Maximum heart rate

Today was the second day that I took my new heart rate monitor out for a spin. My first day was not quite a success.

On Tuesday I was wearing my monitor strap around my belly button. If you don’t know, that is not where the strap is supposed to be. You don’t get a clear heart rate reading down there. But that is where it ended up about 5 minutes into the run. As it turned out, I was getting more realistic numbers from down there than up near my heart. When the strap was somewhat near where it needed to be I was getting readings of 254 beats per minute. That is a little outside the normal range. I think human hearts explode with those numbers. While I was breathing hard, I did not think my heart was pumping quite at that speed. When it was around my belly, and getting a reading, it read 160 BPM. But most of the time it just read 0.

Today I tightened the strap up quite a bit and gave it another try. I was doing an interval workout where I was running fast for 4 minutes and slow for 4 minutes. I did that for almost 40 minutes. My maximum heart rate was 185 with an average of 160. That is about what it should be for a run like that. Normally I would want to keep it in the 140 ish range though.

I got my HRM for Father’s day. So I am not sure I should be talking about it yet since it has not officially been given to me.

It is a Reebok Precision Trainer XT Heart Rate Monitor that I got off of Woot for a good price. As an HRM, I think it works pretty well. As a watch it stinks. There is some pretty good intelligence built into the Timex Ironman watches that I have worn for the last 2 years. None of that exists in the stopwatch features of this HRM watch. Stopwatch is either on or off. No laps to confuse you. I already know that I will be wearing 2 watches when I run anything more complicated than just a run around the block.

One thought on “Maximum heart rate”

  1. I meant to tell you that I bought one two… I think that I have used it 2-3 times. I am going to use it more often, but I am not used to being strapped up all the time. It does everything that I need it to do right now, so that is good.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.