After 30+years of coaching, Indiana head coach Ray Looze has finally found a heart rate monitor that he loves for his athletes. They slip under the swimmers’ caps during practice, then he tracks their heart rates via the Polar app on an iPad, which gives real-time updates throughout the workout.
Looze can see any athlete’s heart rate at any given point during the session this way, meaning he knows if they are higher or lower than the target HR zone. Looze is finding that although some athletes don’t always get their heart rate high enough on any given set, it’s more common for them to get above the intended HR (perhaps overworking themselves), which allows Looze to advise the athlete to reel their effort in.
See full Ray Looze Breaststroke workout below:
Very cool stuff with a great application by a knowledgeable person!!
The camera work was the opposite
Good stuff Ray! No point in using the training zones if they’re not getting an accurate HR an in the proper zone
Its a more exact way of implementing Jon Urbancek’s color training system. The colors were based off HR’s which can generally be used to assess relative intensity of an individual. And can be applied to a large training group because they are relatively the same age and thus have very similar peak heart rates.
That’s not exactly correct. You can’t see real time heart rates with Polar HRMs because they are Bluetooth, which doesn’t work in the water when device is bellow the surface. But Polar OH1 is pretty good though, as you can see the HR just couple seconds after swimmer finishes the distance and lifts their head from the water. Thus I like to use it with shorter stuff like 50s or 100s with 10-15 seconds rest in between. Numbers are pretty accurate BTW and the HRM itself is much more comfortable than those with chest straps.
Hi Eugene. Read your comment with great interest. How is the information captured by the coach during the 15 seconds rest? Thanks.
The picture made me cackle.
Ray Looze gives off cool uncle vibes
Fantastic coach, but top tier dork