THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!
My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.
- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)
***
Back in the late 1990s, I was training under the guidance of Harry Wilson, the coach who steered Steve Ovett to Olympic gold and world records at 1,500m and the mile. Harry was an interesting mix of old-school traditionalist and cutting-edge training buff. Instead of prescribing a set amount of rest between hard intervals (like two minutes, say), he liked to wait until the athlete’s heart rate had returned to given value (generally 120bpm for me). Being a young technophile, I would wear my heart-rate monitor for these workouts in order to have instant feedback. But Harry never really trusted this newfangled technology, so I would stand there between each interval while Harry jammed his fingers into my jugular, listening to my pulse himself until it had slowed to his satisfaction. [EDIT: An astute reader points out to me that you take your pulse from the carotid artery, not the jugular vein. My apologies for any misunderstanding!]
I bring this up because, while I was browsing through the pre-prints of the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports yesterday, I noticed an article by researchers at South Africa’s University of Cape Town, including Tim Noakes, on “heart rate recovery” to monitor training fatigue. The gist is as follows: 14 cyclists took part in a four-week high-intensity training program that included two interval sessions (eight repetitions of four minutes hard, with 90 seconds recovery) each week. Immediately after the final hard interval of each session, the researchers recorded how much the athlete’s heart rate decreased in the next 60 seconds.
After the four-week training period was finished, the researchers divided the subjects into two groups: those whose heart rates had recovered more and more quickly throughout the study, and those whose heart rates had recovered more and more slowly. The hypothesis was that getting better at recovery indicated the subjects were adapting to the training, while getting worse would be a sensitive indicator that they were overtraining. To test this, the subjects rode a 40-km time trial, and compared the results to a similar time trial they had ridden at the start of the study. Sure enough, the group that was recovering better rode faster, and increased power by 8.0%, compared to the slower-recovering group, which only improved power by 3.8%.
This study is part of a larger project investigating the role of heart rate recovery, so it will be interesting to see the remainder of the results when they appear. Monitoring overtraining — the failure to recover from a heavy training load, essentially — is much more of an art than a science, so having some objective tools to use would be really helpful to endurance athletes. (And I’m sure it’ll work better with heart-rate monitors than using a finger to the jugular.) Continue reading ““Heart rate recovery” to monitor overtraining”
