When the Numbers Don't Seem Right

Vision Quest console

When the numbers don't seem right, they probably aren't. I dropped my son off at his extra morning gym class and then drove back home. I only had a little over an hour before having to drive back to school to board the tour bus chartered for the class trip to Locust Grove Historic site and museum. My husband and I bought an elliptical for our garage some three years ago. I confess that I've never actually used it until today. My husband used to run on a treadmill before the circuit board needed a repair that cosedt more than the actual machine itself.

I decide that I'm going to try and do my HIIT/LISS cardio workout on the Vision Quest elliptical. It has a smooth gliding motion but it's hard to get up to speed even on the manual setting of zero incline and level 1 resistance. It takes me a considerable amount of time before I can actually double my speed, even as I'm doing 15 seconds On / 45 seconds Off. I do the HIIT for 15 minutes and then do 15 minutes of LISS. At least the display is clear, and without any gym chatter or ambient noise, I can keep the iPod volume relatively low. What really seems amiss though is the built-in heart rate monitor, which is only part of the stationery handles, and not the moving handles (like on the LifeFitness Cross-trainers). No matter how fast I pedal, the monitor tells me that my heart rate is 80-85 bpm. That can't be right!

Then I remember I can take my pulse for 10 seconds and multiply by 6. I can't get a good reading on my wrist. It's much easier to find a pulse just under the jaw, in the big carotid artery. I count 17 beats in 10 seconds. That's 102, which makes more sense. I take a second read just to be sure. I get 18 beats. Well, that's completely different from the machine's reading, but no more wacky than the Precor telling me that my heart rate has suddenly zoomed to 190 while I'm doing a slow jog. Oh well. Tomorrow I'll be back at the gym. It's Leg Day!

Thursday Cardio Workout

Elliptical

15 min HIIT

15 min LISS 

Calorie :   303 CAL
Distance: 2.42 mile
Speed :    4.8 mph
Duration : 00:30:02