Heart rate

mortikarobinette

Went walking. When I got back home my heart rate was 120. It's usually around 70. Is that good or should I aim higher/lower?

AnnPT77

There's no good way to answer this question, at least not without knowing much more about you. Different people have different heart rate ranges. They can be estimated based on age, but those estimates can be quite inaccurate.

Any walk burns calories, and if you're newly doing noticeably more of it, it will begin improving your fitness.

Over time, to continue building fitness, you would want to keep gradually increasing the challenge for yourself. This could be walking a little faster for the same amount of time, or walking for a longer time, or walking in a more hilly place (or on stairs), or doing some activity you enjoy that's more intense than walking.

If your goal is weight loss, there's no magic heart rate to aim for. You may've heard about the "fat burning heart rate zone", but that's not important in the way that some blogs and such would have you think. If you're in a calorie deficit (burning more calories than you eat), the shortage will mainly be made up by burning fat. (We always lose a little lean tissue in addition to fat; by exercising, losing slowly, and eating enough protein you minimize that lean tissue loss.) The "fat burning zone" is more about where relatively more of the energy comes from during the exercise itself. That can be important to athletes who need to plan fueling for their endurance events, but it's not really important for weight loss. When you're in a calorie deficit, eventually your body has to burn fat to balance things out.

If your goal is weight loss, the best way to burn calories through exercise is to pick an activity you enjoy, decide how much time you can spend on it and still maintain good life balance (time for job, family, friends, chores, other hobbies, etc.), then do your chosen activity at an intensity that's challenging, but not so intense that you feel exhausted and drag through the rest of the day. Exercise is supposed to be fun, and energizing.

If your goal is fitness, then increasing the challenge of your exercise over time, and perhaps varying what you do, will become more important.

mortikarobinette

Thanks. I was asking because of the whole fat burning zone. But it's good to know it's not as important as I was thinking.

mywayroche

Your fitness level is largely down to how quickly your heart rate returns to resting levels. In terms of exercise, unless you're training for something then just moving around more will burn fat