Heart Rate HIIT
HIIT is all about reaching your personal fitness goals. Heart rate HIIT provides you with your own personal yard stick to measure this. Whether you are trying to get more competitive in your sports, live a healthier life, tone your body or lose that extra body fat, you will need to be able to measure accurately how you are doing. Heart rate HIIT takes your inbuilt measurement apparatus into account while doing your HIIT. It measures your intensity by measuring your heart rate.
When you vary your intensity of your HIIT, your heart responds by varying its rate. You have no doubt felt your heart beat faster after taking a relaxed jog, and also no doubt felt it try and jump out of your chest after a sprint. Your heart rate correlates directly with the intensity you are putting into your intervals. Because of this you can now start accurately measuring how intensely you are exercising in your heart rate HIIT routines. This is important as previously you had to measure your intensity by how you felt, and this is where your mind can play tricks on you and make you believe you are more tired than you actually are.
Your heart has a maximum heart rate; this varies per person and is dependent on your genetics, your age and your gender. Knowing your maximum heart rate allows you to do your heart rate HIIT through your hearts full range. It allows you to measure the intensity of your intervals as well as giving yourself the correct time to recover. The more accurate your heart rate HIIT is the more efficiently you will be using your workouts and the faster you will reach your goals of being faster, stronger and leaner.
You can use a formula to calculate your maximum heart rate. This can give you a quick estimation of what your maximum heart rate is. It isn’t 100% accurate but it can get you started if you haven’t had a chance to work this out accurately.First of all you need to get your resting heart rate, you can get this by measuring your heart rate first thing in the morning before you get up. Take it three mornings in a row and then average it. Lets use 60 as an example.
Then you can work out your estimated max heart rate by taking 220 - your age. So my maximum heart rate would be 220 - 33 = 187. Then subtract the maximum from the resting heart rate. (187 - 60 = 127) So you would be aiming at hitting 90% by the end of your interval. So to work this out it would be 60 + (90% x 127) = 174 And when you rest you want to try get down to about 60% of your heart rate so thats 60 + (60% X 127) = 136
You may find that if you are unfit your heart rate doesn't want to get down to the 60%, don't worry too much about that. The fitter you get, the faster you heart rate returns to normal.
Knowing these zones in a workout can ensure that you are not over or under training. Ensuring this will make your heart rate HIIT routines accurate and efficient and provide you with the fastest improvements without pushing yourself over your own limits.
Unfortunately measuring your heart rate by measuring your pulse on your arm is not an accurate gauge. Accurate measurements are made by a heart rate monitor, this device detects your ECG (electrocardiogram - the electric signal originating from your heart) and sends an electromagnetic signal to the receiver device, which is usually a watch. This watch will then give you accurate readings of your heart rate. As a result you get real time information while you are exercising. This allows you to tailor your workouts exactly what you desire and you can train at your ideal intensity, customized for your body and for your HIIT goals.
Not only will you get up to date real time information while you are doing your heart rate HIIT routines but you can measure and monitor your progress over weeks and months. Your improvements are recorded in facts and figures, as you get fitter your resting heart rate decreases. Click here to calculate your resting heart rate. Your heart rate while exercising will also reduce and you will be able to increase your intensities in your heart rate training. Your recovery times in your rest intervals will start to get shorter as well. This path of improvement can be highly motivating as in normal world of exercising progress is slow and difficult to measure. Measuring and recording your heart rate helps show your own progress.
An example of where this can benefit you is measuring HIIT recovery using your heart rate monitor. HIIT routines can be extremely strict in their recovery times, most are predefined in seconds, and for example the standard HIIT routine has a predefined recovery time of 30 seconds. Some people may require more time to recover, especially when starting out. Including heart rate HIIT will gauge when to start the next interval based solely on your body rather than specific times, so you start your next interval only when your heart drops into a particular zone. As a result each HIIT routine is customized for your body and how it is feeling on each consecutive day. You have a much safer measure of gauging what your body can put up with and what it can’t.
Using a heart rate HIIT for sports training can be very effective. Heart rate training can replicate the type of fitness needed for sports so replicating the start and stop intervals of a sport can then be trained for using Heart rate HIIT. As a result you can then train specifically for the fitness required in this sport and this will improve your endurance and ability during the sport.