Another heart rate question....
 

Being 34yo, and back into cycling now for about 6 months. I finally have a new trainer, and have found I was riding on a certain gear, and achieving a heart rate of around 165bpm. I decided today to step up a gear, and at the same cadence I brought my heart rate up to about 180bpm for about an hour.

Using the funky equations which may or may not be accurate, I am guessing I have a max heart rate of about 190bpm. Isn't this kind of low? After my 180bpm workout, I did not feel overstressed at all. A good workout yes, but not overexerting.

Is it safe to do this? I am assuming 180bpm is ok, but that tells me my max HR is probably higher than 190. My guess is it may be well over 200bpm. Maybe this is a Koffee question. I would like to continue training with my HR higher like this, and continue pushing up the gears, but at the same time, I don't want to overexert myself.

Perhaps you should listen more to your body than your HR monitor, if you´re going intop the 90% zone you should also be entering the puke zone (sort off) try to go into the puke zone and see what your HR is then. The signs from your body is more important than the HR value since we´re all so different. The alarm signals are not high HR but chestpain, dizziness and imminenet blackout, at leats those are the ones we use for workloadtesting in cardilogy departments.

I don't think that one's MaxHR, whatever the figure, can be generally regarded as being 'too low'. It's all relative, and affected by numerous variables, which likely require loads of studying, debating and 'mythology'. In the long run, what matters is what your engine produces at a given pump frequency.

For what it's worth, I am about your age and have a similar 'ceiling'.

I'm 46 and when I am training with the local team it's not unusual for my average HR to be around 160 for 3 hrs or so with max up to 190 early in the year and 180 later. I was concerned about whether or not this was too much stress and my Doctor said that the body does a wonderful job of making you slow down when you need to....In otherwords.....don't worry about too high a heart rate (assuming you are healthy)