MHR Test - 2012 Edition

After a well-deserved week off, I broke my respite to test my maximum heart rate--at least the one that applies to the run.

The process is simple, but not easy. After a warm-up, run as fast as you possibly can until you just can't anymore. This will typically be accompanied by your heart rate reading maxing out.

First things, first. Being a Sunday, the track was completely empty. Just me and my wife doing the photography.

It seemed like a good chance to use the panorama feature in the iOS6.

For years, many of us have been told that we can learn our max heart rate using this formula:

MHR = 220 - age

So for a 43 year-old like me, that would mean that my MHR is 177 beats per minute.

The reality was something else, however.

Not the kind of plateau thing to the right-center of the chart. That's the point where I was in pure hell loosing oxygen and feeling just awful. In other words, this was as fast as I could make my heart beat.

The first two laps were great, just a nice easy stride at 8:30 - 9:00 pace:

At the end of that second lap, however, I began to pick up the pace and when I came back around to this point, I was running at about 4:30 pace. See...I'm so fast that the camera blurred!

That peak number turned out to be 166 bpm. That's also 5 bpm lower than a year ago:

I'm a little surprised that I would be nearly 3% lower, but I also feel reasonably certain that I could not have pushed that number any higher. Believe me, I really tried!

There's always the possibility of testing again, but for the time being, this will serve as my baseline for my off season training which should be at at about 60% - 75% of the max or 100 - 125 bpm.

Since the bike typically produces a lower max, I'll test it in the near future as well and report those results.

For now, I have the baseline for my plan. 

Thanks for reading!

Bike MHR Test

While still not balmy, it was calm enough today to do my cycling workout in the great outdoors as well as incorporate my MHR test into it.

I've had a lot of trouble with my heart-rate monitor on the bike. Specifically, it tends to give erroneously high readings, especially in cool weather. I've tried to mitigate this problem by using contact jelly (the same stuff you see them put on de-fib paddles right before they yell "CLEAR!" on T.V.) and that sometimes helps and sometimes does not.

The best solution is to have a layer of sweat between your skin and your heart-rate monitor. Unfortunately, I'm usually headed down hill to start my rides and hence no sweat for a while.

Today, I did manage to start getting normal readings right before heading up the somewhat steep hill that runs west from the intersection of Jordan and E-470. After dodging the right turning cars that invariably don't look for cyclists in the cross-walk, I quickly increased my cadence to 120 rpm and went as hard as I could. The heart-rate kept climbing and I kept feeling more and more miserable, but it finally peaked out at 154.  I think I got a pretty good test and just like Saturday, by the time I hit the max rate, I really had nothing left. The bike MHR is 90% of the run and that sounds about right.

I still need to review the book about the test for the swim MHR, but this one will not involve using a monitor since they generally do not work in the water and my FR305 is not waterproof in any case.

On the return trip of my out and back workout, I kept my speed slow and focused on staying in Z1 which is 92 to 115 bpm. It seems a little easier than running, but we'll see if that is true on future workouts.

Still lots more to come on all of this....stay tuned.