Pacemakers in the Gym

• by longbreak
• 2013-08-06 08:08:58
• Exercise & Sports
• 1555 views
• 1 comments

Greetings pacemakers!! Just thought I would share some of my experience to do with gym exercise with a pacemaker. I had a Medtronic dual chamber pm fitted in 2007 for brady/tachy syndrome and it settled down very well. Last year a couple of changes, Medtronic provided a remote monitor so I could send a report on the pm every three months. Also I was enrolled with exercise physiologists in a gym program two days a week. After twelve months I was told by Veteran Affairs that I should now know what to do and that I was on my own so I simply joined the gym and am now what is commonly known as a gym rat, totally addicted to getting my fix every day. I do an hour every day with a warm up for 15 minutes on the treadmill then do some pull downs and push weights followed by ten minute row and ending with a cool down on the bikes. I also use a Polar bluetooth heart rate monitor which keeps a record on my android tablet while I exercise. This is completely safe as it is nowhere near the pm. An area of difficulty is that even though there are lots of apps available there are none which recognize pacemakers. They expect users to provide an ehr of something like 130 or 140 bpm. I just ignore this and do my own thing.
Well I have had this bad obsession to get to 2km on the rowing but always failed before until I found I could cheat by pausing at 5 and 7.5 minutes letting my pulse drop back to 110. That's why I maxed at 128 bpm on the last five minutes of a row. This is maximum effort for me and I'm completely buggered at this level. A normal healthy person might max at around 135 or 140 bpm. This is a limitation of the pm. Well yesterday I was called in by the Medtronic tecnician as they wanted to adjust my ADL from 105 down to 95ppm (ADL means Activities of Daily Living Rate) which seemed reasonable. The tecnician did his work and I was on my way but today it seemed that all the rates were turned down, not just the ADL because what I call 'buggered up' was now at about 115 bpm instead of 125 bpm. So with a pacemaker we just have to change the numbers all the time as required and live with it. The numbers are only a guide so it is better to know what 'buggered up' feels like and take a pause. The thing is not to obsess about getting high numbers, it is meaningless. With a pacemaker it's a different game. Hope that helps.