Training & Nutrition - Questions of my own about resting HR.

The thread about resting HR promted me to ask some of my own questions.

1. When is the best time to check your resting HR? Isn't in the morning when you first wake up before you get out of bed the best time, when you are totally relaxed?

2. I assume a HRM is a reliable way to do so?

3. Provided a HRM is ok to use to check for resting HR, it would be really uncomfortable for me to wear it all night long when I sleep, but if I put it on after I wake up then lay back down again that will cause my Hr to increase, what solution is there to this problem?

Thanks.

the answer to question one is no

In the early morning, despite feeling relaxed, your natural circadian rythem for releasing a surge of adrenalin is in the morning, so you're resting heart rate is usually slightly faster. (This is why most heart attacks occur in the wee hours of the morning when this natural circadian surge is in effect)

Our body naturally tries to wind down in midday (that's why i like the idea of siestas) so this may be a good time or early evening.

I don't trust heart rate monitors, I just check my radial pulse for 30 seconds and multiply by 2

The advantage of checking you heart rate in the morning before you get up is that you have a better controlled condition to use for comparisons. Since you have been relatively immobile for several hours your body has had time to settle down. You may not get the lowest heart rate, but you will be able to spot trends better.

The key is not the absolute heartrate. It's a the relative changes over time that are important for detecting overall fitness and overtraining issues.

I have found my lowest heart rate seems to agree with cbhungry. Around 2 PM or so, on a day when I am sitting at my desk at work, I get a heart rate about 5 bps lower than in the morning.

As far as how to measure heartrate in the morning, I prefer to count pulses in my wrist while watching the clock on the nightstand. Wearing a heart monitor all night would get old fast and run the battery down pretty quickly if done regularly.

While I see cbhungry's hypothesis, I don't necessarily agree.

I believe when fitness professionals in the industry advise for taking heart rate first thing in the morning, natural rise in heart rate and blood pressure is taken into account.

Keep in mind, when the professionals suggest taking heart rate first thing in the morning, they don't advocate taking it as soon as you open your eyes. Rather, they encourage you to lay in bed for several minutes and allow your heart rate to settle, then take your heart rate. A healthy individual experiencing a peak in the heart rate (assuming they are coming out of REM a the time they awake) should be able to sufficently recover within the wait time to bring the body's resting heart rate back to its normal levels. At this point, taking a radial pulse or using a heart rate monitor would work for taking your heart rate. It is a matter of looking at your body trends- take the heart rate consistently every morning to detect any changes in heart rate. If you're taking your pulse consistently, and you're noticing after a month of taking it that you're suddenly unable to get your heart rate down to the normal levels you've experienced from your other readings, it's time to consider taking some time off. Assuming you've had a sufficient amount of sleep, the body should be at its most rested state first thing in the morning (taking into account the surge of biofeedback resulting from REM awakening and lying still to allow the body's biofeedback to settle back down), it would be a consistent indicator of whether you are sufficiently rested or not.

You can wear the heart rate monitor to bed, but do realize that when you wear the monitor strap to bed, you activate the strap, so you will wear down the battery faster than when you would be putting it on in the morning. One thing you could do is wear the strap, but maybe put it around your waist or stomach before you go to sleep, then in the morning, you can pull the strap up over your heart when you first wake up. You can always wear the watch to bed, but it won't activate until you put the strap on. If you're unsure about your HRM, consider getting a digital monitor instead- they tend to be more accurate than the analog monitors out there, and they respond much more quickly to the increases and decreases in heartbeats. I use a timex digital watch, and I'm pretty satisfied with it.

If you're really concerned about taking heart rate, do as I suggest with my students- get a downloadable heart rate monitor and take it to bed with you. In the morning, you simply download the heart rate monitor onto your computer and then you can track your heart rate much more accurately.

The reason why I can't quite bring myself to go along with cbhungry is that some research done suggests that every time you wake up, you experience this increase in adrenaline, heart rate, etc. because you're coming out of REM. When you first sleep, you experience all stages of sleep- stages 1, 2, 3, 4, and REM, and you will move through the stages 1- REM, then back to stage 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, then REM, then back to stage 1... etc. etc. etc... However, as the night progresses, the body moves mainly into stages 1, 2 and REM. The REM stage is really the longest stage of sleep of the three stages your body experiences, but still.... you wake up when you wake up. Sometimes REM, sometimes, stage 1, sometimes stage 2. With all this said, with stages 1 and 2 being the deepest sleep, and REM being the lightest and most stressful, you are 66% more likely to wake up in a less stressful state. For that 1/3rd of the time you wake up in REM state, is it worth it to discount what the fitness professionals maintain- that awakening is the best time to take heart rate? I don't think so. Even then, as a healthy fit person, you should be able to sufficently recover from an increase in your biofeedback within the first minute of waking up. Heck, your body is recovered from the stresses of the previous day, and fit folks OUGHT to be able to quickly drop heart rate- if they couldn't, there's a problem, and that's when I would suggest someone see their doctor right away.

