Everybody knows that cardiovascular exercise has an important place in a workout regimen. Strength training is just as important, but cardiovascular exercise is right up there. But when you talk about cardiovascular, you're talking about heart rate and working your cardiopulmonary system.
One of the things that's not understood about this is that there are heart rates, and heart rate based workouts, that are better for different types of workouts. And one of the biggest mistakes that people make is to do the same things day after day and plateauing out that way.
One thing about our body, it hates a homeostatic state. And what that means is your body gets stronger or weaker everyday. It doesn't stay at a steady place. And when you're working out, one of the mistakes we often make, especially runners, is they get on a treadmill and they work at the same speeding client for the same amount of time every day. And this certainly beats not working out, but certainly stops progress.
Now you're going to notice that most treadmills and other cardiovascular pieces all have some variation on heart rate training now. And what this means is it takes telemetry from a chest strap or something, and it adjusts the work out intensity based on the heart rate. The really cool thing about this is you can get on your treadmill or a bike everyday, and assign yourself a heart rate workout, but as your heart gets stronger, it will adjust the intensity upward to maintain that heart rate. In other words, heart rate workouts actually adjust the intensity to constantly challenge you and to guarantee improvement.
Now there's also a lot of misunderstanding about heart rate workouts. And there are better or worse versions of them.
The basic idea is that you have a resting heart rate and also a maximum heart rate. Your resting heart rate is as low as your heart rate should go, and your maximum heart rate is the fastest hardest your heart can actually work at.
Now you may never really know what your maximum heart rate is, because it's not safe to redline the body that off. Some of the earlier formulas estimated heart rate at 220 - your age, and later ones are often more accurate to take 209 - 67% of your age to figure out an estimate of your maximum heart rate. But none of these really take into account healthier or less healthy hearts. And your heart is, after all, a muscle. So the best thing to do is to actually work with a personal trainer and do what's called a sub maximal test which will actually estimate your maximum heart rate.
This is one of those advantages with working with a personal trainer, they can get a really good idea what your maximum heart rate is to actually determine what workouts are best for what you want to get out of them.
This is because there are different zones of your heart rate that derive different benefits. And we'll get into those in a later date.
But for now, just understand that heart rate workouts are much more effective than non heart rate workouts for cardiovascular exercise. If you want to know which machines offer better heart rate programs, just ask us!
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