<p>I’ve found I can get a surprising amount of milage out of just exercising for 15 minutes. Something really is better than nothing. Everyone says you can’t lose weight through exercise alone, but all I know is that if the tiny exercise piece is there, I lose weight, if it’s not I don’t. That’s assuming I’m eating reasonably healthily, which I generally do.</p>
<p>MKAT:</p>
<p>I have found a less than perfect correlation between panting and heart rate. Some activities result in breathing hard even at relatively low heart rates. Others produce high heart rates without panting. And sometimes both. And the same activity can vary a lot depending on the weather.</p>
<p>A perfect example of the first is near max output strength training, where I am breathing very hard at the end of a set (like rear foot elevated split squats), but my heart rate may only be 75% of my max – somewhere not much above VT1 on a hike.</p>
<p>Intervals (with full recovery to VT1) are interesting these days. It takes the accumulation of multiple intervals to see high heart rates (90% of my max). Usually I don’t see that until the 5th or 6th interval. I don’t know if that’s better conditioning or if I’ve just learned to pace myself better. Probably a little of both. I haven’t increased the intensity fast enough to match improved conditioning as would be necessary to get the same heart rates as I did when I was completely deconditioned. Back then, I didn’t have to make a concerted effort to push myself that hard. It just happened. Now, I would have to push really hard and I find it very difficult to do that.</p>
<p>Even occasional running, which is a surefire way to jack my heart rate, takes forever and a day on the first few intervals to get my heart rate to 90%. Completely gassed, legs on fire, lungs burning, and the heart rate won’t get there. It takes three or four intervals. It’s so pronounced that, when I’m doing heart rate based intervals, I do the first three to 85% of my max and before jumping to 90% of max for intervals after that. Same thing on the Airdyne.</p>
<p>Hi all, have a calf question. I have been traveling and as part of my travels, was at Cologne Cathedral. I walked all the up way and all the way down the towers and it’s been 2 days and my calves are still aching. I think it was the walking down that was hardest on them. I feel like I can’t flex my foot towards my head as I normally could, and if I point my foot (as if I were wearing high heels) that hurts too. I really need to start some training for 2 more 5ks I plan to run, but I’m a little afraid. When I get up (such as from a chair) I take a few steps like an old lady!! This will not do!! Suggestions? They just feel very crampy. </p>
<p>What shoes did you have on for that climb? It can take awhile for calf strain to subside. I would try to stretch and massage the calves. I bet it will resolve soon. Walking or running down usually kills my quads.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl:</p>
<p>Oh, I can tell you all about that. Last Friday, I walked down 3100 vertical feet and then spent the next 2.5 days barely able to walk. I was having to shuffle around, particularly going down stairs, like an old cripple.</p>
<p>DOMS. Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. Going down steps is almost universally guaranteed to produce it. If it’s any consolation, it’s usually the worst from 24 to 48 hours after exercise and usually gone by 72 hours.</p>
<p>I was fine, soreness gone, and able to work out at 72 hours.</p>
<p>Lowering a weight (eccentric) produces much more soreness than pushing a weight up (concentric). Going down stairs is eccentric as you are lowering your body weight with each step.</p>
<p>Thanks. I stupidly did not have the right shoes - I had sandals on as supposed to sneakers. I didn’t know til I got there that I’d be going up the tower. They were perfectly comfy and well-fitting sandals, so I thought I’d be ok. </p>
<p>Anything specific other than just flexing / pointing I should do? I did get a massage yesterday. </p>
<p>Google tells me the Cologne Cathedral is 533 steps from bottom to top.</p>
<p>Climbing steps is really a weightlifting exercise. You essentially did 260+ reps of lifting your body weight with each leg on the way up, and then again with negative resistance on the way down. It’s no wonder your calves hurt.</p>
<p>I suspect this is just really bad DOMS. Stretching and a couple more days of recovery will have you feeling good.</p>
<p>eta: eh, Idad beat me to it. </p>
<p>What about rolling it??? I’m not a rolling expert, but seems to recommended here for those types of aches and pains.</p>
<p>And, if it’s muscle soreness from stairs, I doubt shoes would have made much difference. With each step down, you were firing the muscles in your leg to keep from jarring as your foot hit the next step – i.e. slowing your descent. That is just not a way that our muscles are used to working. Try stuff like holding the bottom position of a push up or a squat. Same thing. And it will make you sore, sore, sore. I think it’s also why things like downhill skiing or water skiing fry your legs.</p>
<p>It probably hurts too much to foam roll although massaging your calves may help, if you can stand it. Last weekend, it hurt my legs just from the pressure of lying in bed. I’d rather have pulled finger nails out with pliers than even think about foam rolling! I alway find calves pretty tender for foam rolling under the best of circumstances!</p>
<p>“And, if it’s muscle soreness from stairs, I doubt shoes would have made much difference”</p>
<p>I had the same thought. I second the foam rolling recommendation. Vitamin I can alleviate some of the soreness. Hope things will be back to normal for you soon, Pizzagirl!</p>
<p>Thanks! I can’t even contemplate foam rolling!
