Triathlon
How athletes of all abilities can benefit from heart rate training
Chest straps and beats-per-minute may seem the reserve of professional athletes, but anyone looking to improve their fitness can benefit from training to their heart’s content.
Type ‘heart rate training’ into Google Images and you’ll find variations of three themes: data graphs; athletic men or women sprinting with a chest strap on; and someone hunched over, staring intently at their watch while also checking their pulse. Three different results and three misleading implications: that heart rate training is complicated, exclusively for athletes, and not particularly reliable.
The truth is something altogether more positive and, when used correctly, it has the power to take your fitness to new heights.
Heart rate monitoring is simpler than you think
Gordon Bensons finds chest straps most reliable for heart rate monitoring
© Henry Knock, Red Bull Content Pool
Too much tech can be intimidating, but to train to your heart rate you’ll need just two bits of kit: a wrist-based sports watch or fitness tracker, and a chest strap that can be paired with whatever’s on your wrist. Polar, Garmin and Wahoo offer three of the most reliable straps, and all three can be synced to the main fitness apps (think Strava, Nike+ Run Club, etc.). While all the leading GPS watches offer built-in heart rate monitoring, chest straps are widely considered to be more reliable.
Gordon Benson is a Red Bull triathlete and European Games gold medallist. He says, “I've tried both wrist-based heart rate monitoring and chest straps, and from my experience the chest straps are way more accurate.” Although he does caveat that with, ‘But it’s likely to be the smelliest bit of kit you own!’ You’ve been warned.
While her comments remain odour-free, Alexa Duckworth-Briggs, UK Athletics Coach in Running Fitness and We Run Coach for Reading, agrees that chest straps are preferable: “While wrist-based technology is improving all the time, the heart rate strap is still more accurate.” She cites the Garmin Forerunner 235 (and accompanying strap) as providing “all the stats a runner needs without being too pricey.”
Get in the zone: how to train to your heart rate
Heart rate training requires an understanding of your heart rate ‘zones’, which Duckworth-Briggs defines as the following:
HR Zone
% of HR Max
Intensity
1
50-60%
Very low
2
60-70%
Low
3
70-80%
Medium
4
80-90%
High
5
90-100%
Very high
A popular formula for getting a rough idea of your maximum heart rate is simply 220 minus your age, although Duckworth-Briggs warns the only way to get a truly accurate idea is to get it tested in a lab. (As an aside, while max heart rate can be difficult to judge, resting heart rate, as Duckworth-Briggs says, “is a great fitness indicator,” mainly because as you get fitter, your resting heart rate should drop slightly.) Lab tests, though, are unrealistic for most, so the formula is good enough for providing an idea of when you’re training in each zone.
And once you know your zones, you can begin to reap the benefits of heart rate monitoring. Namely, the ability to train to required intensity, track your progression and also ensure you’re not pushing too hard in sessions designed to aid recovery or endurance.
“You can get a good idea of your effort level with heart rate,” says Benson. “A few days ago I did a 3 x5 minutes interval session and I could measure my perceived effort against how hard I was actually working.” That can force you to work harder – and get the fitness boosts from doing so – when you might be tempted to take your foot off the gas during a high-intensity interval session like the one Benson mentions. And because you can see the zones you reach at various intensities, you can clearly track your progress. “As you get fitter,” Benson explains, “your heart rate will stay the same while your pace increases.”
On the other hand, being able to see exactly how hard you’re working also allows you to dial down if you’re supposed to be either taking it easy or training for a prolonged period of time. “This year I've been to Tenerife and Sierra Nevada,” says Benson, “and I stayed at high altitude both times. When you’re doing an altitude camp, it’s important not to get too fatigued, so I set myself a heart rate limit and aimed to not go above that when I was climbing (on the bike) – that might mean that you get left behind on a climb, or that you're overtaking certain people, but it ensures you're not over-exerting yourself.”
It’s a point backed up by Duckworth-Briggs, who says, “In endurance sport, you should be spending most of your time in the lower heart-rate zones.” In those instances (training sessions of 30 minutes or more), tracking your heart rate is the most effective way of ensuring you’re able to go the distance and won’t run out of steam too early.
Train by heart, but race by feel
In a race setting, it may best to run tech free
© Denis Klero, Red Bull Content Pool
While heart rate monitoring is a good idea for training, race situations require a less structured approach. “I've never raced with a heart-rate monitor,” says Benson, “partly because I'm not sure the monitor I've got is waterproof, but mainly because I like to race by feel. If the race is getting away from you, but the stats are saying you're right on track, you need to be able to distance yourself from the monitor and take a gamble.”
Being able to judge your effort naturally is also useful in training: firstly to prevent over-reliance on tech that has the potential to malfunction, and secondly to ensure your fitness retains an element of fun. As Duckworth-Briggs says, “By focussing on the stats, especially during a run, you can lose the ability to run to feel and pace yourself on effort level. And sometimes it's good to just run for the sake of running, without having to concentrate on exactly how you’re doing it!”
However, when used to assist with training, rather than to dictate everything you do, heart rate monitoring is one of the most effective ways of tracking progress and ensuring you’re training to prescribed intensities. Far from being the reserve of elite athletes, anyone and everyone – from those looking to shift a few pounds, to those wanting to break through a training plateau – can benefit from taking fitness to heart.
Try these two heart-rate sessions from We Run coach Alexa Duckworth-Briggs
1. For speed endurance...
Great for a marathon-specific speed session
Time
Zone
5min warm-up
1
3mins
3 (repeat 4-6 times)
2mins
1 (repeat 4-6 times)
5mins cooldown
1
2. For speed and fat loss
Time
Zone
5min warm-up
1
30mins in zone 2 with 10 x30secs ‘blasts’ in zone 4 spread throughout
2 & 4
