3 Ways To Use Your Heart Rate To Show Progress

When we think of progress, we think of more, more weight, higher heart rate max, and more responsibility at work. Improvement can also be seen in less, less time to complete a task, less time to recover, loss of weight. 

When looking at your heart rate, we can use three markers of progress:

Heart Rate Max: The higher your heart rate max, the stronger your heart is. Heart rate max naturally goes down in age, but exercise will slow that process.

Resting Heart Rate: This is your heart rate when you are at rest. You can take this first thing in the morning, or any smartwatch can tell you your resting heart rate if you wear it to sleep. The lower the heart rate, the less stress you are putting on your heart. The lower rate is due to a healthier heart, which needs to pump less to get blood throughout your body. 

Recovery Time:  This is the time it takes your heart to get back to normal after doing a strenuous exercise, like bike sprints. 

How to use these three markers to show progress? 

Heart Rate Max

You can get your heart rate max by doing high-intensity cardio for about a 2 minute period. 

Here is how I like to find HRM: 

  • Warm-up for about 5-10 minutes. Enough to get a lite sweat going.

  • Pick cardio that is easy to get your heart rate up (Airdyne Bike, Sprints, Versaclimber)

  • Go max effort for 2 minutes (this will feel uncomfortable)

  • Find your pulse and count your heart beats for 15 seconds; multiply that number by 4

  • That is roughly your heart rate max.

The easier way to do this is to my a heart rate monitor like the MyZone, which will give you a baseline HRM and automatically update your HRM as you increase your cardio. 

Overtime if you are working on your cardiovascular fitness, you will see your HRM improve. 


Resting Heart Rate


The best way to get your resting heart rate is with a smartwatch (Fitbit and Apple Watch) or a product that monitors your sleep. But if you don't have something like this, here is how you can find your resting heart rate. 

  • When you wake up in the morning, find your pulse

  • Count it for 15 seconds, multiply that number by 4

  • That is your estimated RHR

Each month track what your RHR is and see if it is going down. If it does not, there could be a few reasons why:

  1. You are not consistently doing cardio

  2. You are not getting consistent sleep

  3. You need to learn some breathing and meditation practices to learn to relax

Your resting heart rate should be between 60-100 bpm.  

Recovery Time

To see if your recovery time is improving there are a few ways to do this. The best and easiest way would be to have a device that monitors your heart rate, like a MyZone. They have a visual display that makes it easy to see how quickly your heart rate is dropping. 

How to measure if your recovery time is getting better?

  • Pick a group of exercises or one exercise (example: Bike sprint 1 minute or Circuit: Kettlebell Swings 15x, Med Ball Slams 15x 2 rounds)

  • Once you complete the exercise or circuit, take note of where your heart rate is.

  • Time and see how long it takes you to get to 130bpm or have a MyZone reading of about 70% of your heart rate max.

  • Every few weeks, do the same exercise or circuit and see if your heart rate recovers quicker.

Coach Josh