It is true there are other ways to measure fitness level- you could do an interval ride, then determine how quickly you dropped your heart rate during the recovery period of the intervals. I may do 10- 15 work/rest intervals of 1:2 intervals (ie: work for 1 minute at 90% heart rate max with a 2 minute rest interval at 75% heart rate max for 10 total intervals= 30 minutes of interval time). If during the interval workout, I cannot sufficiently recover (normally, I can drop heart rate quickly) from one of the intervals and my heart rate remains relatively high, I know it's time to take the rest of the time in my 30 minute planned interval as a recovery ride. Intervals are over. The next day, I'll attempt the intervals again, and hopefully, I'm able to recover every time, so I can go back to my normal workouts again. If I'm still having problems, I take another recovery day. I'll repeat the process, and if I'm still having problems recovering (say... a week), I'll book a doctor's appointment. Something has to be wrong with me at this point (I think, but I hope not). Another thing to consider when doing intervals is that the faster you can drop your heart rate in a recovery, the fitter you are. On a good day, I can drop my heart rate from 90% to 75% within the first 30 seconds of my recovery. That's good news for me, because now I can get more oxygen into the body and prepare myself for the next high intensity interval. On an ok day, it may take me a minute to drop my heart rate the 15% to 75%. On a bad day, I can't drop it hardly at all, and it's time for a recovery ride. If it takes you the entire 2 minutes to drop your heart rate down, the bad thing about this is that you just don't get a sufficient amount of time to bring in enough oxygen so that you have increased energy for subsequent intervals. In my indoor cycling classes, the students who are less fit are sometimes groaning when they finally get their heart rate down in the final seconds of the 2 minute rest, only to turn around and get started on the next anaerobic interval. In the meantime, I'm already rested, recovered and ready, since I hung out at my 75% for at least a minute and a half waiting for the next effort.

Another thing you may consider is taking delta heart rate. Simply put, delta heart rate is the measurable difference in heart rate when changing the body position from lying down to standing. The increase in the cardiac load when going from lying to standing will indicate whether your heart works sufficiently to accomodate the increased load. I believe a change of 20 beats or less is fine, but when the change in heart rate between lying and standing (taking your time getting up off the floor and moving to a standing position) is more than 20 beats, it is an indication of stress on the body, and you should take recovery rides or time off altogether until your heart rate returns to normal.

Another way to measure fitness through heart rate is the recovery time at the end of a workout session. Within 2 minutes of the end of your training session, your heart rate should be able to return to within 65% of your maximum heart rate (60% would be even better). If it takes you longer than 2 minutes after light pedaling and easy breathing, I advise my students to take some time off, or see a doctor if they have previous heart conditions. One day, I had an older gentleman in my class with a high percentage of abdominal fat who couldn't recover sufficiently at the end of class. He was breathing heavily, so he drove to the emergency room of the hospital, and he was diagnosed as experiencing a heart attack. Before the heart attack, he'd been groaning and moaning about using a heart rate monitor, but after that incident, he bought his own monitor and now wears it religiously. He was lucky.

Finally, you can test yourself by checking your ambient heart rate (which is what I suspect people posting here are doing when they measure their heart rate towards the end of the day). Ambient heart rate is the heart rate taken while quietly sitting. Ambient heart rate will change over time, but if it remains consistently low, it is a good indicator of good fitness. When ambient heart rate is higher, it is a good indicator of overtraining or stress of some sort. I remember at one time doing an ambient heart rate check, and averaging my heart rate in the 90s! I took more endurance training, more recoveries, and less interval and higher intensity classes, and after doing this for a few months, when I checked my heart rate again, I was in the 70s. Within a few months of that, I was in the 50s.

All right, that's about it for now. It's almost midnight, and I'm missing out on some serious REM's right now.... ;)

Koffee

I THINK THE KEY IS CONSISTANCY RATHER THAN ABSOLUTE HEART RATE OVER TIME AS SUPCOM AND KOFFEE REITERATED.

