I got in a nice run: 4.67 miles in 1h 5min 51s, for an average pace of 14:05. My Fitbit would have me believe that I spent 59 of those minutes with my heart rate in zone 5, which I’m sure is double-false. That is, I don’t think my HR reached the 200 bpm that the Fitbit recorded, nor do I think my maximum HR is nearly as low as 154, which is what the Fitbit estimates.
Still it was a great run. My fastest and longest in a long time, and I felt great the whole time.
I walk a lot. Because I have a dog, and want to be sure my dog gets the exercise it needs, I take a truly inordinate number of steps per day. (Wait just a moment while I check my Fitbit…) Last week I averaged 14,036 steps per day. The previous week I averaged 17,197 steps per day. Those weeks are quite typical for me; I don’t average much under 15,000 unless I’m sick or the weather’s really bad.
So, when I saw the news recently that walking “3,000 to 5,000 steps per day can help to stave off mental decline,” I’m like, “Okay? Great.” Taking 5,000 to 7,500 steps per day seems to stave off Alzheimer’s disease by around seven years.
I mean, that’s great. Staving off Alzheimer’s disease by 7 years would probably cut the incidence of the disease by close to half (because people would die of something else first).
But really? I mean, yes, my inordinate walking takes a lot of time that most people don’t have. Back when I was working a regular job I’d try to get “enough exercise,” and that generally topped out at an average of a little over 100 minutes per day—and that much only in the summer, and that high only because I’d average in a 3 or 4 hour bike ride over the weekend. Now I probably spend close to 150 minutes per day just walking the dog. I recognize that almost nobody’s got time for that.
And, yes, walking in particular depends on capabilities that not everyone has. Lots of people old enough to worry about Alzheimer’s have bad knees or bad hips or bad feet or bad hearts or bad lungs. Maybe their endurance is very low. Maybe their balance is poor enough that walking is a risk.
But it doesn’t need to be walking. Walking is just easy to measure with a wearable device. Any sort of exercise will do the trick. Lift weights. (They don’t have to be heavy weights, as long as they’re heavy for you.) Ride a bike. Ride a stationary bike. Row. Use a rowing machine. Play almost any sport. Dance the night away.
Related to this, only in terms of how low the bar is set to do an enormous amount of good, a different study looked at whether walks needed to be long in order to provide the benefits, or whether cobbling together a number of shorter walks to add up to the same number of steps was just as good. It turns out longer walks are better. (Risk of being diagnosed with cardiovascular disease within 9.5 years dropped from 13% to around 4–8%.) But the dividing line in the study was that walks of at least 10–15 minutes counted as “long” walks, versus short walks of less then 5 minutes.
If you can walk 5 minutes, I’ll wager you can work up to walking 15 minutes in a very short period of time. And the evidence is now pretty clear that it’s worth doing.
Get some exercise. The bar is pretty low for making a big difference.
I haven’t been running enough, so I went for a run today. The metrics are kinda funny, by which I mean my Fitbit thought it was an insanely hard run. I thought it was interesting enough to post about.
Fitbit calculates heart rate zones based on your “heart rate reserve,” which is your maximum heart rate minus your resting heart rate.
Your resting heart rate (roughly what you’d get if you checked your heart rate right after you woke up, before you started moving around) the device actually measures. My resting heart rate, according to the Fitbit, was 56 bpm. (It actually hit 44 bpm at some point while I was asleep, but your lowest resting heart rate is a different number.)
Your maximum heart rate, though, isn’t measured. Instead, it’s estimated as 220 minus your age. I’m 66, so that comes to 154. So my heart rate reserve is 154 minus 56 equals 98. Then my various zones are calculate as a fraction of the reserve plus the resting rate. Zone 5 (peak activity) begins at 85%, so my zone 5 begins at (0.85 ✖️ 98) + 56, which comes to 83 + 56 = 139. All the parts of my run shown in red in the map above were run at a heart rate at or above 139.
In fact though, my maximum heart rate is way higher than that estimate. I have in the past been somewhat dubious of the maximum readings shown by my Fitbit during a run, because all the wrist-worn devices sometimes sync up at your foot-strike rate, so you get anomalous readings around 180 (a common foot-strike rate). But I also check my heart rate doing other exercises, such as kettlebell swings, where foot-strike rate doesn’t matter. Plus, I get heart rate readings from my Oura ring, which is not wrist-worn, and which doesn’t seem to have the same syncing-with-foot-strike problem. So I know my max heart rate is much higher.
On this run, for example, the maximum heart rate as measured by my fitbit was 169. My Oura ring thinks the peak was 166 (but it averages over 5-minute periods, which smooths out the peaks quite a bit).
Anyway, if you take 166 as my actual maximum heart rate, then my heart rate reserve is 110, 85% of it comes to 94, so my zone 5 range ought to begin at a heart rate of 150, rather than 139.
I find that a lot more plausible. If the Fitbit is right, then I just spent 36 minutes in zone 5, which seems very unlikely. It was kind of a hard run, because I haven’t been running enough, but I not only could have talked while I was running, I actually did sing, which is one of the markers for being in zone 1. (I was listening to and singing along with some Kpop songs.)
So, I think much of that run, even some of the bits shown in red above, were in zone 2 or 3, not zone 5.
Whatever the heart rate metrics, it was a rather slow, rather short run: 3.15 miles in 58min 10s.
Much better than not running.
Updated next morning: I slept great after my run, and woke up feeling great. Legs not sore at all. Overnight heart rate right back down to my current baseline.
