Heartrate Concerns..

[sakko]

Hey guys,

I asked my doc about this, and he doesn't seem to worry, but I wanted a second opinion in case he's a moron.

I'm 30 yrs old, 6ft, 225lbs. I was in terrible shape before starting kung fu. Now I'm in much better shape, I can climb stairs, walk for lengthy periods of time, no problems whatsoever. I can also run all the way around the neighborhood park before I need to cut the pace to a walk. Before I could hardly get 50yds.

I want to get better. I want to run ****her, have an easier time with Kung Fu. Eventually go hiking and be more active. But here's the deal.

My resting heartrate is 100bpm. My trip around the park takes probly 2-3 minutes at which point my heartrate will reach 190bpm. I can sustain that only for a short period of time before I feel extremely winded. When I stop I feel pretty jacked up too, but I quickly recover to 150, then 130 if I just continue walking.

I don't know ANYONE with heartrates as high as mine and it kinda scares me. I have a heartrate watch from Polar that I use to measure and it suggests my target exercise heartrates about 150. But I can't jog without it hitting 190 eventually. Anyone else with this problem? Is it even a problem? This heartrate thing is one of the things that inclined me to start kung fu and exercise, but of all the aspects of my health that have improved, including losing about 40 lbs, my heartrate stays about the same.

Any helpful advice appreciated...

[buddah_belly]

If you are thirty, then your max hr would be 190. No wonder you are unable to sustain that workload. I would talk to a doctor or a physical trainer who knows something about exercise. There's a reason why people with PE degrees are the ones giving out graded exercise stress tests (the treadmill test). Usually they don't go into the details of exercise physiology with med students.

[blooming lotus]

check out some meditation and/or deep breathing techniques....do a search on emei breathing exercises, get into yuor lower diahpragm as habit and you should be able to maintain a lower heart rate at max work load...and as a bonus, you get to be more chilled

[Toby]

Well, I'm much lower than you. 31, 6'3", 215lbs-ish. Resting HR low 40's. Max is low 180's. I struggle to get it higher. Slow jogging around the park takes me to the mid 130's. But my wife has a resting HR in the 90's and she's pretty fit.

Tried HIIT? Pretty fun, but that'll be taking you to your max HR. If you're jogging and going 190 now, that's probably overdoing it. Go to a slow jog (more a shuffle). Try HIIT, but do it relative to your target HR. E.g. I try to keep mine between max and high 150's while in an interval, then let it drop to whatever in recovery time.

[buddah_belly]

Max heart rate is determined by subracting your age from 220. I haven't looked into it yet, but I'm thinking there has to be a way to circumvent that. Especially for athletes and more so for hard core martial arts people. However, at my university's exercise lab, we use the same formula to determine max hr for the elite athletes and the sedentary crowd.

To determine "target hr", (usually 75-85% of max), you follow this formula.
(max hr-resting hr)*(.75 or .85) + resting hr
I'll use myself for an example:
(191-65)*(.75)+65=159.5
(191-65)*(.85)+65=172.1
So my "target hr" is between 160 and 171.

[Tak]

At one point, my wife had a resting heart rate of ~120. She always felt tired, and even light exercise would drive it up to 180-200. She went to doctors, and they all said nothing was wrong, she was just not in good cardiovascular shape, etc. (She was 5'7, 110 lbs, very little fat).

Finally, they discovered that she had an electrical anomaly (sort of a "loop") in her heart that would cause it to beat twice for each time it received a "beat" signal. She had a cardiac ablation via a heart catheter, her heart rate dropped to half of what it had been, and many of her health problems immediately began to disappear.

Maybe relevant, maybe not.