Target Heart Rate Zones
Heart rate zones are a useful tool for gauging your exercise intensity. First, you need to determine what your target heart rate is.
Target heart rate is calculated based on a percentage of your maximum heart rate. In general, you should exercise in the range of 50%85% of your maximum heart rate. For a 20-year-old person with a maximum heart rate of 200, the target heart rate range during exercise is 100 to 170 beats per minute .
How do you decide what your target number is? If you’re just starting out, you should aim for the lower end of this range. You can also choose your target heart rate based on your exercise goals.
Target heart rate can be broken down into five different zones that help you achieve different exercise goals. Heart rate increases with each higher zone.
How To Reduce Your Risk Of Developing Heart Disease
Even though bradycardia may not be prevented, you can reduce your risk of heart disease through regular exercise, eating heathy foods, keeping blood pressure and cholesterol in check, managing stress, and monitoring and treating existing heart disease.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of having regular physical exams and notifying your doctor of symptoms you are experiencing. This may be the only way to catch a problem that usually does not have symptoms early on.
Causes Of Low Heart Rate
Firstly we will discuss things directly affecting the heart tissue and the conduction system called intrinsic disease. Aging is a common cause of slow heart rate, which results from degeneration of the conduction system of the heart. Heart attacks may damage areas of the conduction system also. Conditions that affect many organs of the body such as sarcoid, lupus and others can also affect the conduction system of the heart. Undergoing heart valve surgery such as the TAVR procedure for aortic stenosis, the mitraclip procedure for mitral regurgitation, mitral valve replacement or mitral valve repair, aortic valve replacement, or other complex heart surgeries may also cause trauma to the conduction system of the heart. Sometimes infection of the heart valves can extend in to the conduction system of the heart also.
Next we will discuss outside influences on the heart and conduction system known as extrinsic causes. Certain situations such as coughing, vomiting and others can lead to slow heart rate through the nerve system. Drugs that directly slow the heart rate include beta-blockers, calcium channel blockers and others. Metabolic disorders such as hypothyroidism can lead to a slow heart rate. Levels of electrolytes such as potassium derangement can lead to a slow heart rate.
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Can You Have A Low Heart Rate And Be Unfit
People who are physically fit can have a heart rate as low as 40 beats per minute. However, among persons who aren’t physically active, bradycardia is frequently a symptom of cardiac issues. Fit people with normal hearts can have a variety of reasons for having low heart rates, such as aging, anxiety, stress, sleep deprivation, etc.
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Why Could A Low Heart Rate Be Bad In Some Situations
The heart needs to pump out a certain amount of blood to provide the body with the blood it needs to function. The amount of blood pumped is known as cardiac output and is usually defined as liters per minute. Heart rate of course affects this output. In some patients a low heart rate can lead to a low output and cause symptoms such as dizziness, shortness of breath and fatigue. These symptoms are associated with low output heart failure. In other patients a low heart rate causes no effect whatsoever as the heart simply pumps out more blood with each beat to compensate.
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Causes Of A Slow Heart Rate
Its normal for your heart rate to change throughout the day. It speeds up when you exercise, slows down as you recover from exercising, and is usually at its lowest while you sleep.
Sometimes people have a slower heart rate than normal. This is called bradycardia, and it isnt necessarily a problem. Its diagnosed when your heart beats less than 60 beats per minute.
There are several causes of a slow heart rate. The most common are being young or physically fit. The heart is a muscle, and just like the other muscles in your body, it responds positively to exercise. When youre in good shape, your heart doesnt need to beat as often to supply your body with enough oxygen.
But a slow heart rate can also be a sign of a medical problem, such as a heart condition. If your resting heart rate is slow and you have other symptoms of bradycardia such as lightheadedness, call your doctor or go to the ER.
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Does Bradycardia Require Treatment
If your heart rate is slow, but you dont have symptoms, theres no reason to worry. However, its a good idea to know the signs of trouble because bradycardia in some cases does require treatment.
For example, if your heart rate drops into the 30s, you might not get enough oxygen to your brain, making fainting, lightheadedness, and shortness of breath possible. Blood can also pool in your heart chambers, causing congestive heart failure.
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Can A Resting Heart Rate Be Too Low
A low resting heart rate, also called bradycardia, can be a symptom of certain health conditions. However, in athletes, it is typically not worrying.
A low RHR usually does not cause health concerns. If a person is an athlete or does a significant amount of exercise, they will typically have a lower RHR. This just means their heart is more efficient at pumping blood around the body and does not need to beat as fast.
