Giusy Mele-Brown is no slouch when it comes to exercise – she clocks in about two hours of workouts most days. But in the last six years she had seen her weight steadily climb. She eventually gained 25 pounds.
What got the 40-year-old real estate agent from Pasadena, Calif., back on track, she says, was a fitness test previously available only to elite and professional athletes: a noninvasive analysis that determines when she’s in her aerobic, fat-burning heart rate zone and when she’s in her anaerobic, carb-burning zone.
The result? Mele-Brown lost 22 pounds in two months, even as she kicked her workouts down several notches, doing cardio at about 140 beats a minute instead of her usual 180.
Increasingly, high-tech fitness tests are popping up at gyms. There’s the test Mele-Brown took, which determined the heart rate at which she reached her anaerobic threshold, the point when the body stops using fat and oxygen for fuel and relies, instead, on carbohydrates.
This helped her pinpoint her anaerobic zone, where the body produces lactic acid, breathing becomes difficult, the heart races and muscles quickly tire.
Working out in this zone will improve the cardiovascular system but won’t burn the body fat most people want to shed.
Another test now available determines resting metabolic rate – how many calories are burned per day at rest – so people can accurately figure how many calories should be consumed and how many need to be burned.
Not long ago, these tests, which require equipment costing thousands of dollars, were available only at human performance labs, elite sports-training facilities and some hospitals.
Today, they’re increasingly being offered at private training facilities, larger gym chains and even some corporate fitness facilities, the result of a demand from trainers plus savvy marketing by equipment manufacturers.
The costs are about $100 for the test alone to several hundred dollars for bells and whistles, such as individualized exercise prescriptions, with or without a trainer.
Health clubs say knowing these exact numbers is helpful for people struggling with losing weight or trying to improve their performance, whether on a treadmill or in a triathlon. But some exercise experts aren’t sure that any of this is necessary.
They point out that many other fitness tests that have been around for decades (such as using a numeric formula to estimate maximum heart rate) have served the workout population just fine, even if they’re less precise.
“You don’t need an anaerobic threshold test in order to exercise safely and effectively, regardless of what your goals are,” said Mitchell Whaley, a professor of exercise science who also works with the Human Performance Lab at Ball State University in Indiana.
The old, low-tech methods are close enough, he said.
Take heart rate zones. The formula most people use is 220-minus-age to get their maximal heart rate, the highest heart rate attained during exercise. Then they calculate 60 percent and 90 percent of that number to get the optimum range for cardio exercise.
The math-challenged can go even simpler, by paying attention to their rate of perceived exertion, which is little more than noting one’s breathing and heart rate while working out.
If your breathing is slow and heart rate barely raised, you’re probably not exercising hard enough. If you’re out of breath, your heart is beating very rapidly and your muscles feel maxed out, you’re likely in an anaerobic zone.
Basal metabolic rate, or calories burned at rest per day, can be estimated using gender, age, height and weight: A 40-year-old, 130-pound, 5-foot-4-inch woman, for example, burns about 1,325 calories at rest.
To calculate your basal metabolic rate, go to health.discovery.com/tools/calculators/basal/basal.html.
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