the good old-fashioned exercise treadmill test remains one of the most powerful diagnostic tests we have to assess a person’s cardiovascular risk. a stress test typically consists of a brisk walk on a treadmill according to a protocol of increasing speed and elevation. electrocardiographic monitoring documents abnormal heart rhythms and other indicators that your heart is under stress from lack of oxygen during exercise. these more sophisticated measurements coupled with simpler signs like heart rate blood pressure and exercise duration help your doctor better understand your level of fitness and your risk of having coronary artery disease. but the latest research suggests that we haven’t been doing it entirely the right way… for about half of the population. you have probably heard that if you subtract your age from 220 you will get your predicted maximal heart rate. that is if you’re a man. the research studies that gave us this equation were performed on men back in the 1970’s. and like many studies performed on men (and like many things in the 1970’s in general) the results don’t always apply to women today. so a group of researchers at northwestern university decided to tackle this question by monitoring exercise tests in over 5 000 women and looked for correlations between heart rate and increasing risk for heart attacks. their data resulted in a new improved and gender-appropriate calculation of 206 minus 0. 88 of a women’s age to predict maximal heart rate. the changes between the old and the new calculations might result in small differences in the peak heart rates doctors might expect you to achieve or the targets that might be used in exercise testing or even when you’re at the gym. it’s interesting information but is it useful? for years stress tests have been used to estimate cardiovascular risk with excellent track records in both women and men despite using the same calculations. occasionally a stress test is considered suboptimal or less diagnostic if a person does not achieve a particular heart rate. now that the threshold is different this may result in more “conclusive” tests. but how should this impact your workout? while treadmills and elliptical machines present information about heart rate and zones for “fat burning” and “cardiovascular training ” the reality is that tailoring your workout to your heart rate is not as important as tailoring it to how you feel. you can have an excellent workout at a lower or higher heart rate depending on what you do and how long you are doing it. and tailoring your workout to your age (by using the heart rate calculation) just seems sort of depressing. the bottom line is that you should exercise consistently and to the best of your ability — regardless of your heart rate age or sex. competitive athletes and gadget hounds will find this new information helpful in gauging the intensity of a particular workout but for the rest of us the most important calculation is how to find time to get to the gym in the first place.
what is the predicted maximal heart rate for women?