How to determine heart rate "zones"?
 

It’s been 15 years since I’ve been in the saddle (much) and I’m starting to train again.

Question:
Is there a good, quantitative way to determine the heart rate “zones” for training… that doesn’t include paying a doctor for treadmill time? The rule of thumb methods that subtract your age from some arbitrary number really don’t work well for me. I have (and have always had) a “Kawasaki heart” as opposed to a “Harley heart”. Even when I was in top form, racing every weekend, my resting heart rate never got below 57, and I could peg it at ~180 for 15-20 minutes at a time in the hills. At 37 my max heart rate was somewhere north of the measured 210 + I regularly saw in hill intervals.

That was then and this is now, 15 years and a lot of sedentary time later. I'm 55 and I always ride with an HRM and my heart rate averages ~145 on a good, 30-40 mile ride that seems sustainable but fast enough to keep me from feeling lazy. On a nasty little hill the other day I looked down and the HRM read 186. I really try not to do that too often....

I’m prone to over training so I’d like to set some limits before I “crash” and get sick.

I’m Sam and I’m a hammerhead.

Have a look at the sticky at the top of this forum: http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...threshold-test

Thanks! I'll look at that....now I'm just going to ave to buy an indoor trainer...

You don't need a trainer to do the test. It works fine outdoors as well. If you're going to be training outdoors you're better off doing the test outside.

We did our heart rate analysis at the gym for $99. Not free, but no doctor involved. Our trainer even got brave and decided before we left to try it once on our tandem.