It wasn't really an injury but just some sort of overuse weirdness that started to happen in my right knee as I was pushing it perhaps a bit too much during my runs. It was this strange almost pinching feeling in my right knee and it would hit me when I was running almost like it was going to make me fall down. I don't know what it is but for me, this is a sign that I need to step things back because I am no spring chicken, as they say.
So recently someone out there suggested that I use the information on my Garmin to my advantage and pointed to a study about people recovering from an rogue or perhaps not even real injury and the suggestion was to always keep your heartrate in the moderate to aerobic, while never entering the maximum range.
src
Now if you know me, you know that I am basically a walking advertisement for Garmin these days and while I knew that features such as this existed I haven't actually dived into them very much until this strange pinch started happening with my knee.
So the idea is that these numbers of heart rate are going to be different for every person but for the most part you can deduct your age from 220 and that is your maximum heart rate. This doesn't mean that your heart isn't capable of beating faster than that, it just means that this is the area where bad thing can happen to you if you do go there. I am not one to test fate so I rarely end up there anyway but for me, simply following this threshold has made exercise more enjoyable because I feel bad about myself if I don't get at least some exercise each day.
If you have a Garmin or any other sport watch, it will likely determine these levels for you. For me my max is 165 and I know that this is the case because if I am ever starting to feel rather uncomfortable while exercising and look down at my heart rate, it is normally near or over 160. So my friend suggested that I keep myself out of this range and actually focus on the lower portions of it instead.
I don't like ever being categorized as "easy" so my goal was to keep my heart rate between 129 and 165 for an hour... or less time if I can't muster an hour. I can always muster an hour, it just kind of depends on how hard I am going to work.
I think on the 2nd entry I was a bit more motivated because I spent less time in the "easy" section. Purely by chance though, the amount of time that I am spending in threshold and aerobic is pretty standard over the course of an hour of cardio. This is a great feature of the Garmin because I believe it is fairly accurate as far as BPM is concerned.
The total amount of calories burned is around 650 and that is just fine in my world. The thing about that particular stat is that this is actually more calories than I burn if I do a 5k as fast as I can possibly do it and this is what resulted in this strange knee thing that I have going on. For me, I like to burn at least 600 calories due to exercise each day and this new method I have of basically keeping my heartrate between 130 and 160, is working out nicely. I just periodically look at my watch and I have a new "finish" line every couple of minutes. Since I am not training for a race but merely for health and self-preservation, this works out great for me since I never really mind doing it. It's easy once you get used to it.
This isn't to say that people out there should follow exactly this program, you need to input data about your weight and age first. Then you also need to have some method of accurately determining your BPM while you are exercising. My watch was expensive but I have run into people that have cheap alternatives and all of us feel as though having these things has improved our overall lives.
This system wont work for everyone but if by some chance you are the type of person that is avoiding exercise because of some sort of rogue pain that you cannot explain, this might be a good way to at least try to mitigate it other than just parking your butt on the sofa and feeling sorry for yourself.