The Heart of the Matter

Hi, Friends & Fellow Runners:

Heart rate training is clearly one of the most important developments in endurance sports since the women’s marathon was added to the Olympic Games in 1984.  It takes much of the guesswork out of training results and provides objective information that....  

·         Gives you reliable feedback on whether your training program is working. 

·         Protect you from over-training, a contributing factor in most running injuries.

·         Enables you to properly pace yourself in races or long training runs.

·         Tells you whether a training session was too hard and therefore exposed you to injury or too easy and therefore did little to improve your running performance.

·         Accurately measures your exercise intensity so that you are able to match your workout to a specific training zone designed to either help recovery, build endurance, elevate lactate threshold or increase VO2 max.

It goes without saying that a major purpose of your training as a distance runner is to increase the strength of your cardiovascular system.  And because a stronger heart needs fewer beats per minute to pump energy-sustaining oxygen via the blood stream to your working muscles, you should keep the following in mind:

·         If you are gradually able to do your training runs faster and further over a period of several weeks without experiencing a comparable increase in average heart rate (e.g.,  a 3% improvement in per kilometre pace with virtually no elevation in heart rate), it’s a sure sign that your training program is working.

·         Conversely, no discernable change in the relationship between your average heart rate and the pace and distance of your running means that you’re not training enough -- or you’re taking it too easy on yourself when you do train -- to achieve any meaningful gains in performance. 

·         A sudden and unexplained spike upward in average heart rate during a particular workout indicates that you’re over-training and may need some rest and recovery to avoid injury.

·         Finally, by consistently using a heart rate monitor in training, you’ll soon learn the heart rate levels that you can maintain over extended distances – and this knowledge will prevent you from starting out too fast or too slowly in races or long training runs.

Determining the Formulas

Clearly, then, a heart rate monitor can be an important source of information in keeping your training on the right track.  So the question becomes, if you have a monitor or are thinking of buying one, what do you need to know to get the most from it? 

First, you should determine your Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) – that is, the greatest number of times your heart can beat in a minute.  This can best be done by a sports medicine professional in a lab setting, but the figure can be approximated by multiplying your age by 0.7 and subtracting that figure from 208 if you’re a woman and 205 if you’re a man.   Thus, if you’re a 30-year-old female runner, your MHR would be 208 minus (0.7 x 30), or 187 beats per minute.

That formula is the most reliable of several currently in use. The old standby of 220 minus your age is so obsolete that it`s almost dangerous. Yet, strangely enough, that`s the one used in cardio-based fitness equipment throughout North America and is apparently still used in every Garmin sold anywhere.

After you’ve settled on your MHR, be aware that all of your training (including cardio-based cross training) should be done in a range above 60% of that number.  Anything less won’t literally be a waste of time, but it will do little to improve performance or fitness.  Then, too, only hill repeats and speed intervals should be done at an average rate above 90% of MHR.  Exceeding that level with impunity will make recovery more difficult and increase your risk of injury.

At the other end of the spectrum from MHR is your Resting Heart Rate (RHR), or the minimum number of times per minute that your heart will beat when your body is completely at rest.  You can determine that figure by remaining in bed after waking up naturally (without an alarm clock), donning your monitor and chest strap, and lying still for about 15 minutes.  Actually, a good idea would be to take your RHR every other week on the same day, perhaps a Saturday, during the course of any training you may be doing.   This could then become another barometer of how well your training program is working, because researchers have determined that your RHR will gradually drop if your fitness is improving.

In fact, the growing importance of Resting Heart Rate as an indicator of fitness has helped to give “Heart Rate Reserve” (HRR) a prominent place in the research lexicon.  The term signifies the number of beats per minute that separates Resting Heart Rate from Maximum Heart Rate.  The bigger the reserve, the greater your potential as an endurance athlete.

Getting into the Zone

It will be obvious to some of you, but is nevertheless worth emphasizing, that the calculation of Maximum Heart Rate is based on a formula driven by age (and, to a much lesser degree, by gender).  Thus, for purposes of our analysis going forward, the MHR of all 25-year old female runners is the same 191 beats per minutes.  For all 40-year old male runners, it is 177 bpm’s.

By contrast, the Resting Heart Rate of runners can range all over the landscape and has little to do with age or gender.  It is based almost entirely on an individual’s physical fitness and, for most seasoned endurance athletes, it runs a gamut from the mid-forties to mid-fifties in terms of beats per minute.  (The lower the better.)  More than that, it will move downward during the course of a training cycle as an individual’s fitness level improves.

Subtracting RHR from MHR, as noted above, generates a given runner’s Heart Rate Reserve (HRR).  A 32-year old woman with a resting heart rate of 50 would thus have an HRR of 136 bpm’s; her fellow runner, a 38-year old man whose resting heart rate happens to be 48 would have an HRR of 130.

