Heart Rate Monitor

[john]

Hey everybody, I recently read an interesting article and wanted to hear your input on it.  The article is right below.



How hard do I have to workout? How far do I have to go? I workout 2 hours every other day of the week and I still can't lose those last 10 pounds. Why do I keep getting injured when I try to run? These are all questions and comments people make about their training that seems to have no simple solution.

I want to give you that solution. It's called a heart rate monitor. Whether your goal is to win a race or just live a long healthy life, using a heart rate monitor is the single most valuable tool you can have in your training arsenal of equipment. And using one in the way I am going to describe will not only help you shed those last few pounds, but will enable you to do it without either killing yourself in training or starving yourself at the dinner table.

I came from a swimming background, which in the 70's and 80's when I competed was a sport that lived by the No Pain, No Gain motto. My coach would give us workouts that were designed to push us to our limit every single day. I would go home dead, sleep as much as I could, then come back the next day for another round of punishing interval sets.

It was all I knew. So when I entered the sport of triathlons in the early 1980's, my mentality was to go as hard as I could at some point in every single workout. And to gauge how fast that might have to be, I looked at how fast the best triathletes were running at the end of the short distance races. Guys like Dave Scott, Scott Tinley and Scott Molina were able to hold close to 5 minute miles for their 10ks after swimming and biking!

So that's what I did. Every run, even the slow ones, for at least one mile, I would try to get close to 5 minute pace. And it worked...sort of. I had some good races the first year or two, but I also suffered from minor injuries and was always feeling one run away from being too burned out to want to continue with my training.

Then came the heart rate monitor. A man named Phil Maffetone, who had done a lot of research with the monitors, contacted me. Phil said that I was doing too much anaerobic training, too much speed work, too many high end/high heart rate sessions. I was forcing my body into a chemistry that only burns carbohydrates for fuel by elevating my heart rate so high each time I went out and ran.

So he told me to go to the track, strap on the heart rate monitor, and keep my heart rate below 155 beats per minute. Maffetone told me below this number that my body would be able to take in enough oxygen to burn fat as the main source of fuel for my muscle to move. I was going to develop my aerobic/fat burning system. What I discovered was a shock.

To keep my heart rate below 155 beats/minute, I had to slow my pace down to an 8:15 mile. That's three minutes/mile SLOWER than I had been trying to hit in every single workout I did! My body just couldn't utilize fat for fuel.

So for the next four months I did exclusively aerobic training keeping my heart rate at or below my maximum aerobic heart rate, using the monitor every single workout. And at the end of that period, my pace at the same heart rate of 155 beats/minute had improved by over a minute. And after nearly a year of doing mostly aerobic training, which by the way was much more comfortable and less taxing than the anaerobic style that I was used to, my pace at 155 beats/minute had improved to a blistering 5:20 mile.

That means that I was now able to burn fat for fuel efficiently enough to hold a pace that a year before was redlining my effort at a maximum heart rate of about 190. I had become an aerobic machine! On top of the speed benefit at lower heart rates, I was no longer feeling like I was ready for an injury the next run I went on, and I was feeling fresh after my workouts instead of being totally exhausted from them.

So let's figure out what heart rate will give you this kind of benefit and improvement. There is a formula that will determine your Maximum Aerobic Heart Rate, which is the maximum heart rate you can go and still burn fat as the main source of energy in your muscles. It is the heart rate that will enable you to recover day to day from your training. It's the maximum heart rate that will help you burn those last few pounds of fat. It is the heart that will build the size of your internal engine so that you have more power to give when you do want to maximize your heart rate in a race situation.





I just thought this was too good to be true.  Does anybody have any experience with this?  If so I would greatly appreciate the info if it actually is effective.

[bencrozier]

If you want more specific information on how to train with and use a heart rate monitor, I highly recommend this article:

http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-238-267--1039-0,00.html

[Sasha Pachev]

HRM can be a useful tool if you know your body. If you do not, it does more harm than good. Targeting a specific HR because a popular source says so is listed in the Top Ten Training Mistakes at

http://asksasha.com/Running/Top-10-Training-Mistakes.html

and for a good reason.

Maybe some discussion of the common misuses of the heart rate readings would be helpful:

- Your max HR is not necessarily 220 - age or any other formula that uses your age. It is what it is, if you want to know it, run an all out 2 miles and see what it gets up to at the end. It may or may not drop with age. It does tend to drop as your fitness increases when you start hitting neuromuscular limits. That is your heart could beat faster, but your nervous system cannot drive your muscles hard enough, or maybe your muscles are not strong enough to use that much oxygen.  If it does drop with age, it is probably due to the loss in neuromuscular fitness (Quality X).

- A certain percentage of max HR does not necessarily represent the correct effort. If it feels wrong, it is most likely wrong. If you are going to use HR to gauge intensity, first learn about your body. Race different distances with an HRM and learn how long you can hold certain heart rates for.

- HRMs are notorious for intermittent errors that last for as long as several miles. If your HR is normally 130 at 8:00 pace, and then one day you are feeling normal, the breathing is fine, you are just starting your run, the weather is cool, the pace is still 8:00 and your HRM shows 160, it is wrong, do not believe it, do not slow down to make it read 130.

- It is normal to experience an upward drift in HR during a run. So if you target a certain fixed heart rate, you will run a huge positive split in your tempo runs. For example, if I targeted HR of 160 in a 5 mile tempo, I would have to run 5:00 pace for the first 0.5, then slow down to 5:30 for a mile or two, and finish at 5:40 pace. That is not how I want to run my tempos.

- HR varies with the weather. When it is warm, the right intensity will often produce a higher HR.

- HR at the correct intensity is often lower on the downhill, and higher on the up. Somebody may argue that it means you should pick it up on the down, and ease off on the up, but try racing like that on a rolling course, you will lose to a less fit competitor that runs purely by feel. Same for headwind/tailwind.

[Dallen]

I find it fun to play with a HRM, but I have never actually found it very useful. In my opinoin, going by feel is a better way to guage yourself. Like Sasha says, there are a lot of external variables that complicate things.