Endurance training…. you don’t need to endure the suffering to perform.

If your choice of sport is running, cycling or another form of endurance sport and you are not seeing any progress despite seemingly training really hard, there is a good chance you are probably training both too hard and not hard enough at the same time. Sounds impossible and a little bit silly, how can you be doing two totally opposite things at once. Well, let me explain.

Firstly, I like to work to heart rate zones, this could easily be used as perceived effort zones as well. I use a 5-zone scale. With zone 1 being totally easy, a gentle stroll on a summers evening type thing. With zone 5 therefore being absolute maximal effort on the verge of your eyeballs popping out your skull and the risk of seeing your breakfast again.

The holy grail of zone 2 training for endurance.

To be able to go faster for longer with less effort we need to train our body to metabolise fat to refill our ATP or adenosine triphosphate, the fuel which our cells use for every bodily function. I’m not going to get into any detail of how our body makes ATP in this blog however if you’re interested, I will do a blog in the future about this.  But essentially as it takes a little longer to produce ATP with fat metabolism, we have to be consuming the ATP we do have slower so demand doesn’t exceed supply. Or in other words we have to be going slower.

 Not just slower but considerably easier than we expect, which can be frustrating, we all like to see how fast we can cycle up a hill or get carried away on a run with a friend and next thing you know, your heart rate feels like you’re being chassed by a vampire. What that looks like in our effort zone model is that a lot of the time is spent in either the top of zone 3 and probably touching zones 4 and even 5 at times.

If you can restrict your training so that 90% of the time you are in zone 2 then you leave the last 10% to do the really hard work, your maximal effort splits which is where the Vo2 Max gains are to be made. I shall be doing a blog in the future about Vo2 Max training so hold your horses if you can’t wait to hear about it.

If you would like some help setting your training zones or to ask anything about this blog then please get in touch.