Karate & Heart-Rate

You should have seen on my photo displayed in Konchin.com frontpage  : I’m wearing a watch.
This is not a mistake in fact it’s an Heart Rate Monitor.

Heart Rate monitoring is the basis of numerous sports. It was firstly introduced in endurance sport such as running & cycling.
The first heart rate monitor was sold in the 80’s and used on the Cycling Tour de France.

As a former cyclist (I’m still riding but not as my former level and speed), I learnt how to use Heart Rate monitoring and experienced its limits; that’s why I developed a specific method based on muscular power measurement.

Endurance Training Zones :

If you want to train using Heart Rate monitoring as a basis you need to define your endurance training zones.
to know at least 2 values : your Resting Heart Rate (RHR) and your Max Heart Rate (MHR).

Based on that you can calculate training zones used for Endurance Training :

The formula I used to calculate my training zones is the following:

                                         RHR < Zone 1 <  (MHR-RHR)x50%+RHR

(MHR-RHR)x 50% +RHR < Zone 2 < (MHR-RHR)x 75% +RHR

(MHR-RHR)x 75% +RHR < Zone 3 < (MHR-RHR)x 85% +RHR

(MHR-RHR)x 85% +RHR < Zone 4 < (MHR-RHR)x 90% +RHR

(MHR-RHR)x 90% +RHR < Zone 5 < MHR                                      

Coming back to Karate training I continue to use the  Heart Rate while training in my Home Dojo.
When I started again Karate with Uechi-Ryu I was recovering from bad disease and I hard to start from scratch. I will not dig in the details about this disease but at that time I was not able to perform more than 20 minutes of sport without being exhausted.

After a very supporting push from my sensei to convince me to continue; I started to re build my body using the Heart Rate Monitor.

Interest of Heart Rate Monitor :

Heart rate indicates mainly your body answer to the different stimulus (effort intensity, temperature, humidity, ….).

For very short effort I use it to not exceed zone 4-5 during Heavy Bag training and zone 3-4 during kata training.
I look carefully  too the recovery phase just after kata performance.

As an example you will find an heart rate curve of a Kata Training session: