What heart rates do you typically see during riding or other exercise? To give context, what is your resting pulse and, if you know it, your maximum heart rate?
Is it bad for your longevity to have too high a heart rate during exercise? Is it a warning sign that your heart gets to those rates? Should we avoid working our heart rate above a certain level, to get the most life out of the thing?
Here is why I am asking. I'm being told to exercise at a pace where I can comfortably keep talking. But I don't. During spin classes, I usually maintain my HR around 165, and I think for me that's borderline for being able to maintain a conversation. Every morning my ride to work includes a 170+ bpm sprint, and I can't talk at that HR (even if there were anyone to talk with). During fun rides (and now, beginning to run too) I will usually get to 170-175 and sometimes 180+, not for a long time, but for several periods during the ride.
I'm 50 y/o. My resting pulse is about 55. I have gotten up to 190+ when sprinting hard on the spin bike, I wasn't falling off the bike, dizzy, blacking out, or anything. So I'll guess my max HR might be 195-200.
Any thoughts? I like my heart, and don't want to wear it out.
You won't wear your heart out by exercising, just the opposite probably. They tell you to spin at a pace where you can talk because that approximates your threshold heart rate or slightly below threshold HR. An average HR on a ride is just a measure of work performed. Your threshold HR is probably more significant for training purposes. In a long endurance ride, you want to spend as much time as you can at or near the threshold heart rate. That's the point where there is a balance between lactate production and lactate clearing--it is a steady state. You can figure it out a lot of ways, some more accurate than others.
For years I tried to use the basic formula (something like 220-your age) to calculate my maximum HR but discovered in my case the formula was way off. I'm 57. The formula suggests maximum should be 163 and threshold around 131. Yet my actual measured threshold is around 173 and my maximum about 196. I'm an outlier. The gold standard is a cycling-based blood test
done indoors. The silver standard is to ride up a hill for an hour at the fastest pace you can go for that hour. Your average for that hour is your threshold heart rate. That's the point above and below which (depending on your goals) you want to train. See Joe Freil's
blog (and many others) for a simpler way to calculate the threshold HR (if you don't live in the mountains) and if you want to dig deeper into HR or power based training.
Why don't you actually find out your threshold heart rate and then work your training around that, if you are interested in training?Your maximum is probably not all that significant--mostly we do not spend very much time there--it's called a maximum for a reason. When I'm training and doing intervals, I'll see a maximum of 185 or so momentarily during the intervals. When I'm racing cyclo-cross I'll average 180 for 45 minutes and hit 190+ a couple of times in the race as I try to bridge a gap or leave someone behind.
But there's also no huge reason to be super obsessive about HR or watts. If you're not training to race or for long rides that require serious training, just go have fun and enjoy yourself and use a PRE (perceived rate of exertion)
scale to judge how hard you are working. It has pretty good correlation with HR. Good luck! Have fun.