atrial fibrillation – Page 4

Heart-Warming Rate, Rhythm and Recovery

Finish screen for today’s 10,000 meter rowing session.

One of the categories associated with today’s blog post is “Heart Strangeness”, which is the category I use when there is abnormal heart behavior during a workout. The abnormal behaviors have been: atrial fibrillation (irregular heart rhythm), excessively high heart rate, a slow or non-recovery of heart rate after hard work, or a combination of two or more of those.

There have been so many workouts recently with “heart strangeness,” that I was surprised to have everything normal today. Therefore, the category of “Heart Strangeness” was tacked on today to take note of and celebrate its ABSENCE.

The three r’s of heart rate, heart rhythm and heart rate recovery after hard intervals were all normal or – as some astronauts used to say – they were AOK.

There were two workouts. First, 10,000 meters at a constant pace of 2:18/500 meters on the rowing machine. The rowing session was a nice warmup for intervals on the SkiErg. The SkiErg session was preset to continue until 155 Calories had been burned. It was done with alternate intervals of hard/easy 10 Calorie work/rest intervals. The graphical picture of normal heart rate recovery after each interval on the SkiErg was heart-warming to behold.

Report for today’s 10,000 meter rowing session.

RowPro graphs for today’s 10,000 meter rowing session.

Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s 10,000 meter rowing session.

Chart and data for today’s 155 Calorie SkiErg session.

Happy rowing to you!

Normal Start, Strange Finish

Finish screen for today’s 10K. See below for a closer-view of the graphs…

Today’s erg workouts were planned to be a repeat of yesterday’s. Today started out with a 10K, targeting a pace of just faster than 2:20 and a rating of 28, like yesterday. Also like yesterday, a single 500 meter interval was done at a pace of about 2:00, beginning when the remaining distance counted down to 4,000 meters.

Every thing was normal from the start, through the 500 meter interval and a little beyond the end of the 500 meter interval. Then things got strange, like the day before yesterday. Heart rate became irregular with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation and heart rate also spiked up to a rate too high for the low effort level of 2:20/500 meters rowing.

On the heart rate chart you can easily see that heart rate shifted/jumped from a normal rate of around 120 BPM when pace was 2:20, to an abnormally high rate of around 150 BPM.

Heart behavior and rate remained strange after the rowing session was over and all through the SkiErg session which immediately followed the rowing session. After I changed from workout clothes back into regular attire (jeans and T-shirt), heart rate became normal again. Perhaps it is something to do with the clothes? 🙂

RowPro graphs for today’s 10K rowing session.

Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s 10K rowing session.

Chart and data for today’s SkiErg session. Heart rate was way too high for the moderate effort levels.

Happy rowing to you!

Strange Heart Strangenessless

Both today and yesterday’s 10K rowing sessions were done at identical pace and each had one interval of 500 meters. Today’s (on the right) was NORMAL heart rate for that effort, at about 120 BPM. Yesterday’s heart rate was HIGH for that same effort level, at about 150 BPM.

Today started out differently than yesterday in a couple respects. The first of those was that there was no atrial fibrillation overnight or this morning, as there had been the previous day and night. As a consequence of that, the second immediately noticeable difference was that today’s HRV analysis by EliteHRV was a perfect 10, the greenest “green light” possible for any sort of workout today.

Another difference between today and yesterday is that yesterday I did some sweating during both the rowing and SkiErg workouts but today there was no sweating, no drips of sweat today on either the rowing machine or on the SkiErg platform, like there had been yesterday.

Yesterday, there was “heart strangeness” and I categorized yesterday’s blog post, accordingly, with that tag of “heart strangeness”. Today, heart behaved perfectly but because the difference between yesterday and today is so surprising, “strange” to me, I’m using that same tag for today’s post.

Though I rowed yesterday and today at the same easy pace, with sweating while rowing yesterday but not today… today’s SkiErg session was a bit harder than yesterday’s but today there were NO drips of sweat on the SkiErg platform, like there had been during yesterday’s easier SkiErg session while experiencing irregular heart rate which was abnormally high.

Chart and data for today’s SkiErg session.

Happy rowing to you!

