Since my resting heart rate is down in the low 40s, how's my heart rate recovery? I've not been paying much attention to it, in part since I worry that my heart rate recovery isn't great. One part of my standard run -- and I should come up with more types of runs as my foot injury fades way (today was a good day for my foot...)-- is to run six 40-45 second intervals with 45-50s second breaks to recover. This means that I run up by heart rate to the 155-160 bpm range (a comfortably hard pace, but nothing aggressive) and then get back down to a tad under 130 after 50 seconds. One of the standard measures of heart rate recovery is the 1 min recovery, so this probably puts me in the 30 bpm 1 min recovery zone. My sense from googling around is that this is a decent 1 min recovery for non-runners, but nothing to write home about for runners. On the other hand, a HR of 160 is still pretty submaximal for me, I can get up to 190 if I run full out and don't shy from discomfort. My vague sense is that I can get down from 190 to 150 bpm in a minute, for a maximal HR recovery of 40 bpm, but I've not really paid attention to have any good data. Could be less or more than 40 bmp as well.
From Cole et. al., Heart-rate recovery immediately after exercise as a predictor of mortality, NEJM 1999:
The first thing to note is that this is a relatively old and out-of-shape population:
Here is the main result: heart rate recovery predicts mortality. The data is binned in quintiles.
Finally, some other univariate predictors. I've seen similar results elsewhere, with sustaind longer distance running speeds the strongest predictor of mortality out there (I should check if this is actually true, i.e. how good are these studies...but it makes sense, it seems like a pretty good test of heart function and overall health status). BTW, what is 'heart-rate increase during exercise' doing here? I thought the maximal HR wasn't predictive of mortality, but this makes it sound like ti is. And how is this different that chronotropic response?
What's not clear to me here is how hard these test subjects are actually tested. The paper claims the patients are pushed pretty hard, if I'm reading the paper correctly -- but I'm skeptical:
The patients were encouraged to reach symptom- limited maximal exercise; the achievement of the target heart rate (based on age) alone was not a sufficient reason for the termination of testing. Chronotropic response during exercise was defined as the percentage of the heart-rate reserve (the difference between the maximal achievable heart rate [220 beats per minute minus age in years] and the resting heart rate) used at peak exercise. A failure to use 80 percent of the heart-rate reserve was considered to be evidence of an impaired chronotropic response.
My 80 percent HR reserve heart rate is 148 bpm according to this formula, not reaching 148 bpm would be impaired chronotropic response. Getting to 148 bpm isn't a challenge for me, I'm working, but it doesn't require any mental effort. Sustaining 165 bpm starts taking some mental effort, but nothing annoying, but 180 bpm or higher requires serious mental effort (and you start wondering when you're going to slow down).
A fancier HR monitor would provide more data...not obvious that would be of any use though.
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