Heart Zones Advice

[TheOriginalMrP]

On the Charge HR, you can adjust the heart zones.  My question is, what is the benefit to changing the heart zones, and how do I know if the zones I change to are accurate (ie correct for fat burning, cardio and peak) and how do I calculate what to change them to if there is a benefit to doing so?

Thanks all!

[slysam]

Hi, I haven't been as into heart rate monitor training lately, but it use to be a mini-obsession of mine. I use to find that on screen or paper it looked like I never received a good workout because my heart rate would read as lower than the appropriate zones. The thing is... There is so much personal variation in heart rates. Some people naturally have a higher or lower maximum heart rate. Some people naturally have a higher or lower resting heart rate. Some of those can be further influenced by personal fitness, hormone balance, and health (among other things). Most formulas are using a standard to guess based on your age and gender. The benefit to adjusting custom ranges is that it can be more accurate for you when you are looking at your workout intensity. For example, my heart rate runs lower (more so in the past as I was slightly hypothyroid but undiagnosed). So I can do stair laps and be out of breath at 140 bpm. At the time when this was the case, I was exercising once or twice a day up to two hours and averaging 15k steps. On paper 140 bpm should have been my normal cardio range, but my physical reaction as like it was anaerobic. I thought I had poor aerobic fitness and started mixing in HIIT to increase my range. I ended up using an hrm app that links with Fitbit iCardio, and it offered self-administered tests to set a custom range. When I ran the test, the maximum HR was around 150, and 140 was in the anaerobic zones. I find when I walk briskly my heart rate is around 101 which by my custom range was in my fat burning (this makes sense as walking tends to be a fat burning zone activity) while running up stairs can be an anaerobic activity. Setting a custom range made it easier to keep track of my actual workout intensity, and I think it made my calorie burn estimates more accurate and also made it more useful to pay attention to my heart rate during exercise. I mainly go by perceived exertion and use the heart rate more for feedback and record keeping, though. So I guess that mainly just answers the why you might want custom zones.

[TheOriginalMrP]

Hi, thanks for this, it all makes sense.  What was the HRM app that you used?

[shipo]

[VENTMODE]

I really wish the medical/exercise community would get their acts together and circular file the whole 220-Age formula as a dumb idea; yes, it is probably accurate for some folks, maybe even a lot of folks, but I would be surprised if it was accurate for even half the population.

[/VENTMODE]

In my case, I'm old but in pretty good shape.  When I first got my Fitbit Surge last year I was surprised to see the heart rate graph clipped at both the bottom and top ends, as if to say, "Sorry, your heart can't go that slow when you're resting, and can't go that high when you're out for a run."

In the end, I had to change the Heart Rate settings to the absolute minimum and maximum allowed by the app before I could see my true daily range.

[SunsetRunner]

Since the Charge HR can't tell you when you are outside of a given range I don't see much value in making the single zone you can customize. It's for that very reason that I still use my Garmin Fenix2 when I want to do actual HR zone training. I can fully customize the zones and have warning alarms when I am above or below a set range.

However the fitbit Charge HR is far more convienent for overall tracking of my daily activity and my sleep paterns. The two devices combined and syncd meet all my needs. I also have the ARIA scale to monitor my weight as well, and I use MyFitnessPal to track my food intake.

All together it gives me a very good overview of how I am doing.