Zone 5 Training
What is it?
Zone 5 is a heart rate zone at the top end of your maximal heart rate (between 90-100%) that also happens to indicate you are providing maximal effort for very brief periods of time.
Why do I care?
If zone 2 is the best method for building endurance of volumes of work, zone 5 is the most effective method for building speed and power. Zone 5 is a crucial component to training for endurance events if want to complete those events faster.
If you notice that you’re able to go longer on your zone 2 runs and rides but your pace has remained stagnant, you may want to look at incorporating some zone 5 efforts into your training.
How do I find my Zone 5… Zone?
This is fairly easy, the top end of your zone 5 is… your max heart rate. While you can find the bottom end by using the Karvonen formula:
[(Max HR-Resting HR) * (.9)] + Resting HR
The (.9) is indicative of 90% intensity because zone 5 is supposed to be 90-100% effort.
When it comes to finding out what your max HR you could simply do 220- your age, or, if you want to make it more specific to you (if you think you have a naturally higher or lower heart rate) you can perform 2 max intensity 400m intervals. The first interval is to attempt to reach your max heart rate, the second interval is to confirm that it was actually your max.
How can I tell if I am in Zone 5?
This, like finding your zone 5 heart rates, is also fairly easy. Take whatever activity you are doing: running, cycling, swimming, competitive badminton, etc. and make the pace hurt. Preferably rather quickly. The 75 year old men wearing khakis with belts to a serious athletic event will never know what hit them when you sprint to the front to spike that birdie harder than a D1 volleyball player on Adderall. You also might be banned from the country club so perform this at your own risk.
How should I implement this into my training?
It is important to note that zone 5 training is a very large load on your entire body. It can accumulate a lot of muscular, cardiovascular, and nervous system fatigue very quickly. So, it should not eat up a very large portion of the time you are training.
One prevailing theory is the 80/20 principle for endurance training. The idea behind this is that 80% of your training should be within zone 2 and the remaining 20% within zone 5.
Training in this fashion helps you build volume of work and continue to improve speed without overtaxing your body and leading to increased likelihood of injury.
The other point to make is within the workouts themselves. Should you just go out and sprint a 5K once a week? Probably not. This is where intervals come into play.
A general framework for building interval workouts is to create a work to rest ratio of somewhere between 1:3 and 1:5. This means that for whatever amount of time you are working hard, you spend between 3-5x that amount of time resting or at a very low intensity to recover.
You can extend the rest times if you are working harder, for example, doing 200 meter sprints on the track. However, I wouldn’t decrease the rest to be less than the 1:3 ratio if you are truly working within your zone 5.
An example running workout could look something like this:
Warmup - 5’ dynamic drills, easy jog 10’
Main Set: Repeat 10x
30” 5K pace/1:30 walk or jog
Cooldown - 10’ walk or jog
Total Time: 45 minutes
As you can see it can be very simple to build a tough workout and easy to manipulate too. You could alter the repetitions/paces/times of each interval to fit your current fitness level but keep the goal interval the same within workout.
