Benefits of Heart Rate Training

What is Involved in Heart Rate Training?

Ask any person who considers themselves “out-of-shape” or over-weight, doing anything relatively low-impact – like jogging, biking, climbing up a flight stairs - they feel as if their heart is going to explode out of their chest. Obviously elevating your heart rate is a good thing when exercising, doing it without proper understanding of the consequences is not exactly healthy or safe and can potentially be more dangerous than beneficial. To be a well conditioned athlete, you need to understand the concept of proper heart rate training in order to spare yourself the discomfort and possibly danger of an overly elevated heart rate when you're exercising.

Heart rate training is much like exercising or working-out any other muscle, since the heart itself is a muscle. Exercising your biceps or legs, you would normally start off with a lesser amount of weight and gradually increased the load as you got became stronger. As your muscles adapt to repeated exposure to increased load, you are naturally able to lift more weight, and increase the number of reps with your added strength.

One great aspect of specific heart rate training is your heart is getting a workout as soon as you elevate your heart rate – no matter what exercise you may be doing. This is unlike your other specific muscles - if you are just running, your arms aren't going to be worked. If you are doing bench press, your legs won't be worked. However your heart IS getting some real fitness benefit since it is working harder to support your blood circulation and it is working harder while pushing weights since your heart needs to feed blood to your working muscles. For a triathlete, you're going to need to do heart rate training for both aerobic as well as core strength related exercises since you'll need not just overall endurance, but have extended core muscle strength & endurance which will also come with increased aerobic fitness. When you swim, you use your muscles to propel you through the water but it's an aerobic activity as well; this also applies to the basic strength and muscle requirements of biking and running as well.

Obviously, having a good heart rate monitor is essential and you’re anaerobic the whole time, you may need to build up your leg strength to cope with the added load of biking – as your legs grow stronger, your cardiovascular system won’t have to work as hard to move yourself up that hill. Just remember to start gradually when heart rate training and work your way up to your desired endurance and strength levels.