Adjusting heart rate zone to account for POTS elevated heart rates

A friend of mine has POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, a heart condition that causes the heart to beat faster than a normal heart would during exercise. Her maximum displayed heart rate is 206. Yes really.).

As a result her workouts often show that she's done an anaerobic workout when she has really only exerted a moderate amount of effort.

In order to get her workout scores to be more in line with her level of effort, rather than her heart rate, I thought we could reset her heart rate zones so that they were more skewed toward the top of her range. Does anyone have any experience doing this? If yes, what heart rate ranges did you find worked with the different zones? Thanks in advance for any insights you might be able to provide.

0 bwyspa 5 days ago

It seems to me you are asking for a sort of medical advice here. I am not sure if this is the right place. Your friend should probably speak to her/his cardiologist or physio.

0 Bitti 2 days ago

Also, to my knowledge the workout scores and other analytics do not use hr zones for classification, the zones are just for display purposes (and affect intensity minutes, if you've changed them to be fine based).

0 FlowState 1 day ago in reply to Bitti

Bitti said:
workout scores and other analytics do not use hr zones for classification

Yeah, that stuff is based on max hr, not hr zones.

In OP's case, maybe try changing the max hr setting? I'd be curious to know what it currently is. If I were her, I would also set HR zones based on either max hr% or hrr% (heart rate reserve %, which basically takes into account both max hr and resting hr).