Exercise

One of the things I really miss about rehab is the way they could provide me with all sorts of interesting physiological data afterwards because I was all wired up to an EKG the whole time. They couldn't tell me anything about my VOmax or whatever because I wasn't plumbed for gas, but they could discern all sorts of interesting things just in the EKG data.

When I started exercising on my own, I really missed that fountain of data, especially since the heart rate monitor built into my exercise machine is, shall we say, a trifle declasse. It varies by a good deal depending on whether you're leaning forward or backwards, and depending on which finger you put on the pad, and sometimes it just seems to pick up neutrinos from the sun. There are times when it's picking up someone's heart but it doesn't seem to be mine, which is kind of ominous.

But I remembered that I have a Polar heart rate monitor and I started wearing it while I exercise. It's not as groovy as a strip from an EKG, but it seems to chart my minimum, maximum and average heart rates pretty well, and one of my favorite statistics, heart slow-down time, can be determined by studying the thing. Yesterday I lost 1 beat per second for quite some time, but I don't know if that's good or bad. Better than before, I can tell you that, when I sometimes didn't lose more than two or three beats per hour and had a resting heart rate that was downright frightening.

By the by, I continue to be pleased with my Gazelle. The heart rate monitor doesn't work terribly well (or I don't allow it to work terribly well) but the rest of the machine does work well. The difficulty level seems to drop a bit when the shocks get hot and the oil thins out, but A) I can't be sure if that's really happening or if it's just my legs getting into the swing of things, and B) I don't mind a reduction in difficulty level at around the 15-minute mark. One shock has started to make a soft hydraulic wheezing sound as it goes through its range of motion, but that's it. No squeaking, rattling, loose parts, cracks or anything else.