Heart Rate When Climbing a Hill
There's no doubt that adding hills into your workouts will help you burn more calories and generally make things more challenging -- but you may be wondering how hard you should be working when you're making the climb. Your heart rate is one helpful marker for how hard your body is working, helping you gauge whether to kick it up a notch or slow it down.
Heart Rate for Exercise
First, it's important to note the ideal heart rate for exercise. To get the most calorie-burning and cardiovascular benefits from your workout, ensure that your heart is beating at between 50 percent and 80 percent of your maximum heart rate. A quick way to calculate your MHR is to subtract your age from 220. Then multiply that number by 0.5 and 0.8 to arrive at your target heart rate range. Climbing hills while walking, running or cycling is a sure way to increase your heart rate to a near-max intensity, or to the upper end of your target heart rate.
If you're climbing and your heart rate is elevated to the higher end of your MHR, don't expect to be able to maintain that pace for very long without experiencing fatigue. However, it may be appropriate when you're doing shorter-distance hill sprints. With that type of workout, you might run, walk or cycle up a short hill that takes you between 30 seconds and two minutes to climb. Also use your speed to further increase your intensity and give it your all. On a bike, you can shift among gears to make the pedaling harder or easier. When you get to the top, you could head back down the way you came, allowing your heart rate to drop back down to around 50 percent. When you get back to the bottom, you could then head back up the hill, using the short hill as a variation of high-intensity interval training. Hill sprints of this kind will increase your heart's stroke volume and thereby improve your neuromuscular system function.
If you're climbing longer, more gradual hills, you can also expect your heart rate to go up -- but those longer intervals will probably mean you can't maintain a near-max intensity for the entire time. If you're facing a longer hill, set your pace slower than you'd do for hill sprints. If it's difficult to catch your breath or you're getting fatigued, slow down. This type of workout will increase your overall endurance, and the goal should not be a near-max heart rate, but instead an intensity that allows you to power through the entire workout.
Ratings of Perceived Exertion
If you have a heart rate monitor that can help you monitor your rate on those hills, that's great -- but monitoring the numbers can sometimes distract you from the work you're doing. That's when another handy scale can come in handy; it's called the "rating of perceived exertion" scale. The American Council on Exercise recommends rating your exertion level on a scale of zero to 10. You might give an easy walk a rating of 3, for example, and a moderate workout a rating of 6. If you feel like you're at a rating of 10 when you're climbing that hill, recognize that you're probably not going to be able to maintain that level for more than a few minutes. If you have a time or distance goal in mind for your workout, you'll need to slow it down to make it through the entire workout.
Nicole Vulcan has been a journalist since 1997, covering parenting and fitness for The Oregonian, careers for CareerAddict, and travel, gardening and fitness for Black Hills Woman and other publications. Vulcan holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and journalism from the University of Minnesota. She's also a lifelong athlete and is pursuing certification as a personal trainer.