What is PVC?

Premature ventricular contractions. A type of heart arrhythmia. PVCs are weird beats that are usually very noticeable to the person experiencing them.


It's happened to me before, but it's been quite a few years. I do get occasional PVCs, but nothing very sustained since then. Feeling the heart erratically fluttering at rest for hours is definitely a frightening experience.

In my case, the cardiologist had me wear a holter monitor for a little while. I only had a few brief episodes while wearing it, but the cardiologist determined that my palpitations appeared benign outside of the obvious transient heart inefficiency. He told me that he'd attempt an ablation if I wanted but that it would probably also be okay to just deal with it, so I've been going with the latter choice.


Well, yeah. The heart is fairly important, so it's kind of unsettling when something is going wrong with it!

But the first step is sorting things out with a cardiologist.

Wow thanks for this info! Actually need to see my doc because I feel like this might be what I have had in the past. For me it feels like an irregular and very hard heart beat for a few seconds then it’ll go away. Hasn’t happened in a while but seemed to happen a few times a month when I was training more. The irregular timing of them makes me forget about them but I know i need to go see my doc just to be sure.

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From what I'm told, an athlete having a couple hundred PVC's a day is pretty normal. Now what you had is not normal, and I have had similar situations. What I have found is that they "always" coincide with some other, or many different variables that can negatively affect your heart rhythm. For me is is mostly a loss of sodium and magnesium. I find that if I quickly supplement with both of those, the irregular beats will stop pretty quickly. It can also be from stress, loss of sleep, too much coffee, drinking booze, and a few other things that can blow you up.

You have to step out of yourself and really examine what was/is going on at the time. Over the years if you have a bunch of these, you will be able to narrow down the triggers, and thus avoid them. And if you are training very hard, it really doesnt take much of any of these to have an affect, so drill down to what is going on from that standpoint, and you might be able to stay off the doctors table for decades to come...

Good luck, keep us posted..