The next time I reluctantly met my new mentor he sat down with me to explain some things before we started the training.

“You may have seen some information about heart rate monitor training printed in leaflets, or on the treadmill itself. Perhaps you’ve looked at the pretty graph of heart rate training zones. For example, they say you can check your heart rate to ensure that you are training in the fat burning zone, or the aerobic zone. Well, I want you to forget all that nonsense!”

“The heart rate monitor training method I’m going to show you is simple and effective.”

He had my attention. Simple and effective is good.

“The first thing we need to do is establish some numbers to work to. I’m afraid I’m going to have to be indelicate and ask your age, because I can then estimate your maximum heart rate. Unless you would prefer to start with a stress-test to get a more accurate number and keep your age secret?”.

Stress Test? Two of the worst words in the English language!  I gave him my age.

“Right. Now I’m going to apply a quick and dirty formula to estimate some very important figures. Namely your Maximum Heart Rate, your Recovery Ceiling and your Threshold Floor.”

He wrote the calculations down for me. This was how he did the first one:

Estimated Maximum Heart Rate

Start with 205

Subtract half your age

Add 5 for women (0 for men)

If you are following along with this, 40 year old men would have an estimated maximum heart rate of

205 – (40 / 2) + 0 = 185

Whereas 40 year old women’s heart rate monitor maximum would be estimated as

205 – (40 / 2) + 5 = 190

[Note: This is the first number that will be entered into your personal heart rate chart when calculating your own heart rate training program.]

Clearly, not all 40 year old men or 40 year old women will actually have maximum heart rates to match those numbers. In fact, I’ll warrant that statistically, the majority will not match those numbers. They are nonetheless a useful starting point, and far better than anything that I had used up to that point – which was zilch.

“I’d now like you to put this Heart Rate Monitor strap on, so that I can reasonably calculate the next number.”

He could see that I was looking a little worried about what was coming up next.

“Don’t worry.” he said “In fact, it’s very important that you are very chilled-out and relaxed for the next step. Now, before you go to put this on I should point something out…..”

“The heart rate monitor strap has some electrodes at the front and we want to make sure that we get a good reading – even though you haven’t started exercising yet. So please remember to wet the sensor’s that are in contact with your chest.”

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