Your Heart Rate Questions Simplified

Questions about target heart rates are common with P90X and especially Insanity. Shaun T frequently tells people to check their heart rate and to make sure it’s safe, whatever that means. This blog intends to clear up the common questions about heart rates and their effects on exercise.

If you have a short attention span, and don’t care about why, the most important thing to remember is that your body is the best heart rate monitor. Your body will tell you when you need to stop or slow down. That being said, the rest of this article explains this and discusses the broader concepts.

Max Heart Rate

In theory, your body has a maximum heart rate, which is the fastest that heart can theoretically beat. The common estimate for max heart rate is 220-your age. So if you are 20 years old, your max heart rate is 220-20 or 200 beats per minute. If you are 30 years old, your max heart rate is 190. If you are 40, your max heart rate is 180 and so on. This again is just the widely accepted estimate formula of max heart rate. To actually get your maximum heart rate, you have to go to a lab and have your max VO2 measured, where they put a hose in your mouth to measure what's in your breath, and you run on a treadmill to see at what heart rate you stop burning fat.

Biology 101-Your Body Stores Fat, But Not a Lot of Carbs

Before I go on, I should cover a basic, seemingly unrelated, issue. As people know well, your body stores energy as excess fat. Your body does not store any extra protein, and stores a limited supply of carbs, as simple sugar and glycogen, for immediate muscle and brain needs. The average person has about an hour’s worth of carbs stored in their muscles for very hard exercise. If you eat a lot of sugar, insulin converts it to fat as quickly as it can for storage for future needs. If you eat a lot of protein, it too is inevitably converted fat for storage. You will see why this fact is important shortly.

Target Exercise and Heart Rate Zones

Really the discussion about heart rates is irrelevant except as it impacts your exercise. Specifically, there is Aerobic and Anaerobic exercise zones. Aerobic exercise is when your body uses fat as your primary energy source, and Anaerobic exercise where sugar is your primary energy source. Heart rate is what drives your body from Aerobic to Anaerobic exercise zones. Briefly, when your heart beats faster, you move from Aerobic to Anaerobic exercise zones.

Aerobic Exercise

The aerobic exercise range is generally considered when your heart is beating from 60-80% of your max heart rate. So if you are 20 years old, and your max heart rate is 200, your aerobic range is 120-160 beats per minute. This is the range where your body is theoretically burning primarily fat for energy.

You still need carbs to get the process going, but during aerobic exercise, you burn about 80% fat and 20% carbs. Think of carbs as the kindling wood to get a fire going. Given that you have a virtually unlimited fat supply, and are burning carbs slowly, you can exercise for a long period of time.

You can use a heart rate monitor, but the best test is seeing if you can talk while you exercise. If you are exercising aerobically, you should be able to talk while exercising.

Anaerobic Exercise

If you are exercising above 80% of your max heart rate, you are theoretically in your anaerobic range. This means that your body is using sugar, aka carbs, as your primary energy source. When you are in the anaerobic range, you will be breathing heavily and you won’t be able to talk while you exercise. You may be gasping for breath.

The place where you potentially run into a problem with anaerobic exercise, is that as your body has a limited supply of carbs, you can run out of carbs. If you exercise anaerobically for an extended period of time, you can run out of carbs and experience a carb crash. However as was stated, you have about an hour’s worth of carbs in your body, and if you are doing Insanity or P90X, you should be ok.

It is Still Better to Exercise Anaerobically

While most people naturally assume that it is better to burn fat instead of carbs, you still burn more calories in the anaerobic range. The faster your heart rate, the more calories you burn. It is that simple. If you want to burn calories, and push your body to its limits, anaerobic exercise is more effective even though you are not burning as much fat. Your body will begin to convert fat to carbs for energy.

What This Means for Insanity

While it may be controversial, I recommend that people skip the heart rate monitor, and let their body be their monitor. If you are “Digging Deeper!” you will be in the anaerobic range for most of the program. If you try to stay in the aerobic range, you will likely stop every 20 seconds and have to wait for another 20 seconds and barely get a workout in. Insanity wants you to go all out and do it perfectly and stop when you lose your form. That means you need to ignore your heart rate and listen to your body. Of course this assumes that you have a healthy heart, but you shouldn’t be doing Insanity if you don’t.

What This Means for P90X

P90X is very similar to Insanity in most ways. P90X is essentially circuit weight training, which will keep your heart rate in the anaerobic range for much of the workout. There is however more rest during the workouts than with Insanity, so you can sustain the workouts for longer periods of time. You won’t have to worry about your heart rate with Yoga, and you will likely be in the aerobic range for Kenpo X and Cardio X. During Plyo X, you will likely be in anaerobic range for a good portion of the time.

Just in Case

If you do find that you begin to feel lightheaded, develop a halo vision, or become weak during an anaerobic workout, you may be suffering from a carb crash. If that happens, you should take a break and have some recovery drink. This again assumes that you are otherwise healthy and well hydrated. Again, as the workouts always say, you should see a doctor if you have any problems.

