<p>Got a question about heart rate. Was on elliptical machine for 30 minutes this afternoon. The peak rate was at 155, about 2.5 x of my resting rate of 60.</p>
<p>The formula says the max for me should be 220 - my age and I was almost there. Is it too much to go there? Or I should try to go that high every time?</p>
<p>Congrat CD. 75 lb is F^%$^ big, as Biden would have said. I wish I could achieve that much. </p>
<p>Yes, I would look gaunt had I dropped 75 lbs.</p>
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<p>Were you breathing so heavy you couldn’t carry on a conversation?</p>
<p>Check out this piece of equipment… anybody try one of these before? [Helix</a> - Introducing the HELIX 3000 - Lateral Aerobic Trainer](<a href=“http://www.helixco.com/commercial]Helix”>http://www.helixco.com/commercial)</p>
<p>When I go to cardiac rehab, someone from the staff usually comes over and chats with me. I have come to notice that it is during the peak part of my workout. If I’m talking, they know I’m OK and it sure makes the time go faster.</p>
<p>Check with your doc as to whether you/how long you should work at your max heart rate. If you are on any BP or cardio meds, that may effectively reduce your max rate. </p>
<p>The rest of me is not gaunt yet. Just my turkey neck.</p>
<p>Workout: carrying a 27 inch iMac to the Apple Store.</p>
<p>Makes for a good farmers walk.</p>
<p>Also carrying heavy things around doing chores.</p>
<p>Walked all over city today. Up and down the big hill and then some downtown. I think that is my workout for today.</p>
<p>CountingDown, congrats!</p>
<p>MOfWC, good luck with the run!</p>
<p>Did a 3.25 mile walk today. I pulled something in my back on Thursday so I’m trying not to do anything to make it worse for a couple of days. I’ll go to the gym tomorrow and see what I can do without tweaking it again.</p>
<p>Counting Down:</p>
<p>5 pound party time! That is so awesome. It’s staggering to think about it. Fifteen 5 pound parties. I know that you never in your wildest dreams thought you could/would lose 75 pounds.</p>
<p>dadII:</p>
<p>Obviously, none of us can give you medical advice and the “official” recommendation would probably be to have your doctor give you a cardiac stress test, yadda, yadda. Personally… I routinely exceeded 90% of my predicted heart rate and occasionally hit 95% or even 100%. I found that a few minutes later I could breath again and was fine. </p>
<p>I eventually started hitting 101% or even 102% of my predicted max heart rate and had to raise my max. Personally, I find the 100% range is pretty intense and it’s not something I would want to do every time out. It basically is totally miserable. But, I do like my “cardio intervals” to top out at least 90% of my max.</p>
<p>I actually do my walk/jog intervals now according to my HR. I jog to 91% and then walk until I’ve recovered to 75%, then run again. There’s not much difference between 91% and 95%. I just have to run a little bit further once my heart rate is already that high, because it means I’m already at the point where my muscles aren’t getting enough oxygen.</p>
<p>So, assuming you are healthy and don’t have heart problems, go for it. Hitting 90% of your max heart rate or higher for short bursts is actually a beneficial goal in terms of conditioning. The cutting edge coaches in conditioning, the guys using heart rate monitors for professional soccer teams and so forth, use “time over 90%” as a measure for their workouts.</p>
<p>For hiking, I try to keep my heart rate below 85% of my max. I’m out there for hours and it’s insane to push the pace to 90% or higher and try to sustain that over a two or three hour climb. So, once I hit 85%, I stop and get a breather.</p>
<p>Weightlifting is the best. I suggest you search online for routines. Always start light and master the form before you add weight.</p>
<p>New Rules workout in the basement for me tonight. Felt pretty good. Rear foot elevated split squats were maybe the best I’ve done. Trap bar deadlifts were OK. Band assisted chin ups were good. Pushups with my feet in the Jungle Gym straps were great, although a little uncomfortable on my wounded hands!</p>
<p>This workout has a little section where I do kettlebell swings and push presses – a squat and then pushing DBs overhead as I come back up. Boy, that combo will leave you gasping for air.</p>
<p>Mathmom, I hope your back detweakifies soon ~</p>
<p>Did TRX on Friday–met up with my older D today and we went on a house tour in her Boston neighborhood (Southend). I think I can count it as a workout. We toured 5 houses–all of them row houses with at least 4 levels–one had 5 levels (think lots of stairs). Plus, it was almost a mile between the two groups of houses on the tour and a mile from her place to the starting point. We also walked through a church that was part of the tour as well. According to my heart rate monitor–the entire tour took us 2.5 hours and I burned 390 calories.</p>
<p>The best way to determine your max heart rate is, of course, to have performance testing done. Short of that, the 220-age formula is a very rough approximation that is convenient but not necessarily accurate. If you are over 40 and in decent cardio shape, 210-1/2 age is actually a much better predictor. For example, I’m 59 and 220-age gives me a 161 max which is way too low. 210-1/2 age gives me a 180 max which is probably only about 5-10 beats low for me.</p>
<p>How you calculate your target heart ranges is also very important. The old max H.R. X % is way off. A much better formula is max H.R.- resting H.R., X %, + resting H.R. This is the heart rate reserve method of calculating target ranges and gives you a 1:1 correlation with % of your VO2 max. Using heart rate for training is really a surrogate for monitoring the percentage of VO2 max you are hitting. It’s the percentage of VO2 max that gives you the training effect. All of this is explained in more detail in a great book called Precission Heart Rate training which is the bible for understanding the fundamentals and theory of heart rate training.</p>
