Lab 4-2 Your Resting Heart Rate: Fill & Download for Free

I am currently 51 yrs old. At age 47, I was overweight (considered Obese), under conditioned and drinking quite a bit - my weight had peaked at 208#. My husband, while not considered obese, was 20+ pounds overweight and drinking right along side me.My dad, 79yrs old at that time, was becoming less and less mobile due to years of being overweight and years of being diagnosed with different cancers to a point where he no longer would come visit my kids because he was unable to climb stairs and feared falling down and not being able to get up.This was a big wake up call for me. I realized that because I was an older parent, I would not have my kids launched til I was in my 60’s and therefore, I had to take advantage of my current youth to try and right the ship long before my kids were out of the house. It took 6–8 more months of contemplating how to start before I took the plunge, but in January 2015 I signed up for a gym program called Get in Shape for Women. My main goal to start was “go consistently” - I prepaid a 6 mo membership and began going 3 days a week. I also committed to stop drinking during the week and to eat more consciously. I ended up increasing my days working out to 4 and saw great gains in the gym. That first year, I lost 26 pounds and felt more fit than I had in years.In Jan 2016 I realized that I would easily plateau in my current exercise program and although it was highly convenient to get there (a short walk from home) I was the only person pushing hard at the gym. Most of the other patrons were older ladies who did the gym program to “stay mobile” but had no goal to lose weight or gain strength. It was evident that in order to keep getting good results and not plateau, I’d have to find a different program for fitness. I looked out into the environment at other High Intensity programs and since my husband was just changing gyms, I decided to do something totally outside my comfort zone - I sat down with his new gym owner/coach and talk about my current challenges (overtraining, plateau and fear of losing interest) and my goals, to continue to lose weight, change my body and get more fit. That conversation prompted me to join this gym and it was the best decision of my life. The gym: CrossFit TILT in Waltham, MA ( #crossfittilt )Truth be told, I had swore that I’d never “do CrossFit” — kind of told everyone I met this even though my husband had seen amazing results from his 1.5yrs doing CrossFit. But I understood the goals of CF and I knew that it was gonna solve my challenges and definitely help me hit my goals. So, I made a commitment to go 4 days a week for the first 30–60 days with no excuses even if the workout looked hard or unfathomable to me. Within the first 2 weeks, I was going 5 days a week and while still daunted by the programming, my metabolism was on fire, I dropped 5 pounds in 4 weeks and I felt so proud of my accomplishments that i was hooked. I was loving teh adrenalin the workouts provided and every day I was bolstered by the fact that I was doing things that less than 5% of the world did on a daily basis!! I felt like I was slaying dragons.Fast forward 20 months later and I have not only slain dragons, I’ve slain my goals and created new, more awesome ones. My body looks very different from April 2016 - while I’m only down about 20 more pounds total, I am down 4 sizes in that time. I have put on 10pounds of muscle and I feel stronger and fitter than I ever have. My resting heart rate is in the low 50’s (athlete rates), my body fat % is just inside the “normal” range - down from 46% back in 2015 and I have lost over 24″ off my body.I look forward to going to work out every day! I miss being at the gym on rest days and I love the people with whom I get to throw down with every day. You see, so many people (including me, pre-CrossFit) dis CrossFit as being too hard or being some sort of cult. What I’ve come to learn is that CrossFit athletes are so passionate about CrossFit because it changes their lives so drastically, in so many positive ways, they want to share the “fountain of youth” with others. I am not only in peak physical form, My bio markers are perfect, my nutrition is clean and I’ve learned how to eat in a way that allows me to maintain peak performance and weight. I get to hang out with people at the gym who are trying to better themselves every day - they are all positive mental achievers and that energy is uplifting and motivating. I’ve learned tons about the human body, how to keep my old bones moving well and how to right many faults that I had accumulated over the years. This week I hit the 50 pounds lost milestone (and that does not include the muscle i’ve put on in the last 1–1/2 yrs) and I’m just about to buy my first pair of size 4 jeans! My body does not ache, hurt or complain when I have to squat down or walk stairs or pick up grocery bags or lift furniture anymore. I can do anything I want and I have the stamina to play with my kids.But what’s most awesome is that I am setting a model for my children that can’t help but see and it’s changed how they eat and live. My daughter, 9, does CrossFit now as well. I know that I am in a fitness program for life and I love that we decided to start this journey 3 years ago.June 1, 2018 updateIn December 2017 I decided to sign up for a nutrition program (nutrition coaching) called Stronger U (www.strongeru.com). I wanted to take what I though my was the final 20# off my frame. Fast forward 6 months with expert coaching and a wonderful 11,000 person strong support network on FB, led by my Stronger U coach, I have dropped an additional 40# and now weigh 131 pounds, with a body fat 15% my resting heart rate is btw 42 and 48 depending on the day, my blood labs are all stellar and better year over year. I am achieving even more goals in the gym because of the weight loss that’s made the gymnastic movements much more easy.I didn’t realize I could actually ever be a size 0 / xs but I am and I feel great. It’s been life changing for me.

