Daily and nightly heart rate monitor?

[Riverman]

I don't have the best sleeping pattern in the world and suffer from stress with work and wondered if there is a heart rate monitor out there I could buy to keep an eye on my heart rate over the course of the day and night?

Perhaps something that I could upload logs into a computer everyday, keep a log of what I'm doing each day and see how everything is affecting my heart rate.

I'd like to try and calculate my recovery heart rate anyway and see how this changes over time as I improve my fitness.

I'd also like to see the difference between my heart rate on nights where I get a good nights and a bad nights sleep.

 

[Panter]

Couldn't you just log your average HR after a nights sleep and after a days work?

 

[Garz]

Measure it for the first hour your up in the morning, and the last hour before bed. Note the averages and you can compare this with your training averages if need be to see if your getting fitter.

Until reading posts on here I forgot it can highlight if your unwell or suffering from something too.

 

[Will1985]

I would have thought a 24hr ABPM would be more suitable having mentioned stress, although these are far from cheap and not really available to the public.

As others have said, the cheap method re the OP is to keep a log of your own HR measurements at set times during the day using either a manual reading or a cheap HRM.

The next step would be to wear something like a Garmin 310XT with the GPS turned off for up to 24 hours. I've done this overnight and my HR varied quite a bit. You can then overlay smoothed lines for a comparison. As you have said yourself, keeping a diary of activities is useful to compare with your readings.

 

[ColinJ]

Plenty of HRMs can be set to log your HR at regular intervals for later upload to your PC. When my ex was at university she did a project on fitness and got various people to wear a Polar HRM for 12 hours at a time. I went out and did a 5 hour ride over the local hills and was pretty shocked when I got back to discover that my HR had been over 150 bpm for about 4.5 of those 5 hours, and peaked at over 190 bpm several times on 25% hills. The average was about 155 bpm!

I have a Cateye HRM which can double up as a bike computer if I could be bothered to fit the sensors to my bike. It can sample HR at regular intervals too. Some devices may have a limited memory size so there is a trade-off between sampling rate and how long they can sample for. One with a big memory might be able to sample every few seconds. Devices with smaller memories might only cope with sampling every minute or so.

 

[Riverman]

Thanks.

Wow those 24hr ABPM certainly ain't cheap.
http://www.google.co.uk/products?hl=en&q=24+hr+ABPM&scoring=p