Heart Rate Monitor Accuracy

[Colby]

  Hey Everyone,

  Just a quick question about the accuracy of Heart Rate monitors. I have the Garmin 305 (?) the red one with the monitor. Today i while I was running I hit a heart rate of 205 according to my monitor. I warmed up for a couple miles, picked up the pace for 3, then cooled down for a couple of miles so I expected my heart rate to be much higher than it normally is, but 205? That really shocked me. I have never gone out and sprinted up a hill side continuously to find out what my max heart rate is, but I've read online some of the formulas to check it out and they put me in a consistent area, but it is lower than 205. I am a 26 year old male and I have a resting heart rate of about 50 BPM here in Afghanistan, elevation 6,400 ft. So are these monitors very accurate or is 205 somewhere close to what my max heart rate is?

p.s. when I use the monitor to check my resting heart rate, it is pretty much dead on when I check my own pulse out.

[Sasha Pachev]

HRMs are often inaccurate in cold weather when there is not enough moisture between your body and the contact, and with electrical interference. If things do not add up, it is probably wrong.  Overtime you develop a sense of what is reasonable and what is not.

[Colby]

That's what I thought. 205BPM seems awefully high for me, but who knows, maybe it is right.

[esanders64]

If you are outside the US, you may be getting interference from other devices.  When I lived in Europe, my Polar HRM would occasionally spike into the 200's, which I knew was way too high for the effort I was running.  Over time I realized that the spikes almost always happened when I was running near rail or trolley tracks.  Turns out there was electrical interference that was affecting the HRM.

You may want to try using the HRM in different locations to see if there are any patterns for when it shows highly inaccurate reading.

[Colby]

That may be it, appreciate the posts.