Max heart rate by age: formulas and a real test
220 minus age misses by more than 10 beats for one adult in three. Three hill reps and a chest strap find your real max; the formulas only check it.
Updated
If you’re 45, 220 minus age puts your max at 175. Tanaka’s formula says 177 and Nes says 182. Your real number could be 165, or 192, and you’d be no more or less fit for it.
Every zone on your watch hangs off that one value, so it’s worth one hard workout to find it.
Find it on a hill
Wear a chest strap. In a study of 50 adults checked against an ECG, the Polar H7 strap agreed with the ECG at 0.996 concordance. The best wrist device managed 0.92 and the worst 0.67, and optical sensors get worse the more your arms are working, which is exactly what happens at the end of a hard effort.
The workout: jog easy for 20 minutes, add a few strides, then find a steady climb of about 300 m (330 yards). Run it three times, each one harder than the last, and jog back down between reps. Empty the tank on the third, all the way to the top. If that last rep doesn’t peak higher than the second, you’ve hit your ceiling.
No hill? Race a 5K all-out (a Turkey Trot counts) and look at the graph afterward rather than the live number during the race.
Do it rested. Tired or dehydrated, you won’t get there.
Spike or plateau
A 210 three minutes into an easy run isn’t your max. That’s an artifact, usually a strap that wasn’t wet enough when you started. A real max looks like a short plateau at the end of a hard effort, not a single spike.
Whatever you record is a floor. If you held anything back, your true max sits higher. Keep the highest value from the last 12 months that shows that plateau, and replace it when a race beats it.
What the formulas say
220 minus age is everywhere because you can do it in your head. Robergs and Landwehr went looking for the study behind it and couldn’t find one: it traces back to a line drawn by eye through about a dozen data sets. Tanaka, Gellish and Nes built their formulas from measurements on thousands of people.
| Age | 220 − age | Tanaka | Gellish | Nes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | 195 | 191 | 190 | 195 |
| 35 | 185 | 184 | 183 | 189 |
| 45 | 175 | 177 | 176 | 182 |
| 55 | 165 | 170 | 169 | 176 |
Around 40 they all agree. Move away from 40 and 220 minus age drifts: too high in your twenties, too low past 50. If you keep one, keep Tanaka (208 − 0.7 × age). If you run a lot of miles, look at Nes too (211 − 0.64 × age), since everyone in that study was pushed to a verified max.
Tanaka and Nes didn’t find a sex difference big enough to need a separate formula. Gulati did, from 5,437 women who ran a maximal stress test: 206 − 0.88 × age, which gives 162 bpm at 50, 11 below Tanaka. Those women weren’t runners, though. If your Tanaka zones feel too high, try Gulati, then settle it on the hill.
Why the formula can’t know yours
Nes reported a standard error of 10.8 beats. That puts about a third of adults more than 11 beats from their predicted max, in either direction. Two 45-year-olds with the same 10K time can max out at 165 and 192.
Training barely moves it. Getting fitter shows up as a lower resting heart rate and a faster pace at the same heart rate. If your max seems to climb from one season to the next, you measured it better.
Before you change your watch
Put your age in the max heart rate calculator and look at the spread between the four formulas. If your measured max lands more than 15 beats outside it, test again before you trust it.
Then set your zones from the measured number in the heart rate zone calculator, adding your resting heart rate if you know it. On your next easy run, stay under the top of zone 2. If that pace feels far too slow, your max is set too low.
Sources
- Origin of 220 minus age: Robergs and Landwehr, JEPonline 2002;5(2):1–10.
- Tanaka formula: Tanaka, Monahan and Seals, J Am Coll Cardiol 2001;37(1):153–156.
- Gellish formula: Gellish et al., Med Sci Sports Exerc 2007;39(5):822–829.
- Nes formula and standard error: Nes et al., Scand J Med Sci Sports 2013;23(6):697–704.
- Gulati formula: Gulati et al., Circulation 2010;122(2):130–137.
- Chest strap and wrist devices against ECG: Gillinov et al., Med Sci Sports Exerc 2017;49:1697–1703.