Even more explanation of Heart Rate training
Last time I gave you some reasons to use heart rate training but I didn’t explain some of the specifics.
First let’s talk about the specific hardware required. To measure your heart rate you need a device. In the old days athletes would press a finger to the carotid artery in their neck and look at their watch counting of the number of heart beats in 10 seconds and multiplying that by 6 to get their heart rate in BPM or beats per minute.
You can still do this but it’s a bit of a hassle in the middle of a workout. Instead, a few decades ago specific heart rate monitors were engineered. I remember that I had a digital watch that you could hold your thumb on a sensor and it would tell you your heart rate.
The next generation of heart rate monitors were engineered by a company named Polar and could read your HR much more precisely. Some of you may remember that the exercise bikes, elliptical and treadmills all used to have Polar HR monitor capabilities.
In the last decade or so the ability to monitor your HR has become fairly ubiquitous in most sports watches and GPS devices. I have a Garmin 305. The 305 comes with an optional HR strap that allows you to get a very accurate reading of your HR throughout your entire workout.
The strap, you have all seen, is worn on your chest just under your boobs and held in place by stretchy straps. It transmits wirelessly to the sports computer on your wrist. At any point in a workout I can look at my watch and see what my heart rate is and what zone I’m in.
“What’s a zone Chris?” You may ask. Typically there are 5 HR zones and they relate to different ranges of your beats per minute. Some coaches use 6 zones to get more granularities.
I will tell you my HR zones but it is only for explanation purposes because a) I’m a bit of a freak of nature when it comes to HR – definitely not average and b) it will do you no good because your heart and your machine are different than mine. Instead I’ll give you a description of what the zones feel like and the effort level that they conform to.
Let’s start at zero. Zero is not technically a zone but is the bottom number of beats per minute that your zones build from. Zero is your resting pulse. As you are sitting at your desk in the morning and you take your pulse this will be your resting pulse. It will change throughout the day and with different factors.
The Western Medical establishment will tell you that a resting pulse of 60 beats per minute is normal. If your resting pulse is different it does not make you abnormal it just means you are outside the average. My resting pulse is in the 36 beats per minute range. Part of this is dues to long term participation in endurance sports, but mostly it is hereditary.
I have friends who are athletes whose resting pulse is in the 70+ range. It all depends on how your clock is set. Ironically, if you get a pacemaker installed the doctors will set your resting pulse to 60 BPM whether you like it or not!
Zone one is the first level of exertion. This is a walking or very slow jog level of exertion. You will not be breathing hard and you will have no trouble speaking. For me, this might be in the 90’s or low 100’s.
Zone 2 is a slow run or fast walk. You still aren’t breathing hard and you can readily hold a conversation without having to catch your breath. This, for me is the most minimal effort level of running I can do. My zone 2 would be in the 120’s
Zone 3 is where you start to exert some effort. You start breathing a little harder. You can hold a conversation but you have to pause between words or sentences to breath. It is a comfortable, sustainable effort.
Zone three is where you are on most of your bread and butter training runs if you didn’t care about HR and just went out and ran 5 miles with friends it would most likely be in mid zone three. I will race the first 2/3 of a marathon in mid to high zone three and close in zone 4. My zone three is in the 130’s.
Zone four is a high level of exertion. This is your tempo pace effort and may come close to your 10k race average. In zone four you are exerting yourself to the point that you can’t speak whole sentences and struggle to talk. Zone four is where I do my tempo training. It is the level that I try to finish my training runs in. For me this is in the high 130’s and low to mid 140’s.
Zone five is your maximum effort zone. This is where your heart rate is if you are doing a hill repeat or a speed interval workout on the track. In zone five you are fighting to maintain the effort level and can only speak in gasps if at all.
The final HR is the top end of this range. It is called Max heart Rate. Max heart rate is as high as you can make your heart go. The way you test this is to warm up for 20 minutes, then run a mile as hard as you can, all out. Your HR at the end of this mile will be your max HR. You can read it after you finish throwing up. My max is around 160.
Many of the online resources will try to set your zones by using your max heart rate and subtracting a factor for your age. Most of these will be inaccurate. The best way to set your zones is to get a coach familiar with HR training to help you. Failing that you can use one of the online formulas to set your zones and then adjust them as you collect more data.
The posters in gyms sowing HR zones are totally wrong and useless unless you are spot on the average. An easy way to get started is to just start wearing your HR monitor and collecting data points. See what your resting pulse is. See what your max is. See what HR zones relate to which level of effort described here. You can work it out and get close thorough observation.
The straps do have some peccadilloes that you should be aware of. In cold or dry weather they won’t make contact and will give screwy results. You can counter this by running the strap and the contact points under warm water. Get it wet, before you strap it to your chest. This will make the contacts work. Some folks use lube or gel for this and that will work but I would recommend something water soluble so it doesn’t wreck your device.
But, it’s ok to experiment with it. Once you have a baseline you can use HR as another useful data point in your healthy lifestyle. If your HR is high it can mean the onset of a cold, or something you ate, or jet lag or some other disturbance in the force.
Note that I described your running zones here. Your biking or other sport zones will be different. My Garmin lets me set my zones for multiple sports. It also lets me set alerts for zone runs that warn me when I’m outside of the desired range in a workout. Although I don’t use this feature because it’s just annoying. I don’t or can’t use HR when swimming because the Garmin strap won’t transmit through water.
I have the advantage of ‘growing up’ in the sport training by perceived effort and I can tell by how hard I’m working what zone I’m in. In fact most of the trail races, before GPS, were measured just by some person who knew their pace running them at a certain effort level and backing into the distance.
Interestingly enough once you learn the physical cues you can guess your HR fairly accurately. So don’t just slavishly rely on the devices. Understand the interplay of pace, perceived effort and HR and put that knowledge in your HR training plan.
Over time, as your fitness improves your HR zones will change and you may want to adjust them. As your fitness improves you will be able to enter and exit zones, transition between effort levels, faster and more efficiently. When you are fit your heart rate will recover and stabilize very quickly during a workout.
Hopes that helps. I think we’ve covered Heart rate training sufficiently now!