Your Heart: The Beating Drum of Your Body
Our hearts play a vital role in maintaining our overall health by facilitating the transportation of oxygen, nutrients, cells, and various other substances throughout the body. The heart also aids in the removal of waste products and toxins. Capable of adjusting its function to meet increased demand, it responds to various triggers, including environmental, hormonal, and neuronal factors. It achieves these functions through collaboration with the body’s essential fluid: blood.
How Does Your Heart Work?
Muscle fibres within the heart’s four chambers contract and relax in a meticulously regulated pattern, allowing for the synchronised filling and ejection of blood, which is then pumped to different areas of the body. In healthy individuals, the heart beats 60-100 times per minute at rest, which is known as our resting heart rate.
How Does Your Heart Maintain a Regulated Rhythm?
A significant portion of the heart wall is formed of thick muscle tissue. These muscle cells, known as cardiac myocytes, are highly responsive to stimuli, particularly electrical impulses, which prompt them to contract. Within this population, about 1% are specialised pacemaker cells capable of generating electrical impulses. These pacemaker cells initiate the contraction cycle within the heart.
The electrical impulses originate in a specific area of pacemaker cells called the sinoatrial node (SAN). From there, the impulses propagate through the heart, triggering muscle cell contractions sequentially from the top to the bottom of the heart. This rhythmic contraction pumps blood from the upper chambers to the lower chambers and then out to the rest of the body.
Why Is It So Important to Raise Your Heart Rate?
Given the heart’s crucial function in sustaining life, it’s imperative to prioritise its health, especially amidst the increasing prevalence of obesity and related health conditions, such as cardiovascular diseases. Similar to any other muscle in the body, regular exercise that elevates the heart rate contributes towards its strength and overall health.
Benefits of Getting Your Heart Rate Up:
- Your cardiovascular function will get better. It’s like playing an instrument; the more you practice, the better you’ll get. So, by initiating regular bursts of increased heart rate, your heart will become more efficient at doing its job.
- There will be more force behind each contraction, meaning the heart muscle tissue will be able to work at higher intensities for longer, and the muscle cells will be able to make energy quicker to fuel the contractions. This is beneficial for aerobic activities such as running and swimming, but also means that when at rest, the heart doesn’t have to work as hard to produce the same output.
- It’ll help you lose weight! When you exercise with an elevated heart rate, you’ll burn more calories. Even a few hours after an intense cardio session, you’ll still continue to burn more calories than if you hadn’t exercised.
- It will help lower your cholesterol level and boosts your immune function, keeping you well.
- Getting your heart rate up with regular exercise will lower your risk of heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and many more health conditions.
What are the Best Ways to Get Your Heart Rate Up?
- High-intensity interval training (HIIT).
- Aerobic exercises like running, cycling, and swimming.
- Aerobics classes such as spinning, boxing, circuits, and dancing.
- Individual short exercises, for example skipping, jumping lunges, and burpees.
- Gym equipment-based exercises using a treadmill, cross-trainer, exercise bike, indoor rower, and step machine.
Heart Rate Zones
As everyone’s fitness levels differ, it’s important to ensure you don’t overdo it when exercising. Fitness must be built up gradually over time, otherwise, you could put yourself at risk of musculoskeletal injuries and issues.
Calculating your maximum heart rate is a good way of assessing what level of exercise you should be doing. This can be found by taking away your age from 220.
Once you have found your maximum heart rate, this value can be used to identify your heart rate training zones. If you’re just starting up, exercising at 50% of your maximum heart rate is a good place to begin. Moving on from there, 50-70% of your max heart rate gives you optimum fat-burning capacity and will ensure it remains aerobic, so this is an ideal heart rate zone to use for your training.
Have You Tried HIIT?
HIIT, or ‘high-intensity interval training’ is a type of training that involves short bursts of intense exercise alternated with fixed rest breaks. The total session time doesn’t have to be long; even 10 minutes will greatly benefit your heart health. It’s an excellent way of getting your heart rate up for short bursts and is also a fantastic calorie burner! HIIT workouts are very easy to adapt, so you can easily include exercises you particularly enjoy or work around an existing injury.
If you’re new to HIIT training, there are masses of HIIT workouts out there! Follow workouts from health magazines, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can watch fitness vloggers and personal trainers take you through each step. Workouts are often in a circuit format, so you can start with a low number of repetitions and work your way up slowly as your strength and stamina improve.
What Are You Waiting For?
With this new knowledge, it is now up to you to put this into action; not tomorrow or next week… now!
We all know that the most challenging thing is getting started, but once you do, it’ll become second nature to incorporate higher heart rate activities into your weekly routine. Remember, if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need to build up slowly. And if you have any pre-existing health conditions or concerns regarding exercise, always make sure you consult your doctor before starting a new exercise regime.
A happier heart = a happier life.
