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Research > Theory to practice - Post-exercise heart rates: are they accurate?
Theory to practice - Post-exercise heart rates: are they accurate?
Issue: Volume 29 Number 1
Background
In most high performance endurance or team sports, commercial heart-rate monitors are widely used to monitor how hard someone is training, recovering or adapting to training. While heart-rate monitors can be expensive or inaccessible to many coaches, manual palpation of heart rate at the neck or wrist is commonly used to measure heart rates immediately after or during a training set or session. It takes time and experience to quickly find the pulse at the neck or wrist. Moreover, as an athlete becomes more endurance fit, the rate of heart rate recovery becomes faster. Thus, post-exercise palpation of the pulse rate may actually underestimate the actual exercising heart rate.
Research
A group of US sports scientists from the University of Texas studied 20 male and female adults aged 24±1 years who were regular exercisers. The runners did two sets of treadmill exercise for five minutes. One set was at 70% of maximum heart rate and then at 85%, and they measured post-exercise heart-rate at the neck. The second set was the same but post-exercise heart-rate was measured at the wrist. The runners had a 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) attached during each session to measure actual exercise heart rates. Immediately after exercising at each intensity, the treadmill was stopped and subjects had a maximum of 15 seconds to find for the carotid (neck) or radial (wrist) pulse and 15 seconds to count their pulse.
Findings
Post-exercise palpation of pulse rate was significantly lower than the actual heart rate during exercise, underestimating exercise heart rate by 20 to 27 beats per minute. Even when ECG tracings of heart rate were analysed immediately after exercise (0 to 15 seconds), a significant underestimation of exercise heart rate (7 to 9 beats per minute) was found. Following exercise, pulse rate obtained by palpation at the neck for both intensities and radial wrist palpation at the lower intensity was no different from the corresponding heart rate measured with ECG. In the radial wrist pulse trial at the higher exercise intensity, pulse rate following exercise was significantly lower by 10 beats per minute than ECG-derived heart rate.
Coaches Takeout
The researchers concluded that post-exercise pulses taken manually may not be appropriate as an indicator of exercise intensity in active adults. Thus coaches need to be aware of these discrepancies if the athletes they work with are taking heart rates at the neck or wrist. Coaches can either adjust the heart rates using the figures given above or preferably use heart rate monitors that are commercially available that give a heart rate that is more accurate given the quicker response time in getting a heart rate.
Reference
DeVan, AE, Lacy, BK, Cortez-Cooper, MY and Tanaka, A 2005. 'Post-exercise palpation of pulse rates: its applicability to habitual exercisers', Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, 15(3):177-81.
