What is threshold heart rate

This heart rate does not have definitive terms as it does of resting or max heart rate. Your heart is a four-chambered organ within the circulatory system. The right side of your heart receives blood from the body and pumps it to the lungs for aeration. Your blood will function as a signaling system for the heart, any changes within the pH of the blood will alert your heart, due to chemoreceptors.

Any changes to the baseline will cause a cascading effect internally, and will either send signals to the heart to increase or decrease your heart rate. This is important to remember that your heart rate is reactive. It is a response to a change in intensity, so do not be alarmed if you do not immediately hit your threshold heart rate when you just begin an effort, or recovery heart rate when you have just finished an effort.

When training with heart rate remember to still keep tabs on your own personal RPE rate of perceived exertion. Since many different factors can influence your heart rate sleep, hydration, temperature, caffeine, and stress to name a few.

Recognizing how these variables can affect your heart rate can help you to better understand if your heart rate is higher or lower during a session and whether this is a sign to press on or back off. Using Heart Rate can be a great tool for recovery days and weeks. Using heart rate can help ensure that you are staying well within easy zones in order to maximize your recovery so that you can hit your next training block hard.

Using heart rate for short high-intensity efforts will not be the best choice. Your heart rate will not reach its peak most of the time until the effort is already over. Another key takeaway is that heart rate is unique to each activity and testing protocol.

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It is sometimes difficult to know what cycling workouts to do and why, particularly with all the information available nowadays. This article considers how you can determine the demands of your goal event and set workouts to help you train for those demands.

However, is it any use to help you build your cycling fitness? So, is Strava good for beginners cycling training? In my opinion as a professional cycling coach, yes it is an excellent tool that combines elements of social interaction, manageable competition and challenges, and features that allow you to track and direct your progress according to your needs. Like any endurance event, mountain bike stage races are fundamentally about managing your energy. Training for the event is simple in many respects but the added dimensions of off-road riding make it important to develop fitness for harder efforts that are dictated by the terrain as well as your competitors.

It can be demoralising when you are unable to do your workout to the targets that you have set and it can be less effective if your targets are too easy. It occurred to me that there is a lot of information out there about training zones but it still leaves people feeling confused, perhaps because there are lots of different systems which use different calculations, metrics and language.

Riding up hills at the right pace can make a huge difference to how well you perform in endurance cycling events, so I thought I would write down some details of how to get the pacing right. So, how should you ride hills in endurance cycling events? You should ride up hills a little bit harder than you ride on the flat and use downhill for recovery. Because of the way wind resistance works, riding harder up hills is more efficient.

A way to turn the legs and activate the muscles and mitochondria which can promote recovery. We recently had a workshop on goal setting for our training group and I thought it might be useful to write an article to explain the details of how goal setting can support a successful finish in a bike packing event or any other sporting event.

So, how can goal setting help you succeed in a bike packing race? There are three types of goals used in sport: Outcome Goals, your dreams; Performance Goals, measurable things; and Process Goals, things you do. These goals integrate into a plan for both training and your event that if followed effectively should lead bring success. A question that people often want to improve is how to get faster at cycling up hills. Improving your overall cycling fitness and managing your energy effectively alongside improving your fitness for cycling up hills is likely to give you the biggest improvements in your climbing speed.

Many of us question how much training we need to do to meet our goals. It is an interesting question, as is how much training is too much? I thought I would take some time to write down my thoughts and experience on the subject in the hope that it will help you towards your goals. You should first focus how much training you can sustain now and then build up from there. The optimum amount of training at any time is a bit more than you are comfortable with but not enough to be overwhelming physically or mentally.

A good rule of thumb is to allow 1 day for every ten miles run 17km , or if it was a particularly mountainous adventure with lots of climb, 1 day for every 6 miles run 10km. However, there are a number of factors involved in recovery which can mean that it not only varies from person to person, but from race to race. Here are a few things to consider when thinking about your rest after your ultra run So how much sleep do endurance athletes need?

A general rule of thumb is between 7 and 9 hours per night for adults, but studies suggest athletes may in fact need closer to 9 or 10 hours per night for optimum performance. So how do you get faster at trail running? Well, the best way at getting good trail running is to do more trail running. So how much do you need to drink when running an ultra-marathon? If you are running for longer than 90 minutes you should aim to drink to ml of fluid per hour depending on your size and your sweat rate.

Ideally this will include some electrolytes to aid fluid absorption. Rest and recovery is an essential part of getting fitter and faster for any sport. There are many ways to incorporate recovery into your training and in this article, I share some of the ways I have found to be most effective during my years of experience as a cycling coach.

