Weekly Tips for Your Peak Fitness and Wellness

This Week's Tip: Hit Your Target Heart Rate

To reap the most rewards from your fitness program, your aerobic exercise should fall within a recommended intensity range. How do you know if you’re exercising hard enough? Heart rate monitors make it easier, or you could learn to take your own heart rate. Problem with these methods is that you still need to know your target, which is highly individual and requires crunching some numbers.

An easier way to judge your target intensity level, without actually stopping to take your heart rate, is to use what is known as a Rating of Perceived Exertion scale, or RPE. You tend to be a pretty good judge of how hard you’re working just by assessing how you feel--how hard it is to move your body and breathe. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is sitting quietly and 10 is an all-out sprint, you want to be working at a comfortably moderate to strong level, which is generally 3 to 5 for beginners and 5 to 7 for more advanced exercisers.

Remember, your RPE is completely separate from your pace, as a light, level 5 jog for one person might be a breathless 9 for someone else.