Normal Heart Rate: A Guide to Maintaining a Healthy Heartbeat

When you exercise, your body needs more oxygen and energy from your blood. That’s why your breathing quickens and your heart beats faster. The intensity of your workout is directly related to your heart rate. The more strenuous the activity, the faster your heart rate.

But how much is too much and how little is too little? The intensity of your exercise should be just enough so as to be effective and push your body to what it’s capable of, but not so much that it overexerts your heart. 

Your heart rate is a great tool to objectively gauge your exercise intensity and find out whether you’re pushing yourself too hard. Sometimes it may be difficult to ascertain when you’re going over the limit based on how you’re feeling. Monitoring your heart rate in these situations can be beneficial to avoid symptoms of overtraining.    

Gauging Heart Rate During Exercise

Athletes involved in high-intensity sports are known to have a low to moderate heart rate even when they’re going full tilt. They develop a low resting heart rate by constantly monitoring and adjusting their heart exercises. If you wish to maintain your heart rate during exercise, you too can take the help of a heart rate monitor to see how your workout routine is affecting your heartbeat. Nowadays, plenty of fitness bands can easily do this. If your heartbeat rises rapidly, slow down your workout or lower the intensity to avoid 

This leads us to the next step in heart rate monitoring during exercise. What is the heart rate you should be aiming for? First, you need to find out your maximum heart rate, which is the fastest rate your heart can pump at. This number is different for everyone and is dependent on many factors like age, fitness, cardio history etc. 

Maximum Heart Rate

The simplest way to calculate your maximum heart rate is by deducting your age from 220. For example, if you’re 30 years old, 220-30 = 190, which is your maximum heart rate. This means that your heart can handle beating at 190 beats per minute during activity. 

But be aware, the maximum heart rate is not one which you should be aiming at during exercise. It is the absolute most your heart can take, so your desired heart rate should be lower than that to ensure your heart is not overworked. 

The American Heart Association recommends the following heart rate zones during exercise:

• 50% to 70% of your maximum heart rate during exercises of moderate intensity.
• 70% to 85% of your maximum heart rate during high-intensity workouts.

Knowing your target heart rate zone is an important part of understanding your body and designing your exercise routine around it. If you’re just beginning your fitness journey, aim for the lower end of your target heart rate and gradually go higher once you increase your workout intensity.

Guide to Determining Your Target Heart Rate Zone

If you want to zero in on your target heart rate zone, you can calculate it easily using the heart rate reserve (HRR) method. This calculation is for finding the target rate for the vigorous exercise of 70% to 85%. 

• Find out your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220. Let's say you’re 30 years old, then your maximum heart rate would be 190 beats/minute.
• Calculate your normal pulse rate at rest. You can use a simple heart rate monitor to check this while at rest or count it manually for one minute. Resting heart rate can be between 60 to 100 beats per minute. Let’s say it’s 80 beats per minute. 
• Subtract your resting heart rate from your maximum heart rate to get your Heart Rate Reserve (HRR). In our example, we get 110 beats per minute as the HRR.
• Next, multiply the HRR by 0.7 (70%) and 0.85 (85%). Add your resting heart rate to both of these numbers. We get 157 and 173.5 for our example.
• This means that you should aim to keep your heart rate between 157 to 173.5 beats per minute during vigorous exercise if you’re 30 years old with a resting heart rate of 80 beats per minute. 
• You can similarly find your own target heart rate zone using this method. 

Your exercise intensity, technique and breathing should all aim at keeping a normal heartbeat rate. For the best assistance on cardio workouts, sign up for FITCOACH today. Our dedicated AI-based fitness coach will not only curate heart-healthy workouts of just the right intensity, but also self-adjust your fitness plan based on your fitness graph.