For those short of time (I know I am terribly long winded): two questions:
1. anyone here use heartrate as a major training aid or guide?
2. how do you monitor it if you do.
2a. if you use an electronic monitor, which one do you like?
The reason I ask this is because I am attempting to go scientific on my training. Since I have started with "race pace" training, where nearly 25 to 30 % of my training time is dedicated to swimming fast, I have become progressively more interested/ concerned about how hard I am actually pushing myself. The crux of the matter came one day when I actually had to back off due to an impending loss of consciousness (at least I assume that is what it was: black spots in front of my eyes and an overall foggy thought pattern that centered on "STOP" and not much else).
I have looked into heart monitors. I actually have one of the wrist-watch-only modules. It works poorly and unpredictably (and not at all right now with a presumably dead battery). My problem is that I have an abnormally slow heart rate at the best of times (bradycardia is what my insurance company likes to call it: 36 to 40 sitting still and I have no idea what it might be first thing in the morning). My blood preassure is borderline rediculously low most of the time (another issue with my insurance company). On the other hand, when I exercise my pulse can easily go to 200 or more, which is not likely to be too healthy at my 48 years of age. I don't worry too much about that; it drops practically instantaneously once I stop moving. Unfortunately that drop occurs so quickly that my wrist watch monitor never actually catches the real post repetition pulse; it takes 20 seconds to equilibrate and by that time my pulse is back down to 100 to 120. The other issue is that when I am really busting my gut I have trouble focussing my eyes so the reading on the pulsimeter is just a blur. I have used the old fashioned fingers and pace clock system, but when I am fighting for every breath, counting pulses is often more than I can manage.
BTW: my huge variance in heart rates is more of a symptom of how inefficent a swimmer I really am rather than my fitness level.
I would really like to get a top quality pulsimeter and see if I could use it for training. Any comments on how those units with the chest strap work? Is the chest strap hopelessly irritating, especially if you are really giving it your maximum effort?
If I could get a really good pulsimeter at a reasonable price (cheap enough that my wife would not need a complimentary piece of jewelry to keep her happy) my coach has all sorts of drills based on heart rate and rest times I would love to try for a while. Or I could just manage not to blow a valve out of my heart by training more intelligently.
Former Member
Going back to the chest strap issue, would taping it help with the slipping?
I use a polar, and it's a bit sketchy in the water. Sometimes it reads really well, and other times it appears I'm dead, lol (though sometimes at the end of a really hard set, a "00" wouldn't surprise me).
Steve: How did you do in the St. Nick's meet? I think we may have raced in a few of the BR events?
Yes, it looks like we did. If you can call it racing when you're that far out of my league. Those swims were PRs for me; I had a good meet.
Remember heart rate will change depending on how much, or how deep some of your body is submurged. If your waist deep it can be much higher than it would be in the deep end hanging on the side. The pressure assists in delivery.
1. anyone here use heartrate as a major training aid or guide?
2. how do you monitor it if you do.
I don't generally measure my HR during practice. But I do use HR as data for test sets and pulse plotting, as described by Dave Salo in "Complete Conditioning for Swimming." Here's a link to the last test set I documented on my blog (on 11/17), and the results of the pulse plots (see attached figure) as an example:
forums.usms.org/blog.php
I just take my pulse with my fingers on my neck to measure HR.
Going back to the chest strap issue, would taping it help with the slipping?). The best solution is to add shoulder straps (braces) to the basic straps. The end result looks like a sexy bra (not very nice) but it's extremely efficient.
You just buy a cheap HRM, modify the strap and use this strap with say your RS400 only in the pool.
As for converting swim velocity to power (the best option in my humble opinion), a good pal of mine did this little excel spreadsheet.
Not sure if it's entirely bug free but I think it does the job.
I attached a version of this Spreadsheet to this post.
