Today’s EliteHRV morning readiness analysis was good again.
Last night’s sleep was a little short at 6 hours 10 minutes, but it was good sleep with no insomnia interruption.
Today’s main session was rowing until arriving at a total of 800 calories, done at RPE level 7. The main session is available as a screen recording for those who’d like to row-along. It’s link on YouTube is: Indoor Rowing 800 Calories 01212019
The Concept 2 rowing machine is an ergometer and it accurately measures work. It registered 800 calories for the main rowing session today, but the Apple Watch, which independently logged the workout as a rowing session, shows quite a few less calories than the Concept 2 ergometer. So don’t rely on the Apple Watch calorie count if you do a rowing workout.
Today’s second of three sessions was another attempt on the SkiErg to do a one minute sprint. The sprint was done at RPE level 9 and it was a better result than yesterday’s because I didn’t start out too fast and was able to maintain the pace for the entire minute. The third and last session today was going to be another attempt at a 500 meter sprint on the SkiErg, but I started out too fast or didn’t have a suitable drag factor setting (or perhaps I was too tired??), so I let that “sprint” fade into a warm down and the resulting RPE for the 500 meters was Level 4.
Finish screen for 800 calorie rowing.
Report for 800 calorie rowing at RPE level 7.
RowPro graphs for 800 calorie rowing.
Concept 2 online logbook chart for 800 calorie rowing.
There is no report or graph for the 100 meter sprint on SkiErg because it wasn’t done with RowPro but above is a screenshot of the summary data.
The final session for the day was 500 meters on the SkiErg which started out as an attempt to improve the previous, ranked result. But I started out too fast to maintain it so let it fade into a warm down. Heart rate fade lagged behind the fade of effort level.
Today’s HRV Morning Readiness analysis was good, so rowing was okay to do. Of course, it has been good for several days WITHOUT having done any rowing on those days… but today some rowing was actually done!
Today’s main workout was an aerobic row of 19,384 meters. It was at RPE level 2. It was followed by a first time attempt at a one minute sprint on the SkiErg, at what started out at RPE level 10 and faded. That was followed by 500 meters on the SkiErg at RPE level 5, to serve as a warm down for a warm down. Lastly, there was a SkiErg final warm down of about two minutes at RPE level 1.
Last night’s sleep had a bit of insomnia but total sleep was good at 7 hours 50 minutesFinish screen for today’s rowing session of 19,384 meters. It started out as a full marathon in case I felt inclined to go that distance.RowPro report for today’s main session. The finish screen at the time the RowPro session was stopped showed 1,100 calories. This report shows 1,097 calories. The Concept 2 logbook shows 1,095 calories. What’s a few calories, among friends?RowPro graphs for today’s main session.Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s main session.Chart for today’s first time ever 1 minute sprint attempt on SkiErg. You can see that though my effort level faded, heart rate did not fade with the fading effort level.After the 1 minute SkiErg sprint I did two warmdowns. This was the first warm down, 500 meters on the SkiErg at RPE level 5.:This was the final warm down: two minutes on the SkiErg at an RPE 1 effort level that allowed heart rate to slow down.
That’s right – yesterday I only worked out for 400 meters. It was, however, at RPE level 10. The 400 meters yesterday consisted of four 100 meter sprints on the Concept 2 SkiErg. Summary screenshot below:
Of the four 100 meter sessions, the lastest was the fastest at 22.8 seconds, so I included it in the Concept 2 Online Logbook World Rankings for 100 meters on a SkiErg. I placed second to last…Second to last is …. better than last, but not by much!
As today’s title implies, there was no workout on rowing machine or SkiErg today. But… the daily EliteHRV readings and sleep log graphs were captured and those exciting screenshots are displayed below:
January 17, 2019 EliteHRV Morning Readiness readingJanuary 17th, 2019 logged 7 hours 10 minutes sleep in spite of a bout of insomnia.Today (January 18, 2019) also had a good Morning Readiness reading.Only logged 5 hours 20 minutes sleep on the morning of January 18th, after a longish bit of insomnia and the necessity to get out of bed with an alarm clock, to assist in keeping a doctor’s appointment for my better half.
Today’s workout consisted of 5,027 meters on the SkiErg followed by 5,027 meters on the rowing machine. All done indoors, of course.
Today’s EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading was okay for any workout, though the HRV score wasn’t as high as yesterday’s.
