Hi all, please forgive what is probably a couple of very basic questions - I am both new to monitoring my activities and naive in terms of running, beyond putting one foot in front of another at speed. Some details, I'm 55' female and 5' 2.5" and weigh 9 stones. My Garmin 235 reckons I have an excellent VO2 max - I think it's more than flattering me. Since the change in resting calories calculation I think the overall calculation is at least 100 too little. My resting calories are said to be 1024, which when combined with 8.21km of steps gave me a grand total of 1259 calories. I know from previous experience that this calorie level would make me lose weight, even if I just pottered about never mind did 13000+ steps. When I've completed runs which I've really ran fast (for me) and for as long as possible, the numbers don't seem right and the Garmin seemed to have my effort as significantly lower than it felt to me. So I looked at changing my heart rate zones and setting them as per the advice. The numbers they already had were very high compared to what I recorded. Today I'm wondering about the resting heart figure but I'm not sure which to use. Occasionally this can drop to 48 whilst awake, which concurs with that taken from blood pressure/pulse monitor, though it will go lower whilst asleep. As I'm typing now it's hovering around 58. So should I be using my night-time resting HR, my awake doing nothing in particular HR or one when I'm on my feet but relatively inactive? And, does the setting of the resting heart rate figure in establishing how much work you are doing in an activity at all? My reason in the interest in calories is just to maintain my current weight. Thank you in advance for taking the time to read this; it is really appreciated.
RHR is usually defined as your heart rate while being in complete rest (lying down) but awake as far as I know. The best time to measure would be a minute or so after waking up I believe (but still lying in bed) or after lying down for ~10 minutes or so.
The way garmin calculates it might be a bit different, their algorithms have to take into account bad readings so I believe they use an average and/or ignore extremes.
But calories burnt are also dependent on your HR measured I think, so make sure that your HR is registered (semi) correctly.
I haven't really digged deep into all this though, I take all the info from the watch with a grain of salt and just check the steps and hr on a regular basis, and use it to run ;)
RHR is usually defined as your heart rate while being in complete rest (lying down) but awake as far as I know. The best time to measure would be a minute or so after waking up I believe (but still lying in bed) or after lying down for ~10 minutes or so.
The way garmin calculates it might be a bit different, their algorithms have to take into account bad readings so I believe they use an average and/or ignore extremes.
But calories burnt are also dependent on your HR measured I think, so make sure that your HR is registered (semi) correctly.
I haven't really digged deep into all this though, I take all the info from the watch with a grain of salt and just check the steps and hr on a regular basis, and use it to run ;)
Flipstone is exactly right in terms of definition of resting heart rate.
The latest version of the watch firmware for the 235 can lead to some odd readings (don't believe the RHR in the heart rate widget on the watch). But if you are syncing to Garmin Connect, the resting heart rate tracker (either through the app or the website) there is normally pretty accurate - I find it works pretty well for me.
