Today I will teach you how to calculate your maximum heart rate.
In fitness this can be used to calculate the heart rate that you want to reach in order to achieve your goals. I will show you the calculation and then I will give you some examples on how to use this information.
First of all you need to take your age away from 220 (for example if you were 45 you would minus that from 220 which would be 175). The number that you get from this calculation is your maximum heart rate which is in BPM (beats per minute).
Now that you have worked out your maximum heart rate by taking your age away from 220 you can use that number to show you what heart rate you should be aiming for in your exercises.
When doing a cardio vascular exercise it is important to have a target heart rate which can be read by using up to date gym equipment such as the treadmill in the image below which has heart rate sensors that read your heart rate.
I will now teach you how to put this knowledge into action. First of all you need to know what you are trying to attain by doing the exercise, if you are doing a warm up before your workout then you should try to aim for around 75-80% of your maximum heart rate (for example if your maximum heart rate was 175 BPM then for this warm up you should be working at around 131-140 BPM.).
If you were doing a cool down after a workout you should aim for around 60% of your Maximum heart rate but throughout the exercise you should be slowing your heart rate down, you do this by decreasing the speed and resistance of the exercise. (Again for a person that’s MHR is 175 BPM then for the cool down you should be working at 105 BPM.)
Thanks for reading the blog, if you want more advice and information about fitness and how to achieve your goals please read my other blogs.
Written by Joseph Peel.
Gray fitness 