Originally Posted by
Badgerjohn
He said over doing it is not helping my cause and suggested one. Target range etc... I am sure I was way over my target heart rate on this ride. Don't want to get out and keel over. Although I was always a runner and cyclist and have kept my heart strong. Just not as fit as I would like to be.
Well, if by "not helping your cause" he means that going too hard, too often is not ideal, he's right. But it isn't because you might drop dead - that's possible, but very unlikely - but because you can't recover fast enough between rides, and ultimately you overtrain. A couple of really hard sessions a week, separated by at least a couple of days, is enough, and the rest of your riding should be more moderate. The coaches say that the mistake most people make when they are training is to make the hard rides too easy, and the easy rides too hard. Variety, and recovery time, is important.
If you have doubts about your ability to judge how hard you are going, a HRM will certainly help. But you need to take care when setting it up, because many of them ask you to enter a maximum heart rate, and that MHR is used to calculate which training zone you are in. The formula for MHR is usually given as 220 minus your age. It's important that you ignore this. I'm 56, so the formula says my MHR should be 164. Today I hit 170 and I wasn't going that hard, it isn't unknown for me still to see numbers in the 180s. So if I went by the formula I'd end up training at lower rates than I should. If your brother's a serious athlete he'll know all this stuff and can sort it out for you.