Changes in your heart rate relative to your baseline and maximal rates can be a valuable measure of how hard you're pushing yourself in training, and the results you can expect for your efforts. The heart rate also reflects your aerobic fitness level and serves as a way to track your progress.
Identification
Aerobic training is exercise that occurs at between 60 percent and 80 percent of your maximum heart rate. Aerobic fitness is essentially an improvement in how efficiently your heart can transport blood. By definition, aerobic exercise trains your heart, developing the size and strength of your cardiac muscle. Your heart rate is an index of the muscle's development. The lower it becomes, the fitter you'll be.
Function
For fitness development purposes, your heart rate can tell you more than how fit you are. According to Edmund Burke in "Precision Heart Rate Training," your heart rate "serves as a barometer for the rest of your body, telling you how hard you are exercising, how fast you are using up energy, and even what the state of your emotions is." By making use of a wrist heart-rate monitor, you can more realistically map out the duration and intensity of your workouts, deciding whether to train in your energy-efficient recovery zone--60 percent to 70 percent; aerobic zone--70 percent to 80 percent; or anaerobic zone--80 percent to 90 percent.
Benefits
Using your heart rate as a means of developing and measuring aerobic fitness takes the guesswork out of exercise and helps you develop a natural sense of your limits and ideal training strategies. This will lead to more consistent training gains, as well as less physiological stress and fatigue from overdoing it. You will be less likely to become discouraged and continue to reap the healthbenefits of aerobic exercise, with a reduced risk of cancer
and cardiovascular disease, and a stronger, sleeker frame.
Warning
Consistently training in your aerobic zone without including workouts in your recovery zone makes you more prone to overtraining. According to Joe Friel, in "Total Heart Rate Training:" "It's during rest periods of low-intensity exercise that those changes that we call 'fitness' actually occur in the body." Additionally, if you attempt to regularly train in the red-line zone--over 90 percent--you'll be in danger of damaging your heart muscle. Using a heart-rate monitor can help you avoid these problems.
Considerations
Burke notes that "features such as temperature, wind, humidity, altitude, terrain and fitness levels can vary from workout to workout and affect the intensity of your effort." Your heart rate might change due to factors apart from your exercise intensity, even rising from caffeine consumption or dehydration. You'll need to keep track of these factors if monitoring your heart rate is to be an effective means of developing or measuring your aerobic fitness.
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