What do you keep your HR at

[Bos]

I think....We read articles about training in our "bicycling mag" next to the toilet and read something we feel makes sense, then we go out and hold to it like Gospel. Meanwhile the workout was for specific period and specific purpose.

 

Many of the above mentioned things and tips are true, but for different riders at different times. Im not claiming to be Yoda, but I think Ive tried enough, read enough and ridden for long enough to have some Idea of what works and what doesn't. To get fast you need to get stronger and fitter.

 

The method in question here, The HR..

As many of you have stated, the HR is nowhere near as good a measure as power or perceived effort, which only comes with experience, I guess.

 

HR is a cool tool to help measure when doing intensity training. Intensity training helps your body cope with max efforts for longer and recovering from that quicker, IOW It helps you ride higher intensity/HR for longer, It helps your body cope with Lactic acid. It makes your anaerobic system more efficient.

If you want to get stronger, some were saying ride a SS bike. That only gets better with loads of long rides, doesn't matter how fast, but basically you want to up your "cruising speed". for that, just ride lots, forget about Intervals etc for a while and just try ride your bike allot, like every day! As you get fitter (if time allows) you'll be able to ride farther everyday.. In the end your body needs to get more efficient at turning a crank arm, the only way to do that, Is to do a lot of it. So HR doesn't do much for that.

 

Learn Perceived effort, how long you can go at that effort before you kill over race just inside that. I just go as hard as I can If its under 3:30 hours If its 5 hours I have to back off a bit.

If you're very serious, get a power meter.

[SwissVan]

 

I If you're very serious, get a power meter.

 

 

 

And...if your a serious runner, swimmer

[Bos]

And...if your a serious runner, swimmer

 

no-no, you need to be very serious

[CharlV]

And...if your a serious runner, swimmer

 

A powermeter in a Jiffy bag !!!

[akneethling]

Thanks alot for all the comments......... sorry for Hijackin the thread....... lol

 

I think I'll chat to my GP first..... then take it from there.

 

Cheers

AK

[RacerX]

Listen up bud cause I'm only gonna say this once.

Throw away your heartrate monitor and forget about your cadence.

Then buy a single speed steed and pedal till you cant anymore, rise and repeat!

 

I have no idea what my cadence is but in a month I went from 27km average on the flats to 35km.

+1

[Lizzardd]

1st thing would be to find out what your max is. I hope you're not going on the 220 minus your age BS.

 

How do you find this out?

[Joe Low]

How do you find this out?

 

The hard way!

 

You have to push yourself as hard as poss and record the results. e.g. Work hard on a hill before sprinting to exhaustion.... a couple of times.

 

Then look at the karvonen formula that sets your zones between your resting heart rate and your max.

[GrumpyOldGuy]

Thanks alot for all the comments......... sorry for Hijackin the thread....... lol

 

I think I'll chat to my GP first..... then take it from there.

 

Cheers

AK

 

That would be my suggestion. Taking training advice which can affect your health on an internet forum, no matter how well it is intended can be very dangerous.

 

Uncontrolled hypertension is not something to play around with, and overstressing your heart has obvious severe implications.

 

No doubt a good training programme devised by someone with your condition in mind can assist in lowering your BP and improving your overall health, but I would certainly check with my medical practitioner before embarking on any kind of training programme first.

Edited May 27, 2011 by GrumpyOldGuy

[SwissVan]

The hard way!

 

You have to push yourself as hard as poss and record the results. e.g. Work hard on a hill before sprinting to exhaustion.... a couple of times.

 

Then look at the karvonen formula that sets your zones between your resting heart rate and your max.

 

For the average athlete determining true max HR is not so easy due to the humans built in survival mode which tends to slow you down before you reach true max HR.

Also doing a max HR test is very stressfull and imo a waste of time....

 

Rather use lactic threshold HR (LT)as a basis to calculate training zones.

Do this by doing a slightly easier test compared to max HR i.e. a 30 or if possible 60 minute TT. The effort should be a constant all out effort that you can maintain for the full duration.

Record your HR over the last 20 minutes of the TT. Your average HR over the last 20 minutes will be pretty close to your lactic threshold. Then calculate your percentage zones as such:

 

Easy /Recovery Zone LTHR x 0.65 / 0.80

Aerobic zone LTHR x 0.81 / 0.89

Endurance zone LTHR x 0.90 / 0.95

Race endurance zone LTHR x 0.96 / 1.00

Race zone LTHR x 1.01 / 1.02

Anerobic LTHR x 1.03 / 1.05

[Turk182]

http://www.markallenonline.com/maoArticles.aspx?AID=2

 

Working your heart by Mark Allen

 

 

Use your heart rate monitor

During my 15 years of racing in the sport of triathlons I searched for those few golden tools that would allow me to maximize my training time and come up with the race results I envisioned. At the top of that list was heart rate training. It was and still is the single most potent tool an endurance athlete can use to set the intensity levels of workouts in a way that will allow for long-term athletic performance. Yes, there are other options like lactate testing, power output and pace, but all of these have certain shortcomings that make them less universally applicable than heart rate.

