Ago Velox

I am taking my training to the next level and embarking on heart rate measure as another tool to optimise my output.

Whilst I read volumous information on this stuff on the net, I note there is no single agreed way of measuring MHR.

Lactate Threshold

Maximum Heart Rate and Resting Heart Rate

Five Zone Method

Four Zone Method

Three Zone Method

Comparision Using 3, 4 and 5 Zones

Other?

Can i ask what method i best recognised in the cycling world for measuring MHR on a whole?

What is the best way to measure MHR on a spin bike?

Also, how significant are the advertised training zones?

Each of the 5 training zones are singled out for certain outputs such as "moderate", "anaerobic", "aerobic", "fat burning" and "maximum effort".

Besides the "maximum effort" zone, surely each of the other 4 zones cross over and you perform all in each zone (such as burning fat in anaerobic, etc..) - why are these zones called the way they are?

What is the bottom and top of each training zone and where (bottom/top/middle) is the best place for training in the majority of these training zones?




Ago Velox

Athens80

If you read Joe Friel and use the information there you're set on what the zones are. There are other useful guides but the differences are immaterial, certainly until your needs are much more sophisticated.

Then you decide what you want to accomplish. Want to spend a lot of time on the spin bike? Stay in zone 2. Want to get stronger faster? Put in some time in zone 4. It gets more specific than that, but there's the general idea. Find a heart-rate-based training plan and try it out.

Heart rate works best for longer effort intervals. You don't look at your heart rate monitor during a ten second interval; your heart rate change lags your effort change. There you'd use your perceived effort or a much more expensive power meter.

As you questioned, the zones' boundaries are not sharp; they're ranges on a continuum. The names that some people use are attempts to communicate quickly what is especially characteristic of that zone. But fat is always burned; it's just that other energy becomes a bigger percentage than fat during high effort.

Ago Velox

Thanks Athens80.

Does average HR get taken into account at all?

Why woudl staying in zone 2 be more beneficial on a spin bike? Would the same apply to a road bike, training on the road?

What is best - 5 or 6 training zones?

Can any Garmin unit provide 6 training zones?

How good are these Watt bikes that can be used to provide my MHR for a fee? Accurate and worthwhile?



Ago

achoo

First - max HR is pretty useless. However you measure it, your max HR is only your max until something happens and you exceed your supposed "max".

What you want to base your training zones on is your lactate threshold heart rate. (Or you can do a full performance test on a metabolic analyzer and get your training zones that way...)

And yes, the training zones overlap - a lot. How much time you spend in each zone and how hard you train is dependent on how much time you have to train - if you can ride for 25 hours/week, you're going to spend most of that time in lower zones as you won't be able to ride that much in z4, for example. If you can only ride for 5 hours/week, you're going to have to push hard in that limited time to get decent results - and your results will never be as good as they would be if you rode 25 hours/week.

Basically, your body can take a lot of training stress from working in zone 2, not so much from zone 4, and relatively very little from z5/6. Ride too much in zones around your lactate threshold and you get really good at being mediocre.

Ago Velox

great post Achoo - thanks.

Why is more time at in lower zones considered more benefit?

Why is riding too much in zones around your lactate threshold not considered value adding?

Should you always strive to ride beyond that lactate threshold?

Romper

gregf83 

agree with everything except the part about becoming mediocre from spending too much time around lactate threshold. Few riders spend 'too much' time at threshold. It's mentally and physically tough but it won't make you 'mediocre'.

Ago Velox

so, what is the aim of the Lactate threshold HR?

not sure i understand that comment as well (re: mediocrity at threshold levels for long hours)?



Ago

achoo

It sure will if that's all you do, or if you never give yourself time to recover between rides.

gregf83 

I recommend you read Friel's training bible. He does a reasonable job of explaining how to train using HR zones. What are your goals? Are you training for anything specific?

gregf83 

look up Kevin metcalfe on Strava sometime. Multiple time us masters champion, in the winter he rides the trainer every day during the week for one hour with 40 min around threshold (specifically sweet spot training), longer rides on the weekend but lots of time around threshold. He's not mediocre.

achoo

More time in lower zones is only beneficial because you can do a LOT more of it. It's really hard, for example, to get more than, say, 5 total hours of z4 effort a week, unless that's ALL you do. It's not too hard, on the other hand, to get 30 or more hours in z2 a week - if you have the time to ride that much.

