MAX heart rate is a popular/common biohacking, stats-keep number:
There's a popular old formula around: 220 minus your age
so, 20yo = 200 bpm, 30yo = 190 bmp, 70yo = 150 bpm.
Knowing your maximum heart rate can be useful when planning exercise. Workouts in lower “zones”, defined as up to 70% of maximum heart rate, improve aerobic capacity. More intense exercise trains anaerobic fitness.
Unlike resting heart rate, which can be lowered with training, there is little one can do to change the maximum. As exercise gets more intense, heart rate rises to deliver more oxygenated blood to working muscles. But there is an upper limit. Once the interval between beats becomes so brief the heart’s ventricles cannot fully refill before the next contraction, less blood is pumped with each pulse.
Maybe not so sound science? (shocker...)
By modern standards, though, the evidence for the formula is flimsy, explains Robert Robergs, a professor of exercise physiology and biochemistry at Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in the Czech Republic. The original study combined data from several sources without stringent criteria about the subjects or exercise protocols, and the formula was fitted by eye, rather than a proper statistical model. That did not stop it becoming exercise-science orthodoxy.
Update from 2001 is: "maximum heart rate as 208 minus 0.7 times age"
These newer measures still fail to capture the huge amount of individual variability. One study, published in PLOS ONE in October 2025, compared seven different formulas with measured values in 230 people. It found that individual predictions were often off by as much as 20 beats per minute in either direction. That size of error could mean that what counts as moderate exercise for one 50-year-old may equate to vigorous exercise for another.
What should amateur athletes do? Consistency is key, says Professor Robergs.
"Pick one method and stick with it. That way you will know if your chosen training method is working, and can adjust if it is not""Pick one method and stick with it. That way you will know if your chosen training method is working, and can adjust if it is not"
archive: https://archive.md/bsgtm
Maybe it's more accurate at higher ages. The 220 formula for me gives ~150 whereas the 0.7 formula gives 160. Roughly speaking my max is 160.
I wonder if @SimpleStacker finds this as amusing as I do.
They replaced an easy to implement heuristic, with a difficult to implement rule that gives basically the same answers and still isn't reliable.
The funny thing is, having interacted with the journalists who write about "science", they are not interested in your caveats about heterogeneity.
They want a simple headline number: thing A caused thing B to increase by X%.
Wine is good for you? Bad for you? Sometimes maybe good in moderation...
There is a fundamental difficulty with nutrition research, which is that you cannot hold everything else equal: i.e. Is that wine in addition to your normal diet or is it crowding out something else? Both are problematic for a researcher.
I meant in respect to SimpleStacker's journos...(Since wine is healthy/not-healthy are some stupid journo headlines I see a lot)
hashtag science...?
(in the "updated" formula, my result differed from the original simple one by less than 1%... oops)