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(bobpit @ May 29 2007,04:51)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE"><div>
(drpierredebs @ May 29 2007,04:32)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">you are breathing heavy because your going towards anerobic metaboilism. </div>
Anaerobic energy production needs no oxygen. Can you please explain this?
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(drpierredebs @ May 29 2007,04:32)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">Are you using the HRM for dieting purposes or to track your cardiofitness?</div>
I use the HR meter in order to understand better what is happening to the body. Sometimes I do HIIT and compare the readings to regular lifting.
I lift weights for an hour. I spend 400-800 kcal. My HR goes up to 180 after a heavy set of DL. 10-20 minutes are spent above 80% of MaxHR. My HR rarely drops bellow 125 and averages to 130-140. This is a hell of a cardio wo. I really don't think I need SS cardio to stay healthy.</div>
Even when you are performing work in the anaerobic zone, your body still needs oxygen. The point is that at a high intensity, you can not take in enough oxygen to support aerobic metabolism, i.e. beta oxidation of fat, as the sole source of energy production, so your body will switch to using gylcogen to fuel the heavy work as the energy from gylcogen is isolated much faster and less dependent of O2. When you are breathing heavy you are at what would be considered a ventilatory threshold. The better your cardio vascular system is trained, i.e. through endurance training, the longer and harder you can work before hitting this point. I didn´t mean to imply that you need to do cardio to be healthy, but the heavy lifting and the high intensity with which your are working is not going to help your "Endurance" ( this is not what you where shooting for anyway according to your question) your heart muscle and arteries will get stronger, but your body will not become more efficient at burning fat at higher intensities for longer periods of time.
None the less, using a heart rate monitor to track how your body reacts to work, is perfectly valid and usefull to a certain point. I use a HRM for different things. I record every month the whole 8 hours of sleep and thus get a picture if my fitness is increasing through a decrease in my resting HR. For example: over the course of 5 months, my average HR throughout the night went from 55-53-50-48-44. And this was almost linear with respect to the increase in time I spent training on the bike. At the same time, it was increasingly more difficult to reacch the HR max that I measured at the begining of the year which was 195. Now I can´t reach 185 and this is good as it tells me that my heart and O2 exchange is stronger and more efficient. ( It is not the result of any insufficiency as I had my heart checked several time under load). This will reverse itself after I stop training so hard at the end of the season.
Granted, you have to be strict on how you control for your analysis of the changes in your HR during exercise, but with a little stringency, you can very nicely and cheaply, monitor progress in your cardiovascular fitness as it relates to your strength training.
Sprints and HIIT are great for increasing VO2 Max and for the burning of fat AFTER the exercise is finished, but they do relatively little for pure endurance work which lasts more than a few hours. For 1 hour bouts of heavy exercise, you are no so concerned with endurance anyway. At least not as far as weight lifting and increasing strength is concerned.