Riding above threshold - z5 and higher - is HARD. It's hard to do, and it's hard on your body. It's very beneficial, though. But if you try to do too much, instead of doing, say, z6 intervals for the proper length to elicit metabolic adaptations, you wind up doing z4/5 intervals that are the right length of time for z6 intervals. Garbage miles - hard enough to keep you from recovering, but not hard enough to actually do anywhere near as much good as hitting your proper zones.

achoo

40 min times 5 is 200 min, or a bit over 3 hours/week. And "sweet spot" is not "threshold".

40 min at 90% of threshold power (which is what "sweet spot" is) isn't that stressful.

40 min at 90% yields a TSS of 54.

Throw in a handful of points for warmup and cooldown, and let's call it a TSS of 65-70.

Normalized Power, Intensity Factor and Training Stress Score | TrainingPeaks

A "multiple-time US masters champion" limits his training to a mere 3+ hours of less-than-threshold every week, plus longer rides over the weekend - probably mostly in z2/3.

Thanks for helping make my point.

gregf83 

You specifically said ride 'too much in your zones around your lactate threshold' and you'll get good at being mediocre. How can sweet spot training not fit your definition? It's right in the middle of tempo and threshold. Do you think the extra zone 2 riding he does in the winter makes much of a difference? I doubt his fitness would change much if he just did 6 days a week on the trainer. The point is that not having some higher intensity efforts doesn't hinder performance much.

achoo

A rider good enough, fit enough, and with enough miles in his legs to be a "multiple-time US masters champion" rides a mere 3 hours and 20 min of z3/4 (sweet spot) a week, and you try to twist that such that it contradicts "'too much in your zones around your lactate threshold' and you'll get good at being mediocre"?!?!!?

Somewhat over three hours at BELOW THRESHOLD per week with longer z2/3 rides outside - for a "multiple-time US masters champion" - is your anecdotal evidence to support your argument to ride MORE at or above threshold? Because it doesn't "hinder performance"?

Ooooh-KAY.

gregf83 

So where is your evidence that riding exclusively at threshold would result in mediocrity? I did say that's it's difficult but it won't make you mediocre. I'm pretty sure if you rode exclusively in zone 4 for 3 to 5 hrs a week you'd be a strong rider. Not much fun mind you but effective.

Carbonfiberboy 

^ Note: these guys are arguing about what a US master's champion might need to do to be that champion. That's some serious talent, and both these guys arguing about it are also seriously talented and very highly trained. I'm a relatively well trained 69, but not talented. At a training load of 8-10 hours/week, if I go over 1.5 hours/week of zone 4, and keep that up for a few weeks, I'm heading over the edge into overtraining. For those who know what this means, I can hold a chronic training stress of about 70, but that's about it.

So take all this with a grain of salt and find out what works best for you. Some things that are true for everyone: the less you train, the more you need to spend a higher percentage of that time in the upper zones. The more you train, the higher the percentage of time you should spend in the lower zones. These are vague generalities and hard to quantify for an individual without being that individual's coach. Thus most of us are self-coached, which means you make a lot of mistakes and try to learn from them.

Ago Velox

WOW - Dynamic thread! I am not training for any specific event, but I want to learn more about threshold training to extract the most out of my limited time on the spin bike each day - with a century ride on the roads every Saturday.

Ago

achoo

If you're just doing TTs (and maybe triathlons), maybe just doing z4 could work. But otherwise? You're not developing anaerobic power. Do you ride with a power meter? Go look at your power by zone for a race or hard group ride. Lots of zero coasting. Lots of z5/6/7 anaerobic efforts. Maybe good bits of z3/4 sitting in. Not much sustained, long z4 efforts unless you're on a solo break - in front or behind the pack...

