Heart Rate Monitors for HS Cross Country Team?

I'm #1 on my high school team and i tried one out last year and its too much hassell to use on a run.

I prefer to run by feel[quote]Help a High School Coach wrote:

I didn't have much success using HRM's with a HS team and no longer use them very much. I just found that there was too much individual variation of heart rate among runners and often created more questions than they answered. I have a few that I use occasionally when I have an athlete returning from illness.

An HRM can yield useful data for an individual who understands how their heart rate responds to stress at certain speeds, but I don't know how to teach that to a large group. Some of our better runners have had relatively high heart rates, and it wasn't time well spent wondering why their HR's were so high compared to their slower teammates.

In addition, I understand that interference can result when several people run together who all wear HRMs, so the heart rate you monitor might not be your own.

get them if you can. any tool that could possibly make you a better coach or your team better is worth trying. do a fund-raiser. krispy kreme, if they sell those donuts in your area, is so easy and you could make the money to buy plenty of HRM with 100 kids on your team (possibky 100 of them). not that you should promote the eating of donuts as a XC coach, but there are fat people out there and they are going to eat junk food, why not make some money off of them. plus, i know plenty of people that eat them and are not fat because they actually exercise. go to their website and check it out. if they sell in your area you could do the sale and have the money in your hands in 3 weeks. then order your HRM and get after it. good luck.

That would be a lot of data to crunch. Before long you would stop using them. Do not waste the money. You need to know exactly what you are looking for/at in order to use any tool.

I'm not a H.S. coach but I have helped a few high school

runners in the summer because their xc coach is a total idiot. The coach thinks 5 miles is a long run and if you can run 3 miles by the time school starts your in good shape.

What I learned is teenagers heart rates are a lot higher than us older folks. All these formulas for calculating heart rate is useless when working with teenagers.

I use a lactate meter and do some lactate testing (with their parents permission, of course).

Bottom line is if you are going to spend money on heart rate monitors get a lactate meter at the same time or you will be wasting too much time trying to figure out the correct heart rate for each kid using all those formulas like 220 minus your age, etc. The drawback to the lactate meter approach is the cost of the test strips and the time it takes to test each kid.

If I was in your shoes, I would get 5-10 heart rate monitors and lactate test the top 10 kids only.

I have not heard of lactate meters. Any high school coaches using them?

I use HRMs with my teams. During the first week of practice, I have them do an all out 2M on the track to determine their vVO2max. They wear HRMs during this test to give us a value for their HR at VO2max. Do a little math and you can determine an individual's correct HR for subsequent training runs.

I agree totally with Usher and yet also with moleman

I agree with Usher and yet also with moleman. I tried using the monitors with my HS team. Too much variation in max HR and recovery. When you are motivating kids with seemingly equal ability to run as a team do you really want to tell one of them to go 20 seconds a mile slower because he is not fully recovered from saturday's race? If you have a lot of free time it would be an interesting learning experience for you but if you are under time constraint (you said you had a big team) then the monitors will drive you crazy.

I would recommend against it. One of my kids got one. First off all the other guys laughed at him. Second they used to always try to make him run fast so they could hear the heart rater monitor beep quickly.

Check the following websites for more info. I use the Lactate Pro. I also agree with "moleman" about finding HRmax then do the math but the problem I ran into is, how do I know for sure if the kid went all out and gave an honest effort? The kid could have had an off day. If you don't get an honest to goodness HRmax it doesn't work.

I gotta warn you again, it's expensive but it works. I already had the lactate meter so I just got more test strips and charged the kids for whatever test strips they used on the test. Comes out to around $15/kid. Make sure you get the parents permission. I took a lot of time to explain to the parents what the heck all this lactate testing is about.

http://www.fact-canada.com/main.html

http://www.lactate.com/

Not saying there's any type of relationship what so ever, but my max heart rate is 187. My friend has a max of 19X (I forget exactly buts its about 10 beats higher than mine). He's resting heart rate is usually about 52 bpm. mine is about 60bpm. He's a very fit triathlete, a lot of people, like him say I've got natural talent which I have been building upon. But I've worked my but of for 7 years to get where I am. But... when we started running we noticed that whatever pace we were running he was about 5% of his max HR higher than me at the same pace. If was running 65% percent of my max heart rate he was running at 70% or more higher. Even though my max heart rate was lower and my resting heart rate was higher, once we started running I required less effort to maintain the same pace. My resting rate was down in the high 50's but ever since I started working its been about 60-65 bpm. I work about 40 or more hours a week and I run 60 or more miles a week.

Anyway, It may be easier if you split the team into training groups who run about the same pace at the same percentage of max HR. Like say you have 5 kids who can maintain 7:30-8 min/mile bewteen 60 and 70% of their max hr, put them in a group. Say like there are other kids who run 8:00-8:30 min/mile between 60 and 70% of max HR, then they make another group and so on.