How is max heart rate detected?

3219727 over 1 year ago

After my run the watch notified me that a new max heart rate was detected of 191bpm but when I checked the activity my max heart rate during that run was only 177.

How can the watch detect a max heart rate I never reached?

0 Former Member over 1 year ago

Just guessing, but maybe a combination of RHR, VO2max, and how long you stay at a certain HR during an activity?

0 Etupes25 over 1 year ago

Other users have reported the same behavior. Garmin/Firstbeat indicates that they use the 220-age formula by default and only increase the value if a valid period of peak HR is detected. Taken literally, this would mean that the HR max detected can only increase.

If you sort your running activities by max HR, you should find out whether some activity in the past includes a legit max heart rate detection.

In my case, I have found activities where I ran with the wrist HR and the HR info was completely wrong.

I have deleted the bad activities, disabled the auto detection and have completed (now a couple of) HR Max field tests to input a manual value. Since then, the whole VO2 Max, daily suggestions, training status ecosystem is well tuned.