After taking some significant time off I’m running LP again at age 21, 6’0 217 pounds.
I’ve been training hard, making great progress, but last night I couldn’t sleep well. I checked my pulse with an app on my phone and my heart was beating around 75 - 80 BPM.
If I understand correctly, this is high for my age, and perhaps the reason I couldn’t sleep. Do you think this is a sign that I need an extra day off, a reset, etc?
Do you personally check your heart beat per minutes, or HRV, to determine if you need additional recovery?
If someones heart if beating faster than normal, and can’t sleep, whats the best thing they should do?
Also I used to drink around 8 drinks a day for a few years, recently tapered down, and haven’t drank at all in a week – that could have something to do with it.
A heart rate of 75 bpm is not necessarily abnormal, and I cannot confidently say it is related to your sleep difficulty, to be honest.
I don’t routinely monitor my heart rate, no.
HRV refers to “heart rate variability” and is an entirely different metric. It is thought to have some correlation with stress, fatigue, performance, but the science isn’t as strong as some gurus make it sound. Additionally, I don’t want to “nocebo” myself into having a poor training session if I go into it knowing that my HRV was low.
It depends on why their heart is beating fast, of course – could be from anxiety, caffeine, alcohol, or drug intoxication/withdrawal, dehydration, hyperthyroidism, dysrhythmia, sepsis, pulmonary embolism, and about a million other things I could mention.
Well, I was answering your question as I read it … and just got to the part about the alcohol intake, haha. That could have something to do with your difficulty sleeping – though 75 bpm still isn’t a rapid heart rate.
I took an additional recovery day and today my resting heart beat per minute has been consistently in the upper 50’s – is it safe to say that training stresses your heart and can increase Heart BPM for a short time?
I always thought that exercise in general was supposed to lower heart rate, as I know some professional endurance athletes have resting heart rates in the 40’s.
Its hard to find an answer on this: would more or less training decrease resting heart rate? Hypothetically, would doing some endurance work with strength decrease heart rate even more because you’re working heart even more?
I don’t really like the phrase “stresses your heart” (because the general connotation is negative), but yes, training increases your heart rate for a period of time, often a bit beyond your actual training session, depending on your level of conditioning.
Endurance training does tend to lower heart rate, yes. I’m still not clear on why you’re so concerned with your heart rate, however.