Celebrate February by Loving Your Heart
This month’s issue is about love: keeping your heart healthy, loving the shape you are now and adding some love mojo to your diet. This month celebrates National Wear Red Day. Join with millions of women, companies, organizations and cities across America by wearing red and making a donation to the American Heart Association to help support ongoing research and education about women and heart disease. Give your heart and yourself a gift by adding more cardiovascular exercise to your workout regimen, which is a huge benefit for overall fitness. The goal is to achieve a high level of cardiovascular fitness by gradually working up to exercising on most days of the week for 30 to 60 minutes at 50 to 80% of your maximum capacity.
I want you to evaluating your progress by measuring your cardio fitness. The easiest way to do this is by using your resting heart rate to determine cardio fitness. A range of 40 to 100 beats indicates a normal resting heart rate. To determine your rate, take your pulse first thing in the morning before engaging in any significant activity. Because the resting heart rate is a representation of the least amount of beats required to sustain the body, taking the pulse when you wake up will give you an accurate reading. Next, place your index and middle fingers on either side of your neck, or the thumb side of the wrist to find the radial or carotid pulse. Count the beats starting at zero and continue counting for one minute. Record the number of times the heart beats in one minute. This number reflects cardio fitness. For women doing cardiovascular training, 75 beats per minute is the average. Record the resting heart rate over a period of time to determine if cardio fitness is improving. As your cardio fitness improves, your resting heart rate will decrease. 
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