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Calculating your target heart rate
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Your personal target heart rate
Before starting any exercise regime, you should know your Maximum Heart Rate and your personal training zone to make sure that you are training at the right intensity. We are developing a heart rate calculator to give you some guidance on this matter - this will be available soon.
Although Purple Weight Loss can provide you with a basic heart rate calculator for guidance, we would recommend that you use our more advanced and arguably more accurate calculator which is based on the Karvonen Formula. To use this calculator, you must know your resting heart rate to enable us to calculate your Heart Rate Reserve (HRR).
Of course the most accurate method is a treadmill stress test administered by a professional. If you are over the age of 35, overweight, have been sedentary for several years, or have a history of heart disease in your family, clinical testing is recommended.
How to measure your resting heart rate
The easiest and most accurate way to do this is to purchase a heart rate monitor, but...... What if you don't have a heart rate monitor?
...... If you don't have a monitor, don't panic because the learning point below provides you with another easy way to do this by teaching you the old fashioned methodology.
Learning point: Manually calculating your heart rate......
You can manually check your own heart rate by monitoring the radial pulse of one arm with the third and fourth fingers of the opposite arm. The radial pulse can be found by following the following steps:
- Position one hand with the palm facing up toward the ceiling;
- The pulse of the radial artery can be felt on the palm side of the wrist just below the base of the thumb;
- Lightly place the pads of the third and fourth fingers of one hand to feel the radial pulse of the opposite arm;
- When the radial pulse is found, use a clock with a second hand or a timer and begin counting beats. The first beat should be counted as '0' and the count should proceed from thereon (0...1...2...3...etc.);
- Count the number of beats felt during a one-minute period of time. For a faster but slightly less accurate alternative, count the number of beats felt in 30 seconds and multiply that number by two;
- If you are unable to find your radial pulse you can use the carotid pulse on the side of the neck located just below the angle of the lower jaw as an alternative.
Tip: Get comfortable with this method so that you can quickly do this during exercise if you do not have access to a heart rate monitor and are aiming to train within a certain heart rate zone.
Calculating your personal heart rate training zones
Once you have calculated your resting heart rate, you can then make use of the advanced Purple Weight Loss training zone calculator (coming soon) to calculate your personal training zones. If you don't know your resting heart rate, you can still make use of our basic heart rate calculator (coming soon) for guidance.
Once you have calculated your training zones and as long as you have sought medical advice where applicable (e.g. you are over 35, overweight, and have been leading a sedentary lifestyle for a number of years), when exercising, you should try to keep and eye on which zone you are training in.
Some aerobic gym equipment comes with built in heart rate sensors that calculate your heart rate when your hands are in direct contact with the sensors. Failing that, and by far the most accurate and easy way to determine your heart rate, is to purchase your own heart rate monitor.
Alternatively, if you are good at taking your own pulse, take a 6 second pulse check and add a 0 to get the one minute figure (you could also do a 10 second count and multiply by 6 or a 15 second count and multiply by 4).