Max Heart Rate Decline With Age?

Most literature will tell you that MaxHR will certainly drop with age. If you're taking a Beta Blocker for your blood pressure it will certainly lower HRMax, but will probably also lower your resting and submaximal HR as well. There isn't a direct correlation to HRMax and performance, so I wouldn't worry about it too much as long as you're still getting out there and doing what you love.

you know, with honest thoughtful posts like this, you can you my name all you want.

The max heart rate declines for everyone as we age. Alhough looking at yours, you should be happy, your max rate is that of the average 35 year old and with the running, I am sure you are quite successful. I am currently 62 and my max is 167, would be thrilled to have a 185, as long as that is not when I was in atrial fibrillation.

Curious as to how you arrived at 185.

I'll hit 65 in January, and I've been using the formula below to arrive at my MHR(appx 170)

UK Researchers MHR estimate:

Research by Whyte et al. (2008)[7] came up with with the following formulae for predicting maximum heart rates in both endurance and anaerobically trained athletes:

Male athletes - MHR = 202 - (0.55 x age)

I'd kill to have a MHR of 185!!!

I am 63 and the last time I checked my max heart rate with a heart monitor last year, I hit 192. When I was in my mid-40s and first started using a heart monitor I could hit 196. So not much fall off yet, but it seems like a much more taxing effort to hit max HR now doing repeat 200s.

I went from 211 at 18-22 years old to 201 at 27 years old.

A couple of things, if I may. Several folks have mentioned they wished their Max HR was higher. A higher MHR does not increase performance. I have what some cardiologists call a Kawasaki heart: small but a lot of beats per minute. The opposite of my heart has been termed a Diesel heart: larger, but a lot fewer beats per minute. My resting HR is in the mid 50's--that is pretty high for a guy who has run around the world 3x +.

The numerous formulas out there to predict Max HR work for a very small percentage of people. The best way to determine your MHR is to get an OK from your doctor and then go run for 20-30 minutes to warm up, then attack a steep hill and run as hard as you can till you see white spots and you want to gag. That reading will be pretty close. If you do that several times over a few weeks or months and get to pretty close the same results you can be pretty confident you are pretty close to your max.

Having competed in over 450 races-most of them in hot, humid climates I found it pretty easy to get close to my max with my final kick. Example, I ran a1/2 marathon on Sat and averaged 171 for the race, that is 93% of my max. I did get to 183 with my final "kick" near the finish.

Hope this info is helpful.

Aren't you afraid of dying by going so high?

I'm new to the 40s (age) and I would worry about any little variation in my heart rate, especially if I were about the redline on some remote road.

I'm 213 pounds, haven't run but 5 days this year, am 42 and ran 17:16 for a 2-mile Army fitness run which puts me at 72 out of 100 points. I'd like to do more but I worry about doing too much too soon especially at my age. By the sounds of it, a lot of you guys were pretty sprite for your 40s.

My max HR hasn't lowered in the 10 years I've been testing it. Although, I fully realize someday it will be zero.

Mine has certainly come down a bit over the years - I've not tested recently, but I thinks it's around 200 (age 47), whereas it was 220 20 years ago.

It declines for pretty much everyone, but the rate of decline varies a lot, and the rate of decline tends to be less for those who do a lot of aerobic exercise.

Well yeah, I guess so, because I thought the old formula of 220 - your age = max heartrate was pretty accurate. But maybe it depends how much exercise one gets along the way... You seem to have high max heartrates for your age.

The 220-formula was never meant to be accurate for individuals. It's analogous to an estimate of average income for a given group of similar age. You wouldn't expect to have the same income as all of your previous class mates. Thus you shouldn't expect to have the same MHR either.

DoubleNick wrote:

around 185 as I close in on turning 70.

Yep, I'm 65, former marathoner, track athlete, do weights and interval training. HRmax is 185, checked many times with equipment. Resting is 55.

Sounds unusually high, but the formulae are mostly for non-athletes, and it may be more to do with inherent heart dynamics than overt fitness. Even so, one wonders what combining serious aerobic training, heavy weights, and high-intensity intervals does to heart structure.

My max is mid 180s I think. I'm 55, resting 40. Resting had been 38 up until a few years ago.

Ran a 10k a week ago, maxed at 176 for last couple of miles.

The average decline of MHR with age is somewhere between 0.5 and 1 beat per minute, depending on which study you believe. The one I find most convincing (Tanaka et al.) says 0.7 beats per year. This is generally true for athletes too (MHR doesn't have much to do with performance at all; it's resting HR that changes with training).

As other posters have noted, the actual value of MHR is highly individual. About one third of people are more than 10 beats higher or lower than the predictions of age-based formulas. The only way to determine your MHR is to test it by actually maxing out (best way is an incremental stress test, but field tests like back to back all-out 800s or a progressively accelerating 5K work pretty well).

In the end, though, what does it matter? MHR is a pretty meaningless parameter, with no practical implications that I'm aware of (unless it's abnormally low, in which case you'll be hitting max during the course of normal exercise sessions).

Max HR is a misleading term. Nobody's max HR is only 207. Closer to 300. What the heart can do during sustained exercise is nowhere near what it can do under stress or adrenaline.

Why do you care about your MHR? How would you act on that knowledge?

I recorded a MHR of 205 at 19 and 209 at 29. Maybe my decline hasn't started yet, maybe I ran harder the last time, or maybe there is inconsistency between the HR monitors.

Interesting.

I'm 51, and I hit 209 on the stationary bike last week. I was happily shocked I could still hit it that high.