Heart rate advice

s25scd

Done the chris charmichael time crunched cyclist heart rate threshold test . Iam 32 yrs old 12st and 6ft height. I got a max HR of 170bpm. does this seem right, i know noone can answer this question but does it generally seem ok. I think it seems to be on the low side even doing the formuls 220-32 gives me 188. I know this formula is vague but is this formula that wrong that between my test and the formula there is 18bpm of a difference? with this formula and the result of my test i should be 50yrs old, I consider myself to be of good fitness, I take fitness seriously and want to start training in prep for next yr but worried i will be trg in the wrong zones, Maybe i will just need to take another test.

danowat

but is this formula that wrong that between my test and the formula there is 18bpm of a difference?

It is what it is, forget the formula, its bunkem for many people

Herbsman

It's like groundhog day around here!

amaferanga

If you did a threshold test why do you care about your max HR? Is the 170 the maximum your HR reached in the threshold test? Was it actually an HRmax test you did?

ut_och_cykla

s25scd wrote:

Done the chris charmichael time crunched cyclist heart rate threshold test . Iam 32 yrs old 12st and 6ft height. I got a max HR of 170bpm. does this seem right, i know noone can answer this question but does it generally seem ok. I think it seems to be on the low side even doing the formuls 220-32 gives me 188. I know this formula is vague but is this formula that wrong that between my test and the formula there is 18bpm of a difference? with this formula and the result of my test i should be 50yrs old, I consider myself to be of good fitness, I take fitness seriously and want to start training in prep for next yr but worried i will be trg in the wrong zones, Maybe i will just need to take another test.

If you got 170 for the Carmichael test that sounds ok - 90% of 188 bpm HR max.

If your HR max is 170 the test would have been somewhere between 144-161.

But the test is meant to be a focussed evenly paced hard effort - if you got a max of 170 but the average was much lower you probably didn't do the test right.

If I recall the idea is to take the average HR, not the max seen.

Max HR does not predict age - I am not 34, I'm 51 but have a max of 187.
If you get the zones really wrong you'll notice - either you'll make little progress from riding too gently all the time or you won't be able to sustain the efforts at high pulses at all.

sjedwardz

I just bought the book and did the test.
Its quite hard to do properly. First time around I didn't really try hard enough when I looked at my logs in sportracks!

So had another go and worked much harder. Got an average of 167 with a max of 180 - I'm 43 by the way

Its quite tricky to get the average though. I set up a specific training workout on my Forerunner which was just one entry of cycle for 8 mins. That way I could easily get the max and average from that data - in fact the forerunner and sporttracks tell you this.
Otherwise its quite difficult to work out the average of an 8 minute period say in a 1 hr ride.

The figures weren't that far off my max heart rate test that I did a year ago. I come from a running background and the test was very hard - not something I'd like to do again!