Monitoring heartrate during exercise or at rest has become a trend, and various gadgets are available in the market. However, majority of population seems not able to maximize the benefit of data tracking and not sure what devices to use for accuracy of the data.
Before going into devices, let’s discuss why tracking heart rate is important and what are some factors that have impact on it.
Heartrate
Heartrate is monitoring how many time the heart is beating within one minute. While resting and laying down you may see your heartrate being anywhere between 60-100 beat per minute (bpm). When aerobic capacity is high, you may also see the resting heartrate as low as 40s.
When I see heartrate numbers, I think of how much heart is working to send the blood throughout the body. For individual who has resting heartrate of 70-100bpm, means their heart must work at that rate to pump the blood to their entire body. For individual who has lower resting heartrate (40-60bpm), their heart is conditioned to provide blood with less work. Of course, just by looking at heartrate cannot pain the full picture; however, you can make pretty good, educated guess on what those numbers mean.
Heartrate can be influenced by aerobic capacity, stress, sleep, caffeine, alcohol, frequency and intensity of training and so on. Especially with resting heartrate, you can tell about your condition.
Heart Rate and Devices
Originally, we’ve monitored heartrate during exercise by checking the pulse by using wrist or neck pulse. Now with technology we can use watch, phone, straps to monitor heartrate throughout the day and while exercising.
The most accurate device or close to EKG level of heartrate monitoring device is heartrate chest strap. Although it is somewhat uncomfortable at first, but it picks up the heartrate signal (R wave). Chest strap does need to sync with either phone app or smart watch to keep tracking the data. Good chest strap should have good skin contact and does not move around, which interferes with the signal.
The use of PPG (photoplethysmography or optical sensor) we see on watches have been around for about 5-6 years. What its measure is blood volume changes at the surface of skin and not electric signal from the heart. This can become an issue because every time the device moves the reading of the heartrate may vary.
More accurate device type next to the chest strap is forearm strap. Reason is they have a better skin contact and even while moving around the LED sensor does not move. Watch on the other hand, it slides and even when strapped tightly as the wrist move the skin and bone moves which can make the reading less accurate do to introducing noise to the signal.
If you wear a watch to track heartrate, you may have come across the issue of reading the heart rate to being low while you are exercising hard and at rest when you are relaxed you see your heartrate being high.
Therefore, if you want to track your heartrate or other measurements more accurately, I suggest investigating heart rate chest strap or forearm strap. Personally, I track with heartrate chest strap. When I'm doing outdoor training, I will use my watch to track my pace while tracking my heartrate through heartrate strap.
Why Track Heartrate While Exercising?
Monitoring heartrate while exercising to me is like checking the speedometer while driving the car. Depending on your objective you can vary how much effort you should be putting into your exercise.
What I also want to monitor is my recovery after each set, especially if I’m doing zone 3,4 training. I want to see how much heartrate I can recover in one minute. Regardless of what effort I put in, I want to see my heartrate drop below 130 within a minute, that’s usually 30-35 beats drop from my working heartrate. By having tracking device, I have better understanding of my performance not just from how much I can lift but also how much I can recover.
By having an option to monitor heartrate, I can avoid guess work. Unlike when I used to play competitive soccer where I have practiced and trained for 12-14 hours a week, I only have 4-6 hours of training hours in a week because of work and family. To take a benefit of each and every hour, I don't have time for overtraining or undertraining which can lead to poor results, which I have experienced. Even with monitoring heartrate there may be some error in programming, however, I can minimize the error far greater than just guessing.
There are so many high end devices (>$500) out in the market that claim the accuracy of the data but how it is reading the data need to be understood before purchasing.
Kota Shimada
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