Heart Rate REcovery Calculator

Heart rate recovery (HRR) is an extremely valuable metric to measure your cardioaerobic fitness level. The best thing is it’s easy to do and you only need a stopwatch and a way to accurately measure your heart rate.

While HRR isn’t considered as robust a metric as VO2max for assessing your total cardioaerobic capacity it has an added benefit of being able to tell you how well your autonomic nervous system responds to physiological stress.

Training HRR goes well beyond athletic conditioning and you can use it to see how adaptive your nervous system is to stressful situations. As such it’s often used by elite soldiers, professional fighters, mental athletes and anyone who’s looking for a psycho-physiological edge on their competition.

Instructions:

1. Input your age in the Target Heart Rate calculator to get your Target Heart Rate

2. Spent at least 5-10 minutes warming up.

3. Perform some type of intense exercise such as sprint running, sprint cycling, HIIT, or Tabata for a minimum of 3 minutes to drive your heart rate up to your Target Heart Rate or beyond. The highest heart rate you achieve is your Maximum Heart Rate.

4. Make note of your Maximum Heart Rate immediately at the end of your exercise.

5. Rest for exactly 60 seconds in a seated and relaxed position.

6. Note your heart rate immediately at the end of your 60-second rest.

7. Input the values in the Heart Rate Recovery Calculator below.