Heart Rate

On this day of hearts everywhere, I'm thinking about the most important heart of all, the one that beats within the chest. It is for those beats that I have these three goals - physical, mental, and spiritual - so that I may have more beats to enjoy life, to share with my family, to use within this world, so that my beats may continue to strengthen my life and the lives of those around me.

When working out, every beat matters, but it is the rate of those beats that matters most. Getting one's heart rate higher is the key to effective exercise, to changing the body's plateau and improving its strength. While you don't want to go too high, of course - over exertion can lead to just as many deadly problems as under exertion - it is important to exercise your heart as you would any muscle.

At first, you might think there is a finite speed at which the heart can beat if all you do is walk; without increasing your pace even faster to jogging or running, how can you get your heart rate higher for better exercise? There are several tactics I use:

• Changing stride length
• Adding hand weights or ankle weights
• Tightening abdominal muscles, like standing crunches
• Boxing and punching moves
• Increasing the treadmill incline

During a typical walk, I will use two or three methods to increase my heart rate, particularly if I am on the treadmill. I can feel the difference, and my heart does as well - with every beat it grows stronger, at least physically. The mental and spiritual heart rate issues aren't so easily solved, but just like the body, they need the exercise in order to improve. While I'm not yet that far along on those more transcendental journeys, all things in time. Love is more than a single day, and so is building that love to a lifelong commitment.