I train with a heart rate monitor, and have been using 149 as my target heart rate. I try to stay between 140-149 while running. This came from using a combination of philosophies. I like Phil Mafftones theories about making all of your training runs easy runs. But his 180 formula (180-age, etc) has always bothered me a bit. Because according to his formula, I should be training, and keeping my heart rate below 127 (180-age-10 {because I take blood pressure meds}). That is pretty low. Even without the medication penalty, it’s 137. All the formulas that use age leave me suspicious. According to common calcuations to estimate max heart rate, my max heart rate should be 177 or 183. But I have tested it running intervals on a hill, and had it up to 193. Anyway, I question his formula, but I like his ideas of all runs staying in the aerobic zone.
But there are many different ideas on how to find your aerobic zone. I have been using the Karvonen Fomula which uses both max heart rate and resting heart rate (mine is 45). And I have been running at 70%. So that works out to (193-45)*0.7+45=148.5 which I rounded to 149.
But I am starting to play with changing my target heart rate to 145. I want to see how this works. I have had to slow down a bit. I will try this for a while, and see if I see improvements. Who knows, maybe I will drop my target heart rate even further. Maybe to 140.

Posted by Rob in Running on February 22nd, 2007 |