Are Post-Exercise Heart Rates Accurate?
Background In most high performance endurance or team sports, commercial heart-rate monitors are widely used to monitor how hard someone is training, recovering or adapting to training. While heart-rate monitors can be expensive or inaccessible to many coaches, manual palpation of heart rate at the neck or wrist is commonly used to measure heart rates immediately after or during a training set or session. It takes time and experience to quickly find the pulse at the neck or wrist. Moreover, as an athlete becomes more endurance fit, the rate of heart rate recovery becomes faster. Thus, post-exercise palpation of the pulse rate may actually underestimate the actual exercising heart rate. Research A group of US sports scientists from the University of Texas studied 20 male and female adults aged 24-1 years who were regular exercisers. The runners did two sets of treadmill exercise for five minutes. One set was at 70% of maximum heart rate and then at 85%, and they measured post-exercise h
