Road Fan

@Barrettscv, My reply was intended for the OP, who seems to have gone away, not to you. I was stimulated to add by your response to him. To add a bit, some cycling training experts, such as Joe Friel talk about different types of fitness and what they mean. Friel wrote a nice book called “Cycling Past 50.” He describes it as a ”high level of endurance that relates to the muscles’ ability to cope with the fatigue associated with the buildup of lactate and the depletion of glycogen.” These last two effects are what happens to your muscles when your are for example climbing more difficult terrain for a longer time. When your thighs and perhaps glutes burn, your breathing may not permit you to speak a few words, much less have a conversation.

I am nearly 69 and no paragon of fitness or training knowledge, but in the past year I’ve decreased my weight from 207 to 197, reduced BMI from 32% to below 28, and increased lean mass to 138# from 125#. Before this I had burning legs on our local hills (Midwest USA is pretty flat compared to the Rocky Mountains, but still pretty flat), and now my 50/34 11/29 lets me ascend it with about 60 rpm, 7 mph without going anaerobic. The breathing performance alone is aerobic endurance, but adding the load of climbing makes it muscular endurance. The improvement was based on more and harder yoga, more indoor pedaling, a lot of housework and home rearrangement in a house with three flights of stairs.

When I tell my doc I want to kick up my cycle training, she thinks not about my max HR, but about whether my heart is functioning well under physical stress. While I use an HRM, I’m not oriented at the moment to zones and levels. Pushing your heart rate might be ok for you, but if you are using a number just calculated from a simple formula or chart based on age as a firm limit, that is probably not a good practical (or productive!) limit for you.