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Hi, I'm Les Whitley, I'd like to talk to you about, measuring your pulse using your hand,
while training or running. There are a lot of different ways to measure your pulse, through
heart rate monitors or chest straps that you wear, or monitors you wear around your wrist.
If you don't have access to any of those training tools, simply using your hands to measure
your pulse is an effective way to gage your training. Using your two middle fingers on
the radial side of your hand, it's where the thumb is located, slightly through the indentation,
press those two fingers lightly, to begin to feel your pulse. While running, you can
actually palpate and feel your pulse a lot easier, because it's beating at a lot faster
rate, but it's also beating more intensely, so you're more likely to feel that. The other
way, is feeling at the cardial artery in the neck, it's slightly below on either side of
the windpipe, pressing gently. Now, issues with this are pressing too hard, that may
cause constricting or restriction of blood flow to the brain, especially while exercising,
could compromise that blood flow to the point where you become light headed or even pass
out. So the radial pulse becomes a more popular way to check. Ways to check the pulse, you
can actually do it for 1 minute, which gives you your beats per minute, or you can do it
for 10 seconds, multiply that by 6, which gives you the 60 second count, or you can
do it for 6 seconds, multiply it by 10, which again, gets you that 60 second, or the beats
per minute. During a fast race, the less time that you have to spend taking your pulse,
so utilizing the 6 second version, will actually minimize the time that it takes for you to
get an accurate reading. Training utilizing heart rate, or your pulse rate, is a great
way to measure your progress, the level of intensity, as well as how you're improving
through your training.