Understanding max heart rate (2 questions)

Training
42

That formula sucks and heart rate is variable on an individual basis. There are people your age & fitness who legit have a max HR of 160. There are people your age & fitness who legit have a max HR of 195. I would call your max HR observation very typical.

You should trust your own training experience a lot more than you should trust that goofy age-based max HR formula.

Don’t know if it helps you, but I think TR has pretty dramatically increased the maximum heart rate I can tolerate for an hour. I track that metric & in a little less than a year with TR it’s gone from 161 to (just two days ago) a new high of 167. On that day I rode for just over 5.5hrs at an avg HR of 161…so just right at what I could tolerate for only 1 hour less than a year ago.

43

I agree with everyone who says that max HR is individual: there are some good analogies posted. Yesterday on my 8-minute FTP test, I posted max HR = 178. I’m 77 years old.
Take that, formula!

1 Like
44

Did my first CX race at the weekend, quite unfit shall we say, 45 years old, 192bpm average, 203bpm max during the race.