I had just done something similar two days prior at another cathedral (Sagrada Familia), though I took a lift up and walked down. I think the difference was that at SF, you stopped periodically to look at different things and you crossed into other towers, so there was some “regular” walking interspersed with stairs. </p>
<p>Appreciate the thoughts! </p>
<p>Foam roll, girl. Foam roll. </p>
<p>While I don’t have a foam roller, I’m rolling from one side to the other to help my legs. It’s painful! It’s like I can feel each bundle of muscle slip over another as I roll. </p>
<p>Phrase of the Moment: An object in motion, stays in motion. </p>
<p>The more you keep moving, the less you’ll hurt! ;)</p>
<p>Dreaded Airdyne intervals for me. Really dreaded, but I survived.</p>
<p>IDad, there is in fact a relationship between “panting and heart rate” since cardiac output has a direct impact on O2 delivery to working muscles and the elimination of wastes and buffering of lactic acid. When you increase intensity and come out of a steady state balance, your body compensates by increasing cardiac output through elevated heart rate and increasing pulmonary ventilation through increased tidal volume of breathing and rate of respiration. If you don’t have sufficient cardiac output and therefore sufficient O2 going to the working muscles, you go into O2 deficit and the body attempts to compensate by increasing your heart rate. If for some reason you are unable to increase your heart rate sufficiently, your body will continue to attempt to increase pulmonary ventilation and you end up panting and increasing your ventilation rate. You can quickly go into an anaerobic state and can even hyper ventilate. In my situation, because of over-training, I was not getting a normal (for me) heart rate response which was causing me to go into “pulmonary overdrive” at a lower level of work output. </p>
<p>Your comparison to your heart rate response when lifting heavy weights is comparing apples and oranges. Lifting weights depends primarily on the phosphogenic energy system and normally each set will take 90 seconds or less. When you burn off all the phosphogen in the working muscles, your body tries to compensate by accessing other energy pathways and your rate of respiration increases. However, it can take 2-3 minutes for your cardiovascular system to fully ramp up (resulting in fully increased heart rate) and the exercise is normally over long before that. So you end up breathing hard but never achieving the elevated heart rate you would experience from exercise of a longer duration.</p>
<p>That all being said, I agree that using heart rate metrics to determine the intensity of your exercise and how hard you are working is not particularly reliable. There are all sorts of reasons your heart rate can be up or down on a given day. The generic formulas used to determine max hr and hr percentages are not particularly accurate on an individual basis. Instead, if I were a runner, I would use ventilary thresholds to set my exercise intensity levels and then if I were interested in analyzing performance, I would look at speed and heart rate at each threshold or over the duration of the event. For a cyclist, wattage is the platinum standard and that’s what I use to set my training zones. I then look at my heart rate and rate of respiration to get a handle on my body’s consistency at the wattage ranges I train at.If my heart rate or rate of respiration are out of whack for the level of watts I’m producing, then I know something is off. </p>
<p>IDad, as an addendum, I also hear ya when you say that it often takes you several intervals during your cardio training to get your hr as elevated as you would expect or want not withstanding that your legs and lungs are burning at a lower hr. I also have experienced a similar phenomenon during my indoor training where I’m not getting my hr up above 165 but yet my legs are burning and I’m breathing hard. Sometimes it has felt like I just don’t have the muscular strength or endurance to push my work output and place more demands on my hr. At times like that, I’m glad that I have the wattage readouts available since that is an actual measure of performance and I can correlate my hr and rate of respiration with the amount of watts I am producing. But what I am also wondering is whether much of what I was experiencing was over-training related. During this same period I spoke of earlier when I had cut back on training volume, I took the spinning class I also mentioned with the highly ranked masters triathlete who had us doing those 15 x1 minute intervals. My heart rate response was up where I would expect it to be but I didn’t have a reliable wattage readout to measure my work performance.</p>
<p>Another thing to consider is that the whole process is a lot more involved than just cardiac response and respiration. You have glycogen storage capacity issues in the muscles, level of mitochondrial activity, hormonal responses. It could very well be that you hit the peak of your muscular work production at a lower hr rate initially but then as the other systems involved in energy production start to get depleted, hr increases further in an effort to “resupply” those systems or compensate for their depletion. The difficulty is that without a means of getting a reliable and accurate measure of energy or work production, its tough to correlate hr and respiration to how your body is actually performing. As I mentioned before, that’s why cyclists who are training for performance use wattage and I guess for runners you could use speed over distance to place hr and respiration in a context that has more meaning. If your hr and rate of respiration are becoming lower for a given level of work output, that’s a sign of conditioning, as you postulated about your own experience. If your work output is becoming lower at a given level of hr and respiration or your hr and respiration are getting higher at a given level of work out put, or your can’t get your hr up no matter how hard you feel like you are working, that could be a sign of over-training.</p>
<p>Go iDad and MichaelNKat … I love that you know this techie stuff on how our bodies burn energy.</p>
<p>Had a slight mishap last night right before bed. The giant dog slobbered on the bathroom tile floor and I, with bare feet, slipped and hit the floor hard. I think the Phillies could have used me for sliding into first base! Nothing appeared broken (whew), and I seemed OK. Through the night my left ribs started to hurt, and that appears to be the extent of the damage. I think it’s just a slight bruise, since I know how bad REALLY bruised ribs can hurt from other falls.<br>
I don’t need to be falling, with the bone density stuff.</p>
<p>3 miles this morning. Weather is brutal. Very high humidity and 72 degrees at 6am. </p>
<p>Ouch MOWC! Glad you’re not to badly banged up. Damn pets do it to us all the time. Two of our cats have a real penchant for running between my legs as I’m getting out of bed early in the morning or walking towards the steps to go down to the kitchen late at night for some water.</p>
<p>Hope that’s all it is MOWC! Guess you got your run in so must not be too bad. </p>
<p>Ouch, MOfWC! Mr B says he read somewhere that 80% of accidents resulting in minor injuries in our homes are due to pets. 
His were 100% pet-related. </p>