The effectiveness of a home fitness program depends on several key factors. One of the most important is keeping your heart rate at an optimal pace. To burn fat and lose weight, you need to not only raise your heart rate, but also keep it at an elevated level for a specific period of time.

Surprisingly, your optimal heart rate may not feel as intense as you would imagine. This prevents you from working too hard and hurting yourself while keeping your body going with enough intensity to achieve the best results. You should monitor your intensity by checking your heart rate throughout the duration of your chosen exercise videos.

Finding The Range Of Your Ideal Heart Rate

To find out if you are getting the most from your home fitness program, you need to track your target heart rate. This is your heart rate described as the number of beats per minute. To find this out, you can use an online calculator or the Karvonen method.

First, find your resting heart rate by taking your pulse first thing in the morning three days in a row. This should be between 60 and 100 beats per minute. From here, you can determine the upper and lower range of your target heart rate. For the lower end, subtract your age from 220 and times that by 50%. Then you add that answer to your resting heart rate. The upper end is calculated using the same formula except that you substitute 50% for 85%.

Targeting Your Ideal Heart Rate

Once you know how to find your target heart rate or THR, it is time to combine it with your exercise videos and your entire exercise routine. You can use a heart rate monitor that will tell you instantly where your heart rate is tracking, or you can figure it out at certain points during your routine. The trick is knowing what your target should be.

How intense you decide to let your exercise videos get will depend on how physically fit you are. Those who are just beginning their home fitness program will want to stay between 50 and 60%. You can continue to graduate up five or ten percent until you reach the optimum level of 85%.

To achieve the best results, you don't want to reach your top THR and stay there. The lower range will help you burn more fat, but the higher end will help you burn more calories, and therefore, lose more weight. Once you achieve the lower range, the idea is to break it up with five or ten minute segments of medium and high intensity.

Achieving Home Fitness Program Goals

The process described above is ideal for building your general fitness level. If you would like to tailor your routines to meet certain goals, choose the specific exercise videos that allow you to keep your heart rate at the right levels. To burn calories, for example, you need a higher heart rate. Therefore, look for workouts that are short and keep your heart rate at the higher end (about three quarters) of your target range for a longer period of time. If you need to improve your level of endurance, find longer routines that work at a slower pace (about a quarter of the way above the low end of your target range).

By monitoring your target heart range and finding exercise videos that match that, you can design a home fitness program that meets your goals. Combine programs such as Slim in 6 with other daily exercise, or you can use a routine such as the P90X to look the way you have always wanted.