Maximum heart rate

Edited by: Gian Paolo Tascio

Assuming that the objectives of a modern sports center are increasingly directed from fitness to wellness, it is right to say, for the many competent operators in the sector, that within a training room the modulation of workloads, which are administered to the members during group lessons, quantifies the skills, experience and skills of a valid instructor.

It is in fact unthinkable to propose at the same time the same identical job to a young partner, who has been regularly attending our sports center for years, and to the mature "Signora Maria", recently arrived at our center.

Unfortunately, the ideal lesson for our client does not always correspond to his hourly availability, so in cases like these, on the advice of a desirable technical advice, the client is directed towards the lesson that best suits a novice in the sector.

The above could be solved by the instructor in different ways:

Before the lesson starts .

During the lesson .

Before the lesson starts .

- assuring him by presenting us, welcoming him with cordiality and education;

- discreetly asking questions aimed at identifying possible pathologies;

-explaining that this is a path to be taken with all the caution of the case and that we are at your complete disposal.

During class

- recommending partial executions and if necessary stop to recover and drink water;

- initially avoiding the use of overloads;

- explaining that music is another "modulator" of workloads and that in this first phase it is not necessarily to be followed;

- teaching them to monitor themselves the heart frequencies at the radial or carotid level in the highlights of the lesson, to understand if the proposed load was more or less intense or if it is necessary to recover again a few minutes before resuming work.

This last point identifies the EXTERNAL LOAD AND INTERNAL LOAD :

EXTERNAL LOAD, or the training program that is administered by the instructor to the student (eg 30 repetitions of half a squat) and hypothetically executed to perfection by each member, therefore ideally the same for the whole class.

INTERNAL LOAD, that is the reactions of our body to the external load, such as the cardiac response to the training program proposed by the instructor, which will vary according to the individual level of "physical form" (for example the 140 bpm of "Mrs. Maria" and the 110 bpm of "Mrs. Roberta" after both performed the 30 repetitions of half a squat).

It is important to underline that for a correct evaluation of the work we are proposing, a different execution of the exercises or the incorrect monitoring of the heart rate make the data obtained by us less true.

It is therefore legitimate to think that what is ideally correct to do is not always feasible, experience teaches it; all this should motivate a good instructor to teach, educate and correct his student as best he can, perhaps even advising him to buy a simple heart rate monitor!

During our training sessions, the formulas of: COOPER and KARVONEN can be used to assess the INTERNAL load (at the cardiac level) according to the set objectives.

FORMULAS OF COOPER AND KARVONEN

(Health / Fitness instructor's - by ET Howley & B.Don Franks - Human kinetics Publiscers, Inc.1995)

Thanks to these two physiologists it is possible to individualize workloads in a way that is certainly more precise than the empirical method (example: if you can converse during the training phase it means that you are probably doing an aerobic job).

Fc max (maximum heart rate) = 220 - age

COOPER : (Fc max) x% Fc

KARVONEN : (Fc max - Fc rest) x% VO2 max + Fc rest

Correspondence table between% Vo2 max &% FC

This table has as its sole objective that of giving only a correspondence between the maximum oxygen consumption and the heart rate, confusing the two formulas would give rise to gross errors of calculation.

EXAMPLE: Calculate the work heart rates of a person aged 22 years (with 65 bpm at rest ), who must perform a cardiovascular work aimed at "weight loss", therefore at the minimum limit of his aerobic threshold: for Cooper 65% maximum heart rate, for Karvonen at 50% of its maximum oxygen consumption (Aerobic Capacity).

As can be seen from the calculations carried out with the two formulas, Cooper underestimates the cardiac load compared to Karvonen because it does not take into account the very important resting heart rates, therefore certainly much more precise.

In 2001 Hirofumi Tanaka (University of Boulder, Colorado) published the results of the analysis of 351 studies out of a total of 19, 000 subjects. Following what has emerged it is possible to obtain the formula for calculating the Maximum Heart Rate in the following way:

CONTINUE: Maximum heart rate according to Tanaka »