I basically sat on my ass for a year or so, got fat, then finally hit the gym, got on a good cycle, and put on a lot of lean muscle mass. I’m down to 15% body fat (from 28%) but I still have the spare tire to get rid of. So I decide to hit the heavy bag for the 1st time in well over a year, and I get winded in under 5 minutes and felt like I was going to drop dead on the spot. So I grab a new Polar heart monitor to and set out to find my target heart rate, which turns out to be around 160 or so (according to the Polar online calculator). However, in under 5 minutes of aerobic exercise I blow way past that. Almost any real cardio, and my heart rate gets well outside of the “healthy” range.
Obviously I need to start slower and work my way up to a decent cardiovascular workout, but cardio has never been this brutal for me. I assume there is a correlation with lean muscle mass, or mass in general, with the cardiovascular load on the body. Should I maybe be working with a different target heart rate that the seemingly generic one that the online calculators kicks out that are based on age alone? Does anyone have a link to a more accurate and exact target heart rate calculator more for someone doing a significant amount of weight training as well?
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