Should Young Runners Use Heart Rate Monitors?
Following up on my recent experiment with letting my wife borrow my Garmin 305 GPS watch and heart rate monitor, I rigged up my 14 year old son, who is planning on running on the freshman cross country team this fall, with the same equipment. Again, the findings were interesting.
My son is a beginning runner and tends to run fast for a mile, gets winded, rests for a few minutes, and then repeats the cycle. Before today, he had never run continuously for more than a mile. Running on hilly, dirt covered backroads in Northern Michigan, his heart rate climbed quickly to around 190 beats per minute, higher than my max HR of about 185, and stayed there for the entire run. He completed 2.26 miles without stopping, by far the longest he has run. Since his freshman cross country races are 1.5 miles, this should boost his confidence.
Again, using a heart rate monitor provided some key data that we can use to adjust his pace and measure his progress as his training progresses. Although a Garmin 305 costs about $145 and might be a bit too much to spend for a high school student, the older, chunkier Garmin 301 costs under $125, and inexpensive heart rate monitors like the Polar FS1 can be purchased for under $50.
This small investment will certainly pay dividends by helping to avoid overtraining and preventing young runners from getting frustrated by providing them with some clear, objective measures of their training progress.
Have you used heart rate monitors on high school runners? What have you found? Tell me in the comments.
Related Posts:
What Can We Learn From “The Long Green Line”?
Secrets to Coaching a Successful High School Cross Country Team