Thanks for the A2A Benjamin; you have a good name.The lifetime key to health Benjamin is to learn to listen to the wisdom of your own body.Let's address some physical reasons why you might feel an emotional down after doing your best, then we'll explore the psychological.You may actually be working out too hard! Our bodies respond best to gradual increases in demands, and we can actually hurt our heart muscle, for instance, if we don't respect its limitations. There are guidelines for how hard you should work out; Covert Bailey's Fit or Fat book, as well as the old classic by Ken Cooper, Aerobics, have good explanations on how to use your heart rate to guide every work out, even when you have a slight infection or cold.The standard guideline for conditioning your heart is to exercise at 75 to 85% of your maximum heart rate for at least 20 mins per day. There are two tests of how your heart is responding to this conditioning. One is your resting heart rate, taken while you are still in bed before you get up in the morning. You can keep a running tab on this. The other is to keep a record of the recovery rate of your heart; this is how fast does my heart rate return to normal? And normal will be about 5 to 10 beats higher than our resting heart rate in the morning.To get your "recovery" rate, write down what your heart rate is right when you stop exercising (learn from the above books how to take a 6-second count, it's easier than it sounds); then take it again at 1-minute post exercise, then 3-minutes. It should come back down to your normal rate, if not, you are risking injuring your heart, though the first couple of weeks of getting back with it, I notice it takes longer for my heart to come down.Now let's talk fuel, since you already talked about your motor.Barry Sears, a guy who had chased info reported by biochemists Sune K. Bergström, Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane and winning them a Nobel Prize in 1982, needed to find a way out of his own personal ticking time bomb for premature death due to cardiovascular disease that ran in his family, killing off both his father and uncle in their mid-50's.[Read more at Inside Dr. Barry Sears' Zone Diet - Page 2 of 4 - Triathlete.com] Already an accomplished biochemist himself, (having for instance a patent on a new way of delivering cancer drugs to the body with less pain), Sears wrote his classic, The Zone in 1995. He was shunned at first by most elite athletic circles because he went against the fads of carb-loading and other tragic suggestions made in competitive sports. Instead, he said, elite or not, eat like your Grandma taught you.His dietary recommendations have since resulted in NFL stars, world class body builders and cyclists, the Stanford Swimming Team, and a bunch of us regular folks find the "zone" of proper energy metabolism in the body resulting in improved waistlines for us normal folks, and world records for guys like you!I highly recommend you get his first book and study it; then you may want to add Mastering the Zone by him, a Recipes in the Zone. Sears website, Zone Labs Inc. | Leading Anti-Inflammatory Nutrition Diet And Foods has a place to ask questions on line as well, about how you are eating and how your patterns will support the demands you are asking on your body or not.Next, your work out. If you are working out in a gym, there will be a bunch of people who know a lot of things right next to you. Most of them love helping others. Trainers there should be able to ask if your workout would leave your body too drained, or if your training is so anaerobic that you need to add some aerobic meeting to the mix. Be careful about creatine and other body-building supplements especially if you are under 23 yoa.Last, the psychological.Whenever we face and accept responsibility for improving an area of our lives that needs a tune-up, one of the first things we encounter is an increased awareness of the cost of NOT getting better in that area. Therefore, even though you have taken the steps necessary to improve your strength and vitality, you are at the beginning, and you are more aware than ever of the need to improve; hence the self-critical voice.You want to talk yourself through that feeling into a resolve to persevere... to know that the daily investment of time is THE most important thing you are doing right now...getting that commitment to doing it no matter what you feel, no matter what is going on in your life, no matter what, because it's what we do day in and day out that counts.The other helpful tool is to write down a weekly plan for all your exercise, then record what you do.Incorporating a work-out buddy helps cement your commitment to fitness and may also help you get off your own back as you focus on having fun as well as working out!I hope this helps; if it hasn't, or you have a follow up question, message me... or just post another q on q'a. Good luck!

Why ask? It is not difficult to get tested, certainly within a mile or so. If you can run a 6-minute mile, you are not sick. If you had a virus infection, without noticeable respiratory symptoms, your immune system would have cleared the virus within a week to ten days.Have you had an annual physical, yet, this year. Do it, and have your blood tested for all the normal things What is your resting blood pressures and pulse rate. Check the fundamentals; the lab results will tell you everything.