Hello,
I would like to lose weight, and it seems that a healthy diet/lifestyle with cardio is the best way to go.
When doing cardio, at what rate should my heart by working at to get best results?
Most people train too hard or too long, I'm sure you would rather train smart! Beware exhaustion, it doesn't offer any benefit.
Intensity rather than endurance is best for both weight-loss and heart-rate variability. Heart-rate variability is a measure of how well your system can respond to sudden changes in demand, and is a good protector against sudden death from heart attack.
Significantly, heart-rate variability is also improved by eating leafy raw green veg - a plate of salad a day lowers your risk of heart attack enormously, and is easy. What you eat and when is more important than how much you eat. Create a solid nutritional foundation for health and go from there, rather than try to force the weight off by simply limiting calories.
If you are just starting out, or have health problems, then start gently. You can achieve a lot by 20 mins of brisk walking twice a day. The effect of fat-burning from this lasts about 12 hours, so by doing it twice a day, you will always be burning fat, and without harming yourself.
Remember that to be healthy you must adopt a lifestyle that can be sustained for many years. Make little changes and be mindful of the effect. So it should be enjoyable and achievable - indulge yourself with healthful influences, don't deprive yourself or bludgeon your body into submission.
Here are a couple of Mercola links on the subject. Remember,don't go harder or faster than your health status allows. He recommends going to your maximum heart-rate for 20-30 seconds followed by 90 seconds cruising. Repeat up to 8 times, start by just doing it twice.
Phillip Day reckons not to go to your maximum heart-rate for training, but to about 70% of that. (Maximum Heart Rate is 220 minus your age, beats per minute).
Most people are wasting their time working out:
Foods you should never eat after exercise:
long term sustainable weight loss is best achieved by increasing activity by 250kcals ans decreasing calorific intake by 250kcals, this will result in a weight loss of 1 pound per week and not carry a risk of injury. do not increase activity intensity by more than 10% per week to avoid all the associated aches and pains. Most personal trainers dont like to take new clients in January, the investment in programme design, advice and nutritional profiling is often not repaid by the short term motivation of the new years resolution. On average a new client takes up 5 hours of "unpaid time" before and after the first few sessions.
hope all goes well with your plans, remember dont get too caught up at this stage with heart rate training, just feeling slightly out of breath whilst exercising will benefit you. exercising too hard is not sustainable. All too often a too scientific approach will prevent the less informed participant confused and not focusing on the initial goal.
Jx
Hrr
Hi there,
The only way to answer this is to say that everyone is different and it completely depends on the individual and how used to exercise they are.
A very quick way to work out how hard your heart should be working is this though :
Start with 220 and minus your age. That figure is roughly your heart working at 100%, you can then work out from that figure what 50%, 60% etc are from there. You want to make sure that you arent working out at anything higher than 90% and that rate is really only for athlete threshold training.
Generally, working your heart rate working at 50% or above should be perfect for you. Start at this rate and then increase gradually from there.
There are more complex ways of working out your heart rate when working out, HRR for example, but I would go with the simple 220 - age for ease of use.
I hope that is of some use to you?
Russell Valler
Head Trainer and Founder
Vitality Zone, your one stop shop for all you fitness, nutrition, style and wellbeing needs.
The best type of exercising for weight loss is cardio, you will burn more calories than a traditional weight lifting workout.
Swimming is by far the best way to tone your body.
Hey..
As far as i think it totally depend on your workout routine that how much time do you spend while doing cardio and which cardio exercise you choose to do