Road Cycling - Heart Rate Issues

Question for all you exercise physiology wonks out there- when i ride, on everything but the most intense efforts my heart rate stays quite low (115 or so). even when i'm absolutely hammering in the big ring up a hill, i can only get it up to around 75% of max. as a result, my legs give out on a tough ride LONG before my lungs do.
i spin a pretty high cadence when i can, so i don't think that's the problem. i remember all the talk during the tour from Coach C that spinning faster put more load on the CV system, pushing bigger gears put more load on the legs. yet spinning faster doesn't seem to distribute the load at all.
does this problem sound remotely familiar to anyone? i'm simply looking for a way to make my cv system do SOME work when i ride. thoughts?

RACE!

RUN!

Are you wearing a heart rate monitor?

yeah, i finally got one last month to test my theory- i'd noticed before that the only thing that got tired was my legs, unless i was absolutely hammering. i guess i need to figure out a way to just increase my leg strength and endurance. ideas for that?

How have you determined your max HR?

Are you perhaps over 100 yrs old? :D

standard formula. got a max of around 191.

Originally posted by pgreene
standard formula. got a max of around 191.

And you've probably heard the standard rant about that, so I won't repeat it here. What's your resting HR, roughly?

I'm curious. When you're spinning at a quick, but not crazy, rate, say 100-110, do your legs still go first? How breathless do you get? It's hard to imagine that your heart would refuse to respond unless you were so wiped it couldn't (unlikely, I think). Otherwise your cardio system just isn't stressed that much. It just seems like if your heart wasn't pumping sufficient blood, you'd be wheezing and dying to catch your breath. Your muscles, brain, and everything else would be starving for oxygen.

Might be worth getting a doctors opinion.

i'm also thinking in the direction Roadbuzz is:

unless there's some kind of weird physiological thing in which case you need to check with a doctor, it's probably just that your MAX and/or your Lactate Threshold are just way lower than what the formula predicts -- the formula is only accurate for like 75% of the people and for these 25% the deviation can be quite large. this isn't necessarily bad - just different. in the end it's how much power you can produce and maintain.

a friend of mine who races and is about 35 years old has an LT of like 115, but he's fast!

another friend of mine who also races (but he's a little more limited) has some heart-condition so that his max heart rate is like 140 even though he's less than 30! he is pretty fit and strong but can't push really hard for sprints...

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as to your problem of "legs going out before your lungs..." -- yeah, sounds strange to me. again, unless there's some special condition, seems like you should be able to sprint/climb so that your HR climbs high and you max you cardio system... maybe you need to work on leg strength? but spinning sounds like the right technique.

can you really not sprint to a point where you are gasping for breath? (based on feel, not your HR relative to max from formula) if so, then i think there is something odd... otherwise you just have a lower than normal Max HR (maybe your heart pumps more blood with each stroke?)

Every once in awhile I'll have a series of rides wher my CV has no problems but my legs are really suffering. But since I have been lifting weights(consistently for 6 months or so) I don't(haven't) have(had) that problem anymore. I don't really know why, so I won't pretend, but it works for me.

Is your HR Monitor working properly? Maybe there is a glitch with it and it is not reading values properly. There are many things which can cause interference with HRM's. Mine seems to error way high when there is interference. I get HR's in the 280's and that is just not happening.