yesterday i took a spinning class with my school’s cycling club. not wanting to be outdone by anyone, i worked as hard as, if not harder than, everyone else. (i could’ve told them about my 1.5 hour run that morning, but chose not to).
so we were doing a paceline drill for a little while, where one by one we did 30 seconds of max-effort. i figured this would be a good way to find my max heart rate. after the 2nd time through, my hr was 199. i am 20.5 years old, so this seemed about right. i was pleased.
20 minutes later, we did the same paceline drill, but this time the interval was 20 seconds. so i tried to work a little bit harder. this time, my heart rate was 211.
211? whoa.
within 30 seconds, it was down to 160, and then 15 seconds later it was down to 140
i didn’t feel bad at all, definitely no chest pains or dizziness or even that much fatigue… i was breathing hard, but like i said, i recovered pretty fast. but should my heart be able to go that fast? is this healthy?
It is not unusual for an active person, especially someone that has been active for many years, to have a higher max heart rate. I believe Tom’s max heart rate is around 211 and he is in his 40’s.
Rich Strauss has some good tests on his site that you might be interested in.
For some people heart rate max is also a function of stroke volume. If you have slightly lower stroke volume you may have made a natural adaptation to have a higher maximal heart rate.
To be able to recover from over 200 to under 160 in only thirty seconds is extremely unusual.
It sounds like you are extremely fit and perhaps a contributing factor may be the inherit inaccuracy of some HRMs at the outer limits of their measuring capability.
“heart rate max is also a function of stroke volume”
of course! how could i be so forgetful? as a student of biomedical engineering, i spent a solid 8 weeks getting drilled on the mathematics of the vascular system. as it happens, i do have a murmur, caused by a leaky valve. having gotten an echocardiogram and a green light to train from the doctor, i guess there’s some backwash, but not in a valve that is subject to a lot of pressure (ie whichever one separates the left ventricle from the left atrium). which explains the inefficiency.
“a contributing factor may be the inherit inaccuracy of some HRMs at the outer limits of their measuring capability”
sounds right too. another class i had to suffer through was signals and systems, in which i learned that sampling rate can have a dramatic affect on things. according to some theory or other, a heart rate of 211 would need a sampling rate of at least 211/60 x 2 Hz. maybe my cheap p.o.s. doesn’t have that.
“it sounds like you are extremely fit”
thanks! it means a lot, coming from someone who’s opinions i trust and enjoy reading.
You’re referring to the Mitral valve…and it is subjected to the maximum pressure your left ventricle exerts. Mitral valve insufficiency (or regurgitation, or leak) isn’t uncommon. It also isn’t uncommon for people with MR to have atrial arrhythmias arising from stretched left atrial wall foci. Atrial arrhythmias are often of the very high heartrate type…just keep an eye on it. If you feel your heart racing when it shouldn’t be, call your doctor. Really. If it is an atrial arrhythmia, there is a chance of a blood clot being formed, which can be very dangerous. It if only occurs once in a blue moon, you can probably safely ignore it.
another class i had to suffer through was signals and systems
Hey, I suffered through that about 20 years ago!
according to some theory or other, a heart rate of 211 would need a
sampling rate of at least 211/60 x 2 Hz. maybe my cheap p.o.s.
doesn’t have that.
Well, that’s if you have a sample of infinite precision with no
jitter, and enough time to work it all out. (Fourier transforms are
mathematically precise but have their real-world limitations.) But
yeah, depending on the system your HRM uses, there may be some
non-linearities at higher rates. I’d guess that if it is responsive at
190 bpm, it would be pretty hard to be very inaccurate at 210.
But then again, signals and systems was a long time ago.
Oh yeah I feel the same, altough I’m 15 years younger.
On our hard runs (that are longer than 1000m), my HR can climb pretty quickly. I’ve run a 3000m on an average HR of 199.
Last Saturday I ran a 10k on an average of 194. Maximum at the end was 207. Went something like 42:4x.
Resting HR is around 60-62.
