Loading Training Heart Rate Zones…
The highest reading from a hard effort or a supervised test.
Optional. Says which zone a reading falls in.
Built on 180 bpm
142 bpm is 79% of that — vigorous.
An estimate for training purposes and not medical advice. An age-based maximum is the weakest input this tool takes, by a distance: Tanaka found individual maximums scattered about 10 beats either side of the line, so a third of people sit further out than that, and every zone boundary below inherits the whole of that error. If a prescribed intensity matters to you — cardiac rehabilitation, return from illness, a medication that blunts heart rate — the number has to be measured, and measured under supervision.
At 52 years old the two published equations disagree by 4 beats: Tanaka (2001), 208 - 0.7 x age gives 172 bpm and The familiar 220 - age gives 168 bpm. Tanaka’s came from a meta-analysis of 351 studies and was confirmed in 514 people; the familiar one was, in that paper’s own word, set arbitrarily from ten studies whose oldest subjects were under 65. That is why this page uses Tanaka and shows you the other for contrast.
The five bands are the American College of Sports Medicine classification of exercise intensity as a percentage of maximum — under 57, 57 to 63, 64 to 76, 77 to 95, and 96 and above — from the 2011 position stand on the quantity and quality of exercise. They are not the zone 1 to zone 5 ladder a sports watch draws, which has no single published source and moves between manufacturers.
Training zones are percentages, so they are only ever as good as the maximum they are percentages of. That is the whole story of this tool. If you have ever finished a genuinely maximal effort with a monitor on — the last minute of a hill repeat session, a supervised stress test — the highest reading you saw is a far better input than anything your birthday can produce, and it is the first option in the form for that reason.
Subtracting your age from 220 is repeated on gym walls worldwide. Tanaka, Monahan and Seals went looking for its origin in 2001 and found it in a pair of reviews from the 1970s, where it had been arrived at — their word was arbitrarily — from ten studies whose oldest participants were under 65. Their replacement, 208 minus 0.7 times age, came from pooling 351 studies covering 18,712 people and was then confirmed prospectively in 514 more.
The two lines cross at about age 40. Below that the old rule reads high; above it, increasingly low, by roughly ten beats by the time someone is 70. That matters clinically, because a stress test stopped at a percentage of a maximum that was underestimated is a test that ended early.
The bands are the American College of Sports Medicine classification of exercise intensity, published in its 2011 position stand on the quantity and quality of exercise and reprinted as Table 6.1 of its testing and prescription guidelines: under 57 per cent of maximum, then 57 to 63, 64 to 76, 77 to 95, and 96 and above. They are stored here as half-open intervals so that a reading of 63.6 per cent lands in a band rather than in a gap between two of them.
They are deliberately not the zone one to zone five ladder a sports watch draws. That scheme is useful and widely liked, but its boundaries differ between manufacturers and no single published document defines it.
Individual maximums scatter about ten beats a minute either side of Tanaka’s line, and roughly a third of people sit further out than that. Push that spread through the percentages and the boundary between moderate and vigorous work moves by seven or eight beats for someone whose true maximum is one standard deviation from the prediction. Treat a band edge as a soft suggestion, and treat how the effort feels as evidence that outranks it.
A graded exercise test in a clinic or laboratory, taken to volitional exhaustion with someone watching, is the reliable way. Field protocols exist — repeated hard hill efforts with a chest strap being the common one — but they are only valid if you actually reach exhaustion, and they are not a sensible thing to attempt alone or unaccustomed.
Almost always because the watch is working from heart rate reserve rather than from a straight percentage of maximum, or because it estimated your maximum from a formula this page does not use. Neither is wrong, but they are different scales, and a zone three on one is not a zone three on the other.
Substantially. Beta blockers and some other rate-limiting drugs lower both resting and maximal heart rate, so every percentage here is computed against a ceiling the medication has moved. Tanaka excluded medicated participants from the sample his equation was fitted in, which means the equation was never meant to describe you if you take one.
The Karvonen approach works from the span between your resting and maximum rates rather than from maximum alone, and it is generally regarded as the better method when you have a trustworthy resting figure. This page uses percentage of maximum because that is the column the source table publishes with the labels shown here.