A lower than average RHR is not a cause for concern unless it causes other symptoms. For example, if a person feels light-headed, dizzy, or weak, they may want to contact a doctor.
Athletic heart syndrome is a relatively noncancerous condition affecting people who exercise regularly. It describes changes in the heart due to continuous strenuous physical activity.
Exercise can cause a variety of changes in the heart, often called
These changes are not necessarily a bad thing. They are merely physiological changes that occur because of repeated stimulus, and they allow athletes to perform their sport at a high level.
While athletic heart syndrome is relatively rare, there is usually no need to diagnose it because it typically causes no symptoms. However, if an athlete experiences cardiac symptoms, a doctor can rule out other heart conditions like:
Low Heart Rate Training: All You Need To Know
Heart-rate training could easily be one of the most confusing aspects of any athletes workout routine. However, once youve got your data as well as knowledge of what to do with the data, it is a relatively easy way to elevate your performance.
Quite a number of people support and canvass for HIIT training alongside hard intervals with a mindset that a quality session should involve pushing yourself to limits. However, there are several perks that lower heart training offers that would reflect in your performance.
LOW HEART-RATE TRAINING: ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW
Heart-rate training could easily be one of the most confusing aspects of any athletes workout routine. However, once youve got your data as well as knowledge of what to do with the data, it is a relatively easy way to elevate your performance.
Quite a number of people support and canvass for HIIT training alongside hard intervals with a mindset that a quality session should involve pushing yourself to limits. However, there are several perks that lower heart training offers that would reflect in your performance.
Provided your goal is to build a body that is injury-proof and enjoy a lengthy and successful career as an athlete, then getting rid of the Go hard or go home mentality is essential.
The human body is designed to typically recover from stress within a particular time period, however, continuously stressing your body gives it little or no time to recover.
HOW DOES LOW HEART-RATE TRAINING WORK?
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Exercise Recovery And Overtraining
Athletes sometimes monitor their RHR to help them determine when they have fully recovered from a hard workout or race. Since they already know their usual RHR, they can monitor it and see when it returns to normal .
A resting heart rate that is 5 bpm above your usual RHR indicates that you may need more recovery time.
A high resting heart rate is a sign of overtraining. Your resting heart rate may be elevated for one or more days after a vigorous endurance workout, such as running a 10K race or walking a half-marathon. You may want to delay another hard workout until your resting heart rate has returned to its usual value.
Fitness monitors and apps that record resting heart rate daily can use that data to give you a notification when you are ready for another hard workout. If you aren’t fully recovered, the app might recommend a light intensity workout instead.
When I See A Patient With A Low Heart Rate I Ask Myself The Following
Is the low heart rate a physiologic finding or a pathologic finding? An example of a physiologic low heart rate would be an athlete with a low resting heart rate from being trained, which is absolutely fine. An example of a pathologic heart rate would be a disorder of the internal pacemaker system of the heart such as heart block that would often need a pacemaker inserted as treatment.
Is the low heart rate the likely cause of symptoms? Symptoms of a low heart rate may include dizziness and fatigue. In order to be attributed to a low heart rate the symptoms should occur at the same time the heart rate is low.
Are there any reversible causes for the low heart rate? Medicines such as beta-blockers or disorders such as hypothyroidism may lead to low heart rate and if the heart rate is dangerously low and causing symptoms as a result of this, stopping the medication or treating the underlying conditions will likely reverse the symptoms.
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Which Is The Best Way To Measure Your Resting Heart Rate
You can measure your heart rate manually, and the procedure is very simple. The most convenient place to measure it is on your wrist. First, you have to locate the pulse or beat by pressing the side of your wrist below the thumb. Press gently on that place for exactly 30 seconds and double the beats. This gives you your heart rate in beats per minute . If you feel your beat is a bit irregular, count it till 60 seconds.
The best time to measure your resting heart rate is as soon as you get up in the morning, preferably after a good nights sleep.
Your Resting Heart Rate Can Reflect Your Current And Future Health
- By Matthew Solan, Executive Editor, Harvard Men’s Health Watch
One of the easiest, and maybe most effective, ways to gauge your health can be done in 30 seconds with two fingers. Measuring your resting heart rate the number of heart beats per minute while youre at rest is a real-time snapshot of how your heart muscle is functioning.
