Guys, here's the background. In March this year, I changed my cardio routine completely to jogging exclusively (on the treadmill). It's very simple: since March, I have jogged a 5km at 10km/h every morning, 7 days a week. No exception. What I monitor is my Max HR and Average HR during each of these jogs, and I plug in the values in Excel and plot on a chart.
I have observed 2 things:
(1) my daytime resting HR (for example when watching TV in the sofa) has dropped from the low/mid 70s, to low 60s, or even high 50s sometimes. My HR at night has also improved.
(2) my Max HR and Average HR during these runs have dropped from 170 and 160 respectively, to 160 and 150 respectively. In short, my HR for this particular activity has dropped 10bpm after 5 months of training. These numbers have stabilised for the past month or so, and now I expect every morning something very close to 160 and 150 for Max HR and Average HR. The consistency is amazing.
Now, as I said I make no exception to this daily routine, well except one time, which was yesterday. Because on Thursday night I got super drunk with my friends, I decided not to go jogging yesterday, and rest instead. Meaning that today's run was, for the first time, after a day's rest.
This morning's jog showed a Max HR and Average HR of 153 and 145 respectively. Which is of course MUCH lower than the 160 and 150 I was used to. My first reaction was that may be the chest strap is broken, but I went for another jog of just 5' after to check with the HR monitor provided with the treadmill, and both geve me identical results. After this second jog I rested a few minutes, and went for a 3rd jog, 5' again, with another treadmill, and once again, the chest strap showed identical HR as the treadmill's. So I'm quite sure my chest strap is working.
My question is quite simple: in your experience, is it possible that a day's rest can affect performance to such an extent ? If yes, is there any other useful lesson I can extract from this experiment ? For example should I incorporate more day's rest, as in will there be any benefit ? The problem is I'm used to jog every morning now and I'm not sure I want to disturb that, especially since the benefit on my cardiovascular system (I have heart desease and got a stent 2 years ago) seems to be pretty obvious to me.
@ovekvam not sure if you're stll here !
