Now I have been wearing a fitness watch since Christmas 2015. It all started with a Fitbit Charge HR that my wife got us. It has a heart rate monitor and I wore it through every workout from getting it to causing it to explode in summer of 2016 (It wasn't under water for that long).
After I finished my final Fitness Journey Goal of completing the Portland Spartan Sprint my wife bought me a new watch. The TomTom Spark has a Bluetooth music connection so I didn't have to take my phone with me if I didn't want too. I love it, but it also has a heart rate monitor built in.
Now with both watches I didn't give the heart rate zones a second glance because I didn't think they held any weight in the slightest. I also knew that to monitor the rate of your heart through your Radial artery is probably very inaccurate. Then the more I heard about the HRT the more I trouble ignoring the zones my watch provided.
Now how does one go about figuring out their training zones?
Well there are a lot of ways, but the most simple way is to take 220 and subtract your age. This method does have some inherent error in it, but it is a good starting method. I am going to use myself as example. As I am nearly 36 I'll use that, so 220 - 36 is 184. Now 184 bpm should be my maximum heart rate and we can now figure out the zones from that number. The zones are historically 90-100%, 80-90%, 70-80%, 60-70% and 50-60%. Now if you take 90% of 184 you get 165.6 so lets round up to 166 bpm so there is the highest zone or zone 5 166 bpm to 184 bpm. The next zone is 147.2 to 128.8 so lets round to 147 and 129.
I could figure the rest of the zones for myself, but TomTom has already done it for me, but now you know how it works. You can see that the numbers aren't 100% exact, but pretty darn close.
Now for the training method. For long distance runners it is touted to be best to train in zone 3. This is the aerobic training zone that you burn more calories and elevate your endurance and cardiovascular fitness.
In order to stay in zone 3 many runners will actually have to slow down. I find this to be very difficult as I feel like I am going to slow to be doing any good. Now this could be the fact that I was use to training in zone 4 instead of zone 3 up until this point. It could also be that the 220 - my age isn't all that accurate for me.
Although it doesn't feel like much I am continuing to attempt to train in zone 3 for another month. This is simply an experiment on myself to see if this works for me.
However based on my most recent two speed tests I must admit the numbers look promising. As I said in my workout post that the heart rate training theory very well might hold water.
The run on the left was my most recent run and the run on the right was nearly two months before when I wasn't heart rate training.
Now this could simply be just a matter of I'm in better shape now then I was two months ago, but it does look promising as I shaved nearly 30 seconds of my mile pace, but also didn't feel totally wasted.
To Be Continued
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