Wasting a little bit of time...

So I'm sitting here, wishing I were working out, trying to work on my candidacy talk (I have to give a 20 min talk for my exam and I'm practicing in front of my advisor and my lab on Friday morning), and realizing that I'm not extremely motivated.

I haven't been completely unproductive - I've read all of the background papers I had mentioned in my original exam proposal.  But somehow, I can't seem to get my slides together for this talk.

Meanwhile, I decided to do a little bit of research on the whole target heart rate.

What is the target heart rate?  I always knew that it had to do with your heart rate as you work out, and I knew that it needed to be in a specific range in order to show that your working out was actually working YOU out.  Numbers though, I had no idea.

I did a general Google search for target heart rate and found 790,000 hits.  Wow.

Okay, so going to general, legit sites, like this give the basic, "50-80 percent of your maximum heart rate."  How do we measure that???  Am I supposed to go crazy on the treadmill and see how high my heart rate goes?  (By the way, don't do that, very, very, bad!)

They have the tables with average maximum heart rates, which decrease as you get older.  I'm 28, so I'm in between the 25-30 range, so I'm going to stick to 30 yr old info just so I don't kill myself.  For me, my target heart rate is 95-162 beats per minute.  Wait a minute, my resting heart rate is 90 - is that bad?  I'm guessing that just shows how unfit I really am.  Reassuringly, I also read on other sites that these numbers can be inaccurate.

In the same page, they give the alternative way to check the difficulty of your workout.  The talking test.  "If you can talk and walk at the same time, you aren't working too hard. If you can sing and maintain your level of effort, you're probably not working hard enough. If you get out of breath quickly, you're probably working too hard — especially if you have to stop and catch your breath."  Hhm, I'm sure the guy next to me really doesn't want to hear me try to sing as I'm running on the treadmill...

So I did another search and found this.  I liked this one better, because it asked for my resting heart rate and gave me something that seemed more reasonable - 151-172 beats per minute.  It's based off of the Karvonen formula which takes into account your resting heart rate to calculate your target heart rate.  This is range I've been trying to stay within.  I'll run and when I walk to rest, I let my heart rate go down to about 150 and then I run again and I repeat.  I feel that I'm doing something "active," but I don't feel as though I'm going to die.  That's basically what I want, right?