Of course, if you are just beginning a workout program it may be difficult to start with interval training right away so work your way up to it. You will get stronger with every workout so keep at it.
