Changing Max HR

stowerider

Hi,

This reply is kind of late but here you go -

My max increased during the season - for example on similar rides I saw my max increase from about 192 in March to 200 by the middle of the summer.

The reason that your max suddenly spiked to 202 could be due to a number of reasons - was this a one-off, were you going on similar rides, dehydration, cardiac drift. Or its possible that when you saw your max drop to 195 that this was an anomoly - again was this is a one-off, for a short period of time, were you tired etc.
Although my max is 200 - it doesn't mean that everytime I ride I hit this max - even going on fast group rides I see different figures from week to week. The numbers are all in a narrow range - all in the 190+ range.

If you're tracking your max and avg HR then you might find it more useful to compare results between similar rides than between all rides. For example if you go on a fast club ride every tuesday you might find that your HR readings are more consistent with each other than comparing them to the thursday night ride that you do by yourself.

When I train alone its very difficult for me to hit my max. One thing that i have noticed is that if I'm doing intervals and pushing a large gear at a low cadence (say a 53 X 11 at 70 rpm) then my max HR for my workout will be <190 bpm. However if I'm doing some faster cadence intervals (53 X 16 at 90+ rpm) then I will have a max HR >190 bpm for that workout. For the faster cadence workouts, my aerobic system is doing more of the work and not surprisingly I track a higher avg and max HR than compared to the big gear/low cadence intervals.

S