Training and Fitness Articles

 

RECOVERY AND YOUR HEART RATE MONITOR

Would you like to know how successful your training programme is in achieving your goals?

"...you must train very hard to make progress: however, you must be able to recover from your workouts." Jim Schmitz U.S. Olympic Weightlifting Coach 1980, 1988, 1992

 

  

Why do you train? To maintain & monitor fitness or to improve your endurance?

Would you like to know how successful your training programme is in achieving your goals? Instant feedback is one of the most effective ways of keeping you motivated and ensuring that you know your training is on track.

Why is recovery important? Your heart rate monitor can provide you with all the information required to keep you motivated and heading in the right direction & recovery is a key part of any training. Your heart rate monitor can be used to determine how well your heart rate has recovered after exercise, and let you know when you are ready to exercise again, once your body is fully rested. If you are not recovering from the previous session you will not be able to improve endurance and fitness.

Heart rate can also be used as an indicator of overtraining. Successful training requires temporary overloading, longer exercise duration, higher intensity or higher total volume. In order to avoid severe overtraining, overloading must always be followed by an adequate recovery period. With an inadequate recovery period, you may experience a decrease in performance instead of improvement as a result of high training volumes.

Own Optimizer Recovery Test - is an easy and reliable way to determine whether your training program is optimally developing your performance. Polar have developed the test to indicate the level of overtraining or how well recovered you are. Over a five minute period by lying down to record the resting heart rate to standing up to record the variation in heart rate it is possible to determine at what level a person has overtrained. A score is allocated between 1 -9. It is a perfect tool for everyone training regularly, at least three times a week, for fitness improvement or to reach competitive targets. OwnOptimizer helps you to optimize your training load during a training program so that you experience an increase in performance and do not undertrain or overtrain over the long-term.

The Own Optimizer test is a standard feature on the RS400 and takes only five minutes. Each time you perform the test, the RS400 saves the heart rate values and compares them to the previous values registered. You are also presented with a line graph which shows your recovery status at the time of each test.

So does recovery matter? Yes, if you want to ensure that you have a good balance between the duration, intensity, quality of the training and recovery. If poor performance increases you will feel you are not getting any fitter. If you are committed to your training and well motivated you may find that you push yourself harder and you enter a severe overtraining state. Your heart rate monitor can advise how recovered you are and help keep your fitness at optimum levels.

© RefWorld. All rights reserved.