Using Heart Rate Monitors during Fitness Kickboxing Classes
I’m pleased to announce a FREE 3-week fitness challenge that will be focusing on our high-tech heart rate monitors used during our fitness kickboxing classes in Federal Way and Kent, WA. This challenge is a competition, however, unlike our other challenges, this is a challenge against yourself. This is about establishing a PERSONAL BEST aka PERSONAL RECORD (PR). Over the next 3-weeks our kickboxers will be taking our fitness kickboxing classes and posting their heart rate results in our private client group on Facebook.
Everyone participating in this challenge will be eligible for free SWAG from our Pro Shop which will be announced every Friday in our VIP Group. Some of our winners will be picked each week from our team of instructors and others will be picked from a raffle from everyone who completed a workout from the week. We won’t be focusing our prizes solely on the Leaderboard results.
We will be learning about the FIVE HEART RATE ZONES, with an emphasis on points earned in the Orange and Red Zone.
UNDERSTANDING HEART RATE ZONES BASED ON BPM
There are five zones we focus on during class. The chart above explains each zone as a percentage of your recommended MAX HEART RATE which is calculated as (220 – Age) = Max Heart Rate. This is a general rule, it’s not hard and fast. So a 40 year old would have a MAX Heart Rate of 180 BPM (Beats Per Minute). The Orange Zone is 80-89% of Max, so this 40 year old would be in the Orange Zone when they reach a 144 BPM (180 x .8). The same 60 year old would it Orange Zone at 128 BPM. Each Zone indicates the level of intensity with Blue being easy and RED being hard.
Intensity Points are earned for every minute you are in a Zone. 1 point for Blue, 2 for Green, 3 for Yellow etc. We look at Intensity Points when judging intensity instead of calories because men generally burn more calories than women, Intensity Points levels out the playing field.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM PREVIOUS HRM CHALLENGES
A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
Here are several suggestions I have for everyone in this challenge. If you follow them, I believe you will come out of these 3-weeks with a much better understanding of your “Personal Heart Health”, and what “High Intensity Interval Training” (HIIT) is, and how we incorporate it into our class plans. It is the science behind the magic of how we write our 30 & 50-minute kickboxing classes.
Please follow these guidelines:
- Start in the Blue. We will be starting our timers 1-minute before the class starts. Please refrain from starting your warm-up until the class begins. Everyone should start in the BLUE zone, then you can see how long it took for you to get in the RED Zone. It will have more meaning.
- When the Instructor is explaining the next round, please don’t talk, only high-5 someone next to you instead of across the room and let your heart rate drop by not doing jumping jacks in between rounds. I totally understand letting your heart rate drop from RED to YELLOW is NOT FAIR if others are doing high knees during the break, so please don’t do it. We want you to have a better idea of your heart health and how fast your heart RECOVERS in the 60-seconds between rounds. In order to truly experience a HIIT workout, we need to have recovery stages. Use these 3-weeks to understand your recovery and how to improve it with breathing, water, etc.
- Your goal should not be to live in the Orange and Red zones for the entire class. When you do that, you are essentially beating your body up to the core, causing an excess level of physical and emotional stress on your muscles and ligaments. Don’t be fooled by the overwhelming urge to push yourself to the extreme and then be disheartened by the fact that other kickboxers are progressing at a faster rate than you and aren’t killing themselves in the studio. You must listen to your own body. We can learn A LOT from recovery and that means the rest break after each round and what our heart rate does during the last couple of minutes of class. If we all follow the class plan, then we can learn from each other’s results.
Here is one of my Heart Rate Summary graphs from our 60-minute Challenge Class. Our goal during this challenge is to STUDY these graphs and look for patterns. The human body is amazing, but we’re all different so we really can’t compare them with others. We will all recover differently and as we get more fit, this graph changes. But we can LEARN from each other which is why we want you to share your results, WITH YOUR OBSERVATIONS, in the VIP Group.
ABOUT INTENSITY POINTS
As a general rule, we tell our kickboxers to shoot for 200 Intensity Points per class. Once again, this is a general rule. Our goal during this challenge is for you to understand your Intensity Points and take the mystery out of what it means. Can you consistently get 200 points per 50-minute class? We’ll see.
This is an example of the email you will receive after class. I picked this photo because it is an example of the difficulty I had getting in the RED zone during this class and I didn’t hit 200 points. The Zone Summary shows I spent 24:12 in the Orange Zone and 17:36 in the Yellow. This isn’t terrible, these two zones (Yellow and Orange) are proven to help you burn more body fat. My point in showing you this is you can LEARN from each and every one of your workouts.
So, our goal for the next 3 weeks is to dive deep into the science of working out including your BPM, Zones, Calorie Burn, and Recovery. Your ultimate reward, is knowledge, however, we’ll be making it fun by giving away FREE stuff each week and yes we will be looking at the leaderboard too. They are all tools. Here is the Public Leaderboard.