Originally posted by cbhungry
I don't trust heart rate monitors, I just check my radial pulse for 30 seconds and multiply by 2

Why not? A HRM measures how many beats per min. your heart is beating and tramsmitting that info to a monitor that you can read it on. As long as yor heart keeps beating, (if it is not beating you are probably in serious trouble), and as long as the battery's in the HRM are good, the monitor should work fine.

Originally posted by supcom
Wearing a heart monitor all night would get old fast and run the battery down pretty quickly if done regularly.

It would not wear down the battery to fast. The only time the battery supply's power to the monitor is if I push one of the buttons to bring up the display. As long as I have the chest strap on and there is a good connection the display stays on. If I get to far from the monitor, (it is mounted to my handlebars), the display goes blank or shuts off. So wearing it all night would not wear down the batterys as I would not need it to be displayed until I woke up reached over to turn on the display so I could read what it is.

Originally posted by N_C
The thread about resting HR promted me to ask some of my own questions.

1. When is the best time to check your resting HR? Isn't in the morning when you first wake up before you get out of bed the best time, when you are totally relaxed?

2. I assume a HRM is a reliable way to do so?

3. Provided a HRM is ok to use to check for resting HR, it would be really uncomfortable for me to wear it all night long when I sleep, but if I put it on after I wake up then lay back down again that will cause my Hr to increase, what solution is there to this problem?

Thanks.


1. Is good enough for me, if Sally Edwards says it's OK. That said, I usually NEED a leak first thing in the morning....so I do that, then go and relax in bed for a few minutes while lying down, then take a measurement.

2. Absolutely.

3. See 1. :)


p.s. Until recently, I was actually measuring Ambient HR...not Resting HR.... glad I was corrected by reading!

Originally posted by supcom
Wearing a heart monitor all night would get old fast and run the battery down pretty quickly if done regularly.



True...even if the watch is not actively receiving, the transmitter is transmitting I suppose.

Originally posted by N_C
The only time the battery supply's power to the monitor is if I push one of the buttons to bring up the display.

Unless your heart rate monitor is far more sophisticated than the prevailing design, the chest strap has no way of knowing the operational mode of the wrist receiver. The chest strap is designed such that when it detects the electrical pulses of your heart, it begins transmitting data. If there is a receiver around to pick up the transmission, all the better, but the chest strap doesn't know about it.

To do otherwise would require a transmitter in the watch and a receiver built into the chest strap. These would be high cost options that would have no utility for most users.

To make matters worse, if you are using a Polder HRM, then, as I understand it, the battery is sealed inside the chest strap and not replaceable. When it expires, you must purchase a new chest strap.

Originally posted by supcom
To make matters worse, if you are using a Polder HRM, then, as I understand it, the battery is sealed inside the chest strap and not replaceable. When it expires, you must purchase a new chest strap.



2500 hours is plenty of time in most peoples books, no?

Thats two years at an average usage of 4 hours a day for 6 days a week.

Lots of people will probably have upgraded to the next shiny new model by then.... ;)

Originally posted by belfast-biker
True...even if the watch is not actively receiving, the transmitter is transmitting I suppose.



You could wear it, but just flip it over until you need it.

No battery usage then, unless you sweat REAL bad.... ;)

"The transmitter should be facing outwards with the battery cover position on your Left as shown in (figure B).The transmitter is automatically activated when you're -wearing it. It will also turn itself off when it's not connected to your body. Wet the two electrodes (rubber pads) located on the inside of the Transmitter preferably with a saline solution (i.e. perspiration. saliva). The electrodes must be moist throughout the exercise routine for accurate heart rate detection."

Just in case there's any doubt as to if the transmitter and watch can operate independently of each other. They can.

Thanks to Oxologic for picking this up for me months ago and correcting my error in thinking...

KB

Hey sure Koffee, this forum is all about gaining knowledge, correcting our wrong ideas and helping each other out.

Actually I'm not really fond of monitoring my heart rate in the morning. In fact, I usually monitor my resting heart rate before I sleep, relaxing for a couple of minutes with the chest strap and the heart rate monitor on. If you want to take it in the morning, it's absolutely find that you take a leak while putting on your chest strap. Then, you'll return to the bed and rest lying down, taking your resting heart rate. Your resting heart rate will still be as low or if not lower, which is the case for me.

Since reading this thread, I took my resting hear rate just before going to bed, it was 46. When I got up in the morning it was 52.
Resting HR also depends on how much supper I had !
So which number should I used?

Originally posted by spinner5339
Since reading this thread, I took my resting hear rate just before going to bed, it was 46. When I got up in the morning it was 52.
Resting HR also depends on how much supper I had !
So which number should I used?




the lower.