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From: Paul Shields
Category: Coach
Date: 1/25/00
Time: 12:29:35 AM
Remote Name: 203.14.175.10
Heinz,
You have touched on a slightly controversial subject. I will try and give you a brief outline of the issues.
Early research on young athletes showed good correlation between heart rate reserve (Karvonen) and %VO2max. So much so that many knowledgeable bodies (eg The American College of Sports Medicine guidelines for exercise prescription) use the HRR (Karvonen) method. The key factor is not the actual pulse you are training at but the jump between what your body needs at rest against what it needs when exersizing. As you get more efficient your resting pulse drops. Using this approach, it should be just as difficult to raise your heart rate 50 beats (for instance) whatever the resting rate. Dropping your resting pulse actually increases the jump using the HRR method but doesn't bring it back to it's original absolute level.
In short the important fact with the HRR method is the jump in pulse from it's resting level not the absolute pulse.
Recent research (for example see Med Sci Sports Exercize 1998 Feb;30(2):318-21 - Relationship between % heart rate reserve and % VO2 reserve in treadmill exercise. - Swain DP, Leutholtz BC, King ME, Haas LA, Branch JD) however has shown that %MaxHR correlates best with %VO2max whilst %HRR correlates best with %VO2reserve.
This however doesn't help us too much as it just shifts the problem to one of understanding whether a %VO2max pulse zone or a %VO2reserve pulse zone is the best guide. In practice the difference is only a few beats and so both are adequate for most runners.
As a final aside research fro Weltman et at in 1990 showed that the difference between the two measures was about 5 percentage points. ie 85% HRR was about equal to 90% Max Pulse.
The above may be a little complicated but the main thing is that both measures are a good guide even if your resting pulse drops with increased fitness.
All the best,
Paul The real issue