- Morning Trainiacs, Just about to start a 30 minute ride
with people from all around the world.
We do this every Thursday morning, come join.
It's chatty, a little intense, but a good workout.
When new triathletes take up training,
they often start by training with a heart rate monitor
instead of things like power or pace,
because they're not really sure of those things.
Heart rate is usually where people start,
but heart rate training is one of the things that
most people get really, really wrong.
Specifically with the bike for example,
people use heart rate a lot for the bike.
Maybe not the smartest.
After we finish up this ride,
I'm going to go through the biggest mistakes
that I see people using
when it comes to using heart rate
as the main metric for your training plan
and how it should actually be done.
Once you get it right, It'll allow you to become faster
without training as hard all the time.
You're going to enjoy training a heck of a lot more,
and get a lot faster a lot sooner.
Okay, so I have talked about the importance of being able to
run at a low heart rate for a really long time.
And I've primarily talked about it in terms of,
well you have to make sure
that you run under your Zone 2 cap,
your LT 1, your lactate threshold 1,
your maffetone cap.
It's all kind of the same thing.
Essentially physiologically what it is,
is it is the first lactate threshold.
It's the point at which your body can't buffer out
the lactic acid from your body
as quickly as you're producing it.
So you build it up, and you build it up.
And what ends up happening is as you're building it up
you end up creating a bunch of stress responses
in the body that long-term don't really allow you to go
out for those really key (bang) workouts
and hit them very well,
hard enough so that you actually can stimulate a response
in your body to adapt to that hard workout.
So it just ends up being this gray area.
I call it the low return on investment training zone.
In addition to that in most endurance sports
the name of the game is not "how hard can we hit it?"
It's "how much energy can we preserve
so that we don't slow down?"
And when you train your body to run at a lower heart rate
because you are able to run, ride,
swim at that lower heart rate
you're A going to be burning fewer calories,
and B you're going to be burning a higher proportion
of the amount of calories that you burn from fat.
Which is really calorie dense,
and we almost have an endless supply.
So if you can race and train
at a lower intensity more easily,
you are going to feel better when you're training.
You're going to be able to hit the hard stuff harder
so that you're going to get faster, quicker.
You're going to reduce the likelihood
of a bad stress response,
and you're going to increase the amount
of energy that you have available
to you when you are training and racing.
It's just all so, so good and so important.
(bang) But there are a number of things
that we consistently get messages about
over and over and over and over about
that I want to share with you.
Mistakes that people make when they start using
heart rate training for their endurance sports.
The first mistake that people make as it relates
to heart rate training to guide their endurance
training is just not doing it.
Is not creating this system where you do
70 to 80 percent of your training
really, really strictly at low intensities.
Generally what happens is most amateur endurance athletes,
they just go
"Well, you know I'll make this kind of like
an easy-ish sort of ride."
Well it felt easy, so it's kind of going to be easy.
So yeah, it's definitely going to be easy
because it felt easy.
But when you start comparing our amateur triathlon
training metrics to that of pros.
Pros train the vast majority
of their training at low, low intensities.
Like strictly low intensities.
Training intensities that relative to us,
we would be embarrassed if we went and did it.
And you might be saying
"Well I follow them online,
and no they're going way faster."
But relative to what they're capable of,
it is way easier.
I've trained with them and I've gone out and been like
just screaming bloody murder on a ride.
Thinking like, "Oh my God, this is threshold.
How am I going to do this for a long ride?"
Well, I didn't, I got popped off the back.
But for all of them, they were chatting away.
They weren't having anything nutritionally
besides a little bit of water,
because it was so easy for them to ride at like 240 Watts.
Yeah, that's like (metal slice) bye Taren.
Depending on how you actually measure low intensity
there are actually some studies that say that
pros and elite athletes have done as much as 97%
of the time that they spend training at a low heart rate.
This is wild.
When we think about us being like,
"Oh well when I need a rest day,
I'll make sure that it's a low heart rate."
No, you got to do it.
There's no way around it.
Roughly around 70 to 80% of your
total annual training volume as measured
in whatever training app you're using
has to be at a low intensity.
Now the second one,
and this is where I'm going to mess you all up,
is doing too much of it.
What we hear from a lot of athletes is they're like
"All right, I'm bought into this Zone 2 idea.
I'm going to go out and I'm going to
work on it really hard."
And they only do the Zone 2 intensity.
And then they call me six, seven,
eight weeks later and say,
"Well, you know it's not,
I'm not getting any progress and like what's going on?
I'm not getting any faster?"
Well it's not strictly Zone 2 training
that makes you faster.
It's the combination of a large amount of
low intensity training that builds up
all of that mitochondria
and that availability of energy
that allows you to then go and when you hit it hard,
(clap) you hit it really hard.
And the combination of the increased density
in the mitochondria in your muscles,
with those stimuli of the workouts of
(clap) boom really hitting it hard, it's that combination.
So that's why I don't say a 100% of your time year round
should be at Zone 2.
It is more like that 70 to 80% in Zone 2,
and the rest should be really quite difficult.
And the combination of is the secret sauce.
The next thing and we see this all the time
is people thinking that it's a quick fix.
I get messages from people that say,
"Well, you know I've done about 26 runs and roughly
about a third of them have been low heart rate."
Or I've even had people that say,
"You know I've been doing it for a week
and I just can't seem to bring my heart rate down."
Well, I'll give you this as an example
If I said, "You know what?
We're going to train you to get
up to like a maximum heart rate, like up until the 190's,
and you're going to have to learn how to
tolerate that lactic acid, and that pain,
and be powerful enough to get your heart rate up there,
and push your muscles enough, and recruit enough muscles
in your body to be able to do that."
