Heart Rate Recovery Test

"Your heart rate recovery is the key to discovering the exercise that will make you lose weight".

In Best Exericse to Lose Weight I wrote about discovering how your ability to recover can affect your fat natural weight loss.

By discovering and increasing your ability to recover you can turn your body from fat-storing to fat-burning.

You see, your body is doing either one or the other.

Through education, nutrition, training, you can covert the body from fat-storing to fat-burning.

I came across the use of heart rate as an athlete and spending so much time with other athletes. I was always involved with power sports. I used endurance sports as an adjunct and conditioning training to increase power.

No matter what sport, all coaches would focus on two things: intensity of training and recuperation. Recuperation came a far second. But when recuperation became more important, and the results improved.

Heart Rate Recovery Test:
Find Out Which is Dominant

The first thing is to understand the basic divisions of the nervous system. There is the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. They are also called voluntary and involuntary, respectively.

Very quickly, the sympathetic system is the one you directly mentally control; walking, standing up and stuff, etc. It is the one that becomes active and dominant during times of stress and/or emergency.

The parasympathetic system is the one that is in control at all other times.

Now, remember that when you are doing something, you are focusing on that one thing.

But there are hundreds of other functions that go on which we are not aware of that not only keep the body alive but regenerate it. A chiropractor gave me an example of what the parasympathetic system is doing.

He gave me a stick and had me balance it while it was standing up on my hand. I have to move my hnad quite a bit to keep the stick standing up. Sometimes I had to move my whole body.

He said just to stand up straight, your nervous system is controlling all the 200 or so bones in our body and keep it standing. You are just trying to control one stick.

So that is the power of the parasympathetic nervous system.

What the heck does this have to do with weight loss and heart rate recovery?

The heart rate is not a be all and end all, but it is a very practical indicator of vital systems of your body and health.

When it comes to weight loss, I want to find out whether your exercise is making you fat or making you fit. The way I can tell this is using your heart rate to determine what your fitness level is and comparing your exercise to that. Then adjust.

To Lose Weight
The Parasympathetic Nervous System
Has to be Dominant

Period. The parasympathetic system is the part of the nervous system concerned with regeneration, recovery, rebuilding, healing, and all things that have to do with making the body healthier.

When someone exercises, they provide stimulation to the nervous system and other body parts. The sympathetic system is active during this period of time. When the exercise is finished, the parasympathetic system becomes active and rebuilds the body to adapt to that stress if it comes again.

The most common example of this is building muscle. If you do biceps curls, the stress is placed on the biceps muscle. Your body now will naturally want to prepare the bicep to deal with this stress in the future. So during rest, it goes to work rebuilding the bicep to be stronger for the next time it receive with stress.

The nervous system is the air-traffic-control that regulates this. Specifically, it is the parasympathetic system that rebuilds the muscle. After the stimulus is placed on the bicep, it is the parasympathetic system that goes to work rebuilding the biceps, to deal with that stress if it comes again.

That is why the parasympathetic system is more important and should be dominant. It needs to be allowed to rebuild the body in response to stress.

So we have established now there are two parts to preparing a body or system of the body to deal with stress. There is the stimulation or the intensity of the training, and there is the recovery.

Both are needed in the equation. Ask any professional body-builder what will happen if he reduces the amount of sleep he gets. His muscles with start to get smaller. This is because the intensity and stimulation are there but the recovery is deficient.

Both are needed.

The heart rate recovery is an indication of how strong your parasympathetic nervous system is. In other words it is a measure of how fast your nervous system can restore your body to balance or a state of rest.

An athlete that is improving very well with very little plateaus, will find that his heart rate recovery is very good. He keeps recovering very fast. As long as he keeps recovering, he will keep increasing his performance.

This means that the body, through the nervous system, is constantly being rebuilt to adapt to the added stress and strain of the workout.

If the heart rate recovery gets shorter, then he can increase the intensity. If the heart rate recovery decreases, he has to either reduce the intensity or increase the recuperation time.

In fact, heart rate recovery has been shown to be a predictor of mortality.¹ The longer it takes for a person’s heart rate to recover, the greater the chances of this person dying of a cardiovascular illness, or heart disease.

