Heart rate

[Gattopardo]

My resting heart rate is around 95 and lets not discuss my blood preassure.

[Chris S]

Minor thing.

I am a 2.4 to 3.2 w/kg cyclist so very ordinary.

That's not that ordinary. Most of your average Joes and Janes would really struggle with that. Ordinary for a cyclist? Maybe - but I bet there are some awesome audaxers out there who couldn't ride for long at 3w/kg.

Glad you said it, Chris - I was feeling very inadequate. 3.2w/kg for me is over 300W, and that ain't happening for long!

According to TrainingPeaks, I managed 320W for a minute on 18th February, which is depressingly close to 3W/Kg for me at that time. I remember it. It was fucking grim.

The thought of being able to cruise along at 3w/kg, chatting with your mates? Yeah right, if you're in your 20s maybe*...

* ETA: or weigh 70Kg. That would help too.

[MattH]

At peak Audax fitness in my 40s I'd regularly go up to around 195 on climbs. I did a VO2 max test as part of a research study at a Uni, it was around 217 I got to before the grad students decided it wasn't good to continue (and they'd run out of gas collection bags as they expected me to finish well before that). I'd drop rapidly to a resting low 40s.

Nowadays I'm nowhere near as fit, but can still hit mid-180s with little trouble. I haven't tried maxing it out though, and haven't pushed to the feeeling weird and faint level. Resting is now high 40s.

Interestingly, talking to my early-20s son, he also hit >210 when doing a VO2 max as part of a study at his uni. He was heavily into mountain biking then, but with a build more in line with a drinking student than a racing snake. I guess that's the genetics.

[chrisbainbridge]

My resting is 49 currently but I have a significant pectus excavatum so suspect my stroke volume may be a little less than ideal.

[De Sisti]

Under what conditions do you measure your heart rate? Is it first thing in the morning horizontal in bed? Sat up in bed? In front of the tv watching Corrie or Eastenders?

[TimC]

I use a Garmin Venu or Vivoactive to monitor my HR 24/7. My resting HR during the day is lowest while vegging in bed trying to raise the motivation to get up, but it's not so different from my sitting resting HR while working at the computer. A particularly controversial post on YACF might get me up to 60 while sitting, but it would have to be something by HF!

[hellymedic]

Under what conditions do you measure your heart rate? Is it first thing in the morning horizontal in bed? Sat up in bed? In front of the tv watching Corrie or Eastenders?

I've had some sort of monitor since around 1990.

I set it to alarm at 40 as a lower limit and it obliged at 38/39 when I was sleeping after my dawn commute.
I've recorded 192 on a short Glasgow morning commute when I was about 32 and 170+ on long, fast commutes in the mid 1990s, when I was around 36 years old.

Recent recordings are around 50, sitting calmly at 2am.

[zigzag]

Under what conditions do you measure your heart rate? Is it first thing in the morning horizontal in bed? Sat up in bed? In front of the tv watching Corrie or Eastenders?

resting heart rate is lowest during sleep or just after waking up (mine is high 30ies), during the day resting heart rates goes up a bit due to more active brain, food needing to be digested etc (mine stays around mid 40).

[Davef]

Under what conditions do you measure your heart rate? Is it first thing in the morning horizontal in bed? Sat up in bed? In front of the tv watching Corrie or Eastenders?

resting heart rate is lowest during sleep or just after waking up (mine is high 30ies), during the day resting heart rates goes up a bit due to more active brain, food needing to be digested etc (mine stays around mid 40).

I clearly have a very active brain

[Gattopardo]

How the flock do you guys have such low rates?

[Chris S]

How the flock do you guys have such low rates?

My ex MiL (ex as in I'm no longer married to her daughter, not ex as in no longer on this mortal coil) had a HR of 35, and she ended up with a pace-maker; apparently "Too low" can be for values other than 0.

Talking of night time HR - I had a massive spike in mine the other night, over 140, from a baseline of around 60. I've been having some tortuous dreams recently - I guess that one was a doozy.

[Gattopardo]

Meh  140...I got to around 200 and screaming out loud and thrashing about.

No clue what was going on in the night terror to cause that.

My cortizone levels are quite high too.

[chrisbainbridge]

Low HR levels really upset anaesthetists.  They tend to give drugs to speed it up just so that the beeps are in a comfortable range

[hellymedic]

How the flock do you guys have such low rates?

We are born that way.

I saw an ECG done on my (non-athlete) mother when she was in her late teens. Her heart rate was below 50.

