Interested what people (mostly those with watches) do with their HR metrics, and how they use it to plan their exercises or their pace.
What is your rest HR? What is your maximum? What range are you typically in during exercise? What do you consider healthy? How do you use HR to determine your pace or what exercises to do? Do you have any advice with respect to this topic? Or do you think measuring HR is pure nonsense and we should not bother doing so at all?
I noticed my rest HR is at 50. My runs are mostly at 165-170ish averaged (aged 28), which seems to be fairly high. My last run (a bit faster than usual) had 24 minutes between 158-176 and 18mins higher than 176, at the end I peaked at 192 for an end sprint.
My resting HR is… 55 bpm, apparently. Honestly don’t know what that means.
During runs I use HR as a guide for whether my pace is right for the type of run I’m doing. For an easy run I usually want it under 150 bpm, for a harder run I let it go up to 170ish, although I usually can’t keep that up for more than a few kilometers. It’s easier to look at the number on my wrist than to judge the subtleties of whether I’m going to feel gassed in 20 minutes.
If I break 180 I’m definitely going too fast, and the odd time I approach 190 I feel like I’m about to blackout so I avoid that. Those ones are more obvious and I don’t really need to look at my heart rate for them, though.
The absolute values for heart rate vary from person to person and change as you age. But I do notice that my resting heart rate slowy drops a bit as I get fitter (e.g. during a marathon build) and will rise more suddenly if I am getting sick or not getting enough rest.
I don’t really pay much attention to the heart rate zones on my watch, but I do have a pretty good idea e.g. where my 5k race vs marathon race vs really easy run heart rate lies. This can be one piece of information along with perceived effort and pace to decide if I should be able to push a bit harder on a hard run or take it a bit easier on on what is supposed to be an easy run.
Resting heart rate is a very general indicator of your overall fitness. Lower resting HR typically means you are in better shape. There is no “right” number, but what you should be tracking is trends over time. For example, for me when i am in a training block, my resting HR gets lower as i get stronger. Then when the holidays come and i train less and drink more, you can clearly see a rise in resting HR.
for training paces, look up how to do a basic lactate threshold test. This will help you determine some basic training paces. For example, zone 1 might be anything below 120 bpm. Zone 2 121-140bpm. Zone 3, 141-160bpm… Etc. Up to your max HR. Different HR zones produce different physical adaptations, so training plans will help you pick the right paces to run at each day. You shouldnt just go out and smash it at threshold pace every day.
If your watch is able to track heart rate variability (HRV), thats another useful metric. It’s the variance of time between heartbeats. The heart is not a perfect metronome. Like resting HR, you should track trends over time. HRV is pretty responsive to how your body is feeling. My HRV goes down overnight if i’ve been drinking. Indicating that my body has been under some kind of stress (in this case, ingesting literal poison)
Those are some basics. Lots of material out there on the internets.
I don’t check it often, but it looks like my resting is about 52 bpm. I’ve set my max HR at 175 which is just back of napkin math for a 45yo male.
For running, I have 4 rough bands I keep to.
- 127 - 135 bpm - low zone 2
- 135 - 142 bpm - high zone 2 / low zone 3
- 142 - 150 bpm - zone 3
- 150 - 163 - zone 4
For any particular run, I’ll pick a hr zone and stick to that, pace be damned. Over the course of a year, I saw a gradual decrease in pace for each of those zones. Most of my “running” is in the first 2 bands.
Specific numbers to back that up:
- Low z2 went from 8:23 to 6:24
- High z2 / low z3 went from 7:20 to 6:10
- Z3 went from 6:45 to 5:30
Hope that helps someone find a reference. I know thats not really fast; there’s a lot of bloggers, youtubers etc that are so much faster. I know I will never get to that point. I think its worthwhile sharing these stats so others can see its ok to not be running 4:30 and below on the regular.
That sounds perfectly normal to me.
Personal opinion: as long as you have some variation in your exercise, it’s fine to run without paying too much attention to heart rate. If you run different routes or mix hard with easy runs, you already do most of what heart-rate based training program would make you do, which is to build endurance as well as sprint capability - the former for health and fun, the latter so the uphills don’t kill you :)
As a rule of thumb, non-runners often have resting heart rates in the 60s while active runners find themselves in the low 50s or even 40s. But age, size and genetics all make this number pretty individual.
If you have a newer running watch, they often have a “running power” display in Watts, too. I like to sometimes use that to do runs in a fixed power range. It’s more immediate than heart rate, i.e. it immediately forces you to slow down just a few steps into a climb, but it also demands surprising speed the moment your route levels out again. It at least taught me that by avoiding high-intensity sections, my stamina reserves last for a much greater distance.
