What kind of maximum heart rate are elite runners hitting?

September 26, 2020 7:43 AM

I am having an argument with a friend. And I claimed that I think elite runners are very capable of going well over 200, or even 210 BPM. I can't find any reliable article to back this up. I found a reddit thread where plenty of people claimed over 210 or even 220. But can someone help me find an article with reliable data? Thanks!!
posted by maxexam to Health & Fitness (15 answers total)

Here, these are from a book:

During the last weekly mile, he tested the device on a sixth-grade girl who was thin but not the least bit athletic. When Lawler downloaded her stats, he couldn't believe what he fount. "Her average heart rate was 187!" he exclaims. As an eleven-year-old, her maximum heart rate would have been roughly 209, meaning she was plugging away pretty close to full tilt. "When she crossed the finish line, she waent up to 209," Lawler continues. "Ding, ding, ding! I said, You gotta be kidding me! Normally, I would have gone to that girl and said, You need to get your ass in gear, little lady! It was really that moment that caused dramatic changes in our overall [physical education] program. The heart rate monitors were a springboard for everything. I started thinking back to all the kids we must have turned off to exercise because we weren't able to give them credit. I didn't have an athlete in class who knew how to work as hard as that little girl."
He realised that being fast didn't necessarily have anything to do with being fit.

and

When Michelle and Krissy finally saunter over, Duncan asks for their times, but Michelle's watch is still running. Apparently, she didn't hit the blue button. Krissy did, though, and their times are the same. She holds up her wrist for Duncan. "Ten twelve," he says, noting the time on his clipboard. What he doesn't say is, "It looked like you two were really loafing around out there!"
The fact is, they weren't. When Duncan downloads Michelle's monitor, he'll find that her average heart rate during her ten-minute mile was 191, a serious workout even for a trained athlete. She gets an A for the day.

from Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey, Eric Hagerman
posted by aniola at 8:03 AM on September 26, 2020 [4 favorites]

It's just talking about kids in a school, they aren't elite athletes ( I think that's part of the point, though).
posted by aniola at 8:05 AM on September 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think it's generally the case that elite athletes will have a much lower resting heart rate, rather then a higher performance heart rate. Certainly if you're talking about long distance runners anything sustained in the >200 range could be fatal. Sprinters will hit higher numbers, but I can't find any legit sites that suggest it's possible/safe/advisable to be anywhere near 200bpm.

The common formula* for Max Heart Rate (MHR) is subtracting your age in years from 220 to determine your maximum heart rate, and you're not supposed to exceed 80-90% of that number for extended periods (where extended is more then 1 minute) pro athlete or not. So a 20 year old athlete would be targeting 170bpm (85% of 200), and as they get fitter and their heart gets stronger and pumps more blood per beat that number will only go down.

*That formula while popular is not (according to Wikipedia) very scientific, however even if you go with the more proven studies, e.g. MHR = 211 − (0.64 × age) you still won't get anywhere near 200 for any adult.

I think most people are reddit are b.s.ing most of the time, and comments there about fitness, penis size, income and number of sexual partners are the ones I would trust the least.

There is one article that mentions an adult hitting a sustained >200 bpm heart rate cited on Wikipedia, from the NY Times article 'Maximum' Heart Rate Theory Is Challenged, but I think the key quote in the article is that "there's not a textbook in the world that says a person could have done that.'' In other words, the exception that proves the rule.

So if the question was does this ever happen even once, you probably win on the basis of the NYT article. If the question is whether it's common among elite athletes (aka the ones actually running not commenting on reddit) then the science does not seem to back that up.
posted by tiamat at 8:14 AM on September 26, 2020 [6 favorites]

I coach, for a living, in a high performance sport. Ie I plan in 4 (or in this case 5) year quads and the the most important KPI for our program will be the number of medals we win in Tokyo next summer. Y'know, should there be a games to attend and if our country actually sends us. </derail>

What I can tell you about athletes at this level is that there is extremely little general advice, rules of thumbs and/or other heuristics that apply in any meaningful way. We complete all of our sport-specific workouts (those that aren't lumped under "cross training") with wearable heart rate monitors. We have regular testing that (historically and once more eventually - COVID permitting) includes a bevy of metrics including HRs, lactated, Rate of Percieved Exertion (RPE) and sport specific measures for determining technical efficiency.

We also track measures (such as Heart Rate Variablilty HRV, resting heart rate, attach-decay-peak power etc from force plate jumps and a whole host of things that aren't quickly and easily describable).

This is all to say that while one could suggest that, controlled for all other factors, an athlete's resting HR tends to drop as they are more aerobically fit (depending on where they are in the training cycle) this isn't true across all athletes. Furthermore the variability for a specific athlete day-to-day and week-to-week is far higher than one would naively think; this effect completely swamps and signal one would use to make sweeping generalized statements.

