Breath Test or Heart Rate?

When you exercise, focus on breathing instead of your heart rate. Watch to find out why, and learn how to perform the breath test from the heart experts at National Jewish Health.

Transcript

Unless you are a truly elite athlete, worrying about your heart rate to the point where you are adjusting everything every few minutes really makes exercise less enjoyable.

More importantly, is actually the breath test.

And the breath test very simple.

If you go walking, biking, jogging, swimming, and you’re unable to complete a full sentence.

That’s where you want to be.

And the goal is to be there for thirty minutes.

So, for a lot of people just starting out, they warm up and get to the zone where they are short of breath, they stay there for a minute or two or three, and then they calm down and come back up again.

So it might take ninety minutes, initially, to get those thirty minutes in.

But, as the weeks go on, the breaks should get shorter and shorter and shorter until it is one solid thirty minute block.

When you get more fit, you’ll find that heart rate tends to go down, because the heart has learned to be more efficient.