What does your heart do when you perform?

No I don't mean your metaphorical heart, I mean the blood pumping organ in your chest.

A while back Kari got me a heart monitor.  It's a nifty gadget that has two parts: a strap that goes around your chest, and sends your heart beats via wireless signals to a special wristwatch.  No, I'm not having palpitations - we're doing this extreme workout thing called p90x and they recommend you get a heart monitor to make sure you're in the right exercise zone.

Anyway I've often wondered just what my heart did before, during and after a big performance, and since my a cappella quartet Realtime was in Boise this past weekend for the Evergreen district convention, it was my perfect opportunity.  So I got another volunteer on board, my friend Andry Layarda, and the experiment began.

First let me also say that I wasn't drugged up on beta blockers for this test - I never take them, for several good reasons that I've listed elsewhere.  I couldn't use any other members of Realtime because of course we were on stage at the same time, and I only have one heart monitor!  So Andry stepped in.

Andry sings in a great quartet called West Coast Fusion, and they were competing in the contest.  (Realtime can't compete of course because we are International Champs.)  He is the "calm guy" in the quartet, so he didn't expect his heart to react much.  He was really surprised!  When he checked the results after their contest set, he discovered that his heart hit a maximum rate of 164 beats per minute!  That's where my heart rate gets when I'm riding my bike pretty hard.  He burned more than 200 calories in that fifteen minute period!

I was my own guinea pig on Saturday night.  I turned on the heart monitor about an hour beforehand.

The first surprise was that I had an elevated heart rate, between 90 and 100bpm, for the whole hour before going on stage!  I always have a bit of adrenaline before a show, so now I know what that translates to in terms of my heart rate.

The show itself is posted here if you want to see what I was doing while recording the following results.

When I'm on stage these days, I don't usually feel nervous, and this show was no exception.  I spend my time thinking about the scenes in each song, and of course my attention is on my audience rapport when I'm speaking.  My maximum heart rate on stage was 142bpm, and I burned 404 calories over the 90 minutes I was recording.

I recall reading in Psychology For Performing Artists that many professional performers experience their peak anxiety just before going on stage, and that their heart rate and adrenaline levels decline when they are actually performing to an elevated but not unreasonable value.  I expect that's something like what happens to me.  This also makes sense to me, because before I go on stage I'm often thinking about myself, and while I'm on stage I'm thinking about the performance.  You can't really be nervous unless you're thinking about yourself.  That's a cool fringe benefit of performing in the right state of mind - fewer nerves.

I have often heard that singing is healthy for you, and now perhaps I know part of the reason why.  I burn more calories singing than I do jogging!  Maybe doctors should be sending people to singing lessons instead of Jenny Craig.