As promised, here is part three. Sorry for the delay.

Using heart rate to monitor the intensity of your exercise can help you reach your fitness goals faster and with less chance of injury or burnout. In part one of this series I discussed what maximum heart rate is and why it is important. In part two, I explained several ways for you to discover your own maximum heart rate depending on your level of experience with exercise. Now, in part three we can actually use maximum heart rate to build the “zones” we need to use in exercise. I will also give a couple of sample workouts to get started with.

Zone Refresher

If you remember from part one I listed the typical zones used for heart rate training. Here they are again:

  1. 50% to 60% of maximum- This is commonly called the “Healthy Heart” or “Active Recovery” zone.
  2. 60% to 70% of maximum- This is the “Fitness Zone” where you start to work a little harder.
  3. 70% to 80% of maximum- This is the “Aerobic” zone, the sweet spot.
  4. 80% to 90% of maximum- This is the “Anaerobic or Threshold” zone.
  5. 90% to 100% of maximum- This is an extreme level of work. You will only be able to operate in this zone for a few minutes at most.

Building Your Zones

To build your zones take your maximum heart rate and multiply by the percentages for each zone. Using my 186 beats per minute as an example, my five zones would be:

  1. 93 (186x.5)-112 (186x.6)beats/minute
  2. 112-130 beats/minute
  3. 130-148 beats/minute
  4. 148-167 beats/minute
  5. 167-186 beats/minute

To get your zones just substitute your maximum heart rate and calculate from there.

How To Use Your Zones

Ok, now that you have your zones figured, how do you use them in your workouts? The answer depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are looking to gain fitness and aerobic conditioning you will probably spend more time in zones 1-3. If you are looking to add strength and speed to your workouts, such as training for competition, you would need to mix in a fair amount of zone 4 and some zone 5 into your workouts. When it comes down to it, everyone will have a different mix. Once again, I’ll use me as an example to give you an idea of how I mix up my workouts. This is a typical week for me:

  • Tuesday: 45-60 minutes primarily in high zone 3 to zone 4.
  • Wednesday: 60 minutes in zone 3
  • Thursday: 45-60 minutes total with 20 minutes in zone 4, the rest in zone 3
  • Saturday: 60 minutes zone 3 (I sometimes do a couple of short sprints in zone 5)
  • Sunday: 120 minutes+, mostly in zone 2-3 with a few short periods (5-10 minutes) in zone 4

Total time is 5-6 hours a week. I ride a bike as my primary exercise so the length of workouts can be a little longer than if I was running.

Sample Workout

Here is a sample workout for someone who is starting out and has a couple of hours a week to exercise. You can use this for just about all aerobic exercise, especially when starting out. Just remember to start out slow by warming up before each session.

  • Monday: 30 minutes zone 2
  • Wednesday: 30-45 minutes zone 3
  • Friday: 30 minutes zone 3
  • Saturday or Sunday: 45 minutes mostly zone 3 with a couple of short intervals (2-4 minutes each) in zone 4. Make sure to allow time to recover between zone 4 intervals.

As you build your fitness you can increase the amount of time for each workout but to be safe don’t increase by more than 10-15% each week. You can vary your workouts any number of ways but always try to alternate hard and easy days to reduce the risk of injury.

Between the three parts of this series you should have a good start to designing your own heart rate based training program. Here are the other two parts:

Using heart rate to exercise properly- part 1- why training with heart rate is important

Using heart rate to exercise properly- part 2- determining your max heart rate

I’d be very interested to hear from some of you as to how your heart rate training is going. If you want some help designing your own program let me know at mark@livetheactivelife.com and I will be happy to help you as much as I can.