Your Heart
The heart is a muscle and it needs a good workout to keep it fit so that it can pump blood efficiently around the body. Any activity that requires sustained exertion for an extended period of time will give your heart and lungs a good workout. Swimming goes a bit further adding another level to your cardiovascular workout due to the restricted breathing that you have during swimming and the pressure of the water.
An easy way to measure how fit your heart is, is to measure your resting heart rate. The fitter your heart, the lower your resting heart rate.
Find your pulse and count the number of beats for 6 seconds then multiply this by 10. It is recommended that your resting heart rate should be between 70 – 80 beats per minute (bpm), although anyone involved in regular physical exercise should have a resting heart rate much less than this. For example, an elite athlete, Lance Armstrong has a resting heart rate of 37 bpm.
Calculating your recovery heart rate is an excellent measure of fitness. Immediately after strenuous exercise, measure your heart rate. This should be close to your maximum heart rate. Wait only a minute before taking another heart rate reading. The lower your heart rate drops in that minute, the fitter you are.The heart should slow down by about 30 beats in the first minute. If your heart does not slow down by this much, the more swimming which you take part in will make you fitter enabling your heart rate to return to normal in less time. People who are very fit will see their heart slow down by 50-60 beats in the first minute.
The easiest and best known method to calculate someone’s maximum heart rate should be:
mhr ="220" – Age
For example, the maximum heart rate for a 30 year old is 190 beats per minute. Given the level of fitness, this may vary by up to 40 bpm.
To be at your anaerobic threshold you need to be working at between 85 per cent and 90 per cent of your maximum heart rate.
It is quite important that when you are swimming fast, you know that you are swimming hard enough. The water can be deceptive and can make you think that you are training quite hard due to the continuous resistance or specific drills that you are doing, but the only way of knowing whether or not you are hitting the correct targets is by measuring your heart rate.
The different programmes will specify whether or not you are training aerobic (with oxygen) or anaerobic (without oxygen) and the ’threshold’ is the maximum speed which you can swim for a period of time. Sprinting will require maximum effort and only your heart rate will tell you whether you have worked hard enough.
