Heart rate recovery after hard effort is the key cardiovascular metric

Full analysis

Andy Galpin says the most practical way to assess cardiovascular fitness outside a lab is to measure how quickly your heart rate drops after a maximum effort. After pushing to near your peak heart rate (a rough estimate is 220 minus your age), you should recover about half a beat per second in the first minute — meaning heart rate should fall by at least 30 beats per minute within 60 seconds of stopping. At two minutes it should be down roughly 60 beats, and at three minutes, down another 30. A slower recovery than these benchmarks points to a problem in either anaerobic or cardiovascular capacity. He notes that the formula 220 minus age is a very rough estimate and the actual heart rate number matters less than the speed of recovery.