Heart Rate Calibration for the Deaf

To calculate lactate threshold heart rate and the corresponding HR zones for use with aerobic workouts, the easy way is to use the Pear Sports smartphone app.  You can read about it on Pear Sports website or in Matt Fitzgerald's book, "80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster By Training Slower".

The hard way is to locate an exercise laboratory, make an appointment and pay to be scientifically measured with analysis of periodic samples of your blood while you are put through a series of specific paces.

The easy way is, for all practical purposes, just as accurate and far less expensive than the hard way.

An article on the subject, by Matt Fitzgerald, provides more information and takes a good look at the topic.  You can view that article by clicking on THIS LINK to the article, which is titled "Go By Feel, Skip The Lactate Threshold Test."

There is a special obstacle for a deaf person to utilize the heart calibration workout in the Pear app.  All the prompts and other information is 100% audio with no visible aid such as subtitles or captions. A deaf person would have the same problem, doing the test in a laboratory, since the laboratory technicians would not have subtitles or captions whenever they would speak instructions.

Diane  and I discussed the dilemma for her of how to determine the "just right" effort level without either rowing too easy or too hard.  After I once again attempted to explain to her how the lactate threshold test and calculated heart rate zones are used, she had a minor epiphany and decided to take the Pear heart calibration.

It was the first time for her, so she will probably need to take it a few more times in order to zero in on the most accurate results.  Diane is more deaf than most people who are born deaf.  Without hearing aids, a blaring trumpet is a whisper ... or less than a whisper.

Her deafness happened gradually over many decades of relative normalcy with regard to speaking and hearing.  But now she is "stone deaf" and because of her hearing problem, I volunteered to help her by printing out all of the prompts and other spoken words and holding them up for her to read at the appropriate times during the 20 minute workout.

I emailed both Pear Sports and Matt Fitzgerald about the possibility of getting a copy of the transcript, so as to save some time transcribing it myself.  While waiting for a response, I did the 20 minute calibration workout and recorded it.  Then I went to work transcribing all the recorded words.  But before I finished that transcription job, Matt Fitzgerald graciously responded by email and attached a copy of the transcript.

Matt's transcript was better than what I was typing up, because his included helpful time stamps corresponding to where each paragraph was spoken during the 20 minutes.

So I showed the transcript to Diane. She read it through once, to get an idea of what would be asked of her during the 20 minutes.  Then I told her I was going to print out each paragraph on a separate page, in an extra-large font and hold up each page when those words were spoken.

But Diane said she would rather I sit in front of her, so she could see my lips as I would read each paragraph out loud.  I am very self-conscious as a public speaker but quite the opposite with Diane.  So I happily agreed and that's what we did.

It was actually quite a thrill for me to be close to her while she did the 20 minute session.  We only have one rowing machine and I'd never spent any time in the room with her before, when she was rowing.

Diane is an excellent lip reader and so with the combination of her super high-decibel hearing aids plus her lip-reading skills she was able to understand everything perfectly.

The results were quite surprising though.  Diane's lactate threshold heart rate was much lower than my lowest guess had anticipated.  Based on my own early experience taking the heart calibration test the first few times, I suspect that she did the same thing I did at first, which was to row at an effort level that was much easier than called for and described.  So, hopefully, we can zero in on more accurate results for her with a few more tests.

As for my rowing today, it was 10K done with a RowPro painted target zone centered between the new boundaries of recently calculated HR zones 1 and 2.  There was an additional targeted zone for the session, which was a rating of about 18 strokes per minute.

The old heart rate zones are on top and the newest calculated zones are on the bottom.

Screen shot of my HR calibration yesterday.

If you compare the screen shot of the Pear app calculated results for the HR calibration I did yesterday to the spreadsheet printout of them in the lower area of the photo above, you will notice they are not exactly the same.  That's because the spreadsheet takes into account what amounts to a "buffer zone" between zone 2 and zone 3, as explained in Matt Fitzgerald's 80/20 book.

Finish screen of today's 10K session.

You might notice in the HR graph on the view of today's finish screen, above, that toward the end of the session my HR was slightly above the top of the painted area which represented the upper boundary of Zone 2.  I didn't fuss about that, because it was in the "buffer zone" between Zone 2 and Zone 3 and that's what a buffer zone is for... its an area to minimize or mitigate conflict between actually working too hard and almost working too hard.

The RowPro report for today's 10K.