I definitely see a temperature correlation, if it's above 90 my average HR will be 10-15 BPM higher than if it were in the 60s for the same effort, but I don't think it changes my max HR?

I really don't know what my max is anyway, I've seen up to 186 in really hard races but if I'm riding solo I really have to kill myself on a sustained climb to even reach 180. A friend that is a couple years older will average 190 for a fast crit, and have a peak over 200. I guess everyone is different.

How is it not bs AND I'm right for the rest of it?

You're saying that if I was born and decided to do cocaine and heroin and eat poorly and sleep poorly that I'd still have as many heart beats as if I exercised and ate well?

I'd tend to agree that intervals themselves are hard on yourself, but if you spend an hour a day at 150 beats and the rest of your day at 50 beats, you come out way ahead compared to someone who does no activity and has a resting heart rate of 80.

1 hour * 150 beats + 23 hours * 50 beats = 78,000 beats per day
24 hours * 80 beats = 115,200 beats per day

You could even change the exercise individual's RHR to 60 and the non-exercise individual's to 70 and you still come out almost 10,000 beats ahead.

Elevation will do it too... I live at sea level and went to 7,500ft last weekend. Not to exercise but just as a mini vacation. Just casually walking felt like endurance pace cycling and walking up 2 flights of stairs briskly felt like tempo work.

He's saying that it's not BS that you have a given maximum # of beats in your life AND by exercising, these beats span more years. The comment about heroin is ridiculous. Obviously regardless of your max beats, your lifestyle can & will affect your lifespan. I doubt he thinks that everyone actually achieves their lifetime maximum. But that doesn't mean it can't still represent your maximum. Not that I necessarily agree that a person has a maximum # of beats. It just doesn't seem too complicated that it could be true, but you could also be extending your years by exercising.

True. I'm a sea level dweller and I made the mistake of not realizing that alcohol will affect you more quickly at elevation too. 4 beers in a hot tub at 9,000 feet in Colorado = falling face first into the snow from wooziness when attempting to stand up. Climbing up and down the stairs in that house made me feel like I had jello legs.

That is exactly why it's ridiculous. Too many factors to put a stone cold statement out there.

Really? So if you buy a piece of equipment & the manufacturer says that it has a maximum lifetime of 5 years or 20,000 miles or 5 million revolutions under ideal care conditions that is ridiculous because under less than ideal conditions the piece of equipment will/could fail. Not going to debate this beyond this point as it's stupid but a maximum lifetime of anything implies ideal conditions.

You may not have heard this, but this all got started when scientists started calculating the number of lifetime heartbeats of various creatures, from hummingbirds to elephants. It turns out that all species, if they live out their natural lifespan, get about a billion heartbeats. How Long Will You Live? Body Size, Heart Rate and Metabolism*|*Paul Spector, M.D.

It's a bit OT, but when I mention what happened to me,I do get that question a lot. It's very,very hard to respond with a simple answer.Let's just say the experience changed me permanently. This much I can tell you for sure. There's a whole lot more to human consciousness than can be accounted by for sum total of the electro-chemical activity in that 3 pound organ between your ears.. Don't mean to be obtuse, but what I experience doesn't seem to fit the classical near-death stories I've heard. But the simple fact that I did experience something tells me Shakespeare got it right "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet (1.5.167-8)

For what it's worth, it must be noted that my story is also just a one off anecdote. That said, I want to thank you for summarizing the thrust of what I was trying to say in such a clear and concise manner. I think we agree that being absolutely clear with yourself about what you're doing and why is essential.

Honestly, why worry about this? Nobody ever died of Nothing before. I am simply going to run and ride because I enjoy it. I certainly enjoy it more than I would being over weight. I am sure that there is a happy medium as with anything but I am not going to worry. I would rather endulge myself in a little too much exercise than a little too much candy or couch time. At 47 I am dealing with my first real injury, a torn hip. My friends say it was my lifestyle as a kid and adult (too many sports and too much training). My Dr. is not sure is it is overuse or a bone defect that caused it. Either way, I will be back running again after my surgery. I love it and I love riding. I like to run/rode fast and at long distances. If that is my poison, than I am ok with that.

Likewise if you're going to compare a machine to a living organism :lol: what a joke

Revolutions per minute in an internal combustion engine do exponentially more damage the faster it goes. An engine could run practically forever if it ran constantly at low RPM and had a perfect oil filtration system. Run it at or near redline and it'll last WAY less long.

I haven't kept statistics or anything....but it seems to me, that most athletes either die rather young, or end up with lots of problems later in life. While moderate exercise may be good, and being sedentary bad, I've always thought that a lot of exercise and/or hard-core athleticism speeds up one's metabolim. I come from a family of long livers; We all seem to have slow metabolisms; no athletic types among us- most are just shy of being sedentary; and the only exercise they get is walking. I'm beginning to think about this a lot. If it worked for my relatives/ancestors.......and they're living into their 90's with no artificial joints or heart ailments, maybe they're doing something right- at least for our particular genetics/metabolism.

