The Importance Of Heart Rate Awareness and Control

Understanding how to control your heart rate and being aware of its tendencies is beneficial for your daily training, achieving your fitness goals, and day-to-day life encounters. Our heart rate elevates daily in many different scenarios and for many reasons. If we take the time to track those tendencies and become more prepared to handle them appropriately, we will find a stronger ability to manage our training and life experiences.

Heart rate is easily defined by the average beats per minute your heart produces. This number will vary from person to person based on many variables like age, activity, fitness level, and stress. 

The average resting heart rate will be between 60 and 100 beats per minute (bpm).

Training with heart rate zones

Your heart rate has different zones that help you understand how to achieve various fitness goals (fat-burning, aerobic, anaerobic). These three zones help achieve goals like weight loss, endurance training and strength training. If someone’s heart rate stays lower during high-intensity exercise over time, it shows improved aerobic capacity. How quickly the heart rate returns to normal after exercise indicates cardiovascular fitness. Depending on your personal goals, it should help you gauge what zone you are trying to train in and how to maintain that zone during training better if your heart rate is being tracked. 

If these zones are not achieved during your training program, with an optimal zone/stimulus in mind, things must be adjusted accordingly. You will have no way of knowing this unless you try to track your tendencies.

Beyond the gym: heart rate and daily life

There is undoubtedly a connection between heart rate and stress. Elevated heart rates can signal heightened stress or anxiety, and understanding this can help in implementing stress-relief techniques (e.g., deep breathing, meditation). It is strongly encouraged to try maintaining heart health outside of exercise. Regular heart rate awareness can help individuals gauge how their bodies respond to daily activities, including work, social interactions, and lifestyle habits. Sleep, diet, and other daily habits can also significantly impact this. 

Tracking your heart rate shouldn't only be done at the gym. Individuals should also monitor their heart rate during simple activities like walking, climbing stairs, etc, to understand how even low-intensity exercise impacts the heart.

Training examples to build heart rate control

After recognizing and educating yourself on your tendencies, begin training in a manner that builds your control over your heart rate.

Examples:

1: Fat Loss Training: 30+ minutes on a spin bike maintaining 110-125bpm. It builds your ability to maintain a specific heart rate for an extended period.

2: Interval Training of 5 rounds of 3 minutes working at higher intensity with 60-90 seconds of rest between rounds. This is intentionally spiking your heart rate within training and building your ability to focus on recovery/bringing your heart rate back to a controlled state.

3: Strength Training- intentionally forcing your body to expend high levels of effort/strength with near failure sets, all while maximizing recovery and resting as needed between sets. 5 x 5 Back Squat @ 75+% (building in weight if able and resting as much as needed between each set to complete the following set).

When you are in the middle of real-life scenarios/encounters and recognize your heart rate spiking, you can tap back into your training scenarios and rely on those moments to help you get back to a controlled state far quicker. Sure, with consistency in your training, you will begin to recognize that this will happen naturally because of the work you have put in/the healthier individual you are becoming. Still, there will also be encounters in which you will have to focus on listening to its beat and take control over it/not let it take control of you.

Train with purpose. Feel the results.

Investing in yourself will not take much time or education to take your training to a more specialized level. Tracking your heart rate inside and outside the gym will pay dividends to your training and day-to-day lifestyle. 

Don’t settle for training aimlessly; instead, train with a purpose and intention. You will see the results sooner and will thank your younger self later for taking the extra steps to a healthier lifestyle.