A Trial Of Fibrillation

This morning’s EliteHRV analysis on the left and EliteHRV’s graph of my irregular Afib in the graph on the right.

Today started with a very poor HRV analysis by the EliteHRV app and today’s workouts were both blah.

They were blah, because atrial fibrillation happened throughout. Not only did the heart go flutter-flutter, but it also went way too fast for the low effort level. I thought that maybe it would “straighten up and fly right,” before the end of the 10K rowing or the SkiErg session but it didn’t. Hopefully, it will straighten up today or tonight.

But on the BRIGHT SIDE: Though both rowing and SkiErg workouts were very moderate, at least I was able to work up a bit of a sweat. Eventually… it took quite a while, but eventually, sweat happened during the rowing session and continued, through the SkiErg session. The sweat was not profuse, by any means, but it was drippy like proper, respectable sweat should be.

Concept 2 online logbook chart and data for today’s SkiErg session.

Happy rowing to you.

A Green Lit 10K

Today’s EliteHRV analysis was better than yesterday’s and it was green, so I did a bit longer workouts, each at a bit brisker pace than what was done yesterday. The main workout was rowing 10K with a 2:10 pace boat, aiming to stay ahead of the pace boat. There was occasional Afib sputtering of the cardio engine during the 10K but it never persisted and was flutter-free smooth-running for most of the time. You can see the times when the ticker got irregular and fluttered with atrial fibrillation, in the RowPro graph of the rowing session where the vertical spikes to zero are located. There were five of them… possibly six, if you count the very beginning, but heart rate just before the 10K started was 46 to 49 BPM, so that thing which looks like a spike right at the beginning might just be heart rate raising quickly from its low resting rate.

After the rowing, there was a 145 calorie intervals session on the SkiErg.

Today’s green 8 was better than yesterday’s yellow 5 for HRV.

Finish screen for today’s 10K rowing. The Afib spikes in heart rate are not visible in this view but are quite visible, further below, in the RowPro software graph.

Concept 2 online logbook chart and data display for today’s SkiErg session.

Happy rowing to you!

10K Cut Short

The heart strangeness happened before the last work interval. Heart rate increased before I started working again (first green arrow on the left) and then after I started working to increase the pace, heart rate slowed down. After I stopped working hard, heart rate increased again. But it seemed normal by the end of the session.

Today’s main workout was supposed to be 10K on the rowing machine but it had one falst start and finally got started too late in the day to finish it in a timely manner before dinner.

Before rowing, I did 143 calories of alternating work/rest on the SkiErg (see screenshot, above). The SkiErg session went well except there was a wee bit of strange heart behavior near the end, when heart rate started to rise before I started the last in a series of work intervals. But heart rate seemed to return to normal by the end of the SkiErg session, so I put it out of my mind.

Next, I set up a 10K session and was intending to include 8 intervals of 500 meters each, spread throughout the 10K. But heart rate became irregular, so I got annoyed and went to take an aspirin. To buffer the aspirin, I had something to eat. The rowing workout resumed quite a bit later and there wasn’t enough time to finish it and be back to normal before dinner time, so I limited the 10K to about 4K and quit.

The first attempt at a rowing 10K was cut short after only about 500 meters.

There isn’t much of a graph for the first attempt at a rowing 10K today, but you can see that heart rate display was zero for quite a bit of the time during that 500 meters. When heart rate is zero, that usually means heart rate is too irregular for the heart strap to transmit a readable signal to the rowing machine monitor.

Finish screen view of today’s “main workout,” the 10K Cut Short.

Report for today’s “main workout,” the 10K Cut Short.

Graph for today’s “main workout,” the 10K Cut Short.

Happy rowing to you!

Reversing Chronological Order

The top screenshot today is of the SkiErg workout, because it was done before anything else today (that’s the reverse order from how I’ve been doing it in the past, with rowing first).

The thing on my mind before starting today’s workouts was recent bouts of heart strangeness during recent rowing sessions. So as a result, today I decided to experiment by reversing the order in which I do the workouts on rowing machine and SkiErg. Instead of rowing first, I did a SkiErg workout first.

The one and only reason for making that change was because I wondered if my heart rate would become irregular again during the first workout of the day, if I did that workout on SkiErg instead of rowing machine.

