Maximum heart rate blowout!

[Muse]

I recall someone in here saying that the typical wrist-wearable heart rate monitors are less accurate at higher BPM. There's also some evidence that increasing your fitness can increase your max HR (and OP seems remarkably fit for his age), which has also been my anecdotal experience. When I first got my tracker, my max rate seemed to be about 172--it seemed to correlate with my activity level, when I'd hit 172 my body pretty much forced me to stop and wait for it to drop back down a little bit. I kept training with an eye towards improving my cardio fitness, it's harder to know what my max rate is now, I hit 190 during a sprint a while back, and I can continue hiking uphill when I'm at 172 now. I had asked my doctor about it, and her general advice was as long as I feel fine, don't worry about it.

I bought several chest strap HRM's and a company rep gifted me an arm-band unit asking for feedback on how I liked it. I liked that it was on my arm, but the data was crazy so I don't use it. Research online and you'll probably find (I did) that people say the chest strap ones are the most reliable. It's a bit of a pain to put them on and take them off, but I will not try the arm band one again. The one I use:

Powr Labs Heart Rate Monitor Chest Strap - ANT + Bluetooth Chest Heart Rate Monitor with Chest Strap

They use a CR2032 battery. I might get a couple hundred uses out of one battery.

 

[Iron Woode]

I am taking Metoprolol because of my prior heart surgery and limits my max heart rate to 120 bps. It also allows me to have a resting heart rate in the 75 - 83 bps range.