On a different note, I have a friend who’s a little younger than you (18), who’s morning HR is 30 and resting around 42. He can’t even go above 190 (i’m pretty sure). When he did reach that high he was running a 5:45 2k.
no, i was the only one in the class with a hrm. otherwise, that’s plausible.
as far as resting(morning) heart rates are concerned, mine is about 48-52, depending on how hard i worked, and then 56ish if i’m just sitting in class … and then i’m just happy to not be comatose.
my frat brother, who’s premed, just sent me an article explaining to me that i must’ve gone tachycardic to have that high of a heart rate - ie, i should be dead. ha!
Ah, yes, the new med student…learning about lots of that stuff can mess up their minds…but, your frat brother is correct, you were tachycardic, if your heartrate was anything over 100! It just depends upon your definition. You weren’t inappropriately tachycardic until you reach a level that decreases your cardiac output…like what often happens while exercising then going in to atrial fibrillation. But, as far as “should be dead”, well, there are people having arrhythmias all the time…it depends upon the type of arrhythmia, the length of time spent in the arrhythmia, the effect on carotid and coronary blood flow, the relative state of health of the individual, what the person was doing when the arrhythmia occurred, etc.
You could have had a signal interferance with your monitor. You could, especially with your reported history of Mitral valve insufficiency, had a short period of atrial fibrillation or atrial tach. Neither of which will kill a healthy person, unless it is intractable (I’m talking about lasting hours to days) and a clot forms in the atrium, which subsequently embolizes somewhere important…like your brain or a coronary artery…THEN, it really could kill you. That’s why I said, if it happens every once in a while just for a few seconds, you’re probably safe to ignore it. However, if it ever lasts a long time, you need to be defibrillated, or at least, anticoagulated.
FWIW I am 44 and my LT, as measured by Conconi deflection point, is 183. I regularly get readings of 195-199. Estimated max is between 205 and 213.
There appears to be a lot of people with “unusually” high max heart rates - doesn’t that make it “usual” . Comments like “Yes it is” lack substance Sleepy.
“a contributing factor may be the inherit inaccuracy of some HRMs at the outer limits of their measuring capability”
sounds right too. another class i had to suffer through was signals and systems, in which i learned that sampling rate can have a dramatic affect on things. according to some theory or other, a heart rate of 211 would need a sampling rate of at least 211/60 x 2 Hz. maybe my cheap p.o.s. doesn’t have that.
I couldn’t resist commenting on your signal processing comment. A heart rate signal has to be sampled much higher than twice maximum HR for a HRM. The reason is that the heartrate signal is mostly a flat line with the heart contraction a sudden discreet event. Sampling at just twice the expected maximum contraction rate would most of the time miss the contraction. So I guessing that the sampling rate is closer to 10X or 100X expected heart rate. This would make the higher heart rate readings just as accurate as the lower heart rate readings. Maybe someone with a tie in to one of the HRM manufacturers could give us some input on the higher heart rate accuracy.
Polar ain’t got nothin’ on my Physio-Control 12 lead. Yeah, sure it’s a little heavy and the strip draggin’ behind me is a pain in the ass, especially on long runs, but you can’t beat the accuracy.
It is not unusual for an active person, especially someone that has been active for many years, to have a higher max heart rate.
Yes it is.
Is it that that active person’s max heart rate is lower, or is it that it is harder for the active person to hit their max heart rate? What is it that actually makes the max heart rate go down?
I sincerely doubt that they directly sample the signal coming from the heart rate strap. That wouldn’t be very cost effective - they probably use a peak detection or band pass filter to create nice wide pulses that can be digitally sampled easily at low frequencies. If that is the case, the maximum heart rate is limited to a combination of the time constant of the analog circuit and the Nyquist frequency of the adc. If I were to guess a sampling frequency, something like 500Hz would be more than adequate ( max HR of 250Hz - min HR of 20Hz = 230 * 2 ).
The real trick do accurate ecg measurement (especially in these devices) is removing muscle noise from the signal so they would commonly use three filters: 1) notch 50/60Hz, 2) band stop 35Hz- the muscle interference band, 3) high pass 0.5Hz -drift compensation
If they sample this digitally and use and FFT (I would not - something like a CZT would probably work better) then the accuracy of any single heart frequency reading will be determined by the window size (time) of the fft. Scientists would sample much higher and use wavelets to analyze.
