Have you ever heard of training in the grey zone? This is another reference to Heart Rate Zone 3, but it’s not always bad to do zone 3 cardio. We need to understand the nuances of this moderate level of effort.
Most newer runners struggle with the idea of slowing down to get faster and therefore spend a lot of easy runs in Zone 3, instead of Zone 2. The result of this as an athlete is feeling slightly overtrained, never having enough energy to go really hard on speed days, struggling to increase total mileage and eventually injury.
The overall concept is exactly the same for the bike and cyclists, but we’ve seen data that cycling may run roughly 10 beats lower for the same effort. It’s all about intensity levels and the specific goal of the workout adaptations we’re trying to achieve.
Zone 3 can feel confusing because we’re always harping on staying in Zone 2.
However, when used correctly it’s a valuable part of the 20% of hard workouts you do.
Today we’re going to talk more about what this means and how to use the HR Zones to help you figure out what type of training you should be doing.
What are Heart Rate Zones?
There are 5 Heart Rate Training Zones which are designed to correlate to different training intensities. The bottom end of this range is your resting…
