up on workouts is a highly efficient and effective way to maintain or boost fitness levels. "For the runner trying to improve their fitness, the essence is that you are running fast - anything that gets the heart rate up around 80 per cent of maximum
's stroke volume or your ability to extract oxygen from blood that changes with age, says Sandra Hunter, an exercise scientist at Marquette University in the USA. "It's that your maximum heart rate declines, and no one can change that. It just plummets
at the end. You need to get up to race pace earlier on and stay there. The key thing is to get your warm-up strategy right and include some faster 200m sections where you take longer strides to drive your heart rate higher. Practise your warm-up routine
heart rate. Your easy and long training runs can be much slower – they’re often just time on your feet. Don’t worry too much about pace – what is key, is the effort you put in. Pick some races at weekends, relax, make sure you’ve got enough breakfast
these points - the difficult one is swimming. In a race we cannot keep looking at our heart-rate monitor or stopwatch," says Bill Black, who coached the GB Men's Triathlon Team at the Sydney Olympics. "But if we train at a certain pace in the pool we can keep
, an indication that a significant contribution is being made from the anaerobic energy system. Training intensity therefore needs to be low - around 55-70 per cent of maximum heart rate, or conversational effort (if you can't easily carry on a conversation
every Sunday. I have expressed effort in two ways: a) percentage of maximum heart rate, and b) actual running speed. Steady runs will be at around 70-75 per cent effort and you will find that your steady pace will improve over the weeks. When running