Illness aside, if you feel tired but are generally healthy the best thing to do is to go out and have a go BUT if your heart rate is not responding or is going erratically high, or you are significantly off pace despite your best efforts, call it a day, run easy or rest, the session will be there another day. Interval training is an essential part of becoming a fitter and faster cyclist but what should you do, how much and how often should you do it?

Racing off-road adds complication with the skills element and what aspects of training should be on technical terrain and what should be on the road or perhaps even an indoor trainer. Many of us like to enjoy different sports now and again so I thought it would be useful to explain how you can fit them into your cycling training in the most effective way.

So, how should you fit other sports into your cycling training? You need to think about how the sport will complement or hinder particular cycling training workouts:. What is the sport that you will be doing?

Is it explosive with lots of sprints and recoveries like football or hockey, extremely explosive like racket sports or circuit training, more sustained like running or swimming or applying lots of force like weight training or heavy gym work? It is common for people to get tired at this time of year when the better weather comes around.

This can be for a number of reasons and I thought it would be useful to write an article describing why you might feel overtired and explain what you can do to get back on track.

So, should you change your training plan if you are tired? I just finished a YouTube video on how to use heart rate for endurance cycling training and after a quick look on the internet, I decided it would be useful to write an article to go with it.

So, how do you use heart rate to train for endurance cycling? For most of the part this works well, but it gets a little more complicated when we consider things like pace, terrain and outliers to the norm ie excessively heavy or light individuals.

So how did stress have such a drastic effect on my training? When we are using up a lot of energy on stress this can limit the energy we have left for good quality training; in addition to this when emotionally stressed it can take us longer to recover. Unfortunately it is difficult to monitor this closely as emotional stress is very subjective; what causes debilitating stress for one person is a perfect motivator for another. Over recent years I have helped many people train for ultra-endurance bike packing events and over that time I have learned a lot about effective training methods.

I thought it would be useful to write an article explaining the details of what I have found to be the best way to train and prepare for a bike-packing event. So, how do you train for an ultra-endurance bikepacking event? Should I just try to keep my heart rate at 90 per cent of maximum when I carry out a threshold workout?

And should I use my maximal heart rate MHR to figure the percent beating figure, or is it more effective to use the Karvonen formula? While many athletic-minded people think that lactate threshold coincides with about 90 per cent of maximal heart rate, the truth is that it varies tremendously from person to person, and of course it also varies according to your fitness level. Even among people of similar ability levels, LTHR roams all over the map.

For example, if we examined a group of runners, all of whom are able to finish the 10K in 40 minutes flat, some of those individuals would reach their LTHR at 80 per cent of MHR. Others would be at 85, some would arrive at LTHR at 90 per cent, and — of course — the rest would be somewhere in between or perhaps even below You might think that one solution would be to bring you into the lab and begin pricking your finger as you ran at different paces on the treadmill.

We could indeed reckon a LTHR for you in that way, but there would be just one little problem: heart rate varies tremendously according to environmental conditions. If the lab temperature were 20 degrees Centigrade, with per cent humidity, and you tried to run in degree air, with per cent humidity or 2-degree air, with per cent humidity , your heart rate at your actual lactate threshold running pace could be far different than it was in the lab.

However, the Karvonen disciples run into exactly the same problems outlined above: LTHR varies tremendously from person to person and according to fitness level and environmental conditions.

The chart on the next page gives you a view of the parts of Z4. You need to stay below your threshold for all of your exercise. You are told to follow the arithmetic formula to calculate your exercise heart zones, so you use the minus your age formula, which is on the wall charts at your athletic club.

At that intensity level, your chest is pounding, your breathing is faster than you could have imagined, and the pain is enormous. What do you do? If you are like most, you quit and then try and restart at some future time.

The reason you failed is that you were told to train at a level that is above your threshold and cannot be sustained. You were given the wrong information.

They were blinded by the accepted paradigms. So, be warned that we are now leaving the comfort of the health and fitness areas of the wellness continuum. More on weight loss. More on performance. There are others, though, who are threshold Z4 addicts, spending all of their training time hanging out here, producing endorphins and eating up lactic acid as if it were choco-late.

We are concerned about the latter group threshold junkies is their nickname and encourage the former to try a few more sessions here because, if your goal is performance, you can get a lot of bang for your buck in the Threshold zone. As you become more fit, your heart rate at this point is higher; as you become less fit, your heart rate at this point lowers.

This is a moveable and trainable heart rate number — not a fixed one like maximum heart rate — threshold heart rate is dynamic. If you are interested in high performance, one of your goals must be to raise your threshold as close as you possibly can to your maximum heart rate.

In other words, your goal is to improve your maximum sustainable heart rate. It is the highest heart rate that you can sustain for a given distance without having your performance suffer. Racing at your maximum sustainable heart rate improves your performance in any athletic event.

Researchers have discovered that maximum sustainable heart rate is one of the best predictor of your success.