[FifeingEejit]

It's a bit confusing, Diabetes UK (the national diabetes charity, aka the British Diabetic Association) is diabetes.org.uk. The other one (diabetes.co.uk) is a forum and patient group.

Considering I've not worked on diabetes for around 8 years now, it wasn't that interview, I only shared that for the date of diagnosis on it and the other interesting info.
The article in the DiabetesUK mag was 3 or 4 pages worth.

[TimC]

How the flock do you guys have such low rates

Years of practice. And having the right parents, probably.

[TimC]

Low HR levels really upset anaesthetists.  They tend to give drugs to speed it up just so that the beeps are in a comfortable range

See my pneumonia story above. I was in the Canache Hospital in the Falkland islands at the time, and probably the only relief of boredom available, but I think every member of staff in the place was beside my bed when they woke me up to tell me I was beating too slowly. Given that being awake was painful, I was not best pleased and my HR increased to something that didn't give them palpitations but was uncomfortably fast for me. I think I may have been a bit grumpy.

[Lightning Phil]

I feed my resting HR into my NHS digital record.  Probably add in a value, together with blood pressure, once a month.  If they bother to look, at some point in the future, should I be in for something. They’ll have a good picture of what my normal values look like, month to month, year to year.

With all the fitbits and people measuring resting HR daily. I’m surprised there has been no NHS effort to collect a large sample size of resting heart rates together with age, gender. So the outdated view on what normal normal resting HR ranges are, can be updated.

[Lightning Phil]

As for measuring resting HR. I do it sat down just after I’ve got up, before eating or drinking everything. I measure over 2 mins, as I’m measuring HRV as well.

[drossall]

I think I have a little the reverse issue to Asterix. I'm a few years younger than you, but can't get my heart rate above about 140, and that's on a good day. This is generally going flat out on Zwift. But my resting rate is low, like others here, and so I think is my blood pressure.

I've had a heart bypass, so the drugs will have some effect. List Asterix, I took little interest until recently (when I had the op, basically), so I don't have historical data. But I've never been able to push the rate up on hills and so on. I just plod, even in time trials. So my guess is that maybe I've always been a bit like that. I do realise that there's more to hill climbing than heart rate; it's just that it doesn't seem much different now from before.

[Lightning Phil]

My resting heart rate is around 95 and lets not discuss my blood preassure.

If I go for a flattish walk or a recovery ride my peak HR is below 95  Just shows we are all different.

[TimC]

I feed my resting HR into my NHS digital record.  Probably add in a value, together with blood pressure, once a month.  If they bother to look, at some point in the future, should I be in for something. They’ll have a good picture of what my normal values look like, month to month, year to year.

With all the fitbits and people measuring resting HR daily. I’m surprised there has been no NHS effort to collect a large sample size of resting heart rates together with age, gender. So the outdated view on what normal normal resting HR ranges are, can be updated.

Never heard of this facility, and just looked on the NHS app to see if I can find any info. Nothing seen. Is this a generally available process?

[Lightning Phil]

I feed my resting HR into my NHS digital record.  Probably add in a value, together with blood pressure, once a month.  If they bother to look, at some point in the future, should I be in for something. They’ll have a good picture of what my normal values look like, month to month, year to year.

With all the fitbits and people measuring resting HR daily. I’m surprised there has been no NHS effort to collect a large sample size of resting heart rates together with age, gender. So the outdated view on what normal normal resting HR ranges are, can be updated.

Never heard of this facility, and just looked on the NHS app to see if I can find any info. Nothing seen. Is this a generally available process?

My GP surgery use the AirMD app , so it may not be NHS wide.  Last year I was due a blood pressure check. (Standard thing due to my age apparently).  But as they aren’t doing those (at surgery) during pandemic I was asked to do it at home (if I could) and submit readings via the app.

Ah looked on NHS App. Ah it doesn’t show there. That’s a shame as I feel the NHS having a series of reading that give a baseline for a patient would be really useful.  If they don’t have a baseline it’s hard for them to say whether anything looks abnormal, for instance HR or blood pressure. They can only go by their accepted population norms and the opinion of a patient. If the patient is in a position to give an opinion.

[TimC]

Thanks for checking, Phil. At an appropriate time, I may raise it with my GP that lots of 'athletes' (for want of a better category in my case) have a huge amount of health data which could be really useful background info.

[drossall]

Do you mean Airmid (Android and Apple)? I do sign in to my surgery to order prescriptions etc, and they've had an announcement up on their site for a bit that they are using that app. So I've just installed it to take a look.