Heart rate?!
Heart rate questions??
I just started putting my heart rate monitor on as an FYI after not looking at it since before NOV OS and am kinda shocked by what I see now.
I used to do a TT through a park in my neighborhood and would continuosly hold 180 bpm to be at 90% for around 17 miles. Now I rode a 30min TT trying to ballpark my HR for some zones since I wasnt doing a new FTP test soon enough and I was curious. I averaged 168 with a max of 171. (being alot faster than I used to be)
I ran my first Half Marathon averaging 178 a few months ago. Now I can run an hour with averages of 152 and feel i would die at 178 granted I havent done any real tests on the running HR yet but its very low in comparison to my old rate
SO i guess I realize I am in much better shape but I Ifigured I could still hit my max heart rate from 8 months ago. I am only 24 and in the past have had a pretty fast HR so im a little confused as you can tell by this post ramblin on!
Any thoguhts or questions you have to make my ramblings make sense please let me know.
Comments
Good for you man! Go with it and keep hammering, it sound like you are doing great! I gave up my HR monitor as soon as I got a PM and really never used it for running because I always used RPE and pace.... to me, it always seemed my heart had a mind of its own and I never understood it! One day I would go and do an easy run and my HR was high, next day, just the opposite. Very temperamental my heart. I would say don't sweat it, stick with it if you want another metric to analyze, but don't put all your eggs into it. Keep with the consistency of your PM and pace charts. Good luck and keep killing it!
Dan
Your heart rate is what it is. Of course the speed you can hold for an hour running and the power you can hold for an hour cycling are the key parameters. But you're curious why your HR should be lower, despite being faster in those one hour tests. You are young enough that your heart, like your other muscles, is still growing and developing, literally getting bigger just like your biceps might with a lot of weight lifting. The bigger your heart, the more blood it can pump out with each beat. So you can get the Oxygen you need with fewer beats (there are other factors involved as well, such as more flexibility - compliance - in the heart muscle, more efficient use of O2 by your muscles, changes in your red blood cells, etc. etc.) Your resting heart rate might be getting lower as well - that's the number that's most closely correlated to heart size and effectiveness.