And even for TTs and tris, doing z4 efforts is pushing up against your aerobic threshold, so you're starting to engage your anaerobic metabolism quite a bit, while at the same time your aerobic power generation has started a significant shift from fat burning to glycogen burning. So you're not building your purely aerobic fat-burning metabolic pathways to generating power:

Metabolism of substrates: energy substrate metabolism during exerci... - PubMed - NCBI

Think about the impact of adding 20W to your body's ability to burn fats purely aerobically while riding. You won't do that riding solely in z4.

achoo

If you're just doing TTs (and maybe triathlons), maybe just doing z4 could work. But otherwise? You're not developing anaerobic power. Do you ride with a power meter? Go look at your power by zone for a race or hard group ride. Lots of zero coasting. Lots of z5/6/7 anaerobic efforts. Maybe good bits of z3/4 sitting in. Not much sustained, long z4 efforts unless you're on a solo break - in front or behind the pack...

And even for TTs and tris, doing z4 efforts is pushing up against your aerobic threshold, so you're starting to engage your anaerobic metabolism quite a bit, while at the same time your aerobic power generation has started a significant shift from fat burning to glycogen burning. So you're not building your purely aerobic fat-burning metabolic pathways to generating power:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3967777

Think about the impact of adding 20W to your body's ability to burn fats purely aerobically while riding. You won't do that riding solely in z4.

gregf83 

I agree that it's not optimal for training all the time but going back to the example of Kevin Metcalfe you don't get mediocre by sacrificing high intensity work during a portion of the season. Yes, you'll lose some peak form but that's not something you're going to maintain on a continuous basis in any case.

Not quite sure why I'm arguing with you as I would never advocate a regimin of Z4 only but mostly because I think it would be difficult to sustain. If you really want to improve your VO2Max and FTP you could do a strict regimen of Z5 VO2Max intervals only 5-6 days/wk with nothing else. There is a study (Linear increase in aerobic power induced by a strenuous program of endurance exercise) that showed this method resulted in a linear increase in VO2Max over a 10 wk program. The participants were untrained but there was no dropoff or plateauing in performance despite the very limited range training they performed.

Ago Velox

https://www.joefrielsblog.com/2011/04...ge/1/#comments

I'll tap into Mr Friel for this one...and replace MaxHR with LTHR

Question though - On my Wahoo Fitness Tracker App - I only see 6 x HR zones to edit.

Joel Friel has nominated 7 LTHR zones. Which zone do I remove to accommodate the 6 zones in Wahoo?

Zone 1 Less than 81% of LTHR
Zone 2 81% to 89% of LTHR
Zone 3 90% to 93% of LTHR
Zone 4 94% to 99% of LTHR
Zone 5a 100% to 102% of LTHR
Zone 5b 103% to 106% of LTHR
Zone 5c More than 106% of LTHR

Ago Velox

achoo

In my experience, there are a few problems with Friel's zones:

1. They're too high. OK, there is definitely HR zone variation from person to person, but it seems to me that Friel's zones are at the high end of the range of variation. How do I know this? Well, I race, and most if not the vast majority of cyclists who race have powermeters and train using zones. And on long group z2 rides we talk about things like this.

2. Friel's multiple zones result in zones that are too small to be useful. HRs are variable from day-to-day. Thus a zone that's only three or four percent - 5 to 8 bpm - is too small. Also, for the upper zones, how do you hold your variable HR in such a small band or even get your HR up into the zone if your HR is low that day over a short interval where you're literally going all-out?

3. It's really tough to do structured training on short intervals using HR to begin with. Intervals under 5 min or so tend to be very difficult to hold steady effort on as you get tired and your HR moves upward during the interval. Friel's making small zones exaggerates this problem.

Friel's zones will work, but if you find yourself always fatigued when you're doing z2/3 work using his HR zones, you might want to switch over to Coggan's zones.

Ago Velox

Thanks for the heads up Achoo. Some real life input into a theory! Thank you.

I wil no discard Mr Friel.

How does Coggan's zones differ to Friel's?

Why Coggan over many others?


Ago