Here’s How Tracking Your Heart Rate Can Better Your Health—and How To Use It To Get the Most Out of Your Workout

Emily Laurence
·7 min read

Remember when all we used to track were our steps? Wearables now—including Fitbits, Apple Watches, and the just-launched Google Pixel Watch—can tell you way more than how many steps you logged throughout the day. Now, it’s standard for your wearable to tell you how great (or not) you slept the night before, prompt you to meditate if you’re feeling stressed, and tell you what your heart rate is and your heart rate zone, or the percentage of your maximum heart rate. 

Knowing your heart rate is especially beneficial for taking your workouts to the next level. In fact, entire workouts are based around it. With this intel, you’ll be able to reach your health goals faster and live an overall healthier life.

Related: Your Live-Well Guide to Maintaining Heart Health and Preventing Heart Disease

How To Know What Your Heart Rate Is and What It Means

Simply put, your heart rate is the number of times each minute that your heart beats. “If you have a fitness tracker or smartwatch, it may have built-in capability to monitor your heart rate, which is also known as your pulse,” says Cary Raffle, CPT, a certified personal trainer and certified orthopedic exercise specialist. Don’t have one? He says that many health insurance plans will provide one for free or at a discounted rate.

Raffle says you can also calculate your heart rate on your own using what is called the Rate of Perceived Exertion, which uses a scale of one to 20. To do this, you assign a number of how hard you feel your body is working, with one being no effort to 20 being maximum effort. Then, you take that number and multiply it by 10. So for example, if you rate your exertion as a 10, your heart rate is likely 100.

Related: We Spoke With Apple's VP of Health to Unpack the Health app, Activity Tracking, Privacy, and More

“The beautiful thing about heart rate training is that while the heart is just a muscle, it is the only muscle that we can easily and scientifically monitor during the course of a workout,” Raffle says. There are different “zones” or heart rate ranges, which can be used to help craft workouts that will help you reach your fitness goals. There are a few different ways to calculate what the zones are, but one of the most standard ways is calculated by the American Council of Sports Medicine. “These guidelines predict your maximum heart rate is equal to 220 minus your age and suggest five training zones ranging from very light to maximal,” Raffle says. For example, if you’re 50 years old, your maximum heart rate is 170. Below are the ranges for each zone.

Heart Rate Zones

  • Zone 1 ( This zone feels like you’re exerting yourself very minimally.

  • Zone 2 (57-63% age-predicted max heart rate): Zone two is done during light exercise and is something you can do for a prolonged amount of time.

  • Zone 3 (64-76% age-predicted max heart rate): Zone three is exertion that can be maintained for roughly 20 to 30 minutes.

  • Zone 4 (77-95% age-predicted max heart rate): This zone is a high level of exertion and can only be maintained for a few minutes.

  • Zone 5 (95% - maximum age-predicted max heart rate): Zone five is the maximum and can only be maintained for a very short burst, less than a minute.

How To Use Your Heart Rate to Your Advantage

“Heart rate training can help you reach your fitness goals faster, improve your health, and help you have a safer workout,” Raffle says. In fact, nationwide fitness studio Orangetheory bases its entire classes around heart rate zones.

Scott Brown, the Vice President of Fitness at Orangetheory, says that all five zones are beneficial in different ways. (At Orangetheory, each zone is assigned a color. Zone one is gray, zone two is blue, zone three is green, zone four is orange and zone five is red.) “Improving cardiovascular health and fitness requires individuals to train at different intensities,” he says.

Brown says that the benefit of zone one is that it serves as active recovery. He adds that it’s also a great starting place for people who are just starting their journey of improving their cardiovascular health. Brown says that in zone two, the body learns how to utilize fats more efficiently. “This is important when you consider the big picture,” he says. “On any given day for the average person, the number of calories expended in a workout session is small and perhaps even insignificant when compared to one's total caloric expenditure. However, zone two training helps improve the body's overall fat utilization capacity, not just during exercise but over the entire day—an important consideration that is often overlooked.”

Zones three and four are both meant to put stress on the body. “Zone three is an essential zone for fitness enthusiasts and athletes because it represents an intensity range that triggers optimal improvements to aerobic efficiency,” Brown says. “This requires time for adaptation not to occur, which explains the recommendation of 20 to 30 minutes [in zone three].” As for zone four, this zone is important for improving the body’s ability to sustain more challenging anaerobic work, according to Brown. In both zones three and four, he says that the body’s tolerance for what it can sustain is being pushed.

Last, there’s zone five, the most intense zone of all. Brown says that this zone should be used carefully; too much time in it can be dangerous. But when used correctly, it serves as a way to test one’s limits, which can lead to a super satisfying rush.

Related: Make These 7 Lifestyle Changes for a Healthier Heart

Raffle says that it’s recommended that healthy adults spend between 150 and 300 minutes a week doing moderate exercise and 75 to 100 minutes a week doing vigorous exercise. “If you’re beginning to exercise, start with a base of between two to four weeks of moderate-intensity exercise at 65% of your maximum heart rate and re-check your resting heart rate on a weekly basis to see if any adjustment is needed,” he says.

As you become conditioned, Raffle says to incorporate interval training, alternating lower and higher intensity levels. You can use the zones to do this. For example, you may alternate between spending two minutes in zone three and one minute in zone four. “This technique will help improve your cardio conditioning and has the positive side effect of EPOC, or excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, which means you will be burning more calories for one to two hours after you complete your workout,” Raffle says.

If you already exercise regularly and consider yourself pretty fit, Raffle says that the zones can be used for HIIT, or high-intensity interval training workouts. A HIIT workout alternates between short work intervals in the higher zones with recovery time in the lower zones.

“Understand that the end result of a heart rate training program is to have a lower heart rate, and not to get your heart to beat as fast as possible,” Raffle says. “Think of your heart as an engine, the stronger it is the less it has to work. In fact, a strong heart pumps more blood each time it beats so it does not need to beat as many times per minute. As you improve your cardiovascular fitness, your heart rate should decrease.”

Knowing your heart rate can be a good indicator of how hard your body is working throughout the day along with physical activity. If you consistently use the zones in your workouts, it can also be a reflection of your heart becoming stronger over time. Suddenly, that information on your wearable just got a bit more interesting, right? It’s just another example of how knowledge truly is power and in this case, it’s power that can help you live a longer, healthier life.

Next up, find out how to improve your heart health straight from doctors.

Sources 

  • Cary Raffle, CPT, a certified personal trainer and certified orthopedic exercise specialist

  • Scott Brown, Vice President of Fitness at Orangetheory