Your heart rate zones
Your max three ways, zone 2 and the hard minutes of a 4x4 in beats a minute, with your own session drawn out. Drag your age and watch the formulas drift apart.
Your max, three ways
9 beats between the three at 50. A person's real max sits within about 11 beats of a formula only about 2 times in 3, the spread in the 3,320-person HUNT study. The bands below use 208 minus 0.7 x age.
Zone 2, steady
104 to 121beats a minute
60 to 70 percent of your max, the band most watches call zone 2. A pace where you can still talk.
The 4x4, hard minutes
156 to 164beats a minute
90 to 95 percent of max for 4 minutes, then about 121 (70 percent) for the 3 easy ones.
Your session, with your numbers
A 10-minute warm-up, four rounds of 4 hard and 3 easy minutes, a 5-minute cool-down. Run it with the timer.
What your result means, and what to do next
- Zone 2 is your steady days. Most of your weekly cardio goes here, at a pace where you can still talk in full sentences.
- The hard band is the 4x4. Four minutes there, then three easy, four times, once or twice a week.
- The beats are a starting point. About 1 in 3 people have a real max more than 11 beats from the formula, so check them against how it feels.
- Run one session. The timer beeps each change and shows your band. The 4x4 timer
- Put your real max in your watch once you know it, so its zones and its VO2 max estimate start from the right place.
- On a beta blocker, go by effort, about 16 out of 20 for the hard minutes, and ask your doctor first. Zones on a beta blocker
Three formulas, and why they disagree
220 minus your age is the one everyone knows, but it was never tested in enough older adults and it runs low as you age. Across 351 studies and 18,712 people, 208 minus 0.7 x age fit better (Tanaka 2001). In 3,320 healthy Norwegians who each did a verified max test, 211 minus 0.64 x age fit best, and the older formulas came out low for people over 30 (HUNT 2013). At 50 the three give 170, 173 and 179. At 70, 150, 159 and 166.
Even the best formula misses: in HUNT, a person's real max sat within about 11 beats of the formula only about 2 times in 3. A max you measured in a hard test replaces all three. The bands here use 208 minus 0.7 x age when you don't have one, and what's my max heart rate? shows the range around it.
Zone 2 and the 4x4
Zone 2 is 60 to 70 percent of your max, the band Garmin and most watches use, a pace where you can still talk. The 4x4 is the session from the 2007 trial: 4 minutes at 90 to 95 percent of max, then 3 minutes at about 70 percent, four times.
On a beta blocker
A beta blocker holds your heart rate down, so targets in beats a minute don't apply. Generation 100, the five-year trial in people aged 70 to 77, used the 6 to 20 effort scale: about 16 for the hard minutes and about 13 for steady sessions. Ask your doctor before hard sessions on any heart rate medicine.
6 sources
- Tanaka H and others, Age-predicted maximal heart rate revisited, 2001europepmc.org
- Nes BM and others, Age-predicted maximal heart rate in healthy subjects: the HUNT fitness study, 2013europepmc.org
- Garmin, heart rate zones (Forerunner 245 manual)www8.garmin.com
- Helgerud J and others, Aerobic high-intensity intervals improve VO2max more than moderate training, 2007europepmc.org
- Stensvold D and others, Effect of exercise training for five years on all cause mortality in older adults (Generation 100), BMJ, 2020pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Uth N and others, Estimation of VO2max from the ratio between HRmax and HRrest, 2004europepmc.org