If the foregoing points are clear in your mind, you’re in a position to get at the core of heart rate training.  Now it becomes a matter of determining the approximate Target Heart Rate (THR) you should seek to achieve while engaging in one or the other of a training program’s standard workouts.  Here the so-called Karvonen formula is the most reliable in use -- that is, Target Heart Rate = HRR multiplied by % Training Intensity, plus RHR

In this case, the intensity of a given training session is measured by a percentage of your heart rate reserve.  The higher the percentage, of course, the more intense the workout.  This approach, in turn, establishes the heart rate parameters for the different training zones employed in our program.  Here’s a description of those zones, listed along with their corresponding training intensities:

Recovery Zone – 60 to 70% of HRR

Steady, easy runs or cross-training activities done in this zone allow for the repair of muscle and tissue as well as the replenishment of glycogen previously expended in more intense workouts.  They also burn fat primarily as an energy source and are therefore especially effective in any effort to lose weight (if that’s one of your objectives).  An individual with a heart rate reserve of 137 beats per minute and a resting heart rate of 51 should therefore seek to do his recovery workouts within a THR range of 133 to 147 beats per minute.

Aerobic Zone – 70 to 80% of HRR

Training at this level improves your body’s ability to metabolize fat for energy, rather than your much more limited supplies of glycogen.  It also improves the body’s ability to transport oxygen to your working muscles and clear away the resultant carbon dioxide.  In this zone, moreover, you can most clearly experience increases in pace and distance without comparable increases in average heart rate – which is another way of describing improvement in basic endurance and aerobic capacity.  Consider this example: a heart rate reserve of 140 and a resting heart rate of 50.  If that were to describe you as a runner, you would do your aerobic training within a THR range of 148 to 162.

Threshold Zone – 85 to 90% of HRR

Tempo runs done in this zone help to raise your lactate threshold and thereby improve your body’s ability to run harder and longer before surrendering to the fatigue induced in the switch from fat to glycogen as a primary energy source.  A runner with a reserve of 134 and a resting heart rate of 55 should do his or her threshold runs at a target heart rate between 169 and 176.

Anaerobic Zone – 90 to 100% of HRR

Regular training in this zone with Hill Repeats and Speed Intervals helps boost your VO2 max, a measure of how many millilitres of much-needed oxygen your body can absorb under stress.  These workouts also enhance your ability to run fast even when your muscles are getting severely limited supplies of oxygen (or no oxygen at all), and in this way provide a level of stress that simulates competitive race conditions.  And finally, they convince your brain that you can push yourself to the limit and still avoid injury.  If you had a heart rate reserve of 143 and a resting heart rate of 45, you would do your anaerobic workouts in a THR range of 174 to 188.

And One More Thing:

Getting the full benefit from heart rate training means that you must keep a training log that records at least the pace, time and distance of virtually every workout you do, along with your average heart rate and comments on what made the session a success or disappointment.  Only then can you know precisely the progress you’re making – or whether you’re making any meaningful progress at all.  The log can be as simple as handwritten notes in a Day-Timer or as impressive as a computer-driven online diary, so long as it captures the essential numbers you need to grow as a runner.

Coach Stephen

It's All About the Training

Hi, Friends & Fellow Runners:

In any compendium of old jokes, here's one that's often included,.....

A tourist temporarily lost on the streets of Manhattan asks a native New Yorker how to get to Carnegie Hall.   The instant reply he gets is ``practice, practice, practice."

The message here is that if we really want to excel at something – playing the piano, winning at Texas Hold ‘Em, learning a foreign language, becoming a distance runner – we need to put in lots of practice.

We’ve probably always known that.  But what we may not have known is that the practice has to be of a certain quality.  In the words of Keith Anders Ericsson, a Florida State University psychology professor, it has to be deliberate.

Ericcson has done ground-breaking research on the subject and has concluded that expert performance is the result of a prolonged effort to improve through careful training.  He insists that differences in performance among individuals – whether they be piano or poker players, language specialists or competitive runners – is linked inextricably to how many hours they devote to that training. 

Others in the field have followed Ericcson’s lead and accepted his findings.  The consensus among them is that innate ability, raw talent, or genes inherited from our parents are rarely if ever significant factors in explaining why some people excel and others don’t. 

For us as runners, the research is telling.  What it comes down to is that we can certainly become better – we can even become very good – if we’re prepared to spend the necessary time on a goal-oriented, results-driven approach to training.  The approach involves constant monitoring of progress over months and years, coupled with appropriate adjustments, and it’s the very antithesis of following a familiar exercise routine with little thought to the concept of continuous improvement.”

The whole process starts with our recording the results of the great majority of our training sessions – not only the distance, time, pace, and possibly heart rate, but also the reasons why we may have done well or poorly.  What was the weather like?  When and what did we eat before the run?  How much sleep did we get the previous night?  What kind of day did we have at the office?   What do we have to emphasize or avoid the next time we run?  Etc.?

Deliberate practice is far from easy.  Obviously, we must get much more absorbed in our training than most runners.  This means that we start each workout with a performance objective, focus during the workout on training parameters like running form, breathing pattern and levels of perceived exertion (correcting and adapting as necessary), and reflect after the workout on the progress we made or did not make toward achieving our overall goals.

So deliberate practice clearly requires a ton of commitment.  But for those among us looking for a breakthrough performance in our next season, it might just be the answer to a maiden`s prayer.

Coach Stephen