Trouble with most medical studies and such, is that they treat all humans as being exactly the same. We're not. To ignore genetics and metabolism, and other such personal differences, is tantamount to making such studies absolutely meaningless. Some of our body composition/health/metabolic rate/etc. comes from what we do.....but more comes from who our mommy and daddy and grandpappy are- and IMHO, it's downright foolish and counterproductive to try and fight your genetics.

Coming from a family of slow metabolism long-livers, I think I'd be doing myself HARM if I exercised to the point where I sped-up my metabolism.

Yeah, and that's why 220 - age is bunk.

I'm 37 and hit 191 recently, chasing my best time up a hill.

But that manufacturer can say this widget will last 20,000 miles because they've built a million identical ones, tested a bunch of them, and heard reports from their customers. People aren't identical like that. What would it even mean to say your heart was "capable of" X beats if you had died before it got to that number?

yup...I'm 42 and hit 187 on Monday night.

That you were ridden hard & put away wet.

The point I was making is not that a human does actually only get X heartbeats but that if the scientific community were to make such a statement, implicit in that statement would be the assumption that to achieve that number would require optimal care. It seems ridiculous to assume that one would achieve any measure of a long, healthy life incorporating cocaine and heroin and eating & sleeping poorly.

No, it's exactly the opposite. Studies show we get back about 7 minutes of additional lifespan for every minute spent exercising:
Every Minute Of Exercise Could Lengthen Your Life Seven Minutes | CommonHealth

<snip>
No, they don't treat all humans as being alike. Epidemiological studies try to establish probabilities that certain things are linked. They do not attempt to establish cause and effect for individuals. Rather they say that, if you smoke, you are likely to shorten your life. Not the every life will be shortened, but that there is a non-zero increased probability that it will be shortened. They establish that if you exercise, there is a probability that your life will be lengthened, not that every exerciser will live a longer life.

Exactly, even if some holy deity told us that it was true, there would be no way to prove it. No two people are the same so you couldn't exactly duplicate the experiment.

You are a thoughtful man. There is a paradigm shift on the notion of consciousness within he medical community which in many ways is still in the stone age. The changing view is consciousness is not the personal domain of a given person..nor is the voice in a person's head any sort of definition of consciousness. A better explanation is...consciousness is a collective of infinite intelligence and each of our brain's are a reducing valve. This also better fits the concept of genius, idiot savant syndrome and of course precocity like Mozart composing complex music by the age of 3 when a human being can't possibly have the experience to formulate such creativity. This is why when we pass and the brain's restriction dies, we realign with this infinite intelligence...as often written about in NDE's.

Glad you came back to us to ride some more.

Not bad for an old man. ;)

Lesson learned in this thread. A lot of BF posters are way older than I first thought.

Until you hit the point of diminishing returns, and you begin to get no benefit from more exercise, and then actually have negative return.

The J Curve of Exercising. http://www.drjohnm.org/2014/05/exerc...g-the-obvious/



The study referred to your in link was based on 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week (defined as brisk walking). It doesn't address the potential negative effects of years of intense race training.

190 on the Wednesday Night World Championships a few weeks after my 48th birthday. I used to see 200 every now and then, but not for the last few years. I guess there's something to a reduced HRmax and age, but 220-age as a one-size-fits-all rule is bogus.

I'm talking about athletes- not just people who exercise. I mean, you look at marathon runners; pro cyclists; football players, etc. Seems like many barely make it past their 60's.

And I am not aware of any studies on the effects of exercise and health, which take people's genetics or established metabolism into account. Sure, they may say something like "69% of those studied lived an average of 3.7 years longer if they stuck a box of spaghetti on top of their head while hopping up and down on one foot"- but maybe it's because that 69% possessed traits which were conducive to the benefits of such an activity- whereas maybe that same activity was non-beneficial or even harmful to those in the other 31% group, because it was counterproductive to their established traits- but it's just that people with such traits may be in a minority- whether in the general population, or just in the study- the fact remains, that leaving out vital data makes all such studies largely irrelevant. Someone with a slow metabolism may actually be doing themselves harm by doing the same amount of exercise recommended for "the average person"- or conversely, the average person may not be getting enough exercise if the subjects who were being studied were in-fact not so average, but such was noit realized because the attributes which made them not so average, were not even an item being referenced.

This is exactly why we can have "scientists" saying that eggs and salt and butter are b ad for the last 40 years; and that trans-fats are good.....and then all of a sudden, the pendulum swings the other way- and now they are saying the diametric opposite is true. Assuming none of the conclusions are based on out-right fraud or some other agenda, the only other thing which can account for the studies of the very same things giving diametrically opposite results, is that important parameters were were ignored.