You'd be like, "Whoa, this is going to be a long project."
It's kind of the same
for being able to teach your body how to function
at that lower heart rate.
It's very easy to get into the middle heart rate
because your body is working kind of hard, sorta hard,
hard enough that you're exercising.
But it's fairly hard to teach it how to hit
(explosion) boom!
really maximum efforts, or be really efficient.
But it's not about (snap) a quick fix that is going to
change things for you.
It's about structuring a training plan,
so that quarter after quarter after quarter
you can just layer on good training year after year,
and make progress all the time.
As opposed to just sitting in that gray area
of not really ever making progress.
Now, if you got into endurance sports thinking
that within a matter of a week or a couple of months
that you would reach every single one of your goals
and it would be easy.
Would it really even interest you?
Probably not.
The fourth mistake that people make is using it
for bike inner holes or in the pool.
I once saw somebody at the pool doing laps of 50.
Going really, really hard.
And then he popped out of the water
and they go (hard breathing).
And catch his heart rate, beats per minute, and then go
(yelling) "Just can't get my heart rate up."
You're not going to be able to get your heart rate up
in the pool because the hydrostatic pressure of the water
is going to put pressure on the outside of your body,
keeping your heart rate artificially low.
So you're not going to be able to get it up
in the intervals.
It just isn't accurate in my testing by as much as
probably around 20 to 25 beats a minute
at the same intensities.
For bike intervals, bike intervals should be anywhere from
about 30 seconds to like maybe six, seven minutes or so.
And I've done intervals that take three minutes,
and even after the three minutes are up
during the rest period,
my heart rate is still climbing.
So it takes a really long time for your heart rate to go up.
Now using heart rate for short intervals, be in on the bike,
be it in the pool, be it even for running,
is really hard to do because of that heart rate lag.
So for those short intervals,
what I like to do is use either power on the bike,
or rate of perceived exertion,
or if you're on the run, pace.
And I exclusively like to reserve the
low heart rate training
for low intensity bikes and low intensity runs.
The fifth mistake that people make is not pairing it
with carbohydrate timing.
I like to recommend the time carbohydrate approach
where for intense exercising,
you load up with carbs
so that you can hit those intensities.
But for low intensity exercising,
you restrict the carbs beforehand
and then save it for after.
The reason for this is because
you want to have as much energy as you possibly can
in your training and your racing.
So you need to teach your body how to burn fat as fuel.
A higher amount of fat as fuel.
And you can increase the amount of fat you burn as fuel
by about three to four times if you do it right.
When is your body able to burn more fat as fuel?
It's at low intensities.
So you have the opportunity to train your body
to burn more fat as fuel.
Why not take it by restricting those carbohydrates,
keeping your blood glucose nice and stable,
teaching your body how to burn more fat as fuel?
So when you get into a race,
you have more fat as fuel,
and you will likely not run out of energy.
Being one of those people that has muscle cramps,
the body is shutting down,
that you're on the side of the road,
a lot of this is just because
your body has run out of energy.
And you can't eat enough because your stomach
just can't process it fast enough to be able to do that.
So not pairing it with carbohydrate timing
is kind of missing the entire point.
The sixth thing is using a risk-based heart rate monitor.
Look, Garmin, I love you.
And you are perfectly fine for day-to-day use,
for cycling, for walking, for really, really light jogging,
but I found that as soon as you start
upping the intensity at all,
risk-based heart rate monitors can be off by,
I've seen as much as 40 to 45 beats a minute.
Always, always get yourself a heart rate monitor strap.
I use the Garmin HRM-Pro,
and instead of being off by 40 to 45 beats a minute,
we're talking at most, when it is off, which is really rare,
maybe it's three beats per minute.
It's going to be garbage in, garbage out
if you're using that.
You're just going to be frustrated
because more often than not,
the error is that the risk-based heart rate monitors
show too high.
The seventh mistake that people make is thinking
that they can cheat the system
by doing all of their bike training at low intensities.
So that will allow them to do all of their running,
which is harder to keep your heart rate low,
at higher intensities.
It doesn't really work that way.
You have to teach your body how to be efficient at both.
Just the way it is, because if you get into a race
and you've kept your heart rate low during that bike,
you know what?
You still have to go and run after,
and if your heart rate, boom, shoots through the roof
you're going to be burning nothing but carbohydrates,
you're going to have not a big access
to fat in your body as fuel,
and you're just going to tire out so much faster.
You got to do both.
Why not be better at both?
And the eighth and final thing.
This is a bit of a bonus.
Is doing it later in the day.
As we come into summer,
it's getting hotter all around the world.
And in some places of the world,
it's hot all year round.
And doing the low heart rate training later
in the day is going to be really difficult
because your body tends to jack up the heart rate
to get more blood flow to the surface of your skin
to cool you off quicker when it's hot out.
So if you can, if you do have a
low heart rate training session to do,
and you're struggling with keeping that heart rate low,
go and do it earlier in the day
to make it easier on yourself when it's cooler.
Hopefully that helps you out Trainiacs.
Now if you want to get a guided training plan for you
that has the workouts that you should do at low heart rate,
the workouts that you should do with intervals,
and the workouts that you should restrict carbs,
the workouts that you should do with carbs,
you can get all of that at our automated training app.
That is app.mymottiv.com.
Within about 60 and 90 seconds you get a
customized training plan for you,
for your goals, for your zones, for your needs,
and it guides you through the whole thing.
So you can check that out for free for 14 days.
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Later, Trainiacs.