Question about HR during Insanity Workout

SheriM120

So I know Insanity is considered a high intensity interval training workout and that's why there are all the short little breaks in it, but is your heart rate supposed to go all the way back down to a resting heart rate or come down from where it was at during the workout? He is always saying "Check your heart rate," but I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to be checking, if that makes sense. I do use my Polar 4 during the workout, but that is mostly to track calories burned. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

kgeyser

You heart rate should come down a bit, but not to a resting heart rate. And now I have bad news re: using your HRM to determine your calorie burn for a workout like Insanity, your calorie burn is probably off. HRMs are great for steady state cardio, but are not as accurate for interval workouts. :grumble: Make sure you take that into account when you are logging your exercise calories so you only eat a portion back to account for any inaccuracies.

heybales

It's described as intervals upside down, actually the intense sections are long, and the rests are shorter, than normal intervals would be. It's not really HIIT, which has longer recovery compared to the hard part.

Normal HIIT would allow the hard section to be really hard, and that can only occur if the rest is long enough.

So Shaun just has you working out up at the anaerobic level almost the whole time, except for those short breathers. So total carb burn high HR.

And that's also why the HRM is going to be very inflated for calorie burn, because the formula tying HR to calorie burn is for the aerobic exercise steady-state zone, same HR for 2-4 minutes.

Insanity is mostly anaerobic, and no where near steady-state.

Just follow their diet guidelines, and use the HRM for what it was designed for as the name implies, monitoring your HR.

And no, they don't expect you to recover that much, and you'd never get back to resting HR during a workout anyway. If you could, it ain't much of a workout.

SheriM120

thanks for the info, So how do you accurately calculate calories burned during the workout??

heybales

thanks for the info, So how do you accurately calculate calories burned during the workout??

Follow their diet guidelines, which includes it already.

That way you don't have to know accurate, which would be unrealistic anyway.

I believe they expanded their FAQ to include decent estimates of calories burned too for different weight people, which is all that really matters.

The energy required to lift 100 lbs free from gravity doesn't change depending on the person, young or old, male or female, high or low HR. It might be harder or easier for someone, but the energy needed, therefore the calories needed, doesn't change.

Now, your personal efficiency with that type of program will change, so at the start you'll be less efficient and actually burn more, until you get the moves down better. Then you'll burn less.
That would be the same as lifting that 100 lbs slightly out in front of you using your back inefficiently, and getting better and using your legs lifting it straight up. First one is a lever, and everyone doing it the same way burns the same amount.

Unless you can find some studies where they tested to see if people doing it stayed just under their Lactate Threshold, meaning it was slightly aerobic, and then they put a gas exchange mask on them with metabolic cart nearby - you'll never have an accurate calorie burn count.

You'll have to let results in hopefully only fat loss tell you how much deficit you must have in place.

Be aware the more deficit you have for fat weight loss - the less you'll be able to get out of the program.
The smaller the deficit, the bigger body improvement you'll get, and possibly more inches lost.