Its easy to do. Place your index and middle finger on your wrist just below the thumb, or along either side of your neck, so you can feel your pulse. Use a watch to count the number of beats for 30 seconds and double it to get your beats per minute. Repeat a few times to ensure an accurate reading. While a heart rate is considered normal if the rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute, most healthy relaxed adults have a resting heart rate below 90 beats per minute.
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Resting Heart Rate Included In Fitness Calculator
Ulrik Wisløff, a professor at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has previously argued that good fitness is a very important goal for your health.
Fitness is one of the things that says the most about your health right now and in the future, Wisløff has said.
He and his colleagues have created a fitness calculator based on tests they have done on participants in a study of the population of Trøndelag County, called HUNT3.
The calculator includes resting heart rate, along with age, weight and height, among other factors.
How Do I Check My Resting Heart Rate
To check your heart rate:
- Sit down and rest for 5 minutes.
- Turn your wrist so your palm is facing up.
- Feel for a pulse at thumb side of your wrist.
- Once you feel it, count how many times you feel a beat in 30 seconds. Then double it.
If you cant find your pulse at your wrist, put 2 fingers on the side of your neck, next to the windpipe.
If you still cant find a pulse, ask someone else to feel it for you.
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What Is Your Lowest Heart Rate Ever
Well, if you cant win the races, youve got to focus on other competitions. One of my personal favorites is the physical parameter: Low Resting Heart Rate. As I have described previously, your resting heart rate gets lower as your conditions gets better.
You will probably already have noticed that your resting heart is lower when you are in good shape. This is because of a larger stroke volume or more correctly a bigger parasympathic drive on the sinus node. It is easy to monitor your resting heart rate, just put on your Polar rim when you wake up and relaxe for a couple of minutes.
Now I want to know: Who has had the lowest resting heart rate ever?
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Measuring Resting Heart Rate
Though there are a number of products, like smartwatches and heart rate monitors, that can measure resting heart rate, all you need is a watch with a second hand.
To measure your heart rate, place a finger over the radial artery or carotid artery. The radial artery is found at the base of the wrist on the side of the thumb. The carotid artery is found on the neck, to the side of the windpipe, just under the angle of the jaw.
Once you have located the artery, place your index and middle fingers over it and count the number of pulsations in one minute. A quicker method is to count the number of beats over 15 seconds and multiply this by 4 to determine beats per minute.
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Should You Be Concerned About A Low Resting Heart Rate
Sure, your heart speeds up when you watch an action movie or watch your child do a dangerous move in gymnastics.
But if your heart is a slowpoke the rest of the time, your health could be at risk.
Cardiologists consider a pulse rate of between 60 and 100 beats per minute to be normal, and over the course of adulthood, our resting heart rate usually manage to be pretty consistent.
The vast majority of U.S. adults fall into the normal range. In a 2011 study of a decades worth of heart-rate data from 49,000 American adults, the average RHR was 72 beats per minute.
But some of the RHRs studied were, well, slow. About 15 percent of the men and 6.9 percent of the women had an abnormally low RHR of fewer than 60 beats per minute a phenomenon known as bradycardia.
Researchers are still trying to disentangle the many factors that may cause the condition. One thats key is the autonomic nervous system, the control center that keeps our internal organs humming so we dont have to initiate every breath or beat.
That system has two parts: the sympathetic nervous system, which responds to perceived threats and speeds things up internally, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms our processes down.
A large percentage of endurance athletes have RHRs as low as 40 beats per minute, and even lower when they sleep.
That doesnt let the rest of us off the hook, however.
What Happens To Your Heart Rate During A Heart Attack
A heart attack can also trigger a slowing or accelerating of your heart rate. Likewise, your blood pressure during a heart attack may increase or decrease depending on such factors as the type of heart tissue injured during the event or whether certain hormones were released that spiked your blood pressure.
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The Bottom Line: Youre Probably Ok But
You’re probably OK, but it’s worth talking to your doctor.
To recap: youre probably fine if your resting heart rate is over 50, or 40 if youre an athlete. Youre also probably fine if you dont feel any of the symptoms of bradycardia, like dizziness, fatigue, sweating, or fainting.
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But if youre close to those values and still worried, its worth talking to your doctor and getting a few simple tests, including hematocrit, blood oxygen content, electrolyte levels, heart rate variability, and blood pressure.
If youre a health nut, its easy to obsess over isolated measures like your heart rate. The bottom line is, if your low heart rate is a problem, youll probably be feeling it. If youre exercising regularly and have a low heart rate, but you feel good and every other measure of cardiac health looks good, youre fine.