Ali Gordon

What is your target heart rate

From the roof top at the Four seasons Hotel in Lisbon Jay McLaughlin and myself took to the open air track to undertake some serious hit training to work off all those extra calories, and of course flex the Olympus Pengenration camera.

I often confuse myself with which cardio I prefer and I think the blend of Hitt and Liss really suits me rather than being all one sided. Aside from preferences lets discuss optimising our performance by keeping in touch with our own heart rate during training. So to start off we need to find our maximum heart rate which if you spend 5mins online you will find a calculator or a short paragraph describing the easiest method on how to find your maximum during your actual session, As not everyone can calculate depending on your individual body type.

When you have established your maximum beats per minute you need to find your optimum training intensity there are three main zones used to categorise this.

These are three broad training zones:

60-75% – easy
75-85% – moderate
85-95% – hard

To find your target heart rate you can follow this simple calculation, measure your resting heart rate (laying still, soon after you wake up. Ideally take an average over a few days). Subtract the resting rate from the maximum you took above. This figure is your working heart rate. Take whatever percentage of your working heart rate that you’re aiming for (eg 60% for an easy run), and add it to your resting heart rate. The final figure is your personal target heart rate. Simply apply this to each target percentage work rate to find your personal working heart rate, obviously to make your life easier an investment in to a heart rate monitor may come in handy there are plenty on the market to choose from.

When deciding what target heart rate you are trying to achieve make sure you are clear on your independant goals. I train at a moderate intensity as a general rule & flip between Long easy heart rate cardio session Liss & high intensity cardio session  HIIT to attack weight loss. I hope you guys find this helpful & take your training to a new level by calculating training sessions to this degree. – AG


Shorts – Nike     T-Shirt – Physique Apparel     Trainers – Nike

Photographer – Jay McLaughlin 

Camera – Olympus Pen