I mentioned before that my heart rate was occasionally exceeding my maximum heart rate during my cardio workouts. Now that I have purchased a proper heart rate monitor and have calibrated my treadmill I am confident that never happened, and even if it did it won’t happen again because I am not running as fast as I was before.
When you only have your treadmill to judge by you really just trust what it says for speed. After being on my cardio program for awhile I had a pretty good feel for how fast my paces for both walking and running were, and how much my heart was beating during the running portions.
The first time I used another treadmill I was surprised at how slower I was moving. Then I used another treadmill at another hotel and on it too I was moving slower. Both of these foreign machines were high-quality treadmills. So I knew something was up with mine.
Fortunately the instructions for my treadmill, which is almost 10 years old now, were still sealed up inside the machine. So I was able to determine how to turn on the diagnostics mode and calibrate the speed. What I found was that the treadmill was running at .8 mph faster than what it was showing on the display. So my warm-up walks of 3.5 mph were really 4.3 mph and my running pace of 5.0 mph was really 5.8 mph.
Now that I have my treadmill calibrated correctly I have starting pushing up the pace, as well as the incline which I set up to 3 degrees. I am staying with 5.0 mph as my target running pace but now I think I’ll be able to get there faster. I had thought I was going to have to stay at Week 2 of the couch to 5k for a few more weeks but now I am thinking that next week I may graduate to week 3. My heart rate is staying in a range between 135 and 150 during the cardio which is much better.
If you use a treadmill it would be a good idea to calibrate it.
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