 

In our sport there are three key areas of fitness that you will be developing. These are speed, strength and endurance. Strength is fairly straightforward to do. Two days per week in the gym focusing on an overall body-strengthening program is what will do the trick. More time for a triathlete usually ends up giving diminished returns on any additional strength workout. These two key days are the ones that will give you the strength in your races to push a high power output on the bike, to accelerate when needed on the run and to sustain a high speed in the water.

 

Next are the focused workouts that will give you raw speed. This is perhaps the most well known part to anyone’s training. These are your interval or speed sessions where you focus on a approaching a maximal output or your top speed at some point in each of these key sessions. But again, developing speed in and of itself is a fairly simple process. It just requires putting the pain sensors in neutral and going for it for short periods of time. A total of 15-20 minutes each week in each sport of high intensity work is all it takes.

 

Now for the tougher part…the endurance. This is where heart rate training becomes king. Endurance is THE most important piece of a triathlete’s fitness. Why is it tough to develop? Simply put, it is challenging because it usually means an athlete will have to slow things down from their normal group training pace to effectively develop their aerobic engine and being guided by what is going on with your heart rate rather than your will to the champion of the daily training sessions with your training partners! It means swimming, cycling and running with the ego checked at the door. But for those patient enough to do just that, once the aerobic engine is built the speedwork will have a profound positive effect their fitness and allow for a longer-lasting improvement in performance than for those who blast away from the first day of training each year.

 

What is the solution to maximizing your endurance engine? It’s called a heart rate monitor.

 

Whether your goal is to win a race or just live a long healthy life, using a heart rate monitor is the single most valuable tool you can have in your training equipment arsenal. And using one in the way I am going to describe will not only help you shed those last few pounds, but will enable you to do it without either killing yourself in training or starving yourself at the dinner table.

 

I came from a swimming background, which in the 70’s and 80’s when I competed was a sport that lived by the “No Pain, No Gain” motto. My coach would give us workouts that were designed to push us to our limit every single day. I would go home dead, sleep as much as I could, then come back the next day for another round of punishing interval sets.

 

It was all I knew. So, when I entered the sport of triathlon in the early 1980’s, my mentality was to go as hard as I could at some point in every single workout I did. And to gauge how fast that might have to be, I looked at how fast the best triathletes were running at the end of the short distance races. Guys like Dave Scott, Scott Tinley and Scott Molina were able to hold close to 5 minute miles for their 10ks after swimming and biking!

 

So that’s what I did. Every run, even the slow ones, for at least one mile, I would try to get close to 5 minute pace. And it worked…sort of. I had some good races the first year or two, but I also suffered from minor injuries and was always feeling one run away from being too burned out to want to continue with my training.

 

Then came the heart rate monitor. A man named Phil Maffetone, who had done a lot of research with the monitors, contacted me. He had me try one out according to a very specific protocol. Phil said that I was doing too much anaerobic training, too much speed work, too many high end/high heart rate sessions. I was forcing my body into a chemistry that only burns carbohydrates for fuel by elevating my heart rate so high each time I went out and ran.

 

So he told me to go to the track, strap on the heart rate monitor, and keep my heart rate below 155 beats per minute. Maffetone told me that below this number that my body would be able to take in enough oxygen to burn fat as the main source of fuel for my muscle to move. I was going to develop my aerobic/fat burning system. What I discovered was a shock.

 

To keep my heart rate below 155 beats/minute, I had to slow my pace down to an 8:15 mile. That’s three minutes/mile SLOWER than I had been trying to hit in every single workout I did! My body just couldn’t utilize fat for fuel.

 

So, for the next four months, I did exclusively aerobic training keeping my heart rate at or below my maximum aerobic heart rate, using the monitor every single workout. And at the end of that period, my pace at the same heart rate of 155 beats/minute had improved by over a minute. And after nearly a year of doing mostly aerobic training, which by the way was much more comfortable and less taxing than the anaerobic style that I was used to, my pace at 155 beats/minute had improved to a blistering 5:20 mile.

