Looking to amp up your exercise as part of your New Year’s resolutions? Determining the intensity of your workouts is a good way to make sure you’re getting the level of activity you’re aiming for.
How can you calculate it? It’s all about hitting different heart rates, or the the number of times your heart beats per minute.
If you’re focusing on moderate exercise, experts say you should be getting to 50% to 70% of your maximum heart rate. Intense or strenuous exercise is about 70% to 85% of your maximum heart rate.
“You can estimate what your maximum heart rate is — it’s 220 minus your age. But you can also find online calculators for that,” Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, recently shared on “CBS Mornings.”
For example, a 30-year-old’s estimated maximum heart rate is 190, meaning hitting a heart rate of about 95 to 133 would be considered moderate exercise while a range of 133 to 161.5 would be strenuous.
Staying in your designated range will help you “get the most out of your activities,” the American Cancer Society, which offers an online calculator, notes on its website.
Incorporating the range into practice could also help in weight loss.
At least 2.5 hours of moderate to higher intensity aerobic exercise per week “may help lead to a meaningful decrease” in weight, waist size and body fat, according to a review, published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, of more than 100 clinical trials.
“If you exercise for, let’s say, 20 minutes a day, seven days a week, or 30 minutes day, five days a week, you will achieve significant weight loss,” Gounder said of the analysis findings, but added “you also need to get your heart rate up high enough,” to the moderate or intense levels.
Of course, weight loss isn’t all about exercise — nutrition also plays a big role.
“We always recommend starting with diet and exercise. This is something we’ve been saying for decades now,” Gounder said. “You need to increase your amount of aerobic exercise (and) need to be eating a healthy diet, cut out those ultra-processed foods and so on.”
