Heart Rate Management for a Beginner?
admin July 15th, 2007
I ran today 1/2 mile and then took my HR. It was 154. I then walked for five minutes at a normal pace and HR was 120. I again walked 5 minutes at a normal pace and it was 115. I then ran another 1/2 mile and it was 151.So if I’m trying to increase both speed and distance how should I work this? Should I run a bit harder in an attempt to get my HR closer to my max?
You are better off to run by perceived exertion than by heart rate at this point. The tables in the article you link to are adequate for the general description of training at different intensities. But HR zones using formulas have too much error to be useful to the majority of people. You might be someone who falls into the correct zone by usign teh formula, but you won’t know until after you’ve done some training that’s not going well.
Bottom line is to run at a pace where conversation is easy, this accomplishes the tasks described in the page you linked to described here:
“Most effective for overall cardiovascular fitness. Increases your cardio-respitory capacity: that is, the your ability to transport oxygenated blood to the muscle cells and carbon dioxide away from the cells. Also effective for increasing overall muscle strength.”
You don’t need to take your HR to figure out if you are in the right zone if you follow the “conversation” guideline in the first paragraph. There are also percieved exertion tables where you assign a number to your effort. I prefer the 6-20 scale, but there are also 1-10 scales in use that others find simpler.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a big advocate of HR training. But I hate to see people get too caught up in numbers especially when starting off witha formula based plan and without a good understanding of the benefits that you get from training at different intensities.
Too many people think that in order to have quick improvement, you have to go hard. Quite the contraray. From what you describe as your exercise background, slow and stead for several months is the way to go in order to get yoru body acclimated ot exercise, get your cardiovascular system used ot the idea of working harder and to avoid early injury.
I firmly believe that the single most important factor in lifelong improvement is consistancy. If you have to take 1-2 weeks off every few months due to nagging injuries, or if you start out too hard and too fast and develop smaller injuries that you try to train through, you are really sabataging your potential for development.
Joe Friel advocates for an easy Zone 1/2 endurance based approach for up to 2 full years before beginning anything more intense. Many folks on this board hvae stories of amazing improvements in pace as well as comfort by doing nothign but LSD (long slow distance).