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<p>Maybe better from a research standpoint, but I have found that formula to be less than useful while in the middle of exercise that has me sweating bullets and panting like a dog. I just want a simple, immediately recognizable, repeatable number on my heart rate watch that I can correlate to my max and to what I am actually experiencing. I don’t even want my watch to read beats per minute because that requires mental capacity to interpret. I just want to see a straight percentage of my max – that’s a frame of reference that is simple and consistent for a single individual.</p>
<p>All the heart rate reserve formula does is tighten up the scale. For example, 160 bpm is 93% of my true max or 90% of my heart rate reserve. Those are just numbers. They feel the same physically because they are the same. I’m not sure it makes any difference for a given individual as long as they pick one and stick with it so that the heart rate monitor is providing useful information.</p>
<p>IMO, the researchers who believe they’ve got “training zones” figured out think they know more than they really do, based on pretty limited research. My big problem with most fitness/performance research is that they attempt to extrapolate from one very specific activity (like riding a spin bike) with no real reason to believe that what they are observing is more widely applicable. A perfect example is the assumption that everyone should do Tabata intervals, based purely on the fact that some Japanese researcher just happened to pick that particular protocol for testing a half dozen very highly conditioned athletes. He could have just as easily picked a different protocol and the “research” would then “prove” something else was the way to go. In the real world, almost nobody should be doing Tabata intervals. The rest periods are way too short for most people. Either your heart rate just pegs and it becomes an anaerobic workout until you drop or you can’t go as hard as you should on work intervals, just as a matter of survival. I certainly don’t believe that any of the conditioning researchers have it figured out within plus or minus 3%, notwithstanding their efforts to define “training zones” with that kind of precision…</p>
<p>From a general fitness standpoint, it’s probably a good idea to do some stuff in each of the different zones – a good reason to do a variety of different activities and intensities. For example, training at lower heart rates appears to be beneficial for improving the pumping volume of the heart. On the hand, short intense bursts to 90%+ of max appear to have benefits like increased production of human growth hormone and sensitivity to insulin (which are good things if your goal is fat loss!)</p>
<p>The curve between heart rate reserve and straight percentage tightens up as you approach 90%. At 90% the difference is negligible as you note. However, most training and aerobic conditioning should be in ranges below the 90% mark and it is at the 60-85% ranges that the differences are significant. In this regard, most aerobic training should in the zone that promotes aerobic base developement and there are huge differences in the calculations in that zone. Interval work is designed to push the lactic threshold and anaerobic threshold higher and to also work on training specificity such as sprinting and increasing speed capacity and as such should not be done every day. While I understand the appeal of simple and easy means of monitoring hr, in my view the trade off is the loss of effectiveness and efficiency. It isn’t that tough to memorize a few zones and the training benefit and improvements are worth it.</p>
<p>And I would still recommend Precision Heart Rate Training. It combines the input of exercise medical researchers of world repute and coaches and trainers in a variety of sports</p>
<p>I’m sticking with the chat rule. ;)</p>
<p>I thought that if you want to lose weight, working out at heart rates between 100 and 120 would suffice for us middle age to older folks. </p>
<p>No?</p>
<p>For those interested in general fitness and weight loss, the concept of a “fat burning heart rate zone” is misleading. The concept of targeting specific energy sources is much more significant for endurance athletes. For the general public, it’s really a question of calorie burn and the more intense the exercise, the more calories are burned in a shorter period of time.</p>
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<p>I don’t know. I just plotted graphs of my heart rates using both methods. I get straight lines with slightly different slopes. One from 71% to 100%, the other from 60% to 100% – for the same range.</p>
<p>Here’s my data, with the Karvonen percentages in the first column, the heart rate in the middle and the % max in the third:</p>
<p>100% 172 100%
95% 166 96%
90% 160 93%
85% 153 89%
80% 147 86%
75% 141 82%
70% 135 78%
65% 129 75%
60% 122 71%</p>
<p>I think it’s important to know which scale someone is using when they define their ranges, but I don’t see any absolute benefit to one or the other as long as you consistently correlate your own physical response to one or the other.</p>
<p>For example, I have several workouts programmed to go until I hit a specified heart rate and then rest until it falls to a lower specified heart rate. I could do exactly the same workout on either scale, just by changing the numbers. Only the numbers change, not the workout.</p>
<p>It’s also interesting that the real world effects vary from activity to activity. For example, when I’m doing walk/run intervals, I’m ready to go again when heart rate falls to 70% - 75% of my absolute max. Yet, for weight lifting type stuff, I’ve got to let it fall to 60%. That’s why I’m skeptical with implied precision.</p>
<p>Ok…</p>
<p>And are these numbers for real?</p>
<p>[Basal</a> Metabolic Rate Calculator](<a href=“http://www.prohealth.com/weightloss/tools/metabolism-calculator.cfm]Basal”>http://www.prohealth.com/weightloss/tools/metabolism-calculator.cfm)</p>
<p>The calories we burn naturally look a lot lower than I thought.</p>
<p>I thought I burn 1840 calories a day at a minimum, but my eyes are not that sharp. </p>
<p>Looks like I burn fewer than 1640 calories a day. </p>
<p>That is a big difference.</p>
<p>I fell sorry for the 125 pound women. They can’t eat anything. They are stuck with drinking zero calorie flavored water.</p>