Discussion: What is your TRUE max HR?

I'm 41 year old man and have average fitness level with the goal to improve it(actually, get back to my old level :). I used to be quite a good orienteer but then had to stop it due to injuries. I haven't been running for 15 years but still was fit enough, e.g. I was doing bushwalking, swimming(can swim for 5km). 2 years ago I started to run ago, still remember i could only ran for 500m during my first run. Now I'm quite comfortable running 10km with pace 4.50/5.00 min/km. with no pushing. Just out of curiosity I started to use HRM which came with Garmin 405 and to my surprise my real HR was way too different from the max HR I calculated using formula.
E.g. Formula says my max HR is 178 but in real life during my runs it goes to 200 and beyond! Again, it is my normal pace when it goes to 200, if I push harder it goes to 220. Maybe I should check my HR monitor before posting here, but still... Just wondering guys, how close are your real/calculated max HRs?

Not close at all.

If the HR trace from the watch is fairly flat, and the max readings aren't just spikes that don't fit with the HR for the rest of the run, it's probably pretty accurate. your HR would be unusually high, but there is a massive variation in people's actual max HR (though mine seems to fit the standard formula fairly closely)

I have so far witnessed no dropoff in the maximum HR. It's been flat since my early 20s.

It looks my mHR has dropped with age but I think it's a drop corresponding to my current level of craptitude! Threshold is a couple of beats lower than it used to be 'back in the day'. And @Dmitry_oz, the formulas are just based on a normal distribution and I've trained with people +/- 20bpm from predicted!

220 was supposed the max HR for most mere humans. at your age the formula of 220 minus your age sounds like about right. Have you checked your HR against your HRM..is it accurate??

I'm 67 years old. The heart rate I would maintain while riding a bike time trial for 30 minutes to an hour would typically be in the low 170's. I don't really know what short-term max would be, but certainly somewhere over 190. My heart rate is generally a lot lower when orienteering than when bike riding, partly because I don't seem to be able to keep track of where I am when running fast, partly because I can't maintain any sort of speed when running through woods that aren't super-open. I've always assumed my heart rate was a bit on the fast side (resting pulse is around 60) because the heart volume was small. And I haven't noticed any particular heart rate changes in the last 30 years or so since I started thinking about the issue.

Finding your max HR isn't difficult. Run an 800 as fast as you can and look at your HR for the last minute. As noted by Fletch, you don't want to use a "spike" reading (which is what the Garmin will give you if you just ask for the maximum value for the run). HR monitors will often give erratic max readings. Once you are beyond VO2Max (which you can certainly hold for an 800, even if you don't much like the feeling), your HR will level off at max. Once your effort drops below max, the HR will also fall away.

FWIW, my max HR was 195 in my late 20's and now (late 40's) has only dropped to 183, so clearly some folks lose less than 1 beat per year. Max HR is not a useful measure of fitness, but it is something you need to know if you want to compute the appropriate training HR for different intensities.

I would guess that 200/220 for a 41 year old is an aberration ... but definitely suggest what Soupbone recommends: compare manually! You've got a watch on your arm.

In the winter I (and many others) often get big, erroneous spikes to ~200 in the first 10 (pre-sweaty) minutes of exercise.

My max had been 184 since I'd gotten my 305. Then I fell (hand first) into a yellow jacket nest. That got me up to 188, and probably the fastest 200m I've ever done in light green woods. So a few dozen yellow jackets can shed 4 years off of your age! I still use 184 as my max for training calculation though. ;)

Just to show how wide the range of variation about the 'normal' can be, my maximum was 155 when I was in my early 20s (this was done during the 'jump on treadmill at 20% grade at 13 km/h and see how long you last before falling off' test); haven't measured it lately but it is probably lower now. Heard somewhere that maxima based on the '220 minus age' formula have a standard deviation of about 13.

Thanks guys, I will definatelly do 800m test run.
As examples, view at those couple runs:
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/60720258
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/60941761

It is not spikes but rather flat figure.

Only my concern about high HR it is not good good for wellbeing since you heart is working hard and you burn energy too fast. Which is not good for such sport as orienteering. I remember I read article written by some top-level triathlete who managed to lower down his max HR doing special excercises etc but it was quite long process.
Anyway, thanks a lot for your inputs!

That sounds like pop science to me. Does said triathlete have even a shred of empirical evidence that lowering (or raising) your max HR has any correlation to performance? If you have a high max HR, it probably means your heart is a bit on the small side and therefore needs to beat more often to move the same amount of blood. There's no problem with that; the same amount of work is being done and, even if it is a bit less efficient (I'm not saying it is), the total energy consumed by the heart is pretty small compared to what the skeletal muscles are burning.

I was referring to this article:
http://www.duathlon.com/articles/1460

Self selecting sample. No control group. No quantitative analysis. I have great respect for Mark Allen as a triathlete, but his science sucks.

In Mark Allen's article, he reduced the heart rate at which he trained (referred to as "maximum aerobic heart rate"), not his maximum HR. I don't see any mention in the article that his maximum heart rate had changed over the period he describes.

All you need to know...

THE SURPRISING HISTORY OF THE “HRmax=220-age” EQUATION

http://www.cyclingfusion.com/pdf/220-Age-Origins-P...


"the formula HRmax=220-age has no scientific merit for use in exercise physiology and related fields."

Agreed, Allen is not promoting a strategy to reduce Max HR (or even suggesting that's possible). If he merely stated that you should train in your appropriate zone, citing the mountain of kinsiology research backing that, I'd be fine with the article. What I don't care for is the appearance of precision from that crazy HR formula he gives. It worked for him, and probably a handful of other folks he knows. That doesn't make it useful to the athletic community in general, especially without some indication of the expected variability and how such estimates were derived.