Most accurate way to test max heart rate

A lab can't tell you what your max is.I do metabolic testing.

You can only find your max from reaching max hr.

The 220 - age formula doesn't work on me. I'm 39 but I can consistently get my HR up over 200 by doing intervals, hills, or sprinting at the end of a road race. I have tested with a HR monitor and my Garmin and consistently go up to 190s with a harder run. I would say just get a HR monitor and wear it the next few times you have a hard effort.

what is your rest HR though? Seems like my max HR has always been low. At 49 now about 165 and under 170 since I was 25. What is your low resting HR? Mine hits mid 30's.

+1

In any sort of MHR test you need to be well rested, hard to hit maximum with tired legs.

You need to be rested, and what most people not know is that you need to warm-up 30minutes before (=easy running).

I reach my HRmax by being rested, warming up easy for 30minutes, then doing a threshold run for 10minutes and then about a 3min accelaration (not sprinting) to HRmax.

Chest belt!

I’d also add that

1) max HR is not a static scalar fixed value but a joint probability distribution of how fast your heart can beat for how long that can not be empirically measured accurately without risking death;

2) the exact value or even an approximation thereof is unnecessary for just about any kind of athletic training.

Most watches with enough training data can measure the point of inflection in your pace vs HR data and estimate your threshold HR that is much more useful for organizing your training with most of it well below threshold and a small to tiny fraction respectively at or above threshold.

Is samcallan going to clarify what he is referring to with the term SEE?

SEE is standard error estimate.

45 is the lowest I have observed in recent months

I’ve trained based on HR for many years.

The simplest and best test I tried was this: Find a hill of decent length and good but not insane gradient. If your hill is too steep, your legs will “give out” before your heart is able to reach Max. After a thorough warm-up, simply do some hard hill reps by feel.

The key is NOT to do big hard efforts right at the beginning. Hills will skyrocket your heart rate. If you bomb up the hill all-out for a minute on the first rep, your legs will be toast. These things should probably be 15-40 seconds in length, and ideally you’re wearing a chest HRM and can just see when the number stops going up. After that, you can probably even add a bpm or two just to be sure.

How do you work out zones from threshold hr?

So if I put you on a treadmill and every 2 minutes increase the speed and maybe the grade as well until you tap out, that HR at the end is not your Max HR? Funny because I did that hundreds of times to athletes.

Thanks.

That would be the max hr for that session. Repeat the test at another date, when the individual, is feeling different, has eaten different, etc, and the result will likely be different.

However the difference is unlikely to be more than 5 beats. Zone calculations are therefore unlikely to be materially different.

My view is calculating and training by rigid zones is unnecessary as much of the research in this area agrees on the part in bold above and shows incremental or mixed benefits if at all to different zones-based approaches (like uniform, polar etc).

So the classic LR advice to just run baby and to just run by feel bro is good enough, and any further fine tuning can and should be done customized to the individual athlete by monitoring what is or isn’t working well.

I explained how to find LTHR in post #5 on this thread. You use the Joe Frield LTHR method to find LTHR. (Look it up online.)

Once you determine your LTHR, that's the upper HR that you should set for your tempo or threshold runs. It's okay to go a few beats higher up a hill, but if your LTHR is 162 for example, you'd want to slow down if it goes over 163-164 for more than a few seconds. If the course was hilly, I might go a few beats over going uphill because I know I'd be a few beats lower going down the hill.

From LTHR, you only need one other zone. That's your recovery run zone, which is 30-45 beats slower than LTHR. For example, if your LTHR was 162, then you'd want to keep your recovery runs above 162-45=117 and below 162-30=132. When I trained using LTHR and I had an LTHR of 162, I'd set my watch to beep if I went over 132 on recovery runs.

Well that would be true for any situation lab or field testing. Yes, I did not go into elaboration, but at the last lab I worked in we did want them to be pretty "fresh" and since they are high level athletes we were confident they would come in well fed and rested. (They had the incentive of competition with others to perform their best.)

I did repeated MaxHR tests and rarely had a gap as large as 5 bpm. As you note even that is not going to change much of anything especially since HR zones should not be taken as strict cutoffs anyway since HR at a given pace can vary from day to day depending on the ambient conditions as well as the person that day. This is a big issue with training by HR. Now matching HR and RPE and I think you are onto something in running :)

Funny, we would have athletes do VO2max tests and often (not always) they would say "I think I could have gone longer". Every time we would say "we can start the treadmill back up" No one ever took us up on that offer!

I agree that LTHR is a good metric for calculating other intensities, and Joe Friel has a calculator that calculates zones From the LTHR.

Are you saying there is no need for a steady zone between recovery and LTHR?

Other than Joe Friel, I haven’t seen other studies on using percentages of LTHR, but presumably they exist?

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I record my max hr reached at the end of every hill reps, vo2 max reps session etc.

What is interesting is that max hr reached does not always tie in with RPE. Some sessions, I can be on my knees gasping for breath, and hr is no higher than say a 5k race. Other sessions, my hr can have reached a few beats higher, and there is much less discomfort.