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Heart Healthy Minutes – Working your Heart Muscle
The first week to 10 days with your M2/slimcoach was easy! You got all green, you had 5 stars, and now you can’t get out of the red, especially in the heart portion of the circle. What happened!
Well, remember, during the learning period, the M2/slimcoach assigned you to an “inactive” lifestyle and did not expect much from you. Pretty much doing anything would count as heart healthy (hh) minutes. Now that you have shown that you really belong in a higher lifestyle level, it wants more from you, either in increased intensity, increased duration, or both.
For example, say the M2/slimcoach was happy with you doing 5 sit ups in the first week. Now, it not only wants more, lets say 10, but it wants them done at a faster pace. So if you do the same 5 sit ups you did last week they may not count for anything this week because you didn’t do them fast enough. You are behind both on the number of sit ups you did and on the intensity you did them at.
The M2/slimcoach is using its predicted lifestyle level (shown on your overall screen) to determine how long (elapsed minutes) and how hard (intensity levels or METs) you need to work to get credit for 1 HH equivalent (shown on the goals & heart chart as minutes). Although MyTrak does referred to HH Minutes, I believe things are easier if you think of them as HH Equivalents.
HH equivalents are calculated based on the combination of elapsed minutes and intensity. Intensity is subjective, based on age, weight, gender, and fitness level. What is intense exercise for one person may be moderate exercise for another. I’m not sure the slimcoach is actually using METs, but I have found it very useful to get to know a little about them.
MET = metabolic equivalent = unit used to estimate the amount of oxygen used by the body during physical activity.
From the American Heart Association -
1 MET = the energy (oxygen) used by the body at rest, while sitting quietly or reading a book, for example. The harder your body works during the activity, the more oxygen is consumed and the higher the MET level.
• Activity that burns 3 to 6 METs is considered moderate-intensity physical activity.
• Activity that burns > 6 METs is considered vigorous-intensity physical activity.
Moderate-intensity physical activity refers to a level of effort that:
• Causes an increase in breathing and/or heart rate
• Results in three to six metabolic equivalents (METs) of effort
• Burns 3.5 to 7 Calories per minute (kcal/min)
Looking at their activity chart will help you to understand what constitutes moderate or vigorous intensity activities. Please note that their chart assumes a person of 154 lbs. It also assumes men are 30-50 years old and women are 20-40 years old. So if you are older or heavier, the intensity level may actually be higher for you.
For most people, as you engage in activities with higher METs, you will also raise your heart rate. As you are learning what activites net you heart healthy minutes on the graph, monitoring your heart rate can help you to understand what will or will not register on the graph. You do not necessarily have to be in your training zone to score heart healthy equivalents, but if you are below your training zone, keeping a sustained activity (elapsed minutes) becomes important. For example, if you have a very brief interruption to your workout for some reason, you will see your graph drop down sharply and then rise again sharply when you restart your workout.
When you registered, you told the M2/slimcoach your age, gender, height & weight. You probably just took the default resting heart rate however, so to help the M2 judge intensity correctly, you will need to update that piece of information. You may also want to wear a heart belt (see below).
Wearing a Heart Belt
Whether or not you choose to add a heart belt just depends on what types of activities you like to do, how focused you are in meeting your hh minutes and whether or not you are achieving them without the help of the belt. From my experience, you can get your heart healthy minutes without the belt once you figure out which of your activities gets you heart healthy minutes, at least until you get to the competitive lifestyle level. However, the slimcoach relies on total body movement to calculate energy expenditure, so if you are doing things that keep you fairly stationary from the butt up, like cycling and some resistance training, a heart rate belt may help capture your activity and intensity. The activity graph on the heart chart really helps you to figure out what is giving you results here. If you are not seeing results where you think you should be, try adding a heart belt to see if it makes a difference.
If your main focus is weight loss, your most important indicator may be your energy expenditure for now. Especially if you are just starting to get back into shape, focusing on the calorie burn for now and waiting till later to add the heart rate belt is just fine. You don’t have to push for green on all areas of the health circle if you are not ready.
