Is my heart rate too high when I exercise?

how long have you been doing your exercise routine?

when i first started exercising regularly, my heartrate would get reach over 200 in a matter of minutes and the damn machines would beep at me telling me to "slow down to decrease heartrate" even when I wasn't going crazy.

now, i hardly go above 160-170 max unless i'm REALLY going all out for several minutes at a time... and i'm still pretty overweight so i think my endurance is just increasing. it's still well over the recommended (according to the machine) range for high intensity cardio for my age, but i still have a lot of work to do and who knows how accurate those charts are...

When I go running my heartrate gets into the same range without pushing myself too hard, but it's usually up a fairly steep hill, and whenever I do leg excercises I.e. lunges squats. It really gets my heart going, I think if it doesnt hurt you should be okay, also if it starts to get really close to 200 take a few seconds to rest.

Max heart rate should be 220-age. For me it's 179. But that is the maximum

When you start with cardio it is likely that u get above this maximum. But it should get less and less the more you do.

When you are no more over your max heart rate look at your recovery heart rate. This is the best indicator for your fitness.

Recovery heart rate is meassured just after a good cardio session. You meassure the beats and wait 2 minutes and meassure
again. The difference is the recovery heart rate.

eg 145 just after cardio - 110 two minutes after first reading = 35

So the recovery heart rate is 35 which is a good reading.

Hope this helps

Max heart rate should be 220-age. For me it's 179. But that is the maximum

When you start with cardio it is likely that u get above this maximum. But it should get less and less the more you do.

When you are no more over your max heart rate look at your recovery heart rate. This is the best indicator for your fitness.

Recovery heart rate is meassured just after a good cardio session. You meassure the beats and wait 2 minutes and meassure
again. The difference is the recovery heart rate.

eg 145 just after cardio - 110 two minutes after first reading = 35

So the recovery heart rate is 35 which is a good reading.

Hope this helps

Thanks for the info!! :flowerforyou:

In the commonly used terminology of heart rate monitor aided training, max heart rate is not some target or theoretical value. It is literally the max heart rate you can reach at 100% effort. You cannot go above this value. 220-age is a way of approximating this value, but it is very inaccurate --- my measured max has not changed much in 20 years.

The best way to find your max heart rate is to test it by wearing a heart rate monitor and doing intense exercise ---- an all out mile running or a 800 meter hill all out. The result is useful for calculating training zones if you want to do heart rate monitor based training --- e.g. workout plans that specify 70% of max HR on easy days (which I think is actually supposed to be resting hr plus 70% of the difference between resting and max). This is useful in running when you are doing hard/easy training (which pretty much any plan calls for) because most people do easy days too hard and hard days too easy. Other that that, I would not worry too much about it (assuming you have had a physical lately and have no cardiac issues). But, of course I'm not a doctor nor an expert, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I've started exercising more recently and I noticed that when I run on the treadmill my HR gets quite high (180-190) quite quickly.

Can you keep your heart rate there for 30 minutes?