Heart Rate Recovery Test
Determines Exercise for Natural Weight Loss

If a person is not losing weight I do the heart rate recovery test for them and see where they are at. Almost all the time, their recovery is slow. So theie plan is to exercise to rehabilitate the body’s ability to recover. This exercise regimen oxygenates the body, restores, the pH balance, balances the hormones and allows the right muscles to rest and build.

Then intense exercise is introduced back into their life. This is done slowly while monitoring their recovery rate.

This heart rate recovery rate will be the guide they can use for the rest of their life to adjust their exercise to fit them individually.

Sample Graphs

Let’s take a look at a graph that shows how a fit, healthy athlete responds to stress and how an overweight, unhealthy body responds.

The graphs below show the heart rate of the two individuals. The top one is the fit person and the bottom one is the unfit overweight person.

Both do a sprint and stop once they cannot exert anymore effort.

Here “O” is the resting heart rate and “B” is the maximum exertion the person can do.

A is the slope of the heart rate climbing as the person reaches maximum exertion. “C” is the slope of the heart rate after the person stops. C is very steep. This person’s heart rate recovers very fast.

This is another sign that his parasympathetic system is dominant.

The “A” slope is also a sign that it takes more to get the stress response out of this person’s body. This body and nervous system are more resilient to stress.

The Other End of the Scale:

Here the person’s heart rate jumps right up as you can see from slope “A.” Also, Slope “C” shows a very slow decline to the resting heart rate. It can even take days for some people.

Here, the sympathetic system is very sensitive and dominant. The body is in on high alert, and stuck there.

It can’t relax. Sleep is shallow and difficult. Muscles are tense. You are dehydrated. Exhausted in the afternoon about 2-3 p.m.

Heart Rate Recovery Test: Some Samples

A friend of mine is a triathlete. After this test, it takes him 3 minutes to go back to 60 beats per minute. There was a time it took him 30 minutes. By changing his diet and cycling his training between recovery training and intensity training, he was getting better and better times on his runs, rides and swims than before. He was not plateauing anymore.

When he was in a recovery cycle, he looked at his times and pace on the last recovery cycle and would work to improve that time WITHOUT increasing his heart rate. When he would go on the intensity cycle, he would improve his time over the last intensity cycle. So he would push for a time to create added demand on the body. Then go into recovery mode to rebuild the body to adapt to this.

Another client that was very obese could not sprint. I had him do the test but instead of sprinting, he walked up the stairs. It took him 5 days to go back to resting heart rate. In the beginning, when we were trying to get his resting heart rate, we had to wait for a long time because it was so erratic.

Everyday was a torture for him. Everything made him tired. He hired a personal trainer and after the first workout, he got sick and had to stay home. Cortisol is secreted from stress. Intense exercise is stress. Cortisol reduces the immune system.

We reorganized his life and his exercise is walking. Gently. Flat, no incline streets. He had to walk slow so his heart rate would not go too high. Now, he jogs and does Hatha Yoga (a very gentle form of yoga). He has lost over 200 pounds of fat without ever doing an extreme exercise or starvation. We kept his heart rate low. Now, when he does the test with sprinting, it takes 8 minutes to go back.

So, before, walking up the stairs took his heart 5 days to return back to normal. Now, sprinting, his heart rate takes 8 minutes. The course we designed together was to build fat-burning hormones and reduce the fat-storing hormones and alkalize his body and oxygenate it.

Because we changed his internal health his new body is permanent. It was not a quick fix. It was not about calories. It was about using the natural functions of the body and giving it what it wanted.

A little R n’ R!

Metabolism Makeover

You can learn how to use your heart rate recovery as part of a comprehensive weight loss program that focuses of restoring health first to lose weight. If you are interested check out Metabolism Makeover.

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1. Heart-Rate Recovery Immediately after Exercise as a Predictor of Mortality, Study by: Christopher R. Cole, M.D., Eugene H. Blackstone, M.D., Fredric J. Pashkow, M.D., Claire E. Snader, M.A., and Michael S. Lauer, M.D. ; Art. ref. from the NEJM, Volume 341:1351-October 28, 1357, 1999