Can you change your max heart rate?

Seeing as how I'm running faster now than I was in my 30s, there's not much about the allegedly "inevitable" decline in physical performance that I'm inclined to accept.

One thing I do acknowledge is that my maximum heart rate has declined, as I've got older. It's now around 170 on a good day, compared to 195 or more when I was younger. But all may not be what it seems.

What intially got me started on heart rate was the chance to spend an hour or so with Colleen Cannon, a former world and national champion triathlete, who at her peak in the '80s managed to stay on top for around ten years without injury. Collen is some kind of force of nature, brimming with energy and vitality -- a state of peak health she maintained while competing, and maintains now, she says, because of 20 years of regular treatment from acupuncturist and Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner extraordinaire Whit Reaves -- who happens to be my next door neighbour :)

The other big influence on Colleen's long and spectacular career was sports doc Phil Maffetone. While Whit was pioneering the use of acupuncture with elite athletes, Maffetone broke ground by being one of the first to use heart rate monitors. The early models he had access to were so big that if you wore them these days people would think you had a bomb strapped to your chest, says Colleen. She had to cut a hole in her singlets so she could see the display.

Maffetone is the author of a current best-seller, The Maffetone Method, and several other books which detail his holistic approach to fitness and training based on heart rate. His Big Idea is to do a LOT of easy running at around 65% max heart rate or less, and to be very cautious about speedwork (ie intervals). Colleen once won 15 races in a row, and was able to win without speedwork. The way she explains it, the heart rate controlled running builds a reserve of energy and vitality, which you can then draw on with speedwork or racing. Maffetone had her building a huge aerobic base with this controlled running, at times having to persuade her to stick with it, so desperate was she getting to cut loose!

This was not LSD (long slow distance) except at the very beginning, when she would literally be running 12-minute miles AND walking up hills to keep her heart rate down. It was more like Lydiard base-building, since the pace kept increasing, until the 12-minute miles were 6-minute miles -- at the same low heart rate.

This demands a LOT of patience, but Colleen was still able to win races before she added in speedwork. However, I don't buy into his entire approach, as I think the people he had most success with were at the extreme endurance end -- doing Ironman triathlons and so on. Also, Colleen ran 800m and 1500m on her university track team, so didn't need to cultivate her speed. My training with Ric Rojas is more based on the idea that I have more than enough strength and endurance to do what I want to do, so the "speedwork" is actually neuromuscular education -- I have to be taught speed :), so we do 50s, 100s and 200s regularly. This is what Lasse Viren did -- and also Frank Shorter, come to that.

What I AM taking on from it is to keep my easy runs even easier (Ric will be well pleased!); so I've started using a heart rate monitor again for those. And here was a major lesson for me: I've always thought of tiredness and recovery in terms of how my legs feel; it never occurred to me that maybe my heart also needs to recover and that the way to allow that to happen AND to recharge the energy batteries is by real easy running at a heart rate as low as 130 or so.

Which brings me back to maximum heart rate. I went through a phase last year where I just couldn't get my heart rate UP past 145-149 or so. I didn't take this as a sign of extraordinary fitness, but more a possible pathology or chronic fatigue. It took a couple of blistering runs with Patty (Murray) and one particular effort where she coaxed me full-tilt up a nasty little hill to kind of blow the rust out of the tubes; after that I could get up to 170+ with no problems.

Maybe my heart needed a rest, just like my muscles do; then it was able to allow a sustained effort. Which got me wondering whether, with enough heart-rest between hard efforts, I could reach a new high. This goes against current thinking. Plug "heart rate" or a similar phrase into Google and you will get MILLIONS of hits. And every article is saying exactly the same thing. They are all based on the accepted physiological fact that you cannot increase your maximum heart rate by training; it is set by genetics -- and age.

What then are we to make of this sentence in a book on four times Olympic champion Lasse Viren -- written with his coach Rolf Haikkola? Describing a punishing test workout -- 5k's worth of sprint-50m-coast-50m --- run on grass barely two weeks before the first 10,000 metre heat at the Montreal Olympics, main author Antero Raevuori says:

"His time for 5000 metres was between 13:30 and 13:40, but that was not important. The essential thing was to raise the pulse to 190 beats per minute, the magic number which indicated he was at optimum form. Viren's pulse was now between 184 and 186. He needed more work."

The implication here is that until Viren could get near his known max heart rate, in training, he was not fully fit. In other words, a highly trained athlete finds it harder to hit max heart rate.

And in even more other words, what this suggests is that contrary to what every article on Google will tell you about maximum heart rate and heart rate-based training, exercise does have an effect on max heart rate -- it lowers it.

Anxious to junk yet another myth about aging, I scoured the Net for any research supporting this. It's such a radical idea, it seems, that almost nobody has bothered to test it. And after all, no one listens to coaches who are not also exercise physiologists. But in February this year, scientists at the Research Institute for Sport and Exercise Science at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, compared maximum heart rate in elite athletes -- 130 endurance trained athletes, 40 mainly anaerobically trained athletes -- and 95 sedentary participants. Their conclusion:

"HRmax is similar between aerobically and anaerobically trained athletes. HRmax is significantly lower in athletes compared with age matched sedentary counterparts. The mechanisms underlying the lower HRmax remain to be elucidated."

So there you go. If you're a masters athlete, rest easy. Your max heart rate is NOT declining because you're getting older, but because of your training.

The next question is: is Lasse Viren's coach the only one who knows the correct use of high-end heart rate monitoring? Given that Viren's "double double" of 5k and 10k gold medals at the '72 and '76 Olympics has never been matched... maybe so.

* Sources and resources:

Lasse Viren: Olympic Champion, by Antero Raevuori and Rolf Haikkola (Continental Publishing House, 1978), out of print.

Phil Maffetone's website is here, while a basic article on his method is here on the Road Runners Club of America website.

Whyte GP et al, "Training induced changes in maximum heart rate." Int J Sports Med. 2008 Feb;29(2):129-33.

Check out Collen Cannon's continuing adventures at her Women's Quest website here.