Heart Rate Monitor

My heart rate monitor came today. So instead of doing the 1.5 mile fast run that was scheduled I tried to find my max heart rate(MHR). I found a couple of sites with different methods on how to find it. There are a lot of different ways to just calculate it based on your age. Here are a few that I came across.
220-age=MHR
205-(.5*age)=MHR
210-(.7*age)=MHR

I'm 25 so these calculations come out to 195, 192, 192 respectfully. Obviously these calculations are very general. I did some research and come up with a couple different methods to determine your MHR by doing stress tests on a treadmill. I found a couple other methods that don't involve a treadmill that I'll probably try out later too. But I think it would be easier to use a treadmill, so that's what I did.

One method is after a good warm-up to run as fast as you can for three minutes, rest for two or three minutes, then run for another three minutes at your max pace. During the second three minute run you should hit your MHR. As I found out it's hard to pick the perfect pace for this. As I tend to do I made my pace too fast, which meant I didn't get to my max heart rate because my legs where too tired and I completely died. Amy watched my watch for me and came up with a MHR of 180. I think it would be pretty easy to pick too slow of a pace also.

I was pretty tired so I just sat down and watched the Cavs/Pistons game for awhile. After a quite few minutes I felt pretty good so I decided to give it another go. This time I used method number two. I modified it though, because I didn't remember how it was supposed to go exactly. I started walking at 3 mph with the incline on the treadmill at 1. Every minute I increased the incline by one and every other minute I increased the mph by one. I kept that up for about 10 minutes before I couldn't go any longer. That got my heart rate up to 184. After reading how I was actually supposed to do it I bet I can get it higher than that. So that will probably be my next hard workout.

Overall I wound up running about three miles tonight trying to figure this out, instead of the 1.5 I was supposed to run. But a little over a mile was a warm-up and then there were the easy parts of the first method and the first half of the second method was pretty easy. So I'm say I ran less than 1.5 miles hard but I feel like I got in a pretty good workout.

I calculated my resting heart rate (RHR) as well. This one was a little easier, I just put the HRM on after I got home from work (not the ideal time to find your RHR but you have to play with a new toy once you get it right?) and the lowest heart I hit was 54. Like my max I'll use that until I can prove that it is something else. I'll try and get into the habit of taking my heart rate every morning to see what I come up with.

Why do I care about my max and resting heart rates you might ask? Well when I run I either want to run hard or I want to run easy. There isn't much benefit to running in the middle. When I run easy I want to ensure that my heart rate stays below 70% of my working heart rate. For hard runs I want it around 85%. The following equation is how you can determine your working heart rate.
((MHR-RHR)*intesity%)+RHR=Target Heart Rate

Well I think that's enough info for tonight. After I get a chance to play with all the features on my new watch I'll give a full review on it. I'll continue to write posts about training with a heart rate monitor as I learn more about that too. If you know of any good sources for more information (books, web sites, old guy down the street, etc.) I'd love to read about them in the comments.