Today I was doing a balanced distance/speed walk. I was trying out a new blister prevention regimen and things were going well so I was moving pretty fast and added some distance.
There’s a point on my return route where I will pick up the pace if I’m feeling good and today I was feeling very good so I decided to go for it. Around the time I would normally start to slow back down, I looked down and my wrist is telling me my heart rate is 167. My max rate should be around 170. Even allowing for measurement errors for wrist vs chest, which I have spot checked before and it’s not much, I am pretty sure my entire chest would feel it if I was holding at >90% of max heart rate, but my lungs and heart felt great. The only thing going on was that friction was starting to win.
So I looked it up. These guys not only say you shouldn’t use it, they could not figure out where that rule of thumb came from in the first place. Apparently there is no documented origin for 220 - age
@sabby54 Sure, I'm 56 and my max HR is about 185, maybe a touch higher. I never indexed it with a monitor until I was about 48.
If I were training a buddy or anyone who's fitness status was unknown to me, for HIIT with an HR monitor, 220-age would be my initial target. "How's your RPE at X bpm?" Go from there.
@sabby54 Yeah, max HR is highly individual. My max is substantially higher than the formula suggests too. I think of it like BMI. Fairly helpful for assessing a population, but useless when assessing individuals.
BUT you can see the HRMax varies by like 30+ among different people even within the same age. And thats why looking at only the average for your age is useless. You can do manual tests like hill repeats if you want to know the number.
@gavreel Yes, I know, and the density of points is above that hypothesis line and at a shallower slope. It’s already inaccurate at age 30 and gets worse.
The slope of a real fit line would be more like 218 - 3/4 x
There were maybe three kids in my high school who knew what their max heart rate was, and I was one of them. It wasn’t important let alone lifesaving information to anyone else. At 35 that starts to be something that you would encourage people to know, and it’s already off by 5-10% there. That’s not good.
@sabby54 That calculation is like BMI, based on average people in average population, a guide only. Only way to establish real.max HR is to actually measure it at max effort.
