TRACKING IN FITNESS TRAINING: PART ONE

TRACKING IN FITNESS TRAINING: PART ONE

Between fitbits, pedometers and GPS analysis within professional sports, tracking fitness habits and trends over time has become a norm. The following posts will highlight five different measures that can be tracked daily and/or weekly to assess training status and improvements in overall health, well-being and sport performance. The first of five measurements is discussed below.

1.    Heart Rate

Regarding heart rate, there are two important measures that can be recorded. These are resting heart rate, commonly referred to as RHR within the fitness world, and training/exercise heart rate.

a)    RHR: is exactly as it would seem. Take a measure of your heart rate over 15, 30 or 60 seconds. There are a number of places around the body where you can feel your pulse. Locate which position is most comfortable, grab a stopwatch, and begin counting. Over time, RHR should decrease as fitness level increases. This change in HR is attributed to increased stroke volume, which means that the heart can pump more blood throughout the body per heart-beat. The end result is that the heart becomes more efficient at this process, and thus reduces the number of beats or contractions it needs per minute.

b)    Training/Exercise HR: More information will be added to the blog about training/exercise HR in later posts, but what follows is a brief highlight. As exercise intensity or level of work increases heart rate also increases. Therefore, training/exercise HR indicates how hard you are actually working. This method of measurement is superior to how you ‘feel’ as working out based upon how you feel often leads to two extremes of training; under-training and over-training. Moreover, measuring training/exercise HR during activity can help determine the phase of training and ensure the correct training zone is met at the right time. More on HR training will be discussed later.