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Health gym · Signoressa di Trevignano, Italy
Fitness Faktory: Heart Rate Training When the Member Has a Diagnosis
A gym in the Veneto that trains people recovering from cardiovascular disease, with doctors and physiotherapists on the team. The standard heart rate zones were the first thing they had to throw out.
Uptivo is essential to obtain results in total safety and in the shortest possible time.
Gabriele Bettiol
Founder, Fitness Faktory
The gym
Fitness Faktory has been running in the Veneto since 1986, from the years of body building and aerobics through to 2015, when Gabriele Bettiol opened it as a Health Gym in Signoressa di Trevignano, near Treviso. Doctors, physiotherapists, nutritionists and personal trainers build the programmes together.
Some members are athletes. Many have stabilised chronic-degenerative conditions and train there on programmes agreed with the specialists who follow them.
Why the standard zones are wrong here
Heart rate systems normally estimate maximum heart rate from age and split the range into zones. For a healthy adult the estimate is close enough to be useful.
It stops being useful for someone whose cardiac response to effort is altered by medication, or who is recovering from cardiovascular disease. The real ceiling is below what the formula assumes, and the zones on the screen would be telling that member to work harder than their doctor wants.
In Uptivo the maximum heart rate is set by hand for each member, so the zones follow the physiology of the person rather than their year of birth. This is the feature Fitness Faktory built its programmes on: it lets the doctors and the trainers agree an intensity in advance and see it respected during the session.
What it changes during the session
The trainer running the room can see, live, whether a member is above the ceiling that was set for them, and adjust the exercise while it is happening. The same data is there afterwards for the medical side of the team, who use it to revise the programme on what the member's heart actually did rather than on how hard they reported it felt.
What Gabriele says
Asked what Uptivo has meant for the gym, Gabriele does not soften it:
Uptivo saved lives!
Gabriele Bettiol, Founder of Fitness Faktory
He is referring to occasions when monitoring during training brought up heart irregularities that had not been picked up before, and which the medical team then investigated.
That is his account and we report it as his. Uptivo is not a diagnostic system and not a medical device. It makes effort visible, in a place where there are people qualified to act on what they see.
Who else this applies to
Almost no gym runs a medical team. But any club with members over sixty, on medication, or returning from an illness is training people the age formula guesses wrong about, and setting the ceiling member by member costs nothing extra to do.
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