Thursday, March 29, 2007

Be Still My Beating Heart

Before Vince goes into depression, I must make an amendment to my recent Rest Heart Rate entry. When I did check it, I lied down in bed for ten minutes, in the evening, I relaxed as much as possible and pouf, my HR hovered around 44-46 for a good twenty minutes.
The funny thing is that since then, I have not been able to catch my HR going lower than 55-56. It looks like my "real" RHR is usually around 59ish. I've no idea what conditions it takes for my heart to feel powerful enough to relax into a 44 rate, but apparently, it's the exception rather than the norm. Feel better Vince?

I worked out three hours last night (forgetting to start my watch for the second hour so I'm missing those stats). The first thing that strikes me with all this monitoring is that the Perceived Exhaustion Rate, on which I was relying heavily before, is completely unrelated to my actual heart rate. That tends to tell me that the Perceived Exhaustion Rate ain't worth much as far as accuracy. In some exercises that are not that hard, my heart goes through the roof, and on some exercises when I feel like death, my heart is cruising along calmly. So it appears that this tool will actually be very useful to me to verify the actual intensity and to motivate me to work at higher percentages.

Other than that I'm grumpy, lonely and frustrated, today, on a personal level. One of them days when you're looking for friends and they all happen to be busy. It only reinforces the frustration, but the true source comes from inside of course. Argh.

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