Heart Rate

Today I remembered to take my heart-rate monitor to the gym. It is still school holidays, but I put one child in his regular childcare and the other into creche at gym. We were rather slow and lazy this morning getting ready and I ended up with less than an hour of creche time but I made the most of it - 50 mins of treadmill and bike at a low-moderate intensity. I am really determined not to injure myself or burn out this time.

I had a quick guide for my heart-rate monitor but after I got back from the gym I downloaded the full manual from the internet. One important thing I found was that it calculates my heart-rate zones differently from the zones I found on the internet the other day. The other site had 4 zones, and I kept my heart rate around 105 which I thought was zone 1. (My base rate is about 80 and zone 1 started at 90.) I was surprised to find that the summary from my monitor only put me in zone 1 for about 40% of the time, the rest was below (in what I will call zone 0). Turns out my monitor only has 3 zones not 4, and starts zone 1 at 106 for me! My monitor has more information about my age, weight & level of fitness, so I will trust it to guide me. And I need to pick up the pace a bit. Just working that little bit harder will at least put me into zone 1 - I must have been just below for much of the time.

So my resting rate is about 80, my zone 1 is 106-125 for basic fitness and weight control, zone 2 is 125-142 for aerobic fitness and endurance, then zone 3 is 142-160 for peak performance and not to be strived for all the time. Above 160 is bad, 178 is my max heart rate. It is really good to have these figures so I can push myself a bit more. I am feeling quite motivated and excited about it all. For the moment, I want to be in zone 1 most of the time while exercising with a few sprints putting me into zone 2.

I weighed myself, only 2 days since the last time, and am now 79.2 kg which is a drop of... can't remember. But a few hundred grams. Which is great. Unfortunately they changed the scales since Sunday, hopefully they won't keep swapping them around. I need a consistent scale!