The day began with a green light from EliteHRV (see above) and a good night’s rest of 7 hours 40 minutes (see below)
The first of the two workout sessions was set up to be 10K on the SkiErg. That’s what yesterday’s SkiErg session was supposed to be also, but I quit that one yesterday after about 2 miles. Today I got further with it and quit today’s 10K on the SkiErg after a little over 3 miles, logging 5,027 meters.
So for today’s rowing session, I set the rowing machine for the exact same distance, 5,027 meters to compare results. You can see from the session reports that I went a lot faster, with a lower heart rate, rowing than SkiErg-ing.
SkiErg session finish screen.SkiErg session report.SkiErg RowPro graphConcept 2 Online logbook chart for SkiErg. The chart is messy with black lines because there were many false readings for strokes, with the SkiErg connected to RowPro.Finish screen for rowing the 5,027 meter distance.Today’s rowing reportToday’s rowing session RowPro graphsThe Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s rowing session is a lot cleaner looking than the SkiErg chart because it is displaying correct data for strokes and stroke rate.
This morning’s EliteHRV readiness reading was good, but the most remarkable thing was the HRV score of 54. This was the first time HRV score has ever been higher than mid 40s.
Last night’s sleep was interrupted by a long stretch of insomnia from about 2:30 to about 5:00 AM. One thing I did during that insomnia was to resort to an emWave2 device and breathe following its breath pacer, which resulted in a longest-ever “meditation” of 36 minutes in a state of “coherence”. I wonder if that was a factor in getting the higher-than-ever HRV reading with EliteHRV today?
Today’s main indoor rowing session was indoor skiing on a Concept 2 SkiErg. I connected it to RowPro for the sake of logging it and getting a bigger screen display of data. Since RowPro is only designed with rowing machines = boat avatars in mind, it looked like I was rowing a boat on the digital river. Something was going on with the stroke rate not translating well to the display and instead of displaying what should have been a stroke rate in the 20s or 30s, it was all over the place and very frequently displaying a false stroke rate of over 100 SPM. But the other data looked okay.
I preset the distance to 10,000 meters on the SkiErg, but by the time I reached between 2K and 3K I was breathing hard and sweating profusely, though my average pace was a mere 3:00 minutes/500m. So I guess it will take a lot of getting used to as an unfamiliar workout for my underused upper body.
Instead of going the full distance of 10K, I stopped skiing after about 2 miles, which was 3,250 meters. Since I’m brand new to the SkiErg, I started out with the lowest possible damper setting at 0 (zero) and that was a Drag Factor of about 51 according to the PM5.
I rated both the SkiErg 3250 meters and the rowing machine 1,000 meters as each RPE 5.
After the shortened session on the SkiErg I switched to the familiar Concept 2 Model D and rowed 1,000 meters plus a 750 meter warm down.
On the brink of death or what? This morning was the worst reading I’ve ever had.
Yes, this morning’s EliteHRV reading was the WORST EVER reading since I’ve been taking the daily Morning Readiness reading. But I ended up discarding it, because though my actual HRV reading might have been poor, it also might have been good… the results were skewed and basically worthless because there were too many data glitches. See additional screenshot below, for what EliteHRV said about today’s reading.
The “artifacts” were due to the fact that I was having a little bout of heart flutter AKA atrial fibrillation.
I got plenty of sleep last night, at 8 hours and 20 minutes. But you can see that heart rate was elevated from about 5:30 AM through the entire remaining time of last night’s sleep – that’s when the heart fluttering happened.
Other than the fluttering heart, I felt okay. It stopped fluttering around midday and I decided to row late in the afternoon, at a moderate pace.
Today’s rowing session was 17,000 meters done for the sake of burning calories. The hope was to burn at least 1,000 calories and that goal was almost reached, with a total of 988 or 989 calories. (The finish screen reported 988 calories and the report says 989 calories).
A screen recording was made for those of you who like to have it to row along with. It is available at this link: Indoor Rowing 17000 meters 01092019
Even though I took it easy yesterday, today’s HRV score was lower/worse than yesterday’s. Puzzling.
Though the HRV score yesterday was excellent and I took it easy, today’s HRV score was worse than yesterday’s! I’m missing something here… unless this morning’s lower HRV score was due to last night’s sleep? (See caption of image below)
Perhaps the poor HRV score this morning was due to only getting 5 hours 45 minutes sleep last night, instead of closer to 8 hours?
