WHAT IS A GOOD HEART RATE WHEN RUNNING?

We are living in the future. It’s the information age and the access to stats and data are at our fingertips or for runners, on our wrists. It’s hard to buy a sports watch now that doesn’t have GPS tracking linking up to any number of apps which tell you everything you’d ever need to know about the run, walk, ride or swim you’ve just done.

If you’ve got one of these fitness apps, you’ll be able to see the average pace per km, total time, total distance, cadence and heart rate of all your runs.  So much data to use, but how do we use it to our advantage?

Heart rate seems to be one that catches the eye of most that are new to the game of exercise data. Such questions are raised as ‘what is a good heart rate to run at?’, ‘what should my max heart rate be?’ or ‘how do I tell what my heart rate is?’.

So let’s get stuck into it;
A good starting point is knowing what your max heart rate is, as this will affect how you can use heart rate information to be able to run smarter. Without jumping on a treadmill in a sport science lab, an easy rule to work this out is 220 minus your age, so for someone who is 20 years old, your max heart rate would be around 200 beats per minute.

Now that we know a max heart rate can vary a lot between people, to answer the question ‘what is a good heart rate when running’, it’s better to use a percentage than a number. Rather than saying  to a 20 year old you should try to run at 160 beats per minute, it’s better to say ‘run at 80% of your max heart rate’.

The heart rate that you’re aiming to run at will depend on what the purpose of the run is? Is it a hard effort to develop speed? Is it a recovery run to build base fitness?
Below is a quick guide of what the benefit of each heart rate zone is for most runners;

50-60% - Very Easy - warm up or recovery
60-70% - Easy - base fitness, slow jogs, longer durations, to be used most.
70-80% - Moderate - specific fitness, faster jogs, long durations.
80-90% - Hard - performance development, moderate durations, to be used sometimes.
90-100% - Very Hard/ Max - speed, short durations, to be used rarely.

If you’re new to running does the above table really matter that much anyway? It’s easy to get overwhelmed or obsessive with data and sometimes the specifics aren’t that important. For most Run Rabbit runners who are new to running we don’t worry about the data itself but will try to run according to a very easy - very hard effort using a talking test we’ve developed.

So to answer the first question ‘what is a good heart rate when running?’, most runners will benefit from doing most running at an easy pace, under 70% max heart rate. According to our talk test, this is a pace you can run at where you could have a conversation with someone.

If you’d like to be sent a full copy of our Run Rabbit Talk Test Chart, leave your details below.