HRE #8: Cardio Designs for the Fitness Enthusiast

The purpose of this project was to research and understand the impact of cardio designs for the fitness enthusiast - someone whose lifestyle is already active, but is looking to improve fitness benefits. Below are excerpts from this project:

Fitness enthusiast or those who are in more extensive training might often use heart rate monitors to design their cardio training. Below, the student reiterates the importance of heart rate and what it means to monitor it:
"Knowing heart rate is important because you can adjust exercise to reap health benefits. Heart rate indicates the amount of stress or how many times your heart beats per minute during an activity. A person with a RHR of 45 would probably be in good to excellent physical condition so their heart doesn’t have to beat as hard to get the same volume of blood circulation. Monitoring heart rate gives you the exact bpm and the rate of perceived exertion gives a person a range but people may not feel that they are working as hard or harder. Heart rate monitors help people train in certain zones for particular benefits. I would monitor sedentary people or people with low cardio respiratory endurance over an athlete or someone with moderate endurance who knows what their body feels like at certain heart rate levels. A fitness enthusiast would probably be running or cycling because those are the most common and to keep them from getting bored I would recommend rock climbing, swimming, and one-on-one sports. Vigorous exercise means to exercise at an intensity level that is above 60%. Vigorous exercise most likely cannot be sustained for a long period of time for most people. Examples could be running, cross-training or interval training, and cross-country skiing. MET stands for metabolic equivalent and represents the rate of energy expended at rest (1 MET). Exercises are in multiples of 1 MET and depend on intensity. MET applies to fitness because it gives levels for various activities. In performance and training males are genetically predisposed with more muscle mass, which equips males to be physically stronger and faster and women"

During his expedition, the student was asked to reflect on his physiological and psychological experience as he gradually took his heart rate through his training zones:
"I went to the gym and tracked my heart rate while walking on the treadmill. At 40-50 percent I felt find and was able to breath easily. I wasn’t sweating and was able to talk fine. At 50-60 percent I began to sweat but not to where it was rolling down my face. My breathing began to get deeper but I was still able to breath out of my nose fine. At 60-75 percent I was sweating and couldn’t breathe out of my nose comfortably anymore. I could feel the burn in my legs while I was pushing up to and past 75 percent. At 75-85 percent my breathing became very heavy and I could feel my heart began to race. At 85 percent and above my breathing became very hard and my whole body began to burn trying to push through the last two minutes. I could feel my heart racing like it was ready to burst. Sustaining that was not very easy I think I quit at a minute. The cool down at 50 percent I could still feel everything from the 85 percent but my heart rate dropped very quickly. My breathing was still very hard and I couldn’t breathe through my nose comfortably for a few minutes. I still felt like I was exercising hard because I was still sweating during the cool down but my body went back to normal fairly quickly."

Because podcasting has become such a huge movement with iPods, there has been a tremendous surge in the fitness industry to provide programming in mp3 form. The student searched different fitness podcasts for cardio training and assessed their advantages and limitations:
"I searched the web looking for podcasts that were specifically designed to listen to when working out. The ones that I found were all free to use and download to your mp3 player. Once loaded to your mp3 player they are accessible at any time during your workout. I listened to demos both for cardio programs and for muscular strength and endurance and found that they weren’t very motivating for me. They sounded more like instructions rather than a tool to help you workout harder and more efficiently. I would think that the audience of these would be novices who need help but don’t know who to ask and don’t know what to do. Not to get them motivated but to give them a better understanding of what workouts they can do and how to do the correctly. I wouldn’t recommend these to anybody that has access to trainers to aid them or has another person to workout with. I would only recommend this to somebody who is training alone or at home who doesn’t have aid from anyone."

Below is the Public Service Announcement for helping fitness enthusiasts stay active and have versatility in their training.