Maximum Heart Rates for Humans and Dogs

An old agility friend of mine, Pamela, has a nice agility blog that has an interesting article about dogs and their heart rates compared to humans. She shows that you really don't give a dog that much beneficial exercise with agility alone. I think a dog gets mentally tired from agility, but not likely physically.

"For humans there is an optimal "training zone" which is generally between 50-75% of the maximum heart rate. In humans, the maximal heart rate is about 220 beats per minute, so the training zone is about 150-175, depending on the age of the individual.

Problem is, dogs have maximal heart rates far above humans. During exercise, the canine heart can beat 300 beats per minute, which would prove fatal to any human athlete. At 300 beats per minute, the canine heart pumps several times every second! By the time your own feet begin to hurt and you're running out of air, your dog is actually just getting warmed up. In reality, dogs have to work very hard to reach the upper levels of their training heart rate zones. Workouts that are taxing for humans exert the dog much less. For example, running at a rate that exhausts humans is far below even the lower range of the canine training zone for a fit dog."

So no wonder I could never exhaust Tinkerbell or Chip. I just gave them a bad case of the zoomies with running so slow with them.