How to Calculate Your Maximum Heart Rate

There's two ways you can calculate your maximum heart rate. One is very easy to do but is less accurate where as the other method is much more accurate but neccessitates nearly throwing up your last meal after a hard effort!

Firstly - the easy way

Get your calculator out and work out 220 minus your age in years. Thats it - your theoretical max. So if you are 40 years old your theoretical max is 180. I told you it wasn't very accurate! What if you've been overtraining or you are coming back from fatigue, what if you are a very athletic man compared to a woman who hasn't been able to do any exercise for the last ten years? One size rarely fits all.

Secondly - The accurate hard way.

For this you need a static turbo trainer or a long steady climb and a heart rate monitor to measure your heartrate.

Warm up thoroughly and then select a reasonably hard gear that you can sustain for three minutes. You'll notice your heartrate increase and then stabilise for this effort. After three minutes has passed up your gearing again and do another three minutes watching your heartrate increasing and stabilising then keep repeating these three minute patterns until you get to the point where its starting to feel impossible to sustain.

Instead of your heartrate going up and then stabilising it will continue to rise as your legs scream with lactic acid and your lungs are finding it hard to get enough oxygen onboard.

Keep on pedaling! Keep on until you feel like you are either going to faint from exhaustion or barf up your last meal. And then keep going for just another 10 seconds more.

Right at this point check your heart rate monitor and try to remember that number amongst all the brain fog you will be feeling. (This is where the more expensive heart rate monitors that record data come into their own)

Congratulations on doing your first max hr test! Its something you will probably want to repeat in a masochistic kind of way to check your performance as you progress.