[Oliver]

Hello, many times I see athletes complete a heart rate drift and say they felt perfectly fine throughout the test, but when we look at the data they have drifted sometimes up to 10%. It seems like their is a disconnect between their effort perception and whats actually going on cardiovascularly. If you train solely on RPE how do you manage setting workouts based upon this metric if you know there is a disconnect between effort perception and HR.

Thanks in advance!
Oli

Topic

[Jon44]

Jon44 on August 7, 2021 at 3:02 pm #56251

Can’t answer your question, but interesting tidbit I heard recently was there’s a theory that heart rate drift isn’t what people think and might just be your body’s way to thermoregulate itself. So, even if heart rate drifts up, stroke volume goes down, so your overall cardiac output is in fact staying the same…

[Oliver]

Oliver on August 7, 2021 at 3:08 pm #56253

Thanks for the message Jon. That is interesting! I will look into this, any links? Maybe you can answer this question, is Cardiac Drift the same as Heart Rate Drift or are they two different things?
I read that CD is caused by increased body temperature and reduced muscular efficiency and my understanding of HRD is that the increase is because you are no longer working aerobically.

[Emil]

Emil on August 8, 2021 at 4:11 am #56262

There may be a divergence in the other direction as well – low HR, high effort, in the later stages of an ultra race, or long training session. Same with running downhill, or running on harder surfaces. HR alone is not enough for the highly complex mountain sports in my opinion. Best bet – map HR to rpe, and eventually graduate from HR.