Heart Rate Monitor

Wow, I haven't been doing a very good job of updating my blog!! I guess I've been busy working, exercising, playing with the horses (which I post about on my horse blog at http://rdxhorses.blogspot.com) and cleaning house . . . not really a whole lot to blog about I guess. :)

I've been doing pretty good sticking with my sprint interval workout routine. I was stepping over a fence on Monday and my pants leg got hung up causing me to fall, so I was bruised and sore and missed that workout. I did workout today though and the exciting news is I got a heart rate monitor!!

I don't remember if I posted about this, but I was worried my heart rate was getting too high during the sprint intervals so I decided to get the monitor to make sure I wasn't doing something that could hurt me. It was a lot of fun to play with. It uses my age to decide my target heart rate (it chose 126-162bpm as my range). My resting heart rate is 69bpm (this is what the doctor recorded when I went in for annual bloodwork).

When I started my five minute walking warm up I expected to reach the low end of my range (126bpm) fairly quickly, but it actually took several minutes, which just drills home the importance of a proper warm up to me. During the first couple of sprints (running approximately 5mph) I don't think my heart rate went over 162bpm, but on the third one it spiked to 177bpm! Yikes! I was talking and I think that was part of it. Another thing I think is a problem is my breathing. I'm very bad about breathing shallow (grew up in a house with parents who smoked cigarettes indoors) and I think that's affecting my hearts ability to slow down during the walking part. I was doing the 30 second sprints and am now doing only 60 second rest intervals (as opposed to the 90 seconds I started out on) and I noticed each rest interval my heart rate stayed higher. Like the first time it went down to 130bpm, the second was close to the same, the third was 140bpm, the fifth 150bpm and obviously the sixth started the cool down which put me back down to 110bpm.

Out of curiosity I left the heart rate monitor on while I sat down to rest after my five minute cool down. Within five minutes it was down to 90bpm and was still the same after ten minutes. I'm not sure how long it's supposed to take to get back down to the resting heart rate, but didn't want to waste the battery in the monitor so I took it off. So anyway, it's all very interesting. I'll keep you updated on my progress. In another week I will be taking my new measurements to see where my body fat percentage is. It's not uncommon for there to not be a change in the first month (especially since I haven't been very good about the whole eating at my resting metabolic rate (1725 calories a day)) so I'm not too worried about it. I'm also thinking about starting my weight training again soon because now that I'm exercising I miss it! :D