Heart Rate Zone Calculator
With age 35 years, resting heart rate 60 bpm, heart rate zone comes to 184 bpm — maximum heart rate. It is reached in 5 steps, the last of which is 208 - 0.7 * 35, and each one is printed on the page with its numbers filled in. The formula is the one published by American Heart Association, not an approximation fitted to it.
Maximum heart rate and training zones from age and resting pulse, using Tanaka and the Karvonen reserve method.
Formula and sources checked · How we check
Age 35 years, Resting heart rate 60 bpm
184 bpm
Maximum heart rate for the example below. Editing a field recomputes the calculator below; this figure holds the answer the page was loaded with.
It is written into the HTML rather than drawn by a script, so a search engine reading this page without running JavaScript still finds an answer.
- Maximum heart rate (Tanaka)
208 - 0.7 * 35183.5 bpm- Zone 2 lower bound (60% reserve)
60 + 123.5 * 0.6134.1 bpm- Zone 2 upper bound (70% reserve)
60 + 123.5 * 0.7146.45 bpm- Threshold zone lower bound (80%)
60 + 123.5 * 0.8158.8 bpm- Threshold zone upper bound (90%)
60 + 123.5 * 0.9171.15 bpm
Worked example
At 35 with a resting pulse of 60, maximum heart rate is 184 bpm and zone 2 runs 134–146 bpm. The old "220 minus age" rule would say 185 — close here, but it overestimates the young and underestimates anyone over 50 by up to 10 bpm.
How to work it out yourself
- 1.Enter age and a true resting pulse, taken lying down before getting up. A resting figure measured after coffee and stairs shifts every zone upward.
- 2.Maximum heart rate comes from 208 minus 0.7 times age, not 220 minus age. The zones are then set from heart rate reserve, the gap between resting and maximum.
- 3.Treat the boundaries as soft. Individual maximum varies by about 12 beats either side of any age-based estimate, so a lab test or a hard field effort beats the formula.
The formula
- Maximum heart rate (Tanaka)
208 - 0.7 * 35 - Zone 2 lower bound (60% reserve)
60 + 123.5 * 0.6 - Zone 2 upper bound (70% reserve)
60 + 123.5 * 0.7 - Threshold zone lower bound (80%)
60 + 123.5 * 0.8 - Threshold zone upper bound (90%)
60 + 123.5 * 0.9
Source: American Heart Association — target heart rates, Tanaka H et al., Age-predicted maximal heart rate revisited (J Am Coll Cardiol, 2001)
Questions people actually ask
- Why Tanaka instead of 220 minus age?
- 220 − age has no published derivation and a standard deviation of about 12 bpm. Tanaka's 208 − 0.7 × age came out of a meta-analysis of 351 studies and tracks the actual decline in maximum heart rate, which is slower than one beat per year.
- What is the Karvonen method?
- It scales zones by heart rate reserve — the gap between resting and maximum — rather than by maximum alone. That matters because a fitter person with a resting pulse of 45 gets meaningfully different zones from someone at 75 of the same age.
- Why do people train in zone 2?
- It is the intensity you can hold long enough to accumulate volume, and it drives mitochondrial and capillary adaptation without the recovery cost of threshold work. The usual prescription is most weekly hours in zone 2 and a small share at threshold.
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