Heart Rate & Weight Lifting – Making The Most Of Your Workout

Since I’ve started measuring my heart rate when exercising, I’ve learned that I’m nowhere near as efficient as I believed.  So, I’ve tried to get better by making the most of my heart rate when weight lifting.  This would also make my run days more efficient, too.

Your Heart Rate & Weight Lifting

I started wearing a heart rate monitor at the beginning of 2010, in an effort to better understand the nature of my workouts.  Having so little time to dedicate to my fitness sessions, I think its important to be as efficient as possible.  I’ve learned there’s room for improvement.

After 2 months of monitoring my heart rate during workouts, the graph shown here  is pretty typical of my heart rate when weight lifting.  If you check out my fitness workout, you’ll see that my workouts are generally conducted in supersets, with a lower body exercise, followed by an upper body exercise.  The lower body exercise calls for larger and more numerous muscle groups, causing heart rate to spike as oxygen demand increases.  Even moving quickly, the upper body exercises still allow my heart rate to fall, relative to the lower body exercise.  Then there’s a drastic drop during the 30-60 second rest phase before moving to the next superset.  You’ll also notice that my average heart rate is 117 bpm, with a max heart rate of 150 bpm.  That’s been pretty typical.

So how I can do better?

Conventional wisdom is pretty fixed when it comes to weight lifting and heart rate training.  What it tells us is that if you want an “aerobic” workout in the weight room, its best achieved by circuit training.  That is – moving rapidly between exercises using light weights and high reps.  Strength training is generally thought to be best achieved by using 60-80% of your manageable weight with lower reps and 30-60 second breaks between exercises, and mass is generally thought to be built by handling weights ranging from 75-95% of your manageable weight using very low reps and long breaks between exertions.

My goal in weight lifting is strength training, and I don’t want to give that up, but I also want to get my average heart rate up into an aerobic zone during my workouts, without giving up the strength training benefits.  My solution is to try adding a jump rope to my workout.  You can see the results here.

Rather than resting between supersets, I’ve started jumping rope.  You can see, relative to the upper plot, the secondary spike in heart rate at the end of each superset, as I transition to the jump rope.  It also shows up in my average heart rate, which is 136 bpm, and my max heart rate, which is 169 bpm.  If we consider 70% of max heart rate to be an “aerobic” workout, that puts me right around the bottom end of my aerobic training zone, as measured by my Garmin Forerunner 50.

So this may give me a way to be more efficient with my workouts, by adding aerobic heart rate training to my weight lifting sessions.  Hopefully, without sacrificing the strength side of my workouts.  My reason for trying to improve my aerobic efficiency will become more apparent as I take a closer look at some of my other activities.

Related posts:

1. Get Stronger, Better, Faster – Know Your Heart Rate When Exercising
2. Why You Can’t Calculate Your Max Heart Rate
3. Using Body Weight For Exercise Training
4. How To Eat After Exercise
5. Splitting Firewood For Exercise