Discover Your Heart Rate Zones for Endurance Training
This week we're tackling heart rate zones with endurance training.
Before we get into the details I have created a spreadsheet for this blog post that will calculate your heart rate zones for you as well as provide you with free beginner/returning from injury running programs for 5K/10K/Half marathons. So email cganzer@retriperformance.com for a copy of the spreadsheet.
If you have suggestions for future topics that you want to know more about for endurance, strength, injury recovery/prevention you can reply to this email!
First: What are heart rate zones and why are they important?
Your heart rate zones are tied to 2 main things. The first is essentially psychological, your effort.
There is even something called a Borg scale that ranges from 6 to 20 which is supposed to roughly align with your resting to max heart rate. If you rate something as a 6 it's as easy as sitting on the couch. If you rate it at a 20, it's the hardest you could possibly work and you fear your heart may explode.
The next is physiological, which is the lactate levels your body is producing and getting rid of. You've probably heard of "lactic acid" build up from a hard workout. As lactate accumulates your cardiovascular system is working simultaneously to clear it out.
This is where "Zone 2" that you may have heard of comes in. This is the zone where you are challenging yourself aerobically at the level that your body is able to clear out lactate at the same level it is being produced.
You can stay in zone 2 for a long time without accumulating much fatigue which is why this has become such a popular training method for endurance athletes.
This is also the reason you may have been told to avoid training in "Zone 3" or the "gray zone" because you are getting the same return from zone 2 but lactate is building up faster than it can be cleared out and you get much more fatigued as a result.
So, how do we find out what our personal heart rate zones are? The first things we need to know are your resting and max heart rates. Resting can be easy to find. If you have a wearable that tracks your heart rate check what the average has been over the last 7 days or so (even better if you wear it while sleeping). If you don't, sit down and relax for 5 minutes then set a 15 second timer and check your pulse at your wrist (then multiply by 4 to get your resting heart rate). Next is finding your max heart rate... which will take a little more work.
Unfortunately the old 220-Age equation has proven not to be very accurate for finding your max heart rate. The best way to find your personal max heart is to go for an all-out workout.
You can keep it simple, I like:
5x400 meters run with 1-1:30 rest between
OR
5 min all out on the bike (VO2max effort)
Obviously you want to warm up before each of these workouts but these should give you a better sense of your own max heart rate.
After you have your resting and max heart rates you can simply plug the numbers in to the Excel calculator attached to this email to get your zones.
We've already explained zones 2 and 3 above so we'll describe zones 1,4, and 5 below:
Zone 1: Known as the recovery zone, this is typically used for improving blood circulation during a rest day or for training with ultra endurance athletes.
Zone 4: This is often described as Threshold training. It is typically around where your Functional Threshold Power (FTP) falls for bike training and represents the theoretical effort you could sustain for 1 hour.
Zone 5: This is redline training, if done correctly this type of training can only be sustained for a few seconds to a couple minutes.
There are various training methods that we won't dive too deeply into that give guidelines for training.
The most popular being the 80/20 Training popularized by Matt Fitzgerald. The basic principle is to do 80% of your training at zone 2 effort and 20% at zones 4/5 effort while staying away from the Zone 3 gray zone.
80/20 Training has shown great results for athletes of all skill levels when compared to athletes who train primarily in the gray zone.
If you're looking for something to accurately track your heart rate during your workouts your best bet is a chest strap HR monitor. I've linked a Garmin option below:
I like the chest monitor over a wrist watch because they tend to be much more accurate, especially on hard efforts.
