Dear LPG,

I have a suspicion that many LPG readers will have little interest in what I want to focus in on today because, while we all know that exercise is important for us, we older people don’t bother quite as much. Exercise for us older people tends not to focus so much on getting our hearts pumping faster and, as our bodies slow down somewhat, we are doing quite well if we focus on keeping all our joints and muscles working as well as possible.

One of the things that I keep being told is that exercise is good for the heart whatever your age, and I remember regularly ‘going for the burn’ at aerobic classes at least a couple of times a week a couple of decades ago, but now that I am in my mid 70s I have slowed up quite a bit.

Since I realised that my blood pressure was a bit high some ten years ago, I have been taking one prescribed pill a day to regulate it and, while I know so many friends that do the same, I know that I could exercise my heart a bit more. I tend to spend a lot less time exercising my heart, and a lot more time checking it these days, and remember reading a post about two years ago that helped me work out what the readings mean and how high or low they should be before we need to worry about them (►►►). But I never did see the promised follow up with a bit of information about the third reading that most blood pressure gauges show.

I am talking about the pulse, or heart rate reading that is usually at the bottom of the average blood pressure gauge although I have moved on since then and, as old as I am, I now have a fitness tracker which continually keeps tabs on that measurement.

It is worth knowing a bit about how fast your heart should be pumping though, and there is a formula to work out if yours is working too hard. I have gone for the most straight forward version although all the internet explanations assume that you have to be young to want to know where your heart is at.

I am not suggesting that we oldies should start exercising to the point where we are completely out of breath but, I know that being locked down for 6 months has limited the exercise I used to do. The recommendation is 30 minutes’ moderate exercise a day, which can be achieve with a walk down the road, a bit of housework, or even a bit of dancing to a favourite song or two on the radio, but it is so easy to get out of the habit.

The magic number appears to be 220. If you subtract the number that represents the years that you have lived from 220, the resulting number will be the number of beats per minute that your heart should never reach. When working it at its hardest it should only ever beat at between 60% and 80% of that number of times per minute.

I have found some better explanations than I will ever be able to offer online and hope that LPG will add the appropriate links below…

EA, Bellingham

EA offered us the mathematics behind not over doing it and a little other information.

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…and if Maths is not your forte, she also offers a couple of online calculators to do the job for you…

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