What Heart Rate Should You Train At For Weight Loss?

-More and more people wear some sort of watch that will track your heart rate (amongst other things). The idea being this way you can accurately track your heart rate and tailor your workout and intensity according to what it says. What heart rate should you train at for weight loss?

Heart Rate Zones

There is an old myth that you need to be in a ‘heart-rate zone’ to burn the most fat. This isn’t true. You basically want to be working as hard as you can and keeping your heart-rate as high as you can for as long as you can to burn the most calories. Of course one person’s idea of working ‘to their max’ can be very different to another person’s.

And judging it on perceived exertion, whilst gives a good guide is not precise, so it helps me as a trainer and would help you as an exerciser to know where your beats per minute is actually are. For example is you feel you are working as hard as you can and your heart rate is only 120, you need to reassess how hard you need to push. That doesn’t mean to say there is anything wrong with being at 120 if you are relatively new to exercise (or 100 years old!) and that’s all you feel you can manage, but the long term goal needs to be more. A general guide for max heart rate is 220 minus you age. So if you are 50 years old your max would be 170 bpm. And you should be able to average 70/80% of that for an hour’s training. So 140/150 bpm in this example.
Similarly if you are regularly pushing at or over max you may need to take a little longer recovery to bring it down whilst your fitness improves.

Accuracy of Watch

It sounds obvious but the watch is only any good if it accurately and consistently tracks your beats per minute. If it doesn’t you will get an inaccurate calorie burn reading for the session and will be trying to adjust your intensity for false data. You would be amazed how often this is a problem. I find with my clients the watches tend to work pretty well for steady cardio such as jogging. But for other stuff such as weight training, circuits etc. where your arms are moving in different, sometimes sporadic directions the watch loses the heart rate. I have had clients seriously panting and the watch is telling them the heart rate is 70! This is common as well, not a one off. Make sure the watch is tight, if it’s loose it won’t work properly. And check it out straight away when you buy it. If you are working hard and the heart rate reading doesn’t reflect that, take it back.

Conclusion

You want to have heart spikes at or near your max beats per minute. And an average beats per minute of 70/80% of that. But if you don’t have a watch don’t worry just push as hard as you can, try and minimise you rest time and improve on what you do from one session to the next.