Tag: health

Reaching 90th Percentile Resting Heart Rate [Fitness with Fitbit]

I have been using the Fitbit Surge for the past couple of months after receiving one as a gift from my sister. Overall, the product works reasonably well, but its step counter isn’t so good if you play basketball or do crunches – dribbling with your left hand and doing crunches will increase the step counter, resulting in wildly inaccurate distance and possibly calorie measures.

Regardless, I like the heart rate function, and I assume this is something that can be counted on even if the pedometer is wrong – despite recent lawsuits on Fitbit’s heart rate tracking accuracy, I trust this Consumer Reports article, Taking the Pulse of Fitbit’s Contested Heart Rate Monitors, from January. After the first few weeks, my heart rate went down from 68 to 56, where it has remained so for almost a month.

However, I wanted to know what this actually meant, and how this compared to other people.

Real information on resting heart rate is difficult to find. There are many articles, but few that have actual sourcing (this is true of most food / nutrition articles as well) on why we can trust the information. Thus, I began to look into percentiles, and I found the following data (it would be nice if Fitbit allowed its community to share this information in aggregate for public comparison) from the Canadian government:

Average resting heart rate, by age and sex, household population, Canada, 2009 to 2011

Resting Heart Rate Percentiles
Resting Heart Rate Percentiles – Statistics Canada

From this chart, I am at the 90th percentile (top 10% of all males my age group) in resting heart rate. I am not sure what this all means, but I am guessing that because my heart has to pump less on average, I have a combination of a stronger heart, more efficient lungs, and less excess fat that blood has to pump around.

Currently, I do not work out as much as I would like (my knees really swell up after basketball), but I do the following workouts per week, along with my lower carb diet. Ideally, I would like to add bicycling and swimming (once a week) for lower stress workouts later on.

  1. 2 basketball practice workouts (30 minutes dribbling, 1 hr shooting)
  2. 1 basketball playing session (2.5 hrs on average)
  3. 3 sessions, roughly 500 crunches (60 straight, 110 bicycle alternating x 3)

Another Look at Cholesterol Tests [Health Fallacies]

Having read and written about The Great Cholesterol Myth, it had actually been a while since I had taken a test and could understand my results.

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When I got this last week, I was of course worried. (H Flags denote issues) I had been on a (lower) carb diet since 2013, and in the process had dropped over 20 pounds. For the most part I do not eat rice, bread, potatoes, or drink soda or beer, though if I am being social or go out to eat, I consume more of all those. During the last year at Kellogg, I have not been the best at working out (during the Fall, I occasionally played basketball and swam, during the winter, I did nothing and broke my finger during basketball, during the Spring, I swam), but I wondered if I was just super stressed out (I feel reasonably fine) or if I was doomed for heart problems down the road. After a restless night, I remembered that the book argued that traditional cholesterol benchmarks were based on faulty research(read the book to see the extensive history of traditional cholesterol tests and disproving research), and I needed to check my findings with the book’s.

If, for example, your triglycerides are 150 mg/dL and your HDL is 50 mg/dL, you have a ratio of 3 (150:50). If your triglycerides are 100 mg/dL and your HDL is 50 mg/dL, you have a ratio of 2 (100:50). This ratio is a far better predictor of heart disease than cholesterol ever was. In one study out of Harvard published in Circulation, a journal published by the American Heart Association, those who had the highest triglyceride-to-HDL ratios had a whopping sixteen times the risk of developing heart disease as those with the lowest ratios.1 If you have a ratio of around 2, you should be happy, indeed, regardless of your cholesterol levels. (A ratio of 5, however, is problematic.)

My Triglycerides : HDL ratio is .84, well below the happy ratio of 2, where the lower ratio is best. WIN!

A cholesterol level of LDL 160 mg/dL or less has been linked to depression, aggression, cerebral hemorrhages, and loss of sex drive.

My LDL is 172. WIN! (The book explains that cholesterol drugs lower LDL, are actually inflammatory drugs, and that memory loss is a side effect of these drugs)

Triglyceride levels higher than 120 mg/dL and HDL levels below normal (less than 40 mg/dL in men and less than 50 mg/dL in women) are usually associated with the small, dense, atherogenic LDL particles you don’t want!

I am both well beyond these levels (Triglycerides is 63 < 120, HDL is 75 > 40). WIN!

Thus, now I can feel a lot better about things. The only thing I wish I had gotten was a LDL particle size test, which was not included in my physical results. If you need help interpreting your results or in better understanding cholesterol’s impact on health, definitely check out The Great Cholesterol Myth or my blog post about 10 Things to Learn from the book!