It would seem natural that your heart rate monitor should be your greatest ally when it comes to race day – but as ever, the reasoning is not that simple. While you can use your experience from previous competitions to your advantage, you'll find

or races, and you can also see how you’re improving over time. Depending on the package, other charts and graphs can show you how much time you’ve spent in each training zone (the computer can guess the zones from your age, or you can enter them yourself

often see round figures quoted in general guides, ranging from 70-90 per cent of MHR. Unfortunately, the reason they’re so vague is that – as we’ve found out – we’re all different.In the early days, you’d have needed a physiological lab test to find

every few minutes as you're running, to get a general idea of your rate throughout the session. You will probably find that, even if you maintain the same pace throughout, your heart rate will rise by 5-10 beats over a period of 30 minutes

You need more than one-off snapshots of your fitness levels to assess your progress properly. Races and time trials are reasonable guides to how things are developing, but they vary too much to be really useful. Races also rely on maximal effort

Whether you call it tempo running or anaerobic, lactate or ventilatory threshold training doesn’t matter. Threshold training works, and adding it to your schedule is sure to make you faster and more efficient in endurance races.Threshold training

UAN: 178 Article type:-->It’s a common scenario. “I trained harder for this one than I ever have before,” says the disbelieving runner, head bowed after a disappointing race. The reason? Quite simply, your body will let you train harder than

resting heart rate.If you’re ill, tired, stressed or not fully recovered from a race or hard session, you may well see that your resting heart rate is higher than your baseline level. This is your body’s way of sending you warning signals, and you should

, 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

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