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

GETTY IMAGESMonitoring your heart rate during training sessions has two main uses: observation and control. Observation is the more straightforward of the two, and you can do it whether your heart rate monitor (HRM) is an entry-level unit

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

to calculate training heart rates – usually as a percentage of this value.The traditional strategy is to use the formula of 220 minus age to ‘guestimate your max. This is often used in health clubs. Here, charts show age-related MHR and training heart rates

, which is greatly influenced by the ups and downs in your motivation.It’s 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

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

GETTY IMAGESCross-training can be quite an education for an HRM user. You've probably spent time fine-tuning ideal heart rate bands for your various running sessions, to the point where keeping to them is almost second nature. But when you climb

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

train harder than is beneficial, and when you're recovering from a break, it's even more important to stay within your limits. Here, an HRM comes into its own, and though there are differences between injury and illness, the same principles apply.If you

We've already highlighted the difficulties of trying to establish your maximal heart rate. Now you’ve mastered that, here’s another problem: once you’ve found your true maximum, how do you know exactly what heart rates you should be training at? We