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New study may have come up with a more accurate estimate for healthy women to predict peak exercise heart rate.
Ladies, we may have been making things harder on ourselves for a lot of years. A new study out of my home town (Chicago) may have come up with a more accurate estimate for healthy women to predict peak exercise heart rate.
The only true way to find out maximum exercise heart rate is to perform a max Vo2 test in the lab or equipped fitness center. And since that's not the most convenient option, most folks use the standard 220 – your age formula to get a "guess timate" to then figure out exercise heart rate zones. So get this, all these years we've been basing our numbers on research that included only men.
Those days are finally over. A large study from Northwestern Medicine has developed a better calculation to estimate peak exercise heart rate for us gals. These new numbers will also help doctors determine if women are having an abnormal response to exercise, which often is an indicator for disease.
So for the first time there's a formula that will give us a reference range for just women. As Martha Gulati MD, assistant professor of medicine and cardiologist at Northwestern Medicine, said, "Women are not small men. There is a gender difference in exercise capacity a women can achieve. Different physiologic responses can occur."
The new calculation is 206 – 88% of age. So, here's an example: Let's say I'm 50 (not quite, but it's a round number). The old formula would give me an estimated max heart rate of 170. The new formula 162. Since most people figure there exercise heart rate zones to be 65-85% of their predicted max, those 8 beats per minute could make a difference. 105-138 new range compared to 111-146 for the old. The old ranges were too high for some women, where now they're able to hit their range a lot easier.
This new formula is a bit trickier to figure, but I think it might be better. What do you think? Try it out and let us know in the comment section if you think it's a better tool?