For those of you who wear a Fitbit or Apple Watch (or any other fitness wearable) - do you know where your heart rate should be? Although it is perfectly normal and human to have aesthetic goals, the most important thing about a movement routine is making sure it is being done in a way/designed to care for your body how our body is designed. There are multiple forms of exercise: Cardio, Mobility and Low-impact related work like Pilates, yoga, stretching, Resistance training such as weightlifting, band workouts, Performance specific training, and Higher intensity/Combination training, etc. I come from the belief system that our body needs various forms of exercise, aka movement, to be in its most optimal balanced state. I will go deeper into this in further posts, but today is all about how to use heart rate variance as a way to design the different forms of exercise into your week. Heart rate variance refers to the range your heart rate varies during your movement... which makes it a great judge of intensity. Meaning how low the low is, and how high the high is. Research shows that a greater variance is associated with greater cardiovascular health. Let's take going for a run as an example. When you start your heart rate goes from relatively resting (let's say 60 for an example), to then a high rate as your body is adjusting to this new oxygen demand (let's say u to 160), then if you run steady state, it may level out as it finds a rate that meets the demand. Then if you sprint quickly, it will go back up. You stop at the cross walk, and it comes back down. This is variance. The more you train, the greater your ability to "adapt" meaning your ability to reach the end of your variance range faster. Zone 2 Cardio (150-180 min/week) is proven to be some of the MOST essential movement for our overall health. This is a level of intensity in which your breathing and heart rate increase but you can "maintain a conversation", anywhere between 70-80% of your heart rate max. So next workout check your wearable and rather than looking at the total calories burned - take a picture of the HEART RATE RANGE. Let me know what it was! Drop it in the Proof in the Progress group, #sweatcheck.