Exercice du sport en Vidéos : How to Calculate Your Max Heart Rate For Fitness Training

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    How to Calculate Your Max Heart Rate For Fitness Training


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    How to Calculate Your Max Heart Rate For Fitness Training

    At first glance, maximum heart rate is fairly obvious; its literally the maximum rate at which your heart can beat before the world starts to go all blurry and, eventually, black but actually putting a number to this place of pain can be very beneficial, especially if you want to do some serious training.

    Knowing your maximum heart rate is vitally important for fitness training as it forms the basis of pretty much every calculation that you will need to do to work out the various heart rate zones.

    Going out and simply riding your bike will certainly get you fit in a very general kind of way but knowing exactly which heart rate zone you are actually riding in will allow you to fine tune that training to give very specific benefits such as better fat burning or increasing your VO2 Max for improved endurance, strength and speed.

    The absolute scientific method of calculating your max is to do a maximal test actually on the bike. Put very simply you start riding, usually on a turbo trainer and slowly ramp up the intensity until you are at your absolute limit. But then just when you think you can’t ride any more, you do an all out sprint for as long as you can and the number you see on your heart rate monitor just before you pass out will be your max and no, I’m not joking. It really is that tough.

    A proper maximal test has the advantage of being very accurate but, as you can imagine, its not for the faint hearted as it is absolutely brutal.

    By far the easiest method is to use the classic formula of 220 minus your age. So for me, a 49 year old, this works out to 171 beats per minute. While this method is very quick and easy, it can, unfortunately, be rather inaccurate. In the past I’ve used it to get a very rough ball park figure and then fine tuned it using my on the bike experiences.

    As it happened, 171 was quite a bit below my actual max. As I was out riding I could see that my beats per minute were going above this, particularly when I was riding hard up a climb so I gradually increased my maxmium until I saw and felt that it was more accurate. As a result it is now 188 beats per minute and I’m pretty confident this is correct because I cannot sustain this level of intensity for more than about 15 secs without feeling like my heart is about to explode.

    Once you have worked out your max you can start working out the all important training zones and I show you how to do this in another film.

    If you would like to follow my efforts on the bike you can follow me on Strava. My profile is here: