excellent news for me from the New York Times

[khedron]

I've always wondered about "standard" max. heart rates vs. individual variation, since even a couple minutes of jogging gets me up to 180. According to the standard, my maximum should be 188, but if I hit 180 without all-out running or going up hill, I wondered, is it bad? This bit out of an NYT article about numeric obsession and exercise made me very happy:

Mr. Guy's monitor came with a chart telling what a person's maximum heart rate should be. Maximum heart rates normally fall by about a beat a minute each year. No one knows why. The formula used for the charts says a person's maximum heart rate is 220 minus age, which would make Mr. Guy's maximum 168 beats a minute.

But exercise physiologists have long known that such charts are not accurate for some exercisers, and Mr. Guy's own experience shows the chart does not work for him. He has raised his heart rate to 175 during a burst of effort.

"There is large variability in the maximum heart rate," said Steven Blair, the president and chief executive of the Cooper Institute, a nonprofit research foundation that studies exercise and fitness. "For one 35-year-old woman 170 might be her maximum heart rate. Her friend the same age might be able to reach 195. That's just genetic variation."

Mr. Guy, however, had a nagging worry: Is it dangerous to push your heart rate too high?

"Nope," Dr. Blair said. "You can't hurt a healthy heart with exercise."

If you get your heart rate close to its true maximum, you feel so depleted that you automatically slow down. Just as you can't hold your breath until you die, you can't drive your heart rate up until your heart gives out.

Comments

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

I actually disregarded those entirely -- I asked my doctor, and she said "You can do whatever you normally do as long as you don't push yourself TOO hard", so I try to keep it easygoing.

What I stumbled upon is the fact that this is extrapolated from pregnant people having high fevers and there's no research on exercisers to back this up.

That's ridiculous. Arrrrgh.