Because of the poor HRV reading this morning, I only did easy rowing. The goal for today’s rowing was to total at least 1,000 calories, for the Big Burn Challenge (see image below)
Today’s goal of burning at least 1,000 calories while rowing easy was achieved with two pieces: A 10K followed by a 7,700 meter piece. There was a screen recording made of the 7,700 meter piece, for those of you who’d like to row along with it. It is located at this link: Indoor Rowing 7700 meters 01072019
It is now almost 6 hours since today’s easy rowing was finished. When I do “easy rowing,” it is only done by feel. It seemed that 2:20 felt easy, so I aimed for 2:20 and did each of today’s pieces near that pace. But I’m surprised that now, 6 hours later, I’m feeling slight soreness from the rowing! This isn’t “normal”. Is it because I’m “getting old”? or is it because I’m fighting off some kind of bug?
Perhaps the HRV reading tomorrow morning will shed some light on the answer to that question?
10K finish screen
10K report
10K graphs7700 meter finish screen7700 meter report7700 meters graphs
Today’s Readiness was taking with a grain of salt as I mentioned in yesterday’s post… but the grain of salt was later dispensed with after I received more knowledge about the app from a reliable expert on the matter.
There was no indoor rowing goal at the start of the day, except to do some rowing before eating anything. The goal of burning more than 1,000 calories rowing today was decided upon after rowing a 60 minute session, warming down, looking at the total calorie count and noticing it was less than 1,000. One of the current Concept 2 challenges is called “The Big Burn”. The object of that challenge is to burn at least 20,000 calories on a C2 machine this January.
This morning a friend explained how to easily check to see whether or not the EliteHRV app had detected any “signal artifacts” during its morning reading. If it has detected any artifacts, the reliability of its reading is in question, according to his analysis. Checking simply involves clicking/touching a few particular places on the app, but I had been unaware of that.
The happy news was that there were no artifacts and the morning readiness reading today is worthwhile as a training signal.
Another important training signal, quantity of sleep, was also “GO” for training today, at more than 8 hours sleep.
Resting heart rate was a little high at 55 BPM. That was not a drastic difference from normal and was probably due to the virus that tried to get a foothold the previous day. So I took the RHR as a “GO” training signal also.
There is another possible training signal that I don’t know what to think of yet, so I guess I’ll just have to keep watch on it from day to day to form an opinion. It is a relatively new data feature of the sleep logging app I use (SleepWatch): Average heart rate during sleep. It seems to me that average sleeping heart rate would be influenced by things like how much a person ate before bedtime, how much time passed after eating and before going to bed and room temperature, to name a few things that come to mind. I don’t know if it is as relevant as RHR or relevant at all, as any kind of a training guide or signal.
There is a screen recording of the main piece, a 60 minute rowing session today. For those of you who’d like to row along with it, the link for the screen recording can be found here: Indoor Rowing 60 minutes 01052019
Screenshots for the 60 minute piece are below. It was done at about RPE Level 5. The other two shorter shorter pieces were done at RPE Level 1 and I won’t bother posting anything about them. But they are visible to anyone who has a Concept 2 logbook account and who is logged in to the online logbook.
I didn’t get a very early start today and my legs felt a bit tired, so I put off rowing until after noon. For the sake of getting more critical repair and replacement work on my mitochondria, especially the heart mitochondria, I also put off eating until after rowing was finished. So the time before breaking fast was more than 20 hours, which was a solid 8 hours of special benefit to the mitochondria. Happily, both heart rate & rhythm behaved perfectly.
Today’s rowing was a half marathon done at RPE Level 5, followed by an RPE Level 1 ten-minute warm down.
My “traffic lights” for whether its okay to do anything more than very easy rowing are three. Two of those are numbers: The EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading/analysis of heart rate variability and the total time of actual sleep. If EliteHRV says its okay to train harder today, then as far as that criteria is concerned I can row as hard as I want, for as long a distance or time as is possible. But my occasional irregular heart rate is casting a shadow of doubt on the EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading because according to the analysis so far of one who has expertise in the analysis of data – the reading may be skewed to result in being inaccurate, by the way EliteHRV deals with “artifacts” which in my case would be paroxysmal Afib.
So now I’m leaning more to another couple of “traffic lights” as “GO,” “CAUTION” or “STOP” signals for long and/or hard rowing: The amount of sleep I got the night before and, perhaps even more importantly, how I feel after waking in the morning.
