Heart rate monitoring 9

It has been a while, but in August I went to Vancouver with my parents, and hiked in various national parks on the way. Here is the graph from the second hike, which was through a forest, on level ground. The forest was beautiful, but there wasn't much variation in heart rate.

.

Heart rate monitoring 8

This month the "An analytical approach to club dancing" classes started, and I decided to measure them as well. As you can expect, the analytical approach (green) is a lot lower than the beginning hip hop (red):

.

Heart rate monitoring 7

Because of the heart rate monitoring, Anna Botelho asked me to check my heart rate during another class of hers called "Dancing around the world". It doesn't focus on the moves at all, and involves many different dance styles, most of which were quite confusing. Here is the graph comparing it with Shaira Bhan's class, of that same week:



The only clear difference is the start, which is partly due to me being on a treadmill (since Dancing around the World is at the gym) and partly because the Bollywood class (the red line) has a longer warming up (I think this is because people generally show up in the middle of the Dancing around the World class, which means warming up makes less sense). However, if you look at the details you can see that the activity level during the Dancing around the World class is higher (the green line is more often above the red line than the other way around). The software stated I burned 1323 kCal during the Dancing around the World class, but as I stated in my previous post, this should probably be 20% lower. It is still the highest of all activities so far.

For completeness, here is a comparison between "Beginning Hip Hop" and the "Dancing around the World" class:



It isn't difficult to guess that the Beginning Hip Hop is in red. I guess some would say that my heart rate peaking at 190 bpm is not a good thing, and an average of 171 bpm is not a good thing either. However, I feel fine. I'm in far more pain with certain flexibility requiring moves than I have with continuous jumping.

And finally, a more relaxing graph: me sleeping.



The graph looks busy, but the scale is actually quite narrow. I like the part where my heart rate drops down to 51 bpm. I'm also impressed how quickly it can go from 60 to over 100 (this usually happens when I stand up, so I guess I got out of bed at that time).

Heart rate monitoring 6

A day later, and now I can compare two Beginning Hip Hop classes from Anna Botelho with each other:



You can clearly see each time she explains things, and each time we're practicing that particular move. The green graph is the latest class, which was a little bit more intense than the previous one.

The software calculated 677 kCal burned, however, I was told these numbers are a bit high, so I checked how they are calculated. It seems that without knowing my VO2/max it is impossible to get a proper number, however, the software clearly things my VO2/max is higher than it actually is. So it is likely you have to reduce the numbers by 20%. I'll see if I can establish my VO2/max value at some point.

Heart rate monitoring 5

With another week came more dance classes. First there was another class with Shaira Bhan, which allows me to compare two weeks of classes in one graph:



Green is the most recent dance class. As you can see, this time we didn't get our rest period practicing jumping up in sequence. The knee jumping was present (and brought my heart rate up to 188 in the second part, where we had to move the hands in the opposite direction of usual) and the circle "boot camp" was more intense as well. The end result was a total of 1113 kCal burned, which is higher than last time.

The turret project

Just to let you know what I'm currently working on (apart from editing my book): getting the ISD4002 to play sound. I hooked it up to a PIC18F2450 (first time I'm using an 18F series microcontroller, but getting it to work was relatively easy). My first issue was that the ISD4002 uses 3V, but I used an LM 317 equivalent to create a separate 3V supply. 3V into the miceocontroller is no problem (2V is considered 'high'), but the output needed to be scaled down. There was a solution on the Internet using a resistor network with a 1.5k and 1k resistor, but I decided to just toggle the TRIS register and have a pull up resistor to 3V, making the output switch between 0V and 3V.

I thought I had everything coded correctly, but recently understood that the CLK can't have a frequency higher than 1,000 kHz (which some interpret as 1 kHz, but I think it means 1000 kHz). Since I'm clocking at 10 MHz, I might need to slow things down a bit, still. I'll try later with a shorter delay.

The biggest problem is that I can't test what fails: I have to first record something, and then play it back. So I never know whether the recording or the playing back goes wrong. I might have to look at the responses from the chip to see if that indicates something.

Heart rate monitoring 4

Yesterday I went to the "Beginning Hip Hop" class again, with Anna Botelho. This is a fun class, and although there is some exercise involved, it certainly isn't the same as Shaira Bhan's class. And this is quite visible in the heart rate graph:



Green is the Bollywood class, discussed previously, and red is the Beginning Hip Hop class, where we practiced turns. Focusing on proper execution of dance moves is clearly less intensive (although, in my opinion, far more difficult) than letting yourself go in Bollywood mayhem. The software that came with the watch agrees: I "only" used 677 kCal during this class.