, youll have to do a little work and some measurement with your heart rate monitor. But its not as straightforward as taking a peak reading from a race or a hard training session, no matter how exhausted you might make yourself. When it comes to your heart
identify trends, such as how long it takes you to recover from races and hard sessions, but also enables you to check that youve done what you were aiming to do in training. Bar charts, for example, can show how much time youve spent in each training zone
to keep up some high-intensity work so that you maintain your VO2max, don't forget that no matter how hard you try, you'll struggle to hit high heart rates in most forms of cross-training.Cycling and rowing again give you lower heart rate levels than
(running at your maximum aerobic steady state) is beneficial because youre working at what is supposed to be the optimal training intensity for endurance sport. If you work too hard, you risk too great a contribution of anaerobic metabolism to the energy
If you want to run faster on race day, there comes a point where you have to run faster in training. Long, steady runs are fine for improving your base endurance and threshold runs are great for boosting your aerobic efficiency, but to cap
end of the market, the monitor will simply display your heart rate as you train. This is fine if you are only interested in observing how hard youre working, but other models can offer much more.Most runners select an HRM that also has a stopwatch
at normal training speeds.Temperature is not the only thing on holiday that can affect your heart rate. Humidity also has an effect, and a hot and humid environment is particularly harsh. Altitude is another factor that hits your heart rate hard. The effect
that your heart rate is slightly higher than normal when running at your usual pace. This may be accompanied by an increase in resting heart rates. Both these increases are probably caused by a couple of days' hard training, or perhaps by a race or track
that you can't just transfer what you've learnt from ordinary training onto the race course. If you've worn your HRM in races before, one of the first things you'll have noticed is that, unlike in training, your heart rate rises extremely quickly once
, which is greatly influenced by the ups and downs in your motivation.Its just as bad to try to monitor your fitness using a stopwatch on steady training runs. Everyone has fallen into the trap of checking their splits at almost every corner in a training