This morning, all three of my “traffic lights” were “GO”. (1) EliteHRV, which is the one in doubt, said it would be okay to train hard. (2) I logged plenty of sleep and, even more importantly, (3) I felt good and slightly in the happy zone of emotions this morning. 🙂
EliteHRV Morning Readiness today
Last night’s sleep was 7 hours 25 minutes and I felt very good – happy- about waking and getting out of bed.
So today’s rowing was a half marathon scheduled online about 45 minutes in advance. At about 10 minutes before the appointed time, I checked in and was all alone. So I figured I would either row the HM solo online or cancel it and row it offline. While waiting for the scheduled time to arrive, I started typing text messages and sort of forgot about the online rowing session. When I next lifted my head to look at the computer monitor, there were two other guys who had joined and checked in and they were asking me if I was going to start the session or not because it was a few minutes past the starting time.
So I apologized for keeping them waiting and we started. One of them rowed for about 30 minutes and then disengaged from the online session. The other one rowed 10,000 meters in about 40 minutes and then he checked out also. So I rowed a bit more than the last half of the distance alone.
Today’s rowing was done first thing in the morning, before eating anything. I chose to do it that way, because from some of what I’ve read and heard in lectures on the topic of the body’s critically important mitochondria, there is some particularly important and even critical “repair and replacement” work that the mitochondria only does if a person has been fasting for at least 12 hours. Fasting at least 12 hours from evening meal to next day’s first meal seems, in my experience, to be very helpful for “repairing,” “resetting,” or some such thing with regard to my heart and its rhythm. That particular benefit of fasting is enhanced if a person is also active physically during the period of fasting.
By the time I started this morning’s rowing, I’d already been fasting almost 14 hours and by the time I finished rowing and ate something, more than 16 hours had passed. So – the heart’s mitochondria got the benefit of extra-special “attention and repair” during the last 4 of those 16 hours.
Finish screen for today’s online half marathon.
Report for today’s half marathon.As you can see in this RowPro graph, heart rate sputtered a bit and had several brief periods of irregularity, before it smoothed out and behaved very well.
Concept2 online logbook chart for today’s half marathon.
Today’s EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading allowed for any distance or effort level.
Today’s rowing was mainly for the purpose of catching up on more of the “lost meters” this season. Last season my daily average meters was more than 10K. So far this season the daily average is a little over 5K, so I have a lot of catching up to do between now and the end of the season (April 30th).
More than enough sleep (8 hours 40 minutes) last night contributed to today’s favorable EliteHRV reading.
We got a late start this morning, so there wasn’t as much time for rowing as hoped. The two main indicators I use to tell me if its okay to row hard and/or long distance were both favorable. Those indicators are the EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading and whether I got sufficient sleep. The one that I currently give the most weight to is the EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading.
Since both indicators were “GO FOR IT!” I rowed 24,000 meters. None of it was hard rowing but the distance was sufficient that I feel relaxed for sleep this evening.
The four sessions rowed today were, in chronological order: (1st) 2K distance for warmup, (2nd) 10K online with two other guys, at an easy “overdistance” pace (which in this case meant a pace that would raise HR to no more than 55% to 70% of maximum). After the online 10K, there was a (3rd) 10 minute warm down which was 2,000 meters. Later in the afternoon, I decided to do (4th) another 10K and the plan was to do 2 or 3 intervals of 500 meters each and a final interval of 1,000 meters, with the pace of each interval at about 2:00/500m.
A view of the Concept2 online logbook showing the listing of today’s 4 rowing sessions.
But the heart acted up in its strange fashion and became too irregular to register a heart rate for a lot of the time. When it was registering a heart rate, HR was way too high and once got as high as 230 on the RowPro readout from the Polar heart strap. The Apple watch activity tracker, a separate heart rate logging device, showed high heart rate also. So, after a couple of 500 meter intervals at about the target pace of 2:00/500m, I slowed down for the remainder of the 10K. The main goal of completing the distance was achieved. Immediately below this paragraph is a screenshot of data for stroke number 888 through 918 of the strange-hearted 10K.
Strokes 903 through 913 are the highest heart rate I’ve ever seen displayed when my heart acts strangely.
For those of you who like to row-along with some of the rowing session screen recordings, the only session that was recorded and uploaded to YouTube of today’s four sessions was the warm up. It can be found here: Indoor Rowing Just A Warmup 01032019
Below are images of: The finish screen for today’s first 10K, the report and graphs for that first, easiest 10K and then the report and graph for the second 10K, during which heart was being strange.
