Heart Rate Calibration

There's a cool smartphone app by Pear Sports which is called PEAR Personal Coach.  You can read about it either on their website at pearsports.com or wherever you get the apps for whatever brand of smartphone you use.  It's an interactive app which emulates a personal trainer to some degree by incorporating a little bit of artificial intelligence.

Some of the workouts they have are free and the others are by subscription.  One of the free apps is called Heart Rate Calibration and it is something that you must do before you use any of the other workouts because the other workouts refer to your personal calculated heart rate zones in order to determine if you are working too hard,  not hard enough or if you are in the Goldilocks zone of "just right" level of effort at any moment of time during the workouts.

Because a person's fitness level changes according to what they have been doing and how active or inactive they have been during the previous few weeks, Pear Sports recommends that you do the heart rate calibration every 4 to 8 weeks, to keep it fresh and up to date.

It had been a lot more than 4 weeks since I'd done my most recent HR cal, so today I did an update.

The heart rate zones I will be using for reference in the immediate future.

Today's rowing was two sessions:  a 21 minute timed piece to accommodate the HR calibration and a 5500 meter piece to bring the total distance rowed today to a little more than 10K.

finish screen for heart rate calibration

The heart rate calibration was done with a special bluetooth heart strap which is necessary for use with the Pear app.  But it doesn't work with the Concept 2 heart rate receiver, so there is no HR graph on the above RowPro finish screen. Or on the session report for that piece.

Heart rate irrelevant but you can see how the pace/effort level was stepped up in response to the prompts by Matt Fitzgerald on the heart rate calibration workout. 

If you want to read more about the science and research behind the heart rate zones and the training approach, a good book is the one by author Matt Fitzgerald.  It's title is "80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster by Training Slower".  Though it refers to running throughout the book, it is easy to translate it to rowing since they are both aerobic activities.

finish screen for the balance of today's distance quota.

report for the 5500 meter piece.