Hi . Undecided if I need to be on this forum or the afib forum. They both involve the heart so I will post on this forum; if I am wrong please tell me.
I have copd but only mild so they say and does not seem to affect my breathing in any activity unless I go jogging. I started snail jogging at around 70 years old to keep my lungs & heart healthy as possible. I turned 73 this month and in August was diagnosed with AF. They say I am in now persistent AF and therefore on 125Mg dioxin once a day and 5mg of apixaban twice a day.
Personally I am not sure as once my heart rate graph looked like a seismograph recording a magnitude 10 earthquake. Now it looks like someone who is exercising. Anyway that is not the point of post. Once diagnosed with AF I decided to stop snail jogging for 2 miles and go over to brisk walking to keep heart rate lower.
I am supposed so I read try to keep max heart rate around 103 bpm, my max for my age being 148. Anyway even when I was walking as fast as my little legs would go I never at no time felt out of breath or tired. What I did find was my heart rate went up around 1.5 miles which I put down to my body feeling tired although as I pointed out I did not feel physically tired. Also by this point my right hip was getting painful even just to walk so I also put this down to my heart rate climbing.
The cold weather set in and I was getting cold just walking and after many many months I have admitted defeat that I will never jog for more than 3 mins without stopping as I was out of breath.
New strategy, 30/45, 30 seconds snail jog followed by 45 seconds of briskish walk for 2-2:1/4 miles. This I have been doing now for around 4 weeks and for me it works for at least 2 reasons. 1. The jog part warms me up even when it is pouring with rain and 2. The 30 second snail jog gets me breathing just a bit heavy but not out of breath so exercising my lungs.
I have mostly always been one to follow “listen to your body” person when exercising. I think I better mention that apart from mild copd, af, I am supposed to have exercise related asthma so get a bit wheezy sometimes and recently sliding inguinal hernia so basically I am falling to bits but will never stop me fighting it even though it may be a lost cause.
Now this is the problem and not sure how to deal with it. I suppose as I now jog/walk for 2 miles my heart rate is going to increase as I am putting more effort in. Now it goes up to 120 bpm for most of the time but as I near about 1.5 miles again sometimes it will go up to 130-150 bpm which to be honest is high. When this happens I no longer snail jog but walk and sometimes sit down in a bus stop to let heart slow down, which it does very quickly, about 20 beats a minute. Once I start again it gradually goes up.
The thing is I do not feel out of breath, sweating, tired or anything in fact if I did not have a polar watch on I would think my heart rate was high and I could just go on. I would have thought at such a high BPM I would feel some discomfort but I do not so do I just stop or carry on? When I get home it feels like I have not even been out for a jog and have plenty of energy left.
Even though I feel no discomfort I do not want to ignore a high heart rate if it is doing harm.