ABSTRACT.In patients with stable exertional angina the pain reaction during and after exercise has been classified and analyzed with regard to reproducibility, time relationship between pain and ECG reactions with ST‐depression. The pain reaction has a good reproducibility ‐ at least as good as the ECG reaction ‐ both within the day and from day to day. The pain usually appears a few minutes after the appearance of ST‐depression but there are big individual variations. For any given patient the time relationship between pain‐ and ECG‐reaction is fairly constant but beta‐blockers and myocardial infarction may increase the pain threshold in individual cases. To conclude the analysis of the pain reaction adds valuable information to the exercise test both in patients with ischaemic heart disease and in patients with angina‐like pain