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.

  • fivemmvegemite
    3·
    10 months ago

    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.