HRM and heart patients

daydream58

I'm on my last week of Cardiac Rehab work out program at my local hospital. Last year I gained enough weight after two surgeries to get into the program after I had a heart defibrillator implanted to restart my heart in case my genetic arrhythmia caused my heartbeat to become disorganized and suddenly stop. The second surgery was about six weeks after for uterine cancer which was taken care of by the surgery but the two surgeries back to back wiped me out for months.

I take a calcium channel blocker called Verapamil to help my heart beat stabilize and avoid a shock, so my workout heart rate even after 30 min on a treadmill or elliptical is around 95 bpm now, down from about 115 when I started at the beginning of Summer.

Can a person like me use a heart rate monitor? Can you customize the settings and it can still calculate what is what?

TDGee

You should still be able to elevate your heart rate with exercise, even with the meds and the AICD. Note your resting heart rate and go from there. Verapamil will keep your heart rate somewhat dampened, but you should still be able to get it up with exercising. Everything is relative to your resting heart rate. Good luck and don't hesitate to contact your cardiologist with your questions, the staff can easily pass them on and get back to you.

daydream58

My resting heart rate is about 52, can you tell from that what my target should be?

emmab0902

Hi I am on beta blockers and have a similar issue getting HR up - I am guessing your doctor could advise you. It may be proportionally decreased relative to however much the medication etc has lowered your resting heart rate. The only way I could get my HR up was doing interval training - steady state cardio never increased my HR over 100 which was very frustrating!

daydream58

Right on my first week of rehab, I was in the process of switching from metoprolol, a beta blocker. It had a very similar effect on my heartbeat as the verapamil, but it turned my extremities red and then blue and then purple and then black! So I had to switch to a calcium channel blocker. Quite a few docs thought I had Raynauds at that point but it was just the BB.

Actually the first six months of this year I was mostly in bed because if I put my feet down or used them, they turned scary shades of bad colors. I had NO idea the beta blocker was doing it, but with my heart condition (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) these kinds of strange things can happen I guess!

Hope your beta blocker use doesn't wear you out too much - it made me very sleepy!