- Morning Trainiacs,
this is gonna hurt a lot,
but if it's something that I have prescribed
to Team Trainiac athletes,
I gotta do it myself too.
So I am doing a max heart rate test,
running, on the track.
So I'm bringing out the big guns,
bringing out carbs with caffeine, with the UCAN bar.
I'm gonna pull out the Skratch Hyper Hydrator,
I find that my performance gets amped up a little bit.
I got just a low carb bar
to make sure I've got enough calories
and then this is, somebody sent this to me,
I don't really know who it is but thank you.
A little bit of carbs for electrolytes.
If you ever wanted to maybe see
a grown man throw up,
today might be the day.
(upbeat music)
So, as people on Team Trainiac
or all of you just watching,
end up doing low heart rate training,
a lot of people say,
"Well, this zone cant be right, it's too easy."
And that's fair to think that because,
whether it's Maff method, The Maffeton method
of calculating your heart rate zone two cap,
or just a percentage of 220 minus your age,
whatever it is, it's kind of arbitrary.
So instead of going to a lab which i have historically done
which most people can't do,
I found a calculator called a Karvonen method,
which actually takes peoples data,
their max heart rate, and their lowest resting heart rate
and gets your zones there.
We've tested it with a few people on Team Trainiac
who I know have abnormally high heart rates,
and in their cases it gets them something that,
I would actually say is probably more accurate
based on their efforts.
So I have to go do this.
As far as I can tell it should be pretty accurate.
I'm going to guess,
it's a little cold today,
but I think I can probably get around 180.
If it's low 180s, that's a really good effort,
but it's a little cold,
so heart rate might not climb quite so high.
(upbeat music)
So how this is going to work is,
two miles warm up, just an easy jog,
then a mile tempo, so I'm comfortably uncomfortable,
to get the heart rate up.
Then, here is when things get real.
400 max effort.
Then, 400, where every hundred of that 400
we are pushing to another max.
Essentially, pace will probably stay the same,
but hopefully it will drive the heart rate up a little bit
by increasing that effort.
The goal is to,
for the real short interval,
and usually short intervals are better
for getting max efforts,
because you don't accumulate fatigue as you go,
so you can push a little bit.
We get like a true running max heart rate.
Then after I die, we go back home
and I'll explain how we use this.
(upbeat music)
I'm sorry to all the Team Trainiac athletes.
It's clear that I haven't done a lot of max effort.
I think I got up around 180, and then that was enough,
I was just fading at the end.
Let's go see what the results are.
Oh, okay, that was appropriately awful.
So,
I am still a little flummoxed.
Just ended 15 minutes ago.
A couple of quick tips for that,
first make sure that you aren't using
the wrist-based heart rate monitor, if you've got one.
This is the Garmin 745,
it has a wrist-based heart rate monitor.
Even as good as it is,
make sure that you are doing this with a heart rate strap.
It's going to be way more accurate.
When you start running really, really fast,
wrist-based heart rate monitors aren't accurate.
I find in my testing that they are okay for biking,
they are okay for like really light jogging
and just day to day heart rate measurement,
but that pounding of a heart run,
you need a heart rate monitor strap.`
And if you are finding that you are running really slow,
and you are using a heart rate monitor on your wrist,
and your heart rate is sky high,
maybe you need heart monitor strap.
We never really recommend that you use this for much.
Next, have some carbs beforehand,
we need to hit peak efforts,
and do this in a recovery week.
Don't do this when you are fatigued,
or the training load is pretty high.
I want you to be able to put out a real max effort.
Fortunately the good thing about this is that,
the heart stuff, it lasts like 9 minutes,
so its not like this is going to leave a mark
for a bunch of days, fortunately.
Okay, now that we've got that, I want you to go to Google,
and type in Karvonen method calculator,
scroll down, and for me it's about half way down,
calculator soup is what you want.
I want you to then go and change this to
Karvonen by max heart rate and resting heart rate.
This is where we start calculating it,
based off of if your resting heart rate is really low,
really high.
If your max heart rate is really low or really high,
it gets customized to you.
Essentially what this is doing,
the Karvonen method, is taking your unique data,
and figuring out, how much heart rate reserve you have.
Like, it's figuring out the zones based off of your inputs,
and the inputs being the difference between
your low and your high.
So in my case, I ended up coming out of that
with a heart rate of 181.
Personally, most of these tests, I find,
they don't get your actual real max,
like put a gun to somebody's head
or run from something else, add a little bit of adrenaline.
It's probably going to be about two beats higher.
So I would actually put in 183, even though this said 181
and do the same for yourself.
Then, what I did for the resting heart rate,
was I went into Garmin Connect,
and I went to health stats,
then heart rate.
I went for one year, and then what it's going to give you
is in these, you're really quickly going to be able to see
a lowest potential heart rate.
So in here I've got 45 as my lowest
and how you would get that is,
get that by wearing a heart rate monitor overnight.
Day to day, throughout the day,
like your heart rate is going to be higher
than when you are sleeping.
You want to take an overnight resting heart rate.
That might take you a couple of weeks to gather enough data.
Put that in, hit calculate,
and then here, the top of light fat burning zone,
that's 70%,
that's it, 142.
That is basically, exactly,
the number that I get when I'm in a lab.
And when we start looking at people on Team Trainiac
that have really high heart rates
or have abnormal heart rates,
one way or another,
with their resting heart rate or their max heart rate,
this gets them pretty close.
Like for example,
I think on Team Trainiac we've got somebody that,
I'm making these numbers up a little bit,
but what I remember is his max heart rate is around 210
and I think his resting heart rate is around 51.
So instead of taking a Maff method calculation,
which we would get him somewhere in the 140s,
we've got 162.
So it ends up being a lot more customized
based on abnormalities.
And I find there's probably about 5-10% people out there
that an abnormality happens.
So this gets you your unique zones.
Now if you are on Team Trainiac and wondering
how you customize your zones,
as of right now, November 4th 2020, you can't.
At the moment, for all the techies out there,
we are currently re-architecting the entire site.
The techie said that by doing this,
we'll be able to develop features way more quickly.
So we are doing that right now,
so that hopefully early January, February,
we can start developing
and we will update the zones in Team Trainiac much quicker.
That's that, Trainiacs, that hurts,
I apologize to all Team Trainiacs members out there
who are doing that,
but this going to get you
a very customized set of zones that you can use.
Work off of these until we update it in the app,
and in the meantime if you aren't already,
subscribe with the subscribe button below,
'cause who doesn't want to see
a blond Canadian almost throw up on the track
in front of a bunch of high school students.
I mean, that's fun for everyone, right?
Not me.
Later!