It is marketable to compare metrics collected from wearables worn by the general public to highly trimmed, smoothed, curve-fitted models of elite athletes because people will pay money for that. It is not, in any meaningful way, useful to do so. If J Q Public wants to compare themselves to see where they stand it's much more meaningful (and much more discouraging) to compare outputs eg performance metrics like sprint times, weight lifted, peak power, sustained power, jump distance/height etc. The physiology a particular person brings to the table at a particular time isn't as strongly correlated to outcomes as we'd like to think and it's not one stable thing that can be measured.

A body contains so many interacting systems that those scalar metrics can be thought of as a point-in-time snapshot of a complex emergent system. Probably useful for comparing a specific athlete to themselves at different points in time (assuming good testing protocols and supporting metrics for triangulating root causes for observed phenomena) but that's about it.

tl/dr; in my workplace observing world class athletes training to be the best in the world over racing events in the 25ish seconds to 5ish minute range I see:

• resting heart rates in the 42-75 range that track more with recent world load than with athlete
• Max heart rates at RPEs >= 9-out-of-10 (or 17ish out of 20, there are several different self reporting charts and systems each with their strengths and weaknesses) ranging from 175-220ish.... but the accompanying blood lactate measures can vary 5-fold between different athletes working in that zone.
• You're not likely going to get reliable data because testing protocols and real world non-anonomized data simply aren't shared on the regular. Think of them as (not exactly) trade secrets. Even academic papers on the subject tend to use small samples of individuals who are available, for the testing duration, and are fine with participating in an activity that may well interrupt regularly schedule training time and performance.
• If all you need is a token sample to disprove a theory know that some can, some can't and it has little to do with how "elite" they are.

posted by mce at 8:55 AM on September 26, 2020 [41 favorites]

Tour de France cyclists have heart rates around 130-165bpm during the race.

An elite short distance runner collapsed trying to match Kipchoge's pace. His heart rate was 200 bpm and he lasted one kilometer.
posted by srboisvert at 9:03 AM on September 26, 2020

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17960504/

"HRmax is significantly lower in athletes compared with age matched sedentary counterparts. The mechanisms underlying the lower HRmax remain to be elucidated."

https://www.brianmac.co.uk/maxhr.htm

"Elite endurance athletes and moderately trained individuals will have an HRmax 3 or 4 beats slower than a sedentary individual."

Also, none of the redditors in that thread could really be described as "elite": in the 5000m event 50 NCAA men ran under 13:55 in the 2019 outdoor season and 50 women ran under 16:05.

https://www.tfrrs.org/lists/2568/2019_NCAA_Division_I_Outdoor_Qualifying_(FINAL)#event21

Finally, it's fairly difficult to measure top heart rate as you need to count at least three heart beats a second for at least 20 seconds to be remotely accurate (and then multiply by three). The most reliable max HR workout you can do is probably a hill workout where you sprint up a hill for 45-60 seconds and then take max HR after doing that five times. It's really hard!

And now that so many runners wear those watches, their max HR assessments are probably even worse because it's well-known most watches have quite a bit of error (particularly the ones that don't use the chest monitor). Which is a shame as if those redditors are relying on their max HRs for training intensities they are overtraining.

So, tl;dr: trained runners have lower heart rates than sedentary people. That r/running thread has no elite athletes. And self-reported HR maxes are probably inaccurate because they are hard to take manually or they rely on error-prone watches.
posted by Luminiferous Ether at 9:09 AM on September 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

I am by no means an elite athlete, but swim hard at least three days a week. My rest pulse is around 50-55. At 45 years old, though, my heart rate after a 50-yard freestyle sprint is north of 180. (I count 30 pulses over 10 seconds, but there's a noticeable deceleration over those ten seconds.)
posted by notsnot at 9:42 AM on September 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

Shit, forgot to finish my thought: that max HR is for a quick sprint. During sustained sets, my HR was 150 after four months without swimming due to COVID. A couple months conditioning, it's around 140. My HR during half-marathons, back when I did those, was usually a sustained 135-140, but I always felt like I could have pushed harder.

Over 200 sustained? No way. The heart may grow (there's the story of Greg LeMond having trouble getting life insurance because of his "enlarged heart") and red blood cell counts may rise. But heart rate at a particular exertion level tends to go *down* as fitness goes up.
posted by notsnot at 9:48 AM on September 26, 2020

Hmmm, not an expert at all but a quick search is showing mostly evidence that trained athletes have a slightly lower max heart rate than untrained individuals.