 

That means that I was now able to burn fat for fuel efficiently enough to hold a pace that a year before was redlining my effort at a maximum heart rate of about 190. I had become an aerobic machine! On top of the speed benefit at lower heart rates, I was no longer feeling like I was ready for an injury the next run I went on, and I was feeling fresh after my workouts instead of being totally wasted from them.

 

So let’s figure out what heart rate will give you this kind of benefit and improvement. There is a formula that will determine your Maximum Aerobic Heart Rate, which is the maximum heart rate you can go and still burn fat as the main source of energy in your muscles. It is the heart rate that will enable you to recover day to day from your training. It’s the maximum heart rate that will help you burn those last few pounds of fat. It is the heart that will build the size of your internal engine so that you have more power to give when you do want to maximize your heart rate in a race situation.

 

Here is the formula:

 

1. Take 180

 

2. Subtract your age

 

3. Take this number and correct it by the following:

 

-If you do not workout, subtract another 5 beats.

 

-If you workout only 1-2 days a week, only subtract 2 or 3 beats.

 

-If you workout 3-4 times a week keep the number where it is.

 

-If you workout 5-6 times a week keep the number where it is.

 

-If you workout 7 or more times a week and have done so for over a year, add 5 beats to the number.

 

-If you are over about 55 years old or younger than about 25 years old, add another 5 beats to whatever number you now have.

 

-If you are about 60 years old or older OR if you are about 20 years old or younger, add an additional 5 beats to the corrected number you now have.

 

 

 

You now have your maximum aerobic heart rate, which again is the maximum heart rate that you can workout at and still burn mostly fat for fuel. Now go out and do ALL of your cardiovascular training at or below this heart rate and see how your pace improves. After just a few weeks you should start to see a dramatic improvement in the speed you can go at these lower heart rates.

 

Over time, however, you will get the maximum benefit possible from doing just aerobic training. At that point, after several months of seeing your pace get faster at your maximum aerobic heart rate, you will begin to slow down. This is the sign that if you want to continue to improve on your speed, it is time to go back to the high end interval anaerobic training one or two days/week. So, you will have to go back to the “NO Pain, NO Gain” credo once again. But this time your body will be able to handle it. Keep at the intervals and you will see your pace improve once again for a period. But just like the aerobic training, there is a limit to the benefit you will receive from anaerobic/carbohydrate training. At that point, you will see your speed start to slow down again. And that is the signal that it is time to switch back to a strict diet of aerobic/fat burning training.

 

At the point of the year you are in right now, probably most of you are ready for this phase of speed work. Keep your interval sessions to around 15-30 minutes of hard high heart rate effort total. This means that if you are going to the track to do intervals do about 5k worth of speed during the entire workout. Less than that and the physiological effect is not as great. More than that and you just can’t maintain a high enough effort during the workout to maximize our benefit. You want to push your intervals, making each one a higher level of intensity and effort than the previous one. If you reach a point where you cannot maintain your form any longer, back off the effort or even call it a day. That is all your body has to give.

 

This is what I did to keep improving for nearly 15 years as a triathlete and it is the basis for the coaching methodology at my coaching web site markallenonline.com <http://markallenonline.com> where since 2001 Luis Vargas and I have coached hundred of triathletes to great results. It is certainly a challenging methodology for many but the rewards are huge. I invite you to become one of our athletes. Luis and I will personally answer any questions you may have about this methodology and how to overcome many of its challenges. See you at the races.

Mark Allen’s Training (by Joe Friel)

I’ve always enjoyed history. In my undergrad days I had a double major – physical education and history. I even taught US history at the high school level for nine years in what now seems like another life. That was back in the late 1960s and most of the 1970s (there was a gap in the middle as Uncle Sam needed me to help fight a war in Vietnam). Whenever I put the two together (physical fitness and history – not teaching and war) I’m having a good time. Studying how the icons of endurance sports used to train is especially interesting to me. I hope to write about some of them here in the next few weeks – if I can get ahead of the book deadline I’m currently staring down the barrel of. It’s been a challenging book to write. I’ll tell you about that some other time. But for now I want to tell you about how Mark Allen trained 20 years ago and what we can still learn from it.

We think of Allen as perhaps being the best Ironman-distance triathlete in the sport’s rather short history. I could even make the case that he was the greatest male triathlete of all time at all distances given his 20 wins in a row in the late 1980s and early 1990s including the first World Championship at the Olympic distance in 1989. But until 1989 he could not make it happen in the biggest triathlon of all – Ironman Hawaii. Six times he DNF’ed or finished behind people such as Dave Scott, Scott Molina and Scott Tinley. Then it happened. His training paid off and he won six times in six starts in Kona. How did he train then?

