Heart rate monitoring in the setting of Beta-Blocker therapy

beuerc

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone had experience with utilizing heart rate monitors for training while taking a beta-blocker?  It would be my assumption that this would not be prohibitive, though that would be a big assumption.  Moreover, I assume there are limited to no randomized control studies on this, so cardiologists or those with personal experience please feel free to weigh in, thanks!

Chris

Leslie Knight

Chris, I noticed no one responded to this one. Beta blockers block the signals in your heart that make it go faster. You may be able to develop your own HR zones based on your own max HR (which will be very low), but no normal calculator will do it for you. And the BB could also keep you from performing as well as if you didn't need it. You need cardiac output to push a lot of blood to the body and one component of cardiac output is heart rate. Lower HR with a constant stroke volume (output per heart beat) equals a lower cardiac output.

What have you found since your post? Have you calculated personalized zones or did you decide to go with pace?

Bob Irwin

Chris - my cardiologist started me on beta blockers when I was first diagnosed with afib. My resting heart rage dropped a couple of beats, and I was unable to get my herat rate above 120 no matter how hard I tried and my watts were way down. In addition, I felt very fatigued all of the time - so fatigued it was hard to function normally. He switched me to a calcium channel blocker and that worked much better for me. I am able to get my heart rate up to within 6-8 beats of what I can if I don't take the medicine. However, it takes much longer for it to rise, so I can't really train using heart rate. At least I can't using an EN plan. I guess I could if I were using more of a low intensity high volume approach like MAF. My cardiologist allows me to not take the medicine the day before and the day of races. I carry quick acting forms of both the CCB and an antiarythmic in case I need them - but I never have. The only problem that I have is that I really can't tell if my heart rate and watts/pace match to what I would see in training since I don't train without my medicine. So it's harder for me to tell if something is going south in a race. Hope that helps.