Bought a heart rate monitor... Now what?

[ushills]

Unless he means when you are fit. My rhr unfit, 75, fit 48, really fit 44.

Correct, if you are already reasonably fit your RHR will not change significantly, and your maxHR is pretty much fixed, however, the work that you are able to do will increase for a given HR and therefore your body and heart becomes more efficient.

 

[ushills]

Coincidently my RHR at 14-20 was about 45, however, as I've got older it has increased an for the last 20 years has always been between 55 and 62, illness and how I feel generally makes the greatest difference.

 

[palinurus]

"bought a heart rate monitor... now what?"
Wear it on the bike once and watch how the numbers go up and down. Leave it on while at work and note how your heartrate changes when you go up stairs, read an angry email etc. give your colleagues a running commentary about it all day. Get home and lie down and see how low you can get it.

Then stick it in a drawer and forget about it.

 

[fenlandpsychocyclist]

I think its about time i looked at setting up the heart rate zones, etc in my bike computer and actually using them
on my training rides.

I usually average 140ish over a 30 miler, although there's countless junctions/flyover climbs/changes of wind direction
on my courses.

 

[Arsen Gere]

Might be interesting to some folks.
What I do is a benchmark test on an oil based turbo trainer, cyclops. It's a ramp down with intervals.
Here is a group of intervals at a specific load, 1 min hard, 1 min at approx 50-70% of the max load by reducing my cadence to 70 rpm. I adjust the load and cadence by changing gear, ie change down to increase cadence and reduce load. I'm no spring chicken and my max HR is around 165. So these could be expressed in % if you wanted to like for like comparison.

Last night I did
Reps MPH Cadence Avg HR Max HR
4 28 89 130 148
7 27 92 134 150
8 26 95 130 147

Followed by 5 mins at 25 mph none stop 97 rpm Avg HR = 145 Max HR = 151
Then 5 mins easy spinning cool down (100+ rpm).

The whole thing took less than an hour.
What I can see from a year ago is that the Avg and Max have decreased for the same load. I've also increased the number of reps at a specific load and the load I can take now compared to 2 years ago is significantly greater.

You can also see a bit of thermal effect as I get hot when the max hr goes from 148 to 150 on slightly lower load. The continuous 5 mins is a higher avg because there is no easy 1 min section in between, but the max is higher too due to the continous load and me getting hotter sweating buckets.
The 26 mph is too low to provide strength training,the HR has come down, but since cycling is about muscular endurance I know from the pain in my legs on end of that secion it is doing something, lactate tolerance possibly.
After a test like this my HR stays elevated for some hours and the next day I can feel the effect in two ways, I don't have the ability to max out my HR and peddling feels a lot easier - I guess it is down to muscle memory effects.

None of this would be possible if I had not kept a record of what I was doing.

HTH

 

[Monkspeed]

Today I put it into zone 2 mode 148-120 bpm and tried my best to stay within it, which was difficult on hills as I had to pedal really slowly. Actually all of It had to be done pedalling really slowly and was quite boring and ego bruising if I'm honest!

The good thing is the watch lets me adjust the ranges on the three built in zones and an extra "u" zone also.

 

[ufkacbln]

I am an overweight 5* year old with no intention of racing or attaining peak levels of fitness. All I wanted to do was lose some weight.

So I simply measured what I was doing and upped the figures by 10%... manually setting the limits.

Worked fine for me.. and the weight