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Old 05-28-14, 02:05 PM
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Buzzatronic
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My understanding is that average sleeping heart rate and resting heart rate are not the same. To get your "resting" heart rate, you should check it when you wake up in the morning BEFORE you get out of bed. I typically wake up, grab my phone and wait a minute or two then use the HR monitor on my phone to do 3 readings. The lowest one I get is what I record for the day.

Then for the day the things I focus on are:

1. Resting heart rate patterns. Is it higher/lower than normal in the morning and does that mean something. Higher than normal could mean you're fighting off illness or fatigued for some reason.
2. Is my perceived effort on the bike matching my experience with what my HR would be at that effort level? If it's higher/lower, why?

I'm not sure your HR while working during the day is a useful data point after you've gotten off the bike. So many other factors impact your HR all day that you'll have far more noise in the data than you'll be able to sift through.

One thing some people track is how long it takes for them to go from close to their max (zone 5) to zone 2 or lower, but this is usually done within a few minutes of hitting max effort (i.e. climb a badass hill in Z5 for 5 min then at the top, completely stop and see how long it takes for your HR to drop down to Z2). I haven't gotten around to tracking this yet since I don't like to stop mid-ride and just wait for my HR to drop.
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