- Using heart rate during sports has become
pretty commonplace,
so much so that you'll be hard-pushed to find an athlete
who doesn't use it to monitor their training at some point.
- Yeah, after all it is a way of monitoring
so many valuable things,
such are how hard your body's working,
how fatigued you are,
and even how fit you are.
- But swimming has been stuck in the dark ages.
Even though heart rate has been used in training
since the 1970s,
it's still rarely seen in the pool,
and that's not because
it's not going to be useful for swimming;
athletes and coaches have been asking for it,
but it's more the fact that the technology
still struggles to record accurately
while swimming in the pool.
- However, thanks to optical heart rate measurement,
that barrier is now history.
There are more and more products now available
on the market that are utilizing this technology,
and more crucially, in the water.
But how do we use heart rate in swimming?
Well, with thanks to our channel partner, Polar,
we are planning to answer just that for you,
and also helping you to swim smarter.
(chill hip hop music)
- The old school method to measure your heart rate
was just to simply use two fingers
and place them on your wrist or on your neck
just to feel the change in pressure as the
blood actually pumped through your arteries but
this is very much a rough guide,
and you do still sometimes see
athletes doing this if they don't have a heart rate monitor,
but remember, it is just a guide.
- Yeah, and when heart rate monitors actually became
really popular a couple of decades ago,
we actually saw a number of athletes and coaches
actually using these heart rate monitors
at the end of the swimming pool.
An athlete would come in,
grab the heart rate monitor,
place it on,
and then take their reading.
But the issues we did find with this is that,
obviously a heart rate monitor
or a few heart rate monitors were being shared as a squad.
When the athlete came in,
it then had to allow time for it to connect,
take that reading, by which point,
their heart rate may have dropped.
Also, we have issues with maybe getting a connectivity
and picking up that reading through a swimsuit.
- Then the other option was to have your own
heart rate belt and actually wear it while swimming,
but however tight you made it
as long ass it was still comfortable,
I know especially for guys,
every time you push off the wall,
they would quite often roll down so,
with a swimsuit it did stay in place a little bit better,
but still with the movement it did give
slightly inaccurate readings.
(upbeat hip hop music)
- Well, as a result of the difficulties
in getting an accurate heart rate reading,
swimming training hasn't commonly used this metric
as an aid to performance,
which when we compare it to cycling and running,
it seems rather far behind.
I mean, they've even moved on to using power
within their training and even racing.
So until now, swimming has pretty much just used
perceived effort of exertion and times,
which to be honest,
only really paints half the picture,
and actually leaves quite a lot open to human error
when we're trying to work out things like
how hard an athlete is actually working.
So I think it's about time swimming did some catching up,
and this is where some new exciting developments
in technology come in.
(upbeat music)
- It's time to bring in optical heart rate.
Now this measures the change in pressure
of your blood flow as a direct result of each heartbeat
as it pushes the blood through your arteries,
and around your body.
Now, this can then be measured using LED lights,
which is displayed directly as your heart rate.
Now the heart rate strap,
it actually uses the ECG directly from your heart,
but that has its limitations in the water
as we discussed earlier.
So these optical heart rate devices
are actually becoming far more common,
and if you don't own one yourself,
you might well have noticed
the other athletes using watches
with lights on the underside.
While these LED lights are actually using
the blood flow through your wrist
to detect what your heart rate is and displaying it,
so it enables you to use that device on land,
but importantly, also while swimming.
You do just have to make sure though,
that the watch is tight enough on your wrist
to limit the water flowing between your wrist
and your watch,
to make sure that the readings are still accurate.
(smooth jazz music)
- Using the same optical heart rate technology,
Polar have actually come up with an alternative
to the wrist-based measurement for heart rate,
and that is the OH1+.
Now this is a slightly smaller device
that you can be attached to your arm,
or to your leg for land-based activities,
but for in the water and for swimming,
you can actually detach the unit from the clip,
put it on a slightly different clip here,
and that can then be attached to your goggles.
That'll rest really nice and snugly against your temple,
for a slightly more accurate measurement.
Now, as well as being small and out of the way,
it also benefits from you not actually requiring
a watch to record the heart rate data from this.
It actually records all the data onto this device,
that then can be downloaded post-activity
and analysed then,
but if you do want to see this data live during your workout,
you can connect it to your phone,
via the Polar Beat app,
and then, should you have a coach on poolside,
they can then benefit from seeing that heart rate data
live whilst you're working out.
(smooth hip hop music)
- Well now you've got options in the pool,
you can go by heart rate, perceived effort,
times, or even a combination of all boats
to really make sure you optimize your training.
And say for example
you're in the middle of a heavy training block
and your training effort is really high,
but you're struggling to hit those times.
Well, this is when heart rate comes in handy
'cause you can actually have a look at
how hard you're working and
you can adjust your target times accordingly
to make sure you stay in the right training zone.
- Yeah, and alternatively,
if you have a coach actually
tracking and monitoring your heart rate on poolside,
perhaps through the Polar Beats app,
they can actually start looking at your effort level
and then maybe adjusting your target times accordingly.
Now, with swimming power seemingly a little way off,
we can certainly utilize this heart rate data
and start making our swimming training
far more specific and accurate.
- Heart rate in swimming is still a fairly new metric,
especially for coaches and
they maybe aren't yet used to integrating
inter-training programs.
Plus, at the moment you can't actually
see your heart rate whilst you're swimming, yet,
but that said, it's still a very useful tool
when it comes to analyzing your training
and seeing how you're progressing
throughout the season.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Of course swimming does still have
a little bit of catching up to do,
but this is a really exciting breakthrough
and a very useful training tool.
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