Acumen Stopwatch manual Target Zone & Fitness Training, Determining Your Target Zone

Target Zone & Fitness Training

Determining Your Target Zone

What is Target Zone Heart Rate Training? In order to benefit the most from your workout, you need to become familiar with your heart rate training zone. By working within the correct range, you will achieve your fitness goals and strengthen your cardiovascular system in less time. Here is basically how it works.

Effective conditioning requires that you maintain your heart rate at the proper level for at least 20 minutes per workout (or per day). At too high of a heart rate your activity can become counter effective. For most people, as your heart rate exceeds 85% (the upper limit), your body begins to become anaerobic and produce acids. This also burns less fat which can begin to burn and strain muscles, and even start storing fat. As for the lower limit, this number tells you when you have reached a level of intensity that is productive. A heart monitor will tune you into your body's internal activity level and helps prevent injury or worse.

To make this part easy for you, the Hydra-AlertTMautomatically sets the correct target zone for you after you enter in your age in the heart rate setup mode. The internal auto-setting is based on a generally accepted standard range of 65 to 85% of your maximum HR (where max HR = 207 - Age x 0.7).

There are many variations of formulas for calculating target zones. In most cases they will come up with a range very close to or the same as the auto- setting of the Hydra-AlertTM. If you prefer to fine-tune or program your own limits, this can also be done in the HR Setting Mode (see page 43). The internal automatic TZ calculation is based on the following example:

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