Heart Rate Monitor...Now What?

If all you want to do is lose weight, put the HRM away. It is pretty much useless for that. The whole fat burning zone is mostly a marketing term and has very little relevance to weight loss. Eat less than you burn and you will lose weight. Exercise for your health.

sj1sunshine wrote: »

I found my heart rate monitor and have been wearing it when I run/walk/bike...but I am not sure I know what I should be looking for when I am using it. I want to lose weight...about 35 pounds...I am 39 years old. Do I take the 210-39 and get 171...and then find the 60-70% range for burning fat? And then I try to exercise and keep my heart rate at that intensity? If so, I don't know what I am going to do, because when I run, my HR is between 145-155...and that is too high for fat burning? Looking for some assistance so I can better understand this...or if I ma going about it all wrong...

If you're not training for anything specific just go out and exercise. Have fun. If you tie your HRM to Strava, Endomondo, Wahoo Fitness then by all means wear it. It will give you a better estimate for caloric burn. However don't stress over numbers. Sometimes I think we are so connected, that we forget to enjoy the exercise. And anytime you're Caloric Burn is more that your Caloric Intake you will lose weight.

To answer your question.

Your Fat burning zone is your Aerobic Zone. Typically that is 50-75% of your threshold.
Your "Aerobic Endurance Zone" is roughly 75-85% of your threshold. This will help you improve performance and endurance. I wouldn't recommend going above 85% unless you're completely comfortable with it.

You might find that when starting it out can be quite tough to be able to keep your HR down into the "fat-burn" zone when exercising. I know I do.

sj1sunshine wrote: »

That is exactly what I am finding...I have been running daily for 8 weeks, but it still stays between 145-155 during my runs.

Don't worry about it. The main thing is that you're able to run at a pace you can sustain for the duration of the run. Once you've worked out what that is then the HR monitor should help with maintaining that. A lot of my runs are done using the HR to assist with pace management because without it I have a tendency to go too fast and tire myself out.

I suspect as we get fitter we'll be able to maintain a pace in the fat-burn/conversational range - for me at the moment that'd actually be a fast walk rather than a run as I find I can't really sustain a run at anything lower than about 135bpm (and it's more like 150 if any hills are involved) and my max HR is only 180 or so.

MeanderingMammal wrote: »

220-age is a very crude approximation of Max Heart rate and you've got no idea of whether it's realistic unless you go and get lab testing done. It's only worth doing that if you're consistently in the top three for your age group in competition.

Training Peaks has a couple different methods for finding out your Functional Heart Rate Threshold LINK. If [To whom it may concern] is not wanting to go and have lab work down..... I've also seen GMBN & GCN Give a couple ways, They basically recommend going up a good hill and increase your gearing every 20-25 seconds and when you give out that's your maxim HR threshold.

Really need to calibrate the HR. The zone thing does not really matter at all. The more you get into running, it may be important to get the bet use out of the HR to improve or to use it as a tool to gauge your improvement.

Even if you have purchased a quality HRM, the readings will only be as good as your setup information. An accurate estimation of caloric expenditure requires the following input:

Resting heart rate (HR rest)
Maximum heart rate (HR max)
VO2 max
Weight
Age
Gender

Not only must this data be accurate when you set up the HRM, it must be updated as well when your fitness level increases or if your weight decreases.

Determining HR max and VO2 max are the most difficult tasks. You can use a prediction formula (e.g. 220-age) or the built-in "fitness test" of a HR (i.e. Polar), but these have a not insubstantial standard of error. For HR max, I would recommend a Google search for various predicted HR max formulae and determine a range of possibilities. Then compare your exercise heart rate to your feelings of perceived exertion. If your HRM shows your HR during exercise is 90+% of maximum, but you feel like you are cruising at an easy effort, your HR max is probably higher than the predicted number.

VO2 max is even trickier. Keep in mind that as you continue to exercise, and you loose weight your cardiovascular fitness level will improve (that's the whole point, right?). When that happens, you need to adjust the VO2 number up and the weight number down in your setup.

I found my lactate threshold heart rate (LTHR) by running with my Fenix 3 and a chest strap. It detects the threshold based on HRV which is heavily affected by whether your sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system is the dominant influence on your heart. Two different watches have detected several times for me and always at exactly the same value, except for when I'm heavily fatigued. It gets to the same value I had predicted for myself.

The nice thing about knowing your LTHR is that you can do your HR zones without knowing your maxHR. Well, that, and it seems like the fastest way to run any distance beyond a sprint is to keep my HR a couple beats below my threshold. I'm burning a match when I go over and I'm recovering slightly when I go a bit under.