Originally Posted by
banerjek
Did I read correctly that if you hammer for 2 min, you can get your HR to 178 and then it takes 5 minutes for it to drop to 165? Then you can boost it back to 178 really quickly?
I don't know much about training, but that doesn't sound right. If that were going on with me, I'd be trying to build my aerobic capacity.
Let's see... looking at my intervals today, I started each around 120 and quickly ramped to about 170 over a little less than a minute, then drifted up to just over 180 during the rest of the 8 minute interval. It took about a minute coasting downhill to drop back to the 120 range, at which point I had to pedal and it steadily drifted down to around 100 by the bottom of the hill, about 5 minutes from the end of the interval. It would have dropped faster I'm sure, but for the pedaling (there were some uphill sections coming "down").
So that's me, but my aerobic capacity is obviously pretty good. One of the indicators of fitness is how rapidly your HR can recover after a hard effort. It doesn't really sound right to me either that it would take 5 minutes to recover from 178 to 165, but it also depends on what he means by "rest". He could still be working pretty hard in which case it may take much longer for the HR to normalize at the new effort level.