If you are pushing for your HH goal, it may help to wear a heart belt, both to get more accurate information for the slimcoach and to get feedback from the slimcoach regarding your intensity level as you are doing things throughout the day. When wearing a belt, if you are not in the appropriate zone for the entire HH minute, you don’t get credit for it. I don’t think this is a big factor, but just something to be aware of.
M2/slimcoach is fully compatible with a Coded version of the Polar heart rate belt. You can purchase the belt many places on the web, but I did find that the MYTRAK site had the most competitive price when I did a price comparison. It is a fairly narrow belt that is worn around your chest and communicates wirelessly with the slimcoach. Do not get the center piece wet, but do moisten the sensors on either end of the belt prior to putting it on. If you wear the belt all day, you may need to re-moisten the sensors during the course of the day. Read the directions that come with the belt, to familiarize yourself with its use.
When you put the belt on, the battery light will shine solid red, letting you know that the belt is registering. If it doesn’t, press the M2/slimcoach button once and it should.
To get hh feedback from the M2/slimcoach when wearing the belt, push the M2 once and WAIT! After the energy circle displays, the display will change to show you your current heart activity. If it is beating yellow, you are working in training zone 1. If it is beating green, you are working in training zone 2, your target heart rate zone. If it is green and emitting beeps, it is alerting you that you are above your target, in zone 3, and should slow down.
To see the heart rate information associated to your personal target zone (training zone), open your profile and click on “My Health Info”. If you are a Curves member, divide these numbers by 6 to get a 10 second count that you can compare to the heart rate chart on the wall. Green for the M2 is usually a bit higher than green for the Curves heart rate chart. In fact, it may put you into blue or purple! Remember, your heart rate is not what the heart healthy minutes is tracking, so don’t feel like you have to push to get green from the heart rate belt to get your heart healthy minutes!
Making your HH goal on the M2/slimcoach
The first step to getting your heart section out of red and into yellow or green is to figure out what type of intensity is required to get into your target – zone 2. The 2nd step is to figure out what activities will keep it there for a sustained period.
If you think about the Curves circuit, it is not necessary to keep your intensity level maxed out the entire time to achieve your heart rate targets. The whole point of interspersing the machines and the pads is that you get your heart rate up on the machines while you are doing your strength training and then just do enough on the pads to keep your heart rate in the training zone until the next machine.
I have found I can take this into other areas as well. For example, if I wear a heart rate belt and watch the M2/slimcoach to see what training zone it is registering me in, no matter how fast or how long I walk, I can not get it to go from yellow to green. My walking pace is about a mile in 20 minutes, which translates to about 3 mph. In looking at the AHA’s physical activities chart, I can see that 5 mph is their transition from moderate to vigorous activity. To get my METs up, I need to jog rather than to walk, but I am not in shape enough – nor have desire enough – to jog for 45 minutes! However, I find that at the dog park, I can jog around approximately half the perimeter and get into green, then walk for a lap and sustain the green, then repeat. As long as I add short sprints into the mix, I can get heart healthy minutes without spending a lot of time at it.
On the other hand, when I walk the dogs at the briskest pace I can (maybe 3 mph?) without stopping, even though I’m only in yellow, the extended duration also achieves heart healthy minutes and doesn’t mess up my knees.
At the beginning, you will need to experiment and watch the graph to find out which activities net you heart healthy minutes and are something you can do on a regular basis. For example, my Curves workout also nets me a large number of hh minutes, but I do have to focus and work throughout the entire routine - talking and just going through the motions doesn’t cut it, and any break to answer a phone, etc really puts a slash in the graph!
As you experiment -
If you are in the inactive level (assumed in the learning period), you may need 3.5 METs for 30 minutes to get 30 hh equivalents/minutes.
As your lifestyle level rises, you need both more METs and a longer time period.
At the highest level, you might need 10 METs for 60 minutes to get 60 hh equivalents/minutes.
Use an MET table to help you find activities you like that are in the appropriate intensity level to achieve your goal. Mix it up as you do it. Really focus on intense exercise for a short time period and then switch to something you can sustain for a while before switching back.
Good luck!!
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