Aerobic exercise - getting in the zone

At whatever level you train or exercise, making sure that you work at the correct intensity is essential. Take things too easy and you’ve wasted your time. But if you work too hard, you’ll soon become tired and lose the motivation to exercise. Here John Brewer provides some guidance on how to get it right.

Selecting the right intensity of exercise has in the past been hit-or-miss – although trusting to luck and what ‘feels right’ can work in a few cases, in others it soon spells disaster. To help ensure that training is done at the ideal intensity, people now use their exercising heart rate to guide them. Keeping your heart rate within your optimal ‘training zone’ is a simple – but highly effective – method of getting the most from any training session. To appreciate how this works, it’s important to understand the relationship between heart rate and exercise intensity.

As your exercise intensity increases, there’s a corresponding and direct increase in heart rate.