New Heart Rate Monitor

Healthy muffins

Healthy muffins

Very exciting – got my new heart rate monitor late Friday!  It’s a basic Garmin model but does everything I think I want it to do and after a workout I can get a summary on the watch itself or transfer the details to my computer and get graphs of my heart rate over the time of the workout.  Unfortunately it didn’t seem to be picking up my heart rate for about the first half hour, but otherwise it’s looking pretty good.  Am looking forward to using it on a run or walk outside so I can get the gps involved and plot it all on a map.  My average heart rate for the workout was 118 with a spike up to 196 at one point!

At the start of the program I was doing the beginner level – even though I achieved Intermediate on all the activities except the sit ups (no surprise there with post-pregnancy tummy!) and missed Intermediate by 1 second on the 1km time trial.  I thought having done no exercise for so long and with the pregnancy in the middle that I should start at the beginning.  Seemed like a good idea at the time and the first week I found it all hard enough. By the end of the first week though and through the second week I was getting through the exercise feeling a bit tired from it but otherwise pretty good.  I had no post exercise muscle soreness and although I struggled on one or two of the exercises and couldn’t complete all the reps at the time, I recovered really, really quickly.  So afer talking it over with my husband and a couple of friends, I decided to move up to Intermediate.  Then of course this week I missed half the sessions… I’m not sure how much of a difference there is between Beginner and Intermediate there is at the moment, but damn, I certainly noticed the session yesterday.  My quads were still sore in the afternoon and this morning I am feeling it in my upper back and calves.  Feels pretty good though!

Looking forward to a day of rest today and spending time with my little family – trying the baby out on solids for the first time, should be interesting!