This is rather typical. My activity score is down for two reasons: Too much inactivity today, and too little recovery after yesterday’s workout. :-/
The NYT article linked below talks to several people with anxiety or OCD, and somewhat reasonably comes to the conclusion that the Oura ring and similar devices are not for them.
I have a different perspective.
I wear an Oura ring and check it daily, and I’ve had none of these problems. I take what it tells me seriously, but I never let it override my own opinion on how I’m doing.
One fairly new feature is a warning when your metrics (temperature and resting heart rate in particular) suggest that you might be coming down with something. Even though I’m somewhat prone to hypochondria myself, it hasn’t been a problem for me.
Wednesday this week it warned me that I might be coming down with something. I felt fine, so I was inclined to ignore it. By evening I’d realized that I was coming down with a cold. (I felt pretty crappy all day Thursday. Today I feel nearly all better.) Although I was inclined to ignore it, I did take it seriously enough to skip my workout that day, which was probably a good idea.
I did react rather strongly the first time I got that warning, but only because I was visiting my 92-year-old mother, and didn’t want to risk passing something on to her. So I took the warning seriously enough to get and take a Covid-test and to wear a mask around my mom. Maybe that was an over-reaction—I wasn’t sick—but I am sure happier over-reacting than I would have been under-reacting and passing Covid on to my mom.
My brother teases me constantly for wearing such a thing, but I fall very much in the category of people who think, “Why not have as much information as possible?”
“They were like, ‘This is just not necessary information for a healthy, able-bodied person to have.’”
Source: Do You Have ‘Oura Paranoia’ From Having Too Much Information About Your Body? – The New York Times
Several times in my adult life I have suffered a bout of very poor sleep, usually due to life stress. One of those times, six years ago, coincided with the Oura ring becoming available. So I bought one.
Buying a ring, of course, doesn’t help you sleep better. The Oura ring just offers metrics on your sleep. It’s up to you to make sensible use of that data.
Besides buying the ring, I went down the rabbit hole of reading about sleep. In particular, I read the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Based on that book, and a lot of reading of internet articles on sleep, I started trying to get 8 hours of sleep a night, as measured by my Oura ring.
Of course that’s not what the “8 hours of sleep” number ever was. The number was always a “time in bed” number, assuming that you spent an average fraction of that time actually asleep. (Some people might actually need 8 hours of actual sleep per night, but that’s not what the number referred to.)
I conducted various experiments (which is what the Oura ring makes possible), but about the only way I could get 8 hours of actual sleep (besides being really, really tired) was to spend 10 or more hours in bed. Rather pleasant on the right sort of day when you’re in the right sort of mood, but not really a practical lifestyle, even for someone like me who doesn’t need to go work a regular job any more.
I did the sensible thing, which was to mostly not worry about it, and just try to get plenty of sleep. And I did okay. My average sleep score from my Oura ring over the 6+ years I’ve had it has been 84. (That’s one tick below the cut-off for “excellent” sleep.)
Just lately though, I’ve made another tweak to my “sensible sleep” strategy (which will no doubt seem extremely obvious to anyone who has never had an extended period of very bad sleep): I quit trying to extend my time in bed in an effort to try and get 7 or 8 hours of actual sleep.
Like all sensible people, I’m back to just going to bed when I feel sleepy, and getting up when I wake up feeling refreshed.
My Oura ring likes the results:
In part this was due to hearing an interview with the author of How to Sleep Like a Caveman by Merijn van de Laar. He reports that Hadza people spend a very typical amount of time in bed, but only spend a little over six and a half hours of that time asleep.
Of course the smart thing to do is to go entirely by feel: If you wake up feeling refreshed, you’re probably getting enough sleep. If you get sleepy during the day, maybe take a nap.
The Oura ring is for when that simple, sensible strategy doesn’t do the trick.
I do get a fantastic number of steps, almost entirely just walking Ashley.
All consumer-grade heart rate monitors have issues. Chest straps are pretty good. The optical captures from wrist (Google Pixel watch, etc.) or finger (Oura ring) are quite a bit less accurate.
I’ve generally just tolerated it—taking the reported data with a grain of salt—but sometimes it would be nice to get good data. Today I did a little experiment with my Google Pixel watch—tightening the strap at the midpoint of my run—and found that it seems to give me pretty good data this way.
What you see is my warm-up, followed by 1 mile out and then 1 mile back. The HR shown for the “out” phase (averaging maybe 180 bpm) is ridiculous—what it’s capturing is not my HR, but rather my step rate.
In the second half my HR goes from about 160 to slightly above 170 (gradually rising as I get tired), and that’s probably just about right.
(The standard formula for estimating your maximum heart rate is 220 minus your age, which would give a max HR of 156 for someone of my age. But that’s clearly wrong for me. I pretty regularly see peak HRs of just over 170 that seem entirely legit. I assume that my genes and my training history just give me a higher max HR than typical. Sadly, it doesn’t make me faster, as you can see from my average pace for this run. I was running literally as fast as I thought I could maintain for 2 miles.)
Anyway, I think I can recommend tightening up the Pixel watch band as tight as tolerable, for getting the most accurate data.
You couldn’t see it, even if it weren’t behind the Oura ring “activity” sticker, but there’s a Great Blue Heron near the middle of this photo.
Anyway, “Go me!” for getting an activity score of 100 from my Oura ring.
My lowest resting heart rate has crept up these past few months. My Oura ring keeps saying that I need to take it easy, but I think I need to do a few more long runs. So I’m going to test that theory.
