Why do people use heart rate for training without testing max?

It also said his resting hr is 44, which surprised me a bit since mine's lower.

If you run a mile or 5K all out, there's a good chance your max HR is probably your actual max.

If you run an all out 800, rest 90sec and then run an all out 400, whatever your max HR is from that is probably your max (and yes, that's an old Hadd thing).

Even if you want to estimate, there's far better formulas than 220-age. By now it's such common knowledge that 220-age is a bad HR formula that you should be free to openly ridicule anyone who cites it. If you're going to estimate your max, a better formula is (211 - (0.64*age)).

You could also determine your lactate threshold HR from a test, presume that's 90% of your max, and then work backward to estimate a max HR.

It's really hard to know your max HR even if you do some kind of a test. If I'm ever inclined to train off heart rate I use Joe Friel's method for estimating lactate threshold heart rate and use that to set the zones.

The variance day-to-day will be like a couple bpm though, instead of 10-20 like using the formula.

This is pretty common among adults new to distance running. They go and buy all the gear, read through every post on Reddit, and then start talking out of their ass about zones or hr training like they know anything.

Like total missing the forest for the trees type behavior where they overanalyze their HRV on an easy run, focus on their cadence, or talk about getting a vo2 test. But in reality their running 40mpw during their marathon training and wonder why they can't get within 30 minutes of their bq qual time.

It's utter laziness masking as a 'science based' approach to running. Like these idiots don't even realize 1) their HR data is unreliable since it's from their watch, 2) it's nearly meaningless when evaluated in isolation (IE not taking 'feel' into acc, or environmental factors, or addtl stressors), and 3) their gonna have a ton of HR drift because their undertrained

I agree on the use of 5000m peak HR as being close enough. If you are 1-2 bpm off that is really meaningless. Then factor in that for a lot of folks, when they taper properly their HRmax will increase a few beats.

You can kind of figure out what your max is from your training runs. Mine is very high still. So I'm easily in creeping past 190s during comfortable enough tempo runs. You just have to compare where you're at your base rate. My easy runs are in 140s so everything evens out in the end. I see some people who in 100s but they also don't go much beyond 180s.

if you run hard often, and there's a point at which you can say "I've never seen my HR go above here", you can reasonably assume your max HR is pretty close to that.