First results on my usual cycling round
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m cycling frequently. I’ve done so for the last 17 months, so I don’t consider myself an untrained person. However, there’ve been days when I got back home with my face being a very unhealthy colour – nearly purple – and so I decided it was time to track my pulse. I bought the pulse meter you can see above and used it for the first time this morning.
According to their calculations, my pulse shouldn’t get higher than 153 bpm (beats per minute) for maximum effect. As you can see, it did, if only occasionally. There’s an inbuilt alarm which beeps if you’re outside your parameters. I hadn’t even heard the first beep when suddenly my husband asked: did you beep?
Ahem. So I told him it was my new pulse meter (watch). He asked me if my other one was broken. Err. I only have a normal wrist watch. To make him shut up, I replied in the affirmative.
He then asked why it beeped. I told him that my pulse was higher than the suggested maximum, which is at 153 bpm. He looked at me and said: You mean your pulse is that high? Your fitness level is atrocious.
Well, that was me told! – or would have been, had he any idea what he was talking about in the first place! He doesn’t know his bmp – and how would he, without measuring it? He has never read up on these things.
Well, I did. And I measured my resting heart rate, and it was at under 70 which is good. This resulted in a so-called ‘own index’ of 36.
The OWNIndex is comparable to your maximum oxygen intake (shown as VO2max above). I checked the table: for my age and gender, this result is ‘Very Good’.
Considering I measured my resting heart rate about an hour after I had done half an hour of cycling, I won’t complain. I may take another test after waking up in the morning, but I don’t expect it to be significantly different.
So I’ll have to work on a lower pulse rate during exercise, but apart from that all my regular exercise has paid off.
I’m sure all the rates were a lot worse before I started cycling.
And now I’m off for some more cycling….
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