HR advice for a novice please

Just use the age caclulatio to get you started .. its as good as any outhe way of guessing

Also when you get more into it, it is better (imo) to base your zones on LT HR than max MR - which will difffer in each sport

First, you should read the HR THREAD THAT WILL NOT DIE.  Note that Max HR is a bunch of baloney and not how you want to train.  You want to eventually calculate your running lactate threshold.  Chances are you aren't fit enough to do the Lactate Threshold Field test YET.  So, you should just run off rate of perceived effort.  Meaning...run so it feels easy--and do it often.  After you do that for awhile then do the Lactate Threshold Test in the thread I referenced.  And THEN you run in your HR zones!

Oh, and while you're at it, if you upgrade to a gold membership you can get the coaches in the training support forum to make sense of all that.

Oh, and I was perusing other HR threads and found this link from Mike Ricci:

http://www.d3multisport.com/articles/hrms.htm

Written for HRM newbies.

I guess we were typing at the same time.

great minds and all that

I finally decided that I'll weigh in on this topic.

In my opinion saying to use rate of perceived excertion (RPE) is a bigger "bunch of balony" than the age based estimates. Here's why:

RPE assumes you have some basis of comparison.  Someone starting out has none, especially if you have zero athletic background.  So just saying to use RPE you'll see people usually working way too hard or way too easy, they just don't have the experience for comparison.  I base this on my own experience of starting training after a lifetime of couch potatodom and my January/Febuary gym observations.

Now, from what I rememer from the lititure, age based zone calcs can be off as much as 8 bpm.  Fine then use the formula to calculate your max hr and to be on the safe side subtract 6 bpm.  This will give you a place to start.  If after a run or two you feel that you havn't put any effort in at all bump up the zone a couple of beats.  Use this starting zone for a month or two.  You probably still won't be ready for a full LT field test.  Fine modify it for whatever your ability is at the time.  A full test has you going all out for 30 min and using the hr avg over the last twenty.  Can't do 30 min yet, how about 15 and taking the laverage of the last ten.  Not a perfect test but better than a formula estimate.  Now because you only went "all out" for 15 instead of 30 min the hr avg will be higher than you would have been able to sustain over the 30 min, so subtract a few bpm for the test number before calculating your goals.  Also did you really go all out on the test or did you hold back alittle.  I know when I was at that stage due to either physical or phycological reasons sustaining a hard pace for that long wasn't possible so I'd either add a beat or two, or to be conservative didn't add anything, depending upon how I felt I did for the test.

Now you have a better estimate of your zones, not perfect but better.  Use them for a month or two, and repeat.  Or you might by now be ready for a full field test.

This is pretty much what I did and I think it worked fairly well for me.