Heart Rate Training (HRT)
HRT is tailoring your workouts and performance based upon your heart rate. Believe it or not, you're already sort of doing this, even if you don't have a heart rate monitor.
When you run at what you consider an easy pace, what does that really mean? Among other things, it means that you run at a heart rate that you consider maintainable for a specified duration.
Monitoring Heart Rate
The gadget will have 2 pieces, a strap you wear around your chest to capture your heart rate, and a receiver, typically a watch. You can get all kinds of bells and whistles in these things: calories burned, PC synch capabilities, compass, barometric pressure, and whatnot, but all you really need is one that displays your heart rate and the time.
The Training
During HRT we call these zones of intensity training. Sometimes we want to keep our heart rate within a certain zone to build aerobic capacity, other times we may want to keep it in a more vigorous zone to build speed. These zones can be calculated using 2 main methods, maximum heart rate and lactate threshold.
1. Maximum Heart Rate
Most people with even a beginning understanding of heart rate training have heard that to find your maximum heart rate, you subtract your age from 220. This is a nice wild guess like your shoe size is kind of the same distance from your elbow to wrist, but what's the point of getting all geared up with fancy watches if we're not going to be accurate?
The equation itself was uncovered in the 1930's by finding the maximum heart rate of a variety of individuals, some smokers, some trained, some sick, and so forth, and then a line was drawn down the middle to find an average of the general population. Purge that equation from your memory.
The most reliable way to determine your absolute maximum heart rate is to run till you have some kind of health problem, but since that ruins the weekend, we're going to approximate it using a far more accurate method called Lactate Threshold (LT). Put a cool washcloth on your head, this gets more involved than the 220-age estimate.
2. Lactate Threshold
During low intensity, your muscles produce lactate and your body absorbs it back, keeping the overall concentration in the blood low.
more intensity increases more your muscles produce lactate than your body can absorb and the concentration in your blood goes up. This point where the body can't keep up with the lactate production is called the lactate threshold and is the highest intensity that a person can maintain for more than about 30 minutes.
There's no way to measure your LT from the couch unfortunately, which is why so many people don't know theirs. You've got to go out and suck some wind for awhile to find out what it is. You could, of course, do what the pros do and have blood drawn during your exercise sessions to measure the lactate in your blood, but I'll assume you'll pass on that level of detail.
You also have a different LT for each activity. So you may have a different LT for running than you do cycling. This not only means you have to do the LT test for each sport, but that you'll have different training zones for each sport.
Luckily, the way you perform the test is identical for most endurance sports, or at least for running and cycling, which are far and away where HRT is used the most. It's really not as complicated as it seems and the benefits of this training sure outweigh the minor pain in the neck it is to determine all these zones. I'll try and make it as simple as possible.
For either running or cycling, you're going to perform the same 30 minute time trial.
You can see it's easy enough to find what your training zones are using the above. For example, if your LT was 160, your zone 2 would be 136-144 (160 multiplied by .85 and .90).
HRT is tailoring your workouts and performance based upon your heart rate. Believe it or not, you're already sort of doing this, even if you don't have a heart rate monitor.
When you run at what you consider an easy pace, what does that really mean? Among other things, it means that you run at a heart rate that you consider maintainable for a specified duration.
Monitoring Heart Rate
The gadget will have 2 pieces, a strap you wear around your chest to capture your heart rate, and a receiver, typically a watch. You can get all kinds of bells and whistles in these things: calories burned, PC synch capabilities, compass, barometric pressure, and whatnot, but all you really need is one that displays your heart rate and the time.
The Training
During HRT we call these zones of intensity training. Sometimes we want to keep our heart rate within a certain zone to build aerobic capacity, other times we may want to keep it in a more vigorous zone to build speed. These zones can be calculated using 2 main methods, maximum heart rate and lactate threshold.
1. Maximum Heart Rate
Most people with even a beginning understanding of heart rate training have heard that to find your maximum heart rate, you subtract your age from 220. This is a nice wild guess like your shoe size is kind of the same distance from your elbow to wrist, but what's the point of getting all geared up with fancy watches if we're not going to be accurate?
The equation itself was uncovered in the 1930's by finding the maximum heart rate of a variety of individuals, some smokers, some trained, some sick, and so forth, and then a line was drawn down the middle to find an average of the general population. Purge that equation from your memory.
The most reliable way to determine your absolute maximum heart rate is to run till you have some kind of health problem, but since that ruins the weekend, we're going to approximate it using a far more accurate method called Lactate Threshold (LT). Put a cool washcloth on your head, this gets more involved than the 220-age estimate.
2. Lactate Threshold
During low intensity, your muscles produce lactate and your body absorbs it back, keeping the overall concentration in the blood low.
more intensity increases more your muscles produce lactate than your body can absorb and the concentration in your blood goes up. This point where the body can't keep up with the lactate production is called the lactate threshold and is the highest intensity that a person can maintain for more than about 30 minutes.
There's no way to measure your LT from the couch unfortunately, which is why so many people don't know theirs. You've got to go out and suck some wind for awhile to find out what it is. You could, of course, do what the pros do and have blood drawn during your exercise sessions to measure the lactate in your blood, but I'll assume you'll pass on that level of detail.
You also have a different LT for each activity. So you may have a different LT for running than you do cycling. This not only means you have to do the LT test for each sport, but that you'll have different training zones for each sport.
Luckily, the way you perform the test is identical for most endurance sports, or at least for running and cycling, which are far and away where HRT is used the most. It's really not as complicated as it seems and the benefits of this training sure outweigh the minor pain in the neck it is to determine all these zones. I'll try and make it as simple as possible.
For either running or cycling, you're going to perform the same 30 minute time trial.
- Warm up for 15 minutes at and during the last five minutes do a few thirty second sprits to get your heart rate up. When the 30 minutes begins you want to maintain a pace that's as hard as you think you're able to maintain for half an hour.
- After 10 minutes, if you have a heart rate monitor with a 'lap' function, press that lap button to get an average heart rate over the remaining 20 minutes of the test. If you don't have a lap function you'll have to get a reading every minute and do the average yourself.
A treadmill and a training partner are nice to have around in this situation. Remember that you want to end without a whole lot left in the tank, really push yourself. - Your LT is the average heart rate over the last 20 minutes
What Are The Training Zones?
Now that you know your LT, what the heck good does it do you? Nothing, until you figure out your training zones. Then you'll know exactly what HR you should be training at for a variety of goals.
The training zones are below
You can see it's easy enough to find what your training zones are using the above. For example, if your LT was 160, your zone 2 would be 136-144 (160 multiplied by .85 and .90).
Zone 1-2: aerobic capacity.
Zone 3: isn't really low intensity enough to build your aerobic base and not really high intensity to effectively build speed or increase your LT. If you find yourself in this zone, either speed up or slow down depending on your goal to get to zone 2 or 4.
Zone 4: is the sweet spot to increase your LT and gain speed over mid distance events.
zone 5: to build pure speed in the form of sprints.
Article feature by: Rich Butkevic
a ISSA Certified Fitness Trainer and triathlete
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