A run before work
I went to the gym before work this morning as I had a hankering to visit the ‘dreadmill’.
The treadmills in my gym are polar compatible (which means they can pick up my polar heart rate monitor) so it made sticking to my target heart rate (180 – age = 146) a breeze. All I had to do was adjust the speed a bit. I can also set the machine to do a constant speed and it will adjust the incline to keep the heart rate stable but I find that’s a bit too slow to respond for my liking so I prefer doing it manually.
When I run outside I wear my Garmin 305 GPS watch which also has a heart rate monitor and I’ve set it so that a little alarm goes off when my HR goes to high. I then have to slow down sometimes to a near crawl when I’m going up a particularly steep hill. But I digress.
The run this morning was pretty good but felt quite hard towards the end for some reason. I think it’s more that there is a lack of distraction in the gym as compared to running outside. I did 10K in exactly 1 hour. I think this shows the low heart rate stuff must be starting to work as I don’t think I could have done 10K in an hour without a higher heart rate.
The whole point of this slow, low heart rate training is to increase my aerobic fitness and cardiovascular system. I’ve noticed that my resting heart rate is dropping. It was in the low 50s before and now it’s down to the mid 40s so I must be doing something right.
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fitter and fitter and FITTER.
I love the term dreadmill. probably because I never use it? the last sentence of your post may get me to start.
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Oh, I think you’re doing LOTS of things right!
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Huh… Well done. Admittedly, I’ve never been into the heart rate stuff. And… maybe not coincidentally, my resting HR isn’t low. Hmmm…
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If you had to reccommend a polar or a garmin, which would be your pick. Love the blog by the way.
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Sounds good, I’ve really tried to just worry about my fitness lately as well and not put soo much focus on the weight.
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I experimented with the HR alarm on my 301 when I first got it, but the beeping drove me nuts (orienteering isn’t a “consistent” sport). Now I just laugh when people run past with their wrists bleeping away – I know when they’re working too hard, or not hard enough.
I can look at my wrist easily enough – I’ve got pretty good at judging heartrate now.
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Hmmm…interesting to think about with the low HR. Thanks for sharing!
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It’s when you see actual physiological changes that it hits home what you’ve done.
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How do you like the Garmin 305? The pictures of it look really huge – is it manageable?
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AndrewE
reply on December 17th, 2008 8:14 am:
It is rather big. You couldn’t wear it as a normal watch but having said that it is fine when I’m running. It’s never bothered me.
Twitter: AndrewENZ
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I hop on that dreadmill 3 days a week, it helps!!!
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AndrewE
reply on December 17th, 2008 8:20 am:
It does indeed!
Twitter: AndrewENZ
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Nice blog, just recently found it.
Regarding the low HR in similar excersises it also has to do with your body getting use to them. So it is important to vary the training every few weeks, so your muscles get better training. This happens easily when you do spinning with HR monitors, after some weeks its easy to see how diffult it gets to go up to a 80%. I also combine now weight training and small cardio with high and low intervals, and it does the trick.
I think the garmin is still to big, but its nice that you can have a ghost runner, to compete with.
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I like to do a run/jog before work as well, keep up the good work.
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It sounds like you are gathering lots of different ideas in your blog. This is great stuff.
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