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Enter your details below to calculate your Safe Heart Rate Range.
To ensure workout intensity remains within the safe and desired limits it’s essential for an individual to know their Target Heart Rate Zone. This calculator automatically calculates the Target Heart Rate Zone, a safe range for your heart rate while working out.
We use the Karvonen method of calculating the Target Heart Rate which uses the Heart Rate Reserve (HRR) and Maximum Heart Rate (HRmax) to calculate the final result.
When you work out, your body’s need for energy increases. Your body needs more blood flow and energy in the parts which are carrying out different movements or lifting heavy weights. To satisfy this increased demand for energy and blood flow, your heart has to do some extra labor.
This means the number of beats your heart makes every minute increases as your heart tries to pump more blood to different parts of your body. Especially when you are doing cardio or HIIT (high-intensity interval training), you move at a certain pace and need more energy to do so. During weight training, your hands, legs, or core muscles need more supply of blood during isolation movements. While during dynamic movements (movements that involve more than one muscle group) more than one part of your body needs an extra supply of blood. This means that during dynamic movements your heart rate increases more than it does during isolation movements while during intense cardio it increases the most.
This is why most people find intense cardio and dynamic weight training movements very difficult to do in comparison to isolation weight training movements. While good cardio and dynamic weight training sessions help you a lot, they subject your heart to extra work and thus increased stress. HIIT workouts force your heart into working more than normal which can cause problems for some people.
What happens because of it? If you stay consistent and careful with these workouts then over time the work capacity of your heart increases and you lower the risk of many cardiovascular disorders. But if you are not careful while doing these workouts, you might extend your heart rate to its maximum repeatedly, which may result in heart attacks. Staying withing your target heart rate zone should be a priority while you’re working out.
The heart is a muscle just like all other muscles in your body. If you subject it to regular workouts, its strength increases but if you subject it to very intense workout stress then it may lead to injuries and complications. That’s why knowing at what intensity you should work out is necessary.
Everyone starts working out without knowing how much and how intense their workout has to be. This has resulted in many accidents recently. These accidents range from muscle and bone injuries to cardiac arrests. Knowing your maximum heart rate not only prevents you from over-working your heart and also knowing how far you should stretch your body.
At the same time, people are often afraid to even start working out when they come across the news of such accidents. To make sure that you feel safe working out at the gym and also that the intensity of your workouts stays within safe limits, you should know about heart rate.
There are many devices you can use to check your heart rate. Smartwatches like Fitbit come in very handy in this regard. They are fairly accurate and give you a good picture of your current heart rate. The recent trend of doing HIIT workouts is a big issue because it makes you reach max heart rate very quickly. That’s why after knowing your target heart rate zone by using this calculator you can be sure how much you can extend your current heart rate.
In some situations, your trainer might urge you to workout harder but in these cases as well you should know the limits of your heart and body. Constantly reaching close to your maximum heart rate can be harmful or even fatal in some cases. You should try to stay within your target heart rate zone as a precaution and to get the best workout.
As we have established that over-working your heart is the recipe for disaster, but so is not working out at all. Most people who have cardiovascular disorders are not the ones who work out or follow a healthy diet. While the cases of someone with a healthy workout and diet routine getting a heart-related disorder are more of an exception than the norm.
Also, there are multiple factors working in sync that cause heart attacks. Always a combination of reasons is responsible for lifestyle disorders and not just one reason in particular. People who are physically fit but lead very stressful life are at a huge risk to develop cardiovascular disorders. And people who have a family history of heart issues can also develop cardiovascular disorders at an early age despite their efforts to avoid it.
Gyming might trigger a heart attack since it pushes your heart to work more than it normally does, but that doesn’t mean the correlation between the two can also establish causation. Working out still remains one of the best ways to decrease your chances of developing cardiovascular disorders along with many other lifestyle diseases that the majority of people suffer from.
So, don’t run away from working out but just know how you can work out safely. Most people who suffered chronic heart ailments in the gym were most likely exceeding their target heart rate zone. Because not working out is really not an option if you wanna lead a healthy life.
If you want to lose weight then you must stay in a claorie deficit and maintain it for a considerable time. Workout helps you burn calories and also induce muscle hypertrophy which contribute greatly to weight loss. If you wanna lose weight you can’t skip workouts because during weight loss you should ideally lose more fat than muscle. If you don’t work out then in that case you will mostly lose muscle weight and not the excess fat weight.
But since you can’t lose all the excess fat in a very short time (unlike weight, which many people have claimed to lose in a few months or weeks) you need to strike a balance between intensity and consistency. If you push your body too hard then it’ll make staying consistent increasingly difficult for you. That’s why even in order to lose weight you should know the ideal intensity to aim for during your workouts.
Heart Rate Reserve = HRmax – HR rest
HR rest is the heart rate at rest. For most adults, it is between 60 – 100 beats per minute. A lower resting heart rate indicates better heart health and fitness.
Maximum heart Rate (HRmax) is the highest number of beats per minute your heart can reach during exercise. There are two formulas for calculating it
The first formula is more often used because it’s easier to understand and anybody can use it. But this Maximum Heart Rate Calculator uses the second formula for greater accuracy.
Target Heart Rate Zone (THRR) = (HRR x workout intensity) + HRrest
Maximum Target Heart Rate is calculated as follows
THRmax = workout intensity x HRmax
For example, if calculating THRR for a 40-year-old with a resting HR of 72bpm, whereby training intensity is 35-54%:
HRR = [(220 – 40) – 72] = 108
THRR = 108 * 0.35 + 72 = 110 and 108 * 0.54 – 72 = 130THHR = 110 – 130 bpm