I bought a watch that can measure my heart rate. I read it could be useful for making my bike trainer workouts more efficient, although I already knew that years ago. And of course I was curious how high I could get my bpm (beats per minute)--unadmittingly the likely reason for getting it.
Now there's a conventional but inaccurate formula for calculating an individual's maximum heart rate*: (220 - age) = (max heart rate). Unfortunately, that's like saying that the average person's height is 5'8" so we all must be.
Last week I set out to test the '220-age' formula. On that day, I tried taking my heart to the limit on the bike trainer. I peddled and peddled away for about 40 minutes and found my highest rate peaked at 195 bpm. Still, it was a short workout and I wasn't warmed up well enough to get myself to exhaustion for a more accurate reading. Otherwise, it's possible my heart could've gone a few beats higher. So see, being 36 years old, my max heart rate should've calculated to 220-36=184 bpm, but it was really 11 beats above that. Now it certainly doesn't mean that I'm healthier than the avg; just that the formula is inaccurate when applied to an individual. Probably today or tomorrow, I'll bike again for a more thorough test.
By the way, I think there lies the reason for me keeping up with the workouts: it's a methodical way for appeasing my curiosity on how far I can push myself at a given age.
***
* Go ahead, play with yourself :-). I'd previously thought my heart could just keep beating faster and faster til heart attack city occurs. But no, it eventually levels at a certain rate no matter how much you push yourself. How weird it was to see this when I was biking hard!
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