A question about maximum heart rate

[yotphix]

Hi folks, quick question about maximum heart rate. I recently had a stress test, my first annual check-in for cardiac rehab graduates. The test went well, it was hard for them to force me into anaerobic. When I did get there though, my heart rate got up to 179 and they shut it down. I'm 41 and they said they can't test past 220 minus your age.

The thing is though, that in my runs, and while inline skating, I take myself up as high as 189. Not for any length of time, but on an incline, or into a strong breeze or to catch a green light. I have skated with my heart rate in the low 180's for as long as 20 minutes one windy day. It didn't feel horrible, just like hard work. I recovered relatively quickly afterward.

The question is, do others regularly exceed their theoretical max? Is there any significant danger in doing so? Should I pull back from that to prevent some horrible outcome, or just carry on exercising at between 60 and 80% or so of max and exceeding it when it comes up as I have been?

Thanks

Paul

I should add: I'm 1.5 years post AVR, my heart was otherwise perfectly healthy, with no arterial blockage to speak of. I have no other reasons to worry.

 

[ALCapshaw2]

Those are good Questions for your Cardiologist... and others who push themselves to the Max.
Hopefully you will hear from some of the latter.

 

[SumoRunner]

220 - age is just a rough estimate but that's all the technicians have to go on, so their procedure says shut it down since they have no basis to judge whether you can go higher or not. We're all different. Some folks have big Harley hearts that chug slowly and others have small Kawasaki hearts that rev like mad. If you really do regularly go beyond the norm then your cardiologist should have stated the max they could test to, unfortunately he would be risking malpractice to advise going beyond accepted guidelines. They can get sufficient data from sub-maximal tests anyway.

 

[nate_c]

This may not be much use to you, since most of my data comes from before my AVR, and I'm not far enough out from my surgery to know how much this will change. In any case, after my AVR, I started going back and checking my pulse rates during runs and bike rides. To be honest, I'd never really paid close attention to my HR in the years prior to surgery, since I didn't have any symptoms. I have a Garmin 305, but didn't wear the HR monitor too often. In hindsight, wish I had more HR data. Looking back over the data I do have, however, I noticed that when I'd hit hills or turn up the speed for a faster run, I could get up to the 190s. I could also get into the 200s with maximal effort (hill repeats on steep hills, intervals, etc.). My comfortable aerobic-run heart rate seemed to settle in somewhere around 155-165 during runs, and around 135-145 on the bike. I'm not yet 35 years old, so I guess I was on the high side of normal if you go by the age method.

I'm now running around 4 miles most days (surgery was in late August), and I keep my HR in the 130s or 140s. I feel like I could push faster, but I'm still not too far out and I've had some arrhythmia issues, so I'm not supposed to push too hard. I think if I ignored that advice, I could still maintain a rate of 160 or so, since a 140 pace doesn't feel very hard, but I haven't tried it yet, so that's just guesswork. Thanks for the post. Interested to see how others respond, since I've been wondering about the same thing after surgery.

 

[yotphix]

That sounds like a fair analysis Sumorunner. It's a little frustrating that no one at the rehab, for obvious reasons of liability, is willing to say what is and isn't ok. They just keep warning me not to 'overdo it' when I ask.
Nate_C - That is quite useful to me actually. I never wore a monitor while exercising before my AVR so I have absolutely nothing to compare with. It sounds as though your pre-surgery HRs were roughly analagous to mine now, adjusting for the 6 or 7 years between us in age. I don't ever remember feeling like my heart was beating too hard before, just that I went anaerobic too soon and by the end bonked completely after short efforts.
Your running at a 140 heart rate just 9 or 10 weeks after surgery is pretty impressive! Especially on a beta blocker. The rehab folks really held me back to give my LV a chance to return to normal size but even after they agreed that I could speed things up my post surgical beta blocker kept my HR down to 140 max or so. I stopped that at 4 months and soon had my heart rate up to 170 in cycle sprints, though I still trained at 140 or less until the ventricle was declared normal at 6 months post-op.