Understanding your running heart rate zones, before, during, and at peak exercise will help you become a better runner. It’s why you see more and more running watches incorporating this feature even in the base models.
Heart rate training prevents you from running too hard or too easy, allowing you to recover better, enhance performance, and reduce the risk of overtraining.
Step 1 is understanding YOUR personal heart rate zones for training and then more importantly how to effectively use them. Because running data without a purpose is just another number to fret over.
What are Heart Rate Zones for Running?
In between our resting and max heart rates lies a range of 5 heart rate zones that correspond to workouts of varying intensities that range from very light to very hard.
The MOST accurate way to find your zones is to do a VO2 Max test, but that’s not often accessible for many so instead we try to generalize either with an rate of perceived exertion or through running heart rate.
Below is an example of a test I did…wayyyy back in 2010 when I was super sick. My HR was quite a bit higher than it is now when I run in those zones, which is one of the ways that HR training can help you monitor fitness.
As your fitness improves, you’ll be able to run the same paces at a…