For the recent few days, heart rate has had fits of irregularity and other strangeness during the first workout of the day, which was rowing. But it has behaved normally during the second workout on the SkiErg, immediately following the rowing.

Interestingly enough, heart behaved normally during the first workout today on the SkiErg. During the second workout, on the rowing machine, it also behaved normally.

Actually it behaved ever-so-slightly abnormally during the SkiErg workout, and what I’m referring to by that is visible in the heart rate graph after the 2nd of 8 intervals on the SkiErg – in the space of graph between 2nd and third intervals. Heart rate stayed regular, but it went way too high, then recovered and behaved very normally after that.

Was it a coincidence or is there something about using the SkiErg, which is done standing UPRIGHT/100% VERTICAL instead of sitting (with the lower half of the body extended horizontally) and which (SkiErg) mostly uses the arms instead of the legs… which is more agreeable to the heart? Or at least, which is more agreeable if it is done as the first workout before doing any hard rowing?

Finish screen view of today’s rowing session.

RowPro graph for today’s rowing session. Notice the CLEAN heart rate graph! No dropouts to zero, which happens with irregular heartbeat. Heart rate was in normal range for the effort, all through the workout.

Another view of today’s rowing workout, with the Concept 2 online logbook chart.

Happy rowing to you!

Better Than Yesterday

Finish screen view of today’s intervals within a 6K piece.

Today’s rowing session was better than the sloppiness of yesterday’s, because HR was better behaved. It was a little bit confused, as can be readily seen from the rowing session graphs of HR and correlating pace, but overall was definitely better than yesterday.

The rowing session was a continuous 6K which contained a set of 4 moderate intervals of 750 meters each. The first 1,000 meters was warmup, then there were four sets of 750 meter intervals alternated with 2 minutes rest and the remainder of the distance was a warm down.

Today’s SkiErg session, like yesterday’s, had zero HR irregularities. It seems that if there is going to be any heart rate irregularity, it is more likely to show up during a rowing session. Go figure (as I also said yesterday…).

Report for today’s intervals within a 6K piece.

RowPro graph of today’s intervals within a 6K piece.

In this Concept 2 online logbook chart, the odd behavior of heart rate during today’s 6K seems more obvious than in the RowPro graph.

Heart rate was PERFECTLY well-behaved during the SkiErg session.

Happy rowing to you!

Twenty Minutes With 4 “Bursts”

I didn’t believe today’s HRV analysis should be taken seriously, but it seems to have been correct.

Today’s workout was short but more vigorous than recommended by today’s Morning Readiness score from the EliteHRV app.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence or perhaps EliteHRV was right. In either case, an episode of atrial fibrillation happened, which put a damper on things.

So the only workout done was a 20 minute rowing session which included 4 “bursts” of a dozen or so hard strokes. The “bursts” were spaced about 4 minutes apart. The session was uploaded to YouTube, for those of you who’d like to row along with it and is available at this link: Indoor Rowing 20 minutes with 4 bursts 05092019

Finish screen for today’s 20 minute rowing session.

Report for today’s 20 minute rowing session.

RowPro graph for today’s 20 minute rowing session.

Happy rowing to you!

Can Valerian Induce Heart Strangeness?

This morning’s favorable Readiness score from the EliteHRV app left me looking forward to some energetic intervals.

Today’s workout consisted of a 10K rowing session online, with a 10 minute warm down. The 10K was originally planned to be a series of intervals of 30 strokes each and spaced to each start about 1,000 meters apart.

During the first part of the 10K, heart rate was too irregular to display. When It finally became regular enough to display, it was way too high for the effort level, so I slowed to an extremely slow pace. After about 2,000 meters, heart rate settled down to where it should be and the remainder of the 10K was somewhat normal. But I decided to skip using the SkiErg for today.

Last night, I took another dose of Valerian as a sleep aid. I suspect that it may have been at least a partial cause of the irregular and excessively high heart rate. The Valerian did help me sleep through the night, but it seemed to cause strange dreams.

Graphs of 10K rowing session as displayed on RowPro finish screen.

Report for today’s 10K rowing session. Notice splits 4, 5, 6 and 7 where heart rate is way too high for the low effort level.

Happy rowing to you!