RESTING HEART RATE

People often ask how to gauge whether they are working hard enough, or too hard, as an overall issue, as they go forward with six days a week. This is an important question because it is surprisingly easy to over-train. Normally, in the inadequate American scheme of exercise, we do three or four work outs a week. While not enough to give you optimal fitness, this does have the slight advantage of giving you an enforced full rest day between most of your workouts – thereby giving your body a chance to fully recover. Once you move to six days a week you will need to respect your body’s current fitness level and work within that as it grows over the course of time. That means that if you do an extra hard work out one day you may have to have the next day’s workout be lighter, in order to give your body a full shot at recovery and growth.

The best way to monitor this is by keeping an eye on your resting heart rate. This is a little tricky, because it is affected by a number of factors, but basically it goes as follows:

Check your heart rate in the morning when you first wake up, before getting out of bed. The best way to do this is to learn how to take your carotid pulse in your neck. Put two fingers on your windpipe and then slide them off to the side, down into the groove on the side of the windpipe. On either side, your carotid artery is down there, fairly deep, pumping away day and night. Poke around until you find it, and get used to finding it and keeping your fingers on it until you can accurately count your pulse. Since your heart rate should be on the slow side in the morning it is easiest to count for twenty seconds and multiply by three, though some people prefer to count for the full minute, and skip doing any math at all before their first cup of coffee!

It’s important to do this before you get out of bed in the morning, because just the simple act of standing up in the morning activates your adrenalin system and will raise your resting heart rate by a few beats all by itself. Check your morning heart rate for a week or two and notice the variation in resting heart rate. You should come out with a pretty consistent number, accurate within 2-3 beats on days when you are fully rested and recovered. Using this number as your guideline you can then track your body’s readiness for a given day’s work out. Any day your resting heart rate goes 5 beats above normal, something is going on.

One explanation is that you are not fully recovered from the day before, and should take it easy that day. Other explanations are: that you are coming down with a cold, you are mildly dehydrated, you woke up thinking about something stressful, or, you had too much to drink the night before!

If it is something simple like dehydration and you can identify it, go ahead and aggressively consume fluids over the course of the day and then go ahead and do a full work out. But on any day when something else is going on, either a little cold, or an incomplete recovery from the day before, respect that limit, and go ahead and schedule an easier work out for the day.

One of the reasons Olympic athletes pay coaches, and those coaches make them check their resting heart rates, is so somebody can tell them when to do a lighter work out. Interestingly, the trouble with most serious athletes is not getting them to push themselves hard enough, it’s getting them to slow down when appropriate. Serious athletes the world over, or at least their coaches, have learned that often times backing off is the best road to ultimate fitness, not trying to push through the mild decreases in metabolic fitness that come with day to day variation.