Why Does Heart Rate Increase During Exercise?

To get the right answer to the question, why does heart rate increase during exercise, you need to understand the relationship between exercise, muscle, and blood.

When you engage in exercise, you are putting the muscle into serious work. Exercising means improving the fitness and strength of bone and muscles, basically, exercise has several effects on muscle.

The effects of exercise on muscle depend on the type of exercise, intensity, and duration. The harder the exercise the more the effect on the muscle.

So, from this little explanation, you understand that muscle does most of the job when you are exercising. The question is how do the muscle respond or gets the energy required to withstand the exercise period?

During exercise, you are engaging the muscle into work. The more you increase your exercise intensity the more you increase the muscular work. Increase in muscular work means the muscles will require more oxygen to perform.

The next question is, where do the oxygen that the muscle need comes from? The simple answer is that oxygen comes from blood. Now that takes us to the point why the heart rate increase during exercise.

Why Does Heart Rate Increase During Exercise?

Blood contains the oxygen the muscle needs during exercise and it is only the heart can supply the blood. The process through which blood is circulated to the body and muscle is known as the heartbeat. in other words, the heart is responsible for the effective blood circulation in the body because it has the responsibility of pumping blood.

What is a Heartbeat?

A heartbeat is a duration taken for your heart to be filled with blood and contracts to pump it to your body. Medically, the speed of your heartbeat is referred to as heath rate. Therefore, heart rate is the speed of the heartbeat measured by the number of contractions of the heart per minute.

According to the American Heart Association, all things being equal, the normal heart rate of every adult is 60-100 bpm. Heart rate above 100bpm is known as tachycardia and heart rate below 60 is known as arrhythmia.

So during exercise, the heart does more work than when the body is at rest. The heart pumps blood faster than normal thereby increasing the heartbeat. Increase in heartbeat leads to an increase in heart rate

 Heart Rate Increase – Any Side Effect?

It is obvious that during exercise your heart pumps blood faster to the muscle and other parts of the body thereby increasing the heart rate. But the question is, is there any negative effect of the increase in the heart rate?

So far, there is no scientifically proven side effect of an increase in the heart rate during exercise but there is a maximum heart rate you should not exceed. Your maximum heart rate (MHR) is the highest rate your cardiovascular or heart can pump during exercise.

This depends on the intensity of the exercise you engaged in. If you engaged in high-intensity exercise your heart rate will be very high while if you engaged in low-intensity exercise your heart rate will not be as fast as in the case of high-intensity exercise.

The best way to measure your maximum heart rate during exercise is to know your limit. Don’t exercise beyond your physical limit. Doing so will definitely push your heart rate beyond the normal limit.

Another way to know what your heart rate will be under a high-intensity exercise is to subtract your age from 220. This means that if you are a 40-year-old man, the value of your heart rate will be calculated by subtracting 40 from 220.

This entails that for a 40-year-old man, the heartbeat will be 180 times per minute during exercise.

With all these in mind, it is obvious that if you are exercising within your limit, then there is no any side effect as to why heart rate increases during exercise

So, how can you calculate this heart rate during exercise?

Heart Rate Monitor (HRM)

The fastest way to calculate your heart rate during exercise is through the use of a device known as heart rate monitor. This is a personalized device that can enable you to measure your heart rate at any given time. So, if you are interested in measuring your heart rate at different occasions during exercise then the heart rate monitor is all you need.

It is so designed that you can easily read the heart rate even if you are not a doctor. It is an easy to use device. The latest version of heart rate monitor use one or two different methods to detect the heart rate. The methods are the use of an electrical sensor and an optical sensor.

Both methods provide the same result, which shows how accurate it is to use this device in determining the heart rate during exercise.

Why Does Heart Rate Increase During Exercise? – Wrap Up

Obviously, we have tried as much as we can to answer your question why does heart rate increase during exercise. We hope you have understood that exercise means putting the muscles to work.  And for the muscle to respond accordingly it needs some level of oxygen to keep it going.

The required oxygen can only come from the blood and it is the heart that does the work of pumping the blood that supplies the oxygen. So, when you exercise you are increasing the demand for oxygen by the muscle and invariably increasing the pumping speed of the heart, which is referred to as heart rate.

The heart rate depends on the type of exercise, intensity, and duration. So, if you are in for a high-intensity exercise then the heart rate increases faster and vice versa.

The good news is that medically, there are no side effects of an increase in heart rate during exercise.  Just make sure you don’t stress your body beyond the limit because that is the only point there could be a danger.