Dirt road running and bodyweight excercise nutrition advice?

[Nidan Melbourne]

Your Max Heart Rate is 220 - your age. But to be more specific and accurate you want to do 208 - (0.7 * your age) which is called the tanaka formula.

220-age is a complete myth, and one of the worst estimates to float around in exercise science. There is no way to know a person's maximum heart rate without clinical testing, and even then it may be off some. For example, I am 46 and I regularly hit 190+ on interval training.

Also, I tend not to recommend heart rate zone based training, as there are too many variables that can affect the heart rate either up or down, without changing the relative effort level.

Here's an interesting writeup of the various estimation methods, and the error regression levels for the various formulae:

http://www.cyclingfusion.com/pdf/220-Age-Origins-Problems.pdf

You can find other formulae and discussions on google scholar.

John

That's why I suggested the other formula. I am a clinical exercise physiologist for a career. HR training is actually proven to be good for weight loss and training. But for some people they can only do it in the precence of a medical practitioner as they are considered a high risk patient.

But a persons MHR is affected by how healthy the person is. So you might be really healthy so you have ensured your heart can go at a higher intensity than those of the same age that are unhealthy

[Aodhan]

That's why I suggested the other formula. I am a clinical exercise physiologist for a career. HR training is actually proven to be good for weight loss and training. But for some people they can only do it in the precence of a medical practitioner as they are considered a high risk patient.

But a persons MHR is affected by how healthy the person is. So you might be really healthy so you have ensured your heart can go at a higher intensity than those of the same age that are unhealthy

Mmm...we can agree to disagree on the efficacy of HR training, although it's probably more applicable to an untrained person than it is to a trained person.

And MHR is a genetic determination. Fitness merely indicates how close you can get to your MHR. An untrained person won't be able to get very close to it, where a trained person might. But, MHR itself is a genetic factor.

John