Originally Posted by
chasm54
But even among the sample of people that have posted here, the variation is massively greater than that. My theoretical HR based on my age should be 165. Yet in the past year I've touched 186 and as I didn't have a gun to my head, it's safe to assume I could have pushed it a little higher than that. Training on the basis of my theoretical max would mean that most of the time I'd be in a zone below the one I thought I was in. And I didn't need to spend hundreds of dollars in medical tests, I just needed a freaking big hill.
I'm in just about the same place. I have been occasionally using the heart rate function on my Garmin for the past couple of months. On a couple of rides where I flogged myself mercilessly on the hills, I hit around 188 briefly. Based on that, I am figuring my zones based on a MHR of 190 (formula says 166). I don't really pay a lot of attention to the thing, but I'll use it on occasion to push myself to work a little harder than my comfort zone if my heart rate is not approaching 90%.