Don’t Worry About It

The human race was exercising long before the advent of heart rate monitors, and we seemed to do fine before that. I just don’t want P90X and Insanity to start looking like a 1990s aerobics class, where everyone stops every 5 minutes to check their heart rate and wait until their heart rate goes down. Their hour workouts ended up being 30 minutes, and results went down. Unless you have your Max VO2 measured, you are really just guessing anyway. Just learn to trust your body and you will be fine.

When Will I Begin to See Results?

Given all of the focus on incredible results in the infomercials, it is natural for people to want to know when they will personally see results. After all, P90X and Insanity are extreme programs that deliver extreme results. However, individual results vary greatly, as do the timeframe and nature of those results.

Body Fat NOT Weight

Before I begin the article, I want to stress that your most important measure of success with either P90X or Insanity, or any other exercise program for that matter, is body fat. If you are decreasing your body fat, assuming that you don’t have an eating disorder, you are improving your physical condition. You are losing fat, even though you are possibly increasing your weight due to muscle gain. That is very good. More muscle burns more fat.

While there are several ways to calculate body fat, the easiest and most consistent method I found is on teambeachbody.com. The Body Fat Calculator on teambeachbody.com is under Eat Smart > Nutrition Tools. If you don't have a teambeachbody.com account already, click here for a free one.

Use that to track your real progress.

Insanity vs. P90X results

Insanity and P90X are clearly very different programs. Insanity is a plyometric cardio program, while P90X is essentially a circuit training program with different forms of cardio thrown in. This means that you will get different results with both programs. For example, Insanity is clearly a lower body workout, and will improve your lower body more than any other program ever could. P90X is 65% an upper body program, and you will see great toning and/or muscle development in the upper body.

Given that the leg muscles are naturally the largest muscles in your body, when you start to work them, especially with a plyometric workout, you will put on leg muscle with Insanity. This means that your fat loss will be offset on the scale by your muscle growth. So, for most people, the scale is not the best way to determine your results.

While P90X will also develop muscle, the muscle growth tends to weigh less, so it is easier to lose weight on the scale. However, that does not mean that the scale will tell you the whole story, as you are still putting on muscle, while losing fat.

The Cruel Irony

The speed of your obvious results is also impacted by how much you have to lose. If you are already in good shape, eat well, and are basically doing everything right, your results will appear much slower than someone who has lots of fat to lose. So don’t expect immediate changes if you only have 10-15 lbs to lose. If you have less than 10 lbs to lose, you might not lose any weight as you can easily lose 10 lbs of fat, while gaining 10 lbs of muscle.

Early Results Come From Dietary Changes

Assuming you have significant weight to lose, you will likely see measureable weight loss in your first weeks. This is due to a change in diet. While you may eat a lot following the P90X or Insanity nutrition plans, you are eating whole foods that are not processed. You will be eating less sodium, which means that you will reduce pounds of water retention. A great deal of water retention is in your fat cells, so you will reduce body fat.

Also, you will be eating less processed carbohydrates, which have a high Glycemic Index. While you don’t have to understand the science behind it, foods that have a high Glycemic Index cause an insulin release, which causes carbs to be converted to fat for storage. Also high Glycemic foods are likely to increase cravings, while low Glycemic foods keep your blood sugar steady, reducing cravings, so you eat less.

Diet Does Matter

A frequent question that comes up is to whether a person can just do the exercises and not follow the nutrition plans. In short, you can. You will be in better physical condition to a certain extent, but you will not get the weight loss or aesthetic results that you might be looking for.

Insanity Results

If you don’t have a lot of weight to lose, or are in good shape already, you will likely not see a lot, if any, weight loss in the first few weeks. As a matter of fact, you might not see much over the life of the program. However, you must calculate your body fat. It will be extremely likely that you lost many pounds of fat. Again, you have to get what the scale says out of your mind. That is possibly the worst measure of success with Insanity.

I would especially advise you not to listen to when other people say that they started to see results. Everyone is very different. If someone says to expect to see results the next week, again don’t listen. While you might, you very easily might not. While such comments might provide enough encouragement to get you to the next week, it can be a major set back to when results don’t come. Again, don’t worry about the scale. See how you do with body fat and your fit test.

P90X Results

P90X results tend to be much more consistent. Many people tend to lose weight early on if they follow the nutrition plan. Also for people who have not recently done any strength training, they tend to find that they are slimmer from the weight lifting. However, that is not universal. Again, if you are in good shape, you results will come slower. You should see your numbers go up, with regard to reps and weights, but you might not see too much weight or fat loss early on.

However if you have good results early on, your results might slow down once your body gets rid of all of the sodium and adjusts to the lack of processed foods. This is a good thing. Then you are down to a combination of fat loss and muscle gain. While it is impossible to state how the results may come for every individual, if you follow the P90X nutrition plan, you will generally lose 1-2 pounds of fat a week on a steady basis. While that may be a major slow down from the initial weeks, it is a good sign that you are now tackling straight fat.

Conclusion

Doing P90X or Insanity, you will see major physical improvements. However with regard to results, you have to stop focusing on your weight and focus on your body fat. A future post will focus on what happens if you aren’t losing body fat, but for now just be aware that everyone is different and that you should trust the programs, as they have worked for millions of people around the world.