He basically followed a three-mesocycle periodization format. In the first period he focused on aerobic endurance. The second was devoted to strength. And the third was for speed. Then he was ready to race. He generally moved on to the next mesocycle when he saw an obvious plateau in performance.

We can still learn a lot from how he trained. The first block of his training is the piece I so often see missing in most athletes’ training. Regardless of your endurance sport, the most important aspect of your fitness is aerobic endurance. Yet I see triathletes, cyclists and runners only paying lip service to it. They seem to be impatient to get to the hard stuff – hill work, intervals, fartlek and tempo.

I know of athletes at all levels, from age groupers to top pros, in many endurance sports having great seasons after spending several weeks just focused on aerobic endurance. It’s the most important training you can do in every macrocycle.

Allen used a fairly complex formula to determine an aerobic endurance training heart rate zone based mostly on age and experience. I’ve found it’s remarkably accurate and closely matches the zone 2 training I have athletes do in their Base periods. His long, steady sessions at this rather low effort built a great aerobic engine. His goal was to get as fast as possible at a low effort. That’s a great goal. Using the formula he determined his aerobic endurance training heart rate was about 155 bpm and so would spend hours running and riding at that intensity in the first period. He says that when he first started he was running 8:15 mile pace (5:09/km) at 155 bpm. After a few weeks he was running 5:20 per mile (3:20/km) at the same heart rate. That’s a whopping 35% improvement. How would you like to run 35% faster or raise your FTP on the bike by 35%?

 

<http://joefriel.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a92f5af5970b01347ff79497970c-popup> If he could run a 5:20 mile at a low heart rate and effort, coming off of the bike after 112 miles and running 6 minutes per mile was relatively easy. In fact, that’s what he did in 1989 in perhaps the greatest Ironman of all time. He went shoulder to shoulder with Dave Scott until about 4km to go on the run when Dave faded and Mark kept his relentless 6-minute pace going (see accompanying picture). I was there as a spectator that day and am still amazed at how easy he made it look. Two hours, forty minutes and four seconds for a marathon after riding 112 miles. No one has matched that time in 19 years.

It seems that we’ve forgotten how important it is to become as fast as possible at a low effort before moving on to higher-intensity training. I’d suggest that after your first A-priority race this season that you return to Base training for a few weeks and do lots of training in my heart rate 2 zone for the run or the bike, or Andy Coggan’s power 2 zone on the bike. You’ll get faster without working any harder.

[Turk182]

While power training may be all the rage, the high tech toy of choice for the majority of cyclists is the heart rate monitor. One important question to ask is exactly at what heart rate should one be working at to optimize training time and efficiency? The first thing to understand is the different ways by which scientists and coaches base their heart rate training zones.

 

It is indisputable that heart rate monitoring remains the dominant mode of fitness monitoring for the majority of cyclists. Ever since Francesco Moser pioneered the use of heart rate monitors (HRMs) to closely track his preparations for the Hour Record in 1984, HRMs have become almost as ubiquitous as a water bottle for both elite and everyday cyclists alike. The cardiovascular system is a complex interplay of many things going on inside your body, but heart rate remains the simplest indicator of strain on the entire cardiovascular.

 

Cardiovascular Physiology 101

Cardiac output is simply the overall volume of blood that is being pumped out of your heart each minute, with maximal cardiac output estimates of 25 L/min for untrained individuals and possibly 35+ L/min for highly aerobically fit athletes. In turn, cardiac output is simply your heart rate multiplied by your stroke volume, or how much blood is pumped by your heart with each beat.

 

While cardiac output is ultimately the measure we would really like to have as a measure of training intensity. However, this is not common because, while heart rate is simple to measure using either a heart rate monitor or simply counting your pulse with a stopwatch, it is much harder to measure stroke volume. There are some non-invasive and some highly invasive methods, but they are generally done only in an exercise physiology laboratory like mine.

 

Therefore, heart rate is what we use for tracking exercise intensity much of the time, but it is not perfect. Heart rate is also affected by your nervous system, as can be seen when you are at the start line of a bicycle race and your heart rate is already at 150 bpm before the starting gun even goes off! Or you could be tired and pushing yourself harder than ever, yet your heart rate will only reach 160 bpm as compared to your normal 175 bpm at threshold. In both cases, your nervous system is sending signals to your heart that overrides your body’s physiological demands for cardiac output.

