Originally Posted by Heathpack

OP, if your HR is always in zone 4 on every ride, you are doing it wrong. That is a very bad way to train. You should spend the majority of your training time in lower exertion zones. I have an awesome coach and I regularly do very hard workouts. But I still spend 70% of my total cycling time in easier effort zones. As I mentioned upthread, I don't train with HR, I train with power. And we have different zones. But to give you a semi-idea, just translate what I said into the concept that 70% of my time is spent in zones 1 or 2 and you'll get the gist. I race time trials and do long endurance climbing rides, 100+ miles/10k ft climbing is my idea of a challenging ride. You do not get yourself to that kind of fitness by riding every ride in zone 4.

You should never think you'll look like a poser on a nice bike riding slowly. That's actually what serious cyclists do, very bad-arse racing types.

I would also say that if *every* ride, no matter how easy vs hard it seems, shows your HR in zone 4 90% of the time, something does not make sense. You can for sure have rides that are like that very regularly, but it does not make sense that every ride looks like that. You may be like @redfooj. How much HR data do you actually have?

Originally Posted by linsdog

Agree with this. While I may train hard. Most of my training time is spent in Zone 2.

Originally Posted by bored117

Too many of people here assume their HR applies to someone else...
In my case, with years of data, at age of 43 weighting about 167lbs 5'11" my max HR is about 207. (dropped from 209 5-6 years ago). Some people just have much higher max HR. My threshold HR seems to be right around 183-185. In lieu of this, I don't see a problem with original posters HR... especially if he didn't push himself to pre-puking stage with reported HR.