Max Heart Rate Decline With Age?

Yes heart rate appears to decline with training, but this is because we gain an increase in blood plasma. When plasma is shifted out ot the blood during a hard effort, the heart rate goes up, and you might find, with the right kind of test that you can get your max heart rate much higher.

Well interesting all this about Mhr.Mine at 51 should be 172 ,went for 12km run today and Hit 211.My History is when I was 19 my heart rate could go as low as 45 resting and I was bloody fit running marathons .by my early 20s I gave it away .I have only been running again since February .So what is my Max ,I do be leave it will go higher when I push myself to max!

About 6 years ago when I was 48, I would run hills and be hurting pretty bad with a peak HR of 168. I thought "Man, I am getting old." But then I did a winter experiment doing pool running, that is running on the bottom of a pool with shoes in mid-chest deep water. After 3 months of building up to 2-1/2 to 3 hour pool runs (and nearly losing my mind), I began introducing more and more running. When I ran my first road 5K my HR was 190 by half-way, and soon up to 200. I felt GREAT! All I wanted to do was step on the gas more. And my race times dropped and dropped. Now I understood what it meant to patiently build my aerobic engine. A few months later, in early autumn, I hit a peak HR of 216 in a race. I am 54 now, and the past few years I have had the same experience (but doing my aerobic base building mostly on hilly, soft trails) that when I really lay it down in a race I can hit around 212. I am a 1-mile/5,000m specialist, but have done runs up to 50 miles. After such an effort, even though the average pace was only 10:30/mile, my resting HR would remain around 60bpm for about 3 weeks. It has been in the 40bpm range since I was about 15 years old. So I repeated the easy base building, this time with ultrarunner friends doing easy 2-3 hour runs at 12-15 min/mile, just easy running/hiking over hilly trails. Happily, my heart recovered and returned to 40bpm. I patiently rebuilt my aerobic base over 5 months in the autumn-winter period, and had a great spring racing season. I concluded from this that our hearts need a break from even moderate training, and from all racing, and that heart health can be improved by gentle, low-aerobic training. During this learning time, events in the running world occurred such as Ryan Shay's death in the US Olympic marathon trial (and the autopsy finding that he had a scarred heart), and Micah True's (Caballo Blanco) death (and also finding a scarred heart). The past two years I had great autumn-winter aerobic base building periods, and just kept getting faster (over 90% age-graded for the mile and 5,000m). But in 2013 I extended my racing with races here and there as part of a club championship series. Winning my age-group against stiff competition in that year-long series as well as running a fall marathon left me stopping at the 3-mile mark in a 5-mile race and dry heaving for 45 seconds. Finished the race and clinched the series, but after that year and the marathon I was done. I won't do that again! Now, once again I am doing very easy aerobic base building and seeing great results. But this time my races will be few and far between. I think I have learned something valuable about respecting my body and coaxing satisfying performances from it.

I'd expect your medicine to affect MHR, so that could explain your results.

To me, your max is amazing, never mind the fact that you're nearing 70.

My max has hovered consistently around 204 since I was in my 20s. I was at 206 when 25, and I hit 204 a couple weeks ago during a test (age 44).