 

Maximal Heart Rate

How best to use heart rate then? There have been numerous attempts to peg the ideal heart rate at which to exercise in order to maximize training efficiency. Some point to an idea of basing things on maximal heart rate, such as training zones set as particular percentage of maximal heart rate. For example, endurance efforts might be at 60-75% of maximal heart rate, tempo efforts at 75-82%, etc. For these zones to work, the critical assumption is that you have an accurate knowledge of your maximal heart rate.

 

If you have been in a gym, then you have likely seen the most common way for determining maximal heart rate, and that is by subtracting your age from 220. However, as Matt McNamara wrote last week, there is little actual scientific backing for the concept of a maximal heart rate based on an equation of 220 – age.

 

Here is an example from my own cycling career on the dangers of basing maximal heart rate, or indeed overall training, on a generic template. In my early years of competitive cycling, when I was an undergraduate in my late teens, my maximal heart rate should have been around 220-20, or 200 beats per minute. However, in all the tests I did on myself in the lab and on the bike, my heart rate NEVER exceeded 175 beats per minute, and often was much lower.

 

Flash forward to when I was 23 and was on a regional development team. We would be climbing and I would be at 165 beats per minute while my partner riding right beside me was at 185 beats per minute, with both of us working at about the same overall exertion level. This was good evidence that heart rate by itself is not a valid point of comparison between cyclists.

 

Another example from that time. Our coach would prescribe intervals where our heart rates should be about 180 beats per minute. However, there was no way I could do anywhere close to that, to which his response was simply that I should work harder. Not surprisingly, it was about that time that my personal interest in sport science got even deeper!

 

How has my maximal heart rate changed, if at all, in the twenty years since? According to the 220 – age equation, my maximal heart rate should actually now be at 220 – 42 or 178 beats per minute. However, in all my lab and field testing, I cannot find a maximal heart rate above 165 beats per minute in the past four years.

 

So let’s use me exercising at 70% as an example.

 

• My twenty-something training HR would be 70% * 175 = 123 beats per minute.

 

• My current training HR would be 70% * 165 = 116 beats per minute.

 

Heart Rate Reserve

Another way of quantifying heart rate training intensity is to base it on your “heart rate reserve” or HRR. Your HRR is calculated from both your maximal and your resting heart rate. As an example, your HRR might be 175 (maximal heart rate) – 55 (resting heart rate) = 120.

 

Your exercise intensity might then be described as 50% HRR for an endurance effort. So using the above values as an example, this would be:

 

baseline HR + 50%HRR, or

 

55 + (50%)(175-55)

 

55 + (50%)(120)

 

55 + 60 = 115 beats per minute.

 

The advantage of the HRR concept is that it integrates both your minimum and maximum heart rate values, rather than simply your maximum heart rate. For example, you may have two cyclists with the same maximum heart rate of 175 beats per minute. But if Cyclist A and B have resting heart rates of 50 versus 75 beats per minute, this intuitively should make sense that the two cyclists might need different heart rate levels to achieve a particular training intensities.

 

Using my example again, let’s figure out 70% training targets. My resting HR has not really changed in twenty years, staying at 50 beats per minute:

 

• My twentysomething value = 50 + (70%)(175-50) = 138 beats per minute.

 

• My current value = 50 + (70%)(165-50) = 131 beats per minute.

 

Steady State Heart Rate

A third way to normalize heart rate training levels is to anchor heart rates based on the average values that you might achieve during a 20-30 min time trial. Those of you training with power may see that this is very analogous to the 20 min test for functional threshold power. This is based on the idea that, this is the “maximal” heart rate you can realistically sustain for a prolonged hard effort, and therefore forms the best anchor for your training levels.

 

In my case, this threshold heart rate really has not changed at all in >20 years of riding, racing, and testing. Despite my maximal heart rate decreasing by 10 beats per minute, and my functional threshold power changing over the course of a season and through the years, my threshold heart rate over a 20 min time trial or test has remained essentially constant at 155 beats per minute.

 

In this case, my 70% training level in both my twenties and now would be:

 

70% * 155 = 109 beats per minute.

 

Summary

The critical lessons?

 

1. Do not rely on average values or estimates. Base things on your own values!

 

2. There is never a case of “highest/lowest heart rate wins!” All testing and training should be individualized, and the value of your data comes when you track your own training long-term.

 

3. I used a set “70%” to illustrate that different ways of anchoring your heart rate will get you different heart rate values. Of course, it is not automatic that a 70% is meant to represent the same training intensity (e.g. endurance) for each method! We will explore the concept of what might be an optimal heart rate training intensity in my next Toolbox.

 

4. You will likely need to change your heart rate training levels over the course of a season, or as you age. We will also explore this concept more in my next Toolbox.

 

Ride safe and have fun