Heart health is an integral part of day to day life and learning to understand it is vital for physical and mental wellbeing.
It goes beyond external fitness, it’s the most important part of the body and is often unmonitored and unconsidered.
Prevayls® attention to heart health is second to none and plays a huge part in their technology. Below is a ‘Heart Health Series’ to enable you to enrich your own heart health knowledge.
The series homes in on various elements of heart health, what the terms actually mean and why it is important to track and analyse.
Heart Rate
Your resting heart rate is the number of times your heart beats a minute.
Depending on whether heart rate is measured at rest or exercise it can be used to measure general health, stress levels and level of cardiovascular fitness.
As a rule of thumb, the more you exercise, the lower your resting heart rate is. Therefore, heart rate is commonly used to measure how fit a person is.
However, it is important to remember that a healthy heart will not beat with regularity, it speeds up and slows down in order to accommodate your changing need for oxygen based off your activity.
Through tracking of heart rate, certain risk factors can become apparent, for example an usually high resting heart rate or low maximum heart rate may signify an increased risk of heart attack, health conditions or illnesses.
There are several ways to check heart rate, the most traditional of them being to apply two fingers to your pulse and count. However, the majority of people are now turning to wearable alternatives to track their resting heart rate such as using FitBits, Garmin or TomTom smart watches, allowing them to be sign-posted to better health and activity levels.
Heart Rate Zones
Heart rate zones are the range that defines the optimum upper and lower heart rate limits for effective training sessions.
In its simplest form, it should be calculated using an age and gender related predicted maximum heart rate and an equation called heart rate reserve.
Heart rate zones are most commonly used to monitor training zones when working out, they can monitor training intensity and are used to reduce the risk of injury.
How training or exercise is traditionally measured…
Duration – how long you’ve been exercising, usually measured in minutes
Frequency – how often you are exercising across a period of time, usually measured weekly
Intensity – How hard you are working during a workout
What are the five heart rate zones..
Zone 1 – 50-60% of HR Max, a low intensity zone.
Training or exercising at this level of intensity will boost recovery and prepare the body to train in higher zones. This zone allows for easy control of heart rate, any gentle exercise falls into this zone.
Zone 2 – 60-70% of HR Max, light intensity zone.
This zone improves general endurance levels and assists the body in oxidising and burning fat along with capillary density. Training for long periods of time in this zone is great for endurance training.
Zone 3 – 70-80% of HR Max
Working out or training in heart rate zone 3 is proven to increase efficiency of blood circulation in the heart and skeletal muscle. Exercising in this zone will make moderate efforts easier and improve efficiency.
Zone 4 – 80-90% of HR Max, a significant increase in intensity.
Working out in this zone will improve speed endurance. Your body will begin to effectively use carbohydrates for energy and withstand high levels of lactic acid in your blood for longer, it will also be more difficult to breathe whilst exercising in this zone.
Zone 5 – 90-100% of HR Max, this zone if your maximum effort.
This means your heart, blood and respiratory system will be working at maximum capacity. Often zone 5 traning is only used with athletes as interval training to increase peak performance ability. At peak in zone 5, you will probably be unable to speak.
Heart rate zones are commonly used in wearable technology to track and monitor performance, often without us knowing. Fitbit, Garmin and Polar all use them to monitor how effectively we’re working out and training.
Tracking heart rate zones are a great way of understanding your optimising your schedule and reducing the risk of injury personal.
Heart Rate Variability
A healthy heart does not beat regularly like a metronome, instead it’s rhythm changes with each beat.
The variation of time between each heart beat is called heart rate variability.
The variation is controlled by the autonomic nervous system and can be triggered by various factors such as the amount of physical activity you are doing, whether you are stressed, how much sleep you are getting, whether you have any physical health conditions and many more.
Traditionally heart rate variability is measured using an electrocardiogram in a medical setting by detecting the time difference between R waves in the QRS complex.
However, there are now various wearables that allow you to track this at home, they typically measure the wave of blood flow to analyse heart rate variability.
Everybody has a unique HRV, it’s important to measure your own without comparing it to others, the best method is tracking over time in order to understand your own pattern.
For adults, a normal HRV can be anywhere from below 20 to over 200 milliseconds.
HRV and the autonomic nervous system
Your autonomic nervous system has two sides and both alter heart rate variability in different ways.
The parasympathetic side – this slows your heart beat and induces a higher HRV. This side is related to your relaxation response.
The sympathetic side – this speeds up your heart beat creating a lower HRV. This side is related to your fight or flight response.
Measuring heart rate variability is the best way to analyse your autonomic nervous system and is the best indicator of any imbalances.
Generally, high HRV is considered an indicator of a healthy heart, greater cardiovascular fitness and means you are more resilient to stress. Whereas, a low HRV can be associated with depression and anxiety.
Tracking heart rate variability helps you to become more aware of your nervous system and how you generally live. Stress is not something that can be eradicated in life, however tracking something like HRV can help identify stress triggers and help you to manage and identify these in the future.
Heart Age
Your heart age does not necessarily reflect your genuine age.
Rather, it is a calculation of risk factors for cardiovascular complications and what parts your lifestyle choices play in these. These factors include: blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, physical activity levels, diet and smoking.
Heart age can be measured by a medical professional, or now, by using online questionnaires, providing you have access to your blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
As a rule of thumb, a younger heart age means a lower risk of heart disease and overall better cardiovascular health. Whereas a high heart age can make you up to three times more susceptible to heart disease or strokes.
Using wearable technology devices to track your physical activity levels and heart rate will give you an insight into your performance levels. Monitoring this regularly will give you the ability to track progress and improvements, all leading towards the possible lowering of heart age.
Knowing your heart age can aid you in understanding your risk of cardiovascular diseases and enable you to reduce this risk, allowing you to be more in control of your heart health.
Heart Rate Recovery
Heart rate recovery is typically defined as the decline in heart rate following the end of exercise.
Currently it is under-considered when it comes to insights in wearable technology. However, it is vital it becomes a regular feature in wearable devices to enable consumers to measure their fitness levels, fitness progression and even whether they have any underlying cardiac conditions.
It cannot be quantified by age groups as it differs on a personal basis but typically, the lower your heart rate recovery time, the better cardiovascular condition you are in and the higher your fitness levels are.
By following a regular fitness regime your heart becomes more efficient, in turn, lowering your heart rate recovery time.
Orthostatic Heart Rate
In medical terms, “Orthostatic” refers to conditions relating to, or caused by, an upright posture.
OHR refers to the changes to heart function brought on by standing up from a resting position (usually lying down).
When resting lying down, your heart has the least amount of work to do as you’re not undertaking any activity. When you stand up, your heart must overcome gravity and pump blood against the pull of gravity all the way up to your head; this causes your heart rate to rise.
A lot can be learned about a person by measuring the difference between lying down and standing, and this is done using an OHR Test.
The OHR is the difference between the standing heart rate and the resting heart rate. For this test to be most useful, it is advisable to collect 7 days of data and then compare the daily reading to the look at the trend over this period.
Performing an OHR test can determine how recovered or under covered you are based on the small differences in beats per minute.
Often the combination of a OHR test with a heart rate variability test enables more accurate insight on whether to train as normal, reduce training intensity or rest and to advise whether you could be under-recovered or over-training.