 Hey guys, today we're going to talk about maximum heart rate. We're going to talk about what that means from a physiological standpoint. Is there such a thing as a good maximum heart rate? Is it a trainable factor? Can you train your max heart rate? How can we test or find out our max heart rate? Is it possible to just use a formula like some people do? And once we have our max heart rate, how do we use that as a training tool? Those are some of the questions that I'm going to answer in this video. If you're interested in that, stay tuned. So first of all, the heart obviously beats to pump blood around the body. And in that blood are red blood cells with hemoglobin. That's a protein that transports oxygen from the air we breathe in. The air goes into the lungs and oxygen diffuses across the membrane and attaches to that hemoglobin in the red blood cells. And the heart pumps the blood around the body and delivers it to the working muscle and other tissues. And oxygen is a really key determinant of endurance running performance because the more oxygen you can get to the muscles, the better, essentially, and the faster you can run, especially if you're able to also extract that oxygen by having muscle full of mitochondria, etc. But that's another video. The point is that pumping capacity is key. And there's essentially two ways that your heart can pump more blood. One of them is to pump more blood per beat. And the other one is to pump more often. So more beats per minute increased heart rate. That's what heart rate is, how many beats per minute. As you get fitter, your heart gets bigger and stronger and your stroke volume, the amount of blood per beat, gets bigger. So that means you can supply more blood at a lower heart rate because your blood is pumping more blood per beat so it doesn't have to pump as often, right? If you've got a weak small heart then there's very little blood or there's less blood being pumped per beat and thus in order to meet the requirements, when you go for a run or whatever, or just for a daily life your heart has to pump faster in order to deliver the same amount of blood, right? Makes sense. And that gets better with training. So when you're training you improve the heart's ability to pump more blood for each beat. Now, the other way was to increase the rate, right? So pumping more often means you're also getting more blood and if you pump more often with a bigger stroke volume you're going to get even more blood delivered. At a certain point though you'll reach your maximum heart rate and a lot of people don't know this but your maximum heart rate is actually not trainable. It's genetically and atomically determined so you're sort of stuck with the max heart rate that you have and it's not actually relevant. I mean there are some interpretations that it might have some relevance obviously but really realistically speaking there are people performing at the highest level in running with a max heart rate of 210 and some other people running the same pace the same time just as good a performer and their max heart rate is 160, right? So 160 because it's a lower heart rate and 210 doesn't mean that you're fitter and 210 doesn't mean that you're fitter either. Oh wow that's what a high max heart rate you have amazing. You've got to be so, no, it has nothing to do with fitness, okay? You can have people that are super fit and super not unfit and they can have the same max heart rate, okay? So the difference then comes more in stroke volume as well as many other factors of course of fitness. And of course just a quick reminder if you're interested in learning more about this or perhaps making it more practical and applying it to your training. I am a coach, I offer coaching for people. We can also do single consultations that you know it's not really related to a training plan or anything but just talking about stuff like this if you're interested you can always check out what I offer. The link is in the description to my coaching website, MGJCoaching. Check it out, all right? Back to the heart. So that's the first thing I wanted to tell you and explain that you know you are born with a max heart rate so to speak. You can't change it with training and it's not an indicator of fitness. It does go down with age though as you grow older your maximum heart rate will go down a little bit, little by little but you can maintain it better if you train a lot versus if you didn't. So how do you determine your maximum heart rate you ask? Well, a lot of times people will use formulas like 220 minus your age that sort of thing. That's just for statistical purposes. That's just if you have like a huge group of people you can sort of calculate an average typical max heart rate for that person and gives you an idea. But for any given person that is probably going to be wrong. So you cannot rely on those formulas for calculating your max heart rate. You can have a 50 year old man who should have had a max heart rate of 170 if you took 220 minus his age but his max heart rate is actually 195, right? And if it's 195 is his max and you're calculating 170 all your calculations are going to be completely wrong and your zones are going to be wrong, etc. So you cannot do that if you want to rely on your heart rate as a training tool you've got to do a max heart rate test. How to do it? Well, actually just a simple prescription would be there's different ways to do it but warm up for 15 minutes jogging easy then you take 5 minutes of just progressing faster and faster but still keeping it fairly moderate, getting the system revved, getting ready then you find yourself a long hill, not too steep though actually shouldn't be too steep at all but should be pretty long sloping upwards where you can drive that heart rate really high you could do it on the track but if you want to sort of really get the highest heart that you could you probably want to have a hill and what you'll do is just run for like 3 or 4 minutes up that hill controlled effort you don't want to sprint because then you'll just end up burning out too quickly and slowing down and you won't reach your max heart rate it takes a bit of time actually to get your heart rate up it takes about 2 minutes to reach max heart rate so going for 3 or even 4 minutes up that hill will drive that heart rate up then you record what your heart rate is at the top you jog back down if you have a very long hill you can just jog a little bit down then you don't have to go all the way down again let's say 2 to 3 minutes recovery and then you do it again same thing just steady hard effort you're going to go hard ok it's supposed to be hard but not so hard that you can't complete it with the steady pace get to the top record your heart rate if it's higher than before well you go back down and do it again and do it again until you get the same reading 2 times in a row at the top then basically you've probably plateaued and you've reached your max heart rate you could always just add at the end of the last rep you could add like 15 seconds of just going absolutely berserk which could drive your heart rate up a couple of beats more so that's your max heart rate how to test it and then here's another thing people don't realize and that is the relevant number when you're looking at someone's effort based on heart rate it's not their actual heart rate it's the percentage of their maximum heart rate so if your max heart rate is 200 150 is 75% of that max so for you 150 is 75% and that's actually a fairly easy effort easy to moderate maybe like let's suppose someone else has a max heart rate of 160 if they are running at 150 they're actually at like 94-95% of their max which is a lot different from 75% so they're actually going all out almost they're at their VO2 max whereas the other person also running at 150 they're more like easy effort conversational pace so the absolute number in terms of heart rate is not as relevant as the percentage of their max heart rate which is why it's so important to know your max heart rate also worth noting here at the end of the video is that your stroke volume will actually plateau or start to plateau at relatively easy effort if you're at like 60-70% of your max heart rate that's an easy effort your stroke volume is very close to as high as it will ever be on that day for example so running faster will elicit a higher heart rate the heart beats faster to get more blood out but the amount of blood pumped per beat will not necessarily increase as much as you would think so from that point onwards actually a lot of the additional blood supply actually comes from frequency rather than amount per beat which means again that even if you're training easy your heart is actually beating very hard it's getting a good workout even if you're running easy and easy running should certainly form the basis and the majority of your running so that's it for the max heart rate video summing up your max heart rate is genetically determined you can't change it much but you can maintain it higher for longer because it goes down with age by training the more relevant factor for your fitness progression in terms of your cardiac development is going to be the stroke volume the amount of blood pumped per beat which is determined in large by the size of the heart which grows and becomes stronger it's a muscle remember, the heart the relevant number when measuring someone's effort is not their absolute heart rate but rather the percentage of their maximal heart rate and how do you measure max heart rate? you just go hard for three minutes repeatedly and maybe towards the end of the session you go even harder yet just to drive that heart rate up and by the end of the session you should have a good reading of your max heart rate and if you're looking at a graph you should actually be able to see that it's sort of plateaus it plateaus rather than trending up, trending up as long as it's trending up then there's more heart rate to go but at a certain point the heart is beating as fast as it can and you're just at a plateau check out my coaching link post a comment what's your max heart rate let me know in the comment and subscribe of course and stay tuned for more videos thanks for watching bye