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Choosing the Right Heart Rate for Cardio Fitness
When you step into the gym, you often have the choice between three different types of training: cardio fitness, strength training, and group classes. Cardio fitness is often recommended if you want to work on your overall fitness and endurance, or if you want to manage your weight. Whether you’re aiming to work on your weight or your fitness, your heart rate is crucial. In this article, we explain the best heart rate for different objectives and provide formulas to calculate the best heart rate for your goals.
Goal of Cardio Fitness
The goal of cardio fitness is often focused on improving overall fitness and endurance. This form of training is also often referred to as endurance training and can be performed at various intensities. Due to these varying intensities, as well as the duration of the workouts, the goals can vary greatly. It is therefore important to monitor your heart rate to determine if you’re training at the intensity level that suits your goals. You can measure your heart rate by wearing a heart rate monitor. Often, you strap this around your chest using a band and can measure your heart rate on the device you’re using to train.
Heart Rate Zones
If the goals of your cardio training mainly focus on improving your fitness, then your heart rate should be between 75 and 90 percent of your maximum heart rate. You can easily calculate this by using the following formula:
Maximum heart rate: 220 – your age in years.
So, someone who is 20 years old has a maximum heart rate of 200 according to this formula. This means that if he wants to train his fitness, his heart rate should be between 150 and 180. Many factors influence your heart rate, including genetics and your baseline fitness level. Therefore, this formula is an estimate and not 100 percent accurate.
If you want to use the same formula for your cardio training for fat-burning goals, your heart rate should be lower, somewhere between 55 percent and 75 percent. This is often called aerobic training, and during this type of training, the body primarily uses fatty acids as energy sources.
Heart Rate Formulas
Because your heart rate can change due to cardio training, it is important to first determine what your resting heart rate is. Your resting heart rate is the heart rate at rest. This is often around 70 beats per minute, but it can be higher or lower. This mainly depends on your baseline fitness, age, and whether you take medication. When your fitness improves, your resting heart rate decreases. There are people with a resting heart rate of 30 beats per minute, but there are also cases where the resting heart rate can be around 100. If you have a heart rate above 90, this may indicate overtraining or illness.
You determine your resting heart rate in the morning, just after waking up, and you actually measure it by counting the number of beats in 1 minute. If you want to measure your resting heart rate very accurately, take 3 measurements on 3 different days and take the average.
With the Karvonen formula, you can determine your training intensity using your maximum heart rate and your resting heart rate. The Karvonen formula is as follows:
Heart rate zone = (Maximum Heart Rate – Resting Heart Rate) * ..% + Resting Heart Rate (+5 Zone -5)
In the Karvonen formula, you start with the difference between your maximum heart rate, which you can measure based on your age, and your resting heart rate, which you have measured for 3 mornings in a row. The difference between these two is your heart rate range. When you add a percentage to this, the different heart rate zones become clear for you, and you know at which heart rate you should train.