An athlete would obviously want a higher cardiac output -- the total volume of blood being pumped by the heart through the body -- which is determined by the stroke volume x heart rate. However, stroke volume -- the amount of blood pumped out by the left ventricle with each contraction -- ends up mattering a lot more than HR. Part of how trained athletes have higher stroke volumes is that their left ventricles get bigger. BUT another big part of it is how much time the left ventricle is relaxed, allowing it to fill with blood (this process is mostly passive). If your heart is beating very rapidly, the ventricles don't have enough time to fill with blood, so each stroke ends up being less effective - -and since the heart itself needs increased blood supply to pump that fast, it's increasing demand on the heart (in extreme cases, this is heart failure). Being able to maintain a lower heart rate during exertion means each stroke counts for more. I don't know at what heart rate that tradeoff happens, though. But that may be one reason it's more beneficial to increase the amount of work you can do at a lower HR, instead of trying to work near your HR max.
posted by autolykos at 11:27 AM on September 26, 2020

Part of how trained athletes have higher stroke volumes is that their left ventricles get bigger...

This is putting quite the image in my head as I remember bike rides where I was sure I was in 200BPM territory, or at least it felt like it. /reddit ...but I think in general this is getting us into VO₂ Max and other systemic-efficiency measures that depend even more on genetics and less on reproducability.
posted by rhizome at 12:41 PM on September 26, 2020

Out of left field: it's a plumbing problem proportional to the height of the mammal. Mice have really fast heart rates; giraffes, elephants and whales, slow heart rates.

Think of the problem as being limited by the pressure wave-front from the pump output. At some point that pressure wave will be cancelling itself out on the rarefaction, or low-pressure, infill to the heart chamber. That timing is related to the longest loop the blood flows round, the heart-to-toes distance (and back again) for your runner.

Short humans can sustain higher max heart rates than taller runners -- with the caveat of all other things being equal, such as his hydration making your blood more and less viscous to carry that pressure wave. If we have to give that caveat, then you've got to note that the best sustained effort isn't one that's at this maximum, so other factors will govern what effort correlates with the heart rate.
posted by k3ninho at 3:19 PM on September 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

As mce said, top athletes aren't very interested in sharing their training data with competitors. There are some elite runners who do post all of their stuff on Strava - marathoner Scott Faubs comes to mind. If you have a Strava account, you could look back at the 2020 US Olympic marathon trials for actual heart rate data. It looks like at least five of the men posted all of their data publicly to Strava. I'll give you the short version here: for three of the men (Faubs, Walmsley, and Albertson), one spent 2 minutes out of the race above 184 bpm, one spent 0 seconds above 189 bpm, and one spent 31 seconds above 184 bpm. Everyone racing distances longer than a mile is going to be focused on increasing their running economy at their anaerobic threshold, which is what you are seeing with those marathoners. They are so efficient they can run 4:50 to 5:00 miles for two hours, while spending most of that time at heart rates of 160 or 170 with a few bursts for hills or someone making a move in the race.
posted by BlueTongueLizard at 3:31 PM on September 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

You might be also interested in checking out the series on Youtube called "Anatomy of an Olympian". The different episodes that look at the stats (including max heart rates) of marathon runner, Desiree Linden; 3,000m steeplechaser, Soufiane El Bakkali; and rower Damir Martin might give you some additional insights about elite athletes, efficiency, and heart rates.
posted by skye.dancer at 4:56 PM on September 26, 2020

(may require Strava membership).

Jim Walmsley's course-record setting Western States 100 mile endurance run.. Includes HR of 168 held for about 14 hours. Mountain course.
1:03 half marathon, still in the 150s.

He posts all his runs with HR info.

Jim's full Strava profile.

Echoing BlueTongueLizard that most pros are very secretive about this. Jim is the exception (elite at Ultras, "near elite" for marathon).
posted by gregglind at 12:47 PM on September 28, 2020

So first off, max heart rate varies as lot more than the commonly used formulas would make you think. It's a kind of population-average guideline, but nothing more. Think of it as (at best!) the centerline of a wide range.

And the range is probably a lot larger than you would think.

For the Fox scale--the commonly used 220-age formula--"the difference with measured-HRmax varied from an overestimation of 49 bpm to an underestimation of 43 bpm". The Tanaka scale--2008 - 0.7 * age--is a bit more accurate but still ranged "from an over-estimation of 44 bpm to an underestimation of 38 bpm".

Altogether, measured max heart rate in a population of 762 sedentary subjects ranged from 136 to 215.

All the above is from Measured Maximal Heart Rates Compared to Commonly Used Age-Based Prediction Equations in the Heritage Family Study, Am J Hum Biol. 2013 Sep-Oct; 25(5): 695–701.

So you're right that some people might have a max heart rate above 210 and maybe some can even hold it above 200 or 210 for somewhat extended periods of time. Let's say your a 15-year old with HRmax that is naturally at the very, very high end of the normal range. It wouldn't be much of a surprise at all if they could hold their HR above 200 or even 210 for quite a while.

But the fact of a high HRmax seems to be more a matter of genetics, maybe some specifics of your physiology, and of course age. As you train your HRmax actually goes down a little bit--not up: "at any given age the athletes had a slightly but significantly slower maximal heart rate than the untrained men"

See The effect of age and athletic training on the maximal heart rate during muscular exercise, American Heart Journal, 1968.
posted by flug at 1:12 PM on September 28, 2020 [1 favorite]