What is a good heart rate while walking?

What a normal heart rate while walking is

While walking, your heart rate is lower than in any other endurance sport at the same perceived effort. You use less muscle mass, there is no flight phase, and your weight never has to leave the ground. An easy walk often lifts your heart rate only twenty to thirty beats above your resting heart rate; brisk walking, uphill or in the heat, can add twice that.

Naming a number that is right for everyone is therefore impossible. A twenty-five-year-old with a resting heart rate of 50 and a sixty-year-old with a resting heart rate of 70 walk the same pace at completely different heart rates, and both are normal. What you can say: a walking heart rate that ends up far above your easy running heart rate is a sign that you are working hard, or that something else is at play, such as heat, a climb, or a bad night.

Why running zones say nothing about a walk

Heart rate zones are built around an anchor from running or cycling: your threshold heart rate or your maximum. Zone 1 starts somewhere around half of your maximum. When walking on flat ground, you often do not even get there. The vast majority of walking time falls below the lowest running zone.

A zone ladder then says the same thing for the whole hour: below zone 1. That is not wrong, it is just useless. It makes no distinction between strolling and brisk walking, and it says nothing about what that walk meant for you.

Walking in zone 2 is therefore a question without an answer. Zone 2 is a region from running, and when walking you only get there uphill, in the heat, or at a pace where walking is almost running. For an ordinary walk, the whole ladder is the wrong tape measure.

A personal walking band instead of a ladder

What does work is taking your own walking heart rate as the measure. If you walk regularly with a heart rate monitor, your walks together draw a band: the range your heart rate usually sits in while walking. The bottom is your heart rate on a relaxed walk, the top is what you reach when you push on.

That band is personal, and so it does say something. If a walk sits at the bottom of your band, it was recovery. If it sits at the top, it was training. If it sits above it, something was going on: a climb, heat, an illness on its way, or simply a day when you wanted more. The same 110 beats per minute can sit at the bottom of the band for one person and at the top for another.

A band also has a pleasant property that a ladder does not: it shifts with you. As you get fitter, your heart rate at the same pace drops, and after a few weeks your usual walk sits at the bottom of a band that used to be tight. You do not need to reset anything.

What pushes your heart rate up without you walking faster

Heat is the biggest one. Your body sends blood to your skin to cool down, and your heart has to pump more to keep supplying your muscles as well. On a warm afternoon an ordinary walk can come out ten to fifteen beats higher than the same walk on a cool morning, without you walking any faster. After a week or two of warm weather your body adapts and that difference shrinks again.

Hills and sand are the second. Walking uphill takes your heart rate into regions that flat walking never reaches, and it is one of the few ways to get near running zones on foot. A backpack does the same.

And then there is the slow side of your heart rate itself. It lags one to two minutes behind what you are doing, and on a long walk it creeps up slowly through fluid loss and fatigue, even if your pace stays the same. A heart rate that is higher in the second hour than in the first is normal for walking, not an alarm.

What Trimetra does with this

For walking, Trimetra shows no running zones but your own walking band: the range between the easy and the brisk side of your own walks with heart rate. That band comes from your own data and needs no setting. Without walks with heart rate there is no band yet, and then the app would rather say so than draw one from a formula.

With heart rate, every minute of a walk counts towards your load, even below the pace that serves as the lower limit without a monitor. The effort is then read from your heart rate relative to your own band, not from a zone ladder.

The planner steers walking sessions on a target pace. For walking, your heart rate is the second gauge, to see afterwards whether a walk was harder than the pace suggested, through heat, terrain or fatigue.

Frequently asked questions

Trimetra reads your walks against your own walking band, not against running zones that say nothing about them. You can try everything for your first month; recording and collecting stay free after that.