Intensity Described as Training Zones

I will assign workouts based on training zones. There are five training zones, labeled 1, the easiest, through 5, the most difficult, with one additional level for "all-out" effort.

 

á          Zone 1 is fairly light exercise. It is used for easy days, recovery workouts, long slow workouts, and to improve overall health. It is also used as a warmup and cooldown for harder workouts.

 

á          Zone 2 is the "somewhat hard" zone. Zone 2 is used to improve the hearts ability to pump blood, increase metabolism of oxygen, increase cardiovascular capacity of muscles, tendons and ligaments, and to improve fitness and endurance. A large percentage of your weekly distance will be done in zones 1 and 2.

 

á          Zone 3 is a good hard workout. This is the zone in which we exercise at a good pace but still feel comfortable and still have the ability to carry on conversation. Exercising in this zone teaches the body to burn fat, improves endurance, familiarizes us with training at a faster pace. This is a zone that feels terrific, and you will feel as though you could continue forever, but you shouldn't.

 

á          Zone 4 is the "very hard" workout zone. Exercising in this zone increases tolerance to lactic acid, increases enzymes in the muscles used for anaerobic metabolism, familiarizes us with the pace and effort used for racing and time trials. For readers familiar with heart rate training concepts, the LT (Lactate Threshold or Lactate Turnpoint) falls within this zone. This point is also sometimes referred to as your A T (Anaerobic Threshold), and also by its more scientific term "Onset of Blood Lactate Accumulation" (OBLA). It is likely that during a zone 4 workout, you will stray over this point at times; you will learn to notice the feeling of increasingly heavy arms. Learning to notice this feeling early, and to get back below your OBLA, is a valuable skill. When this happens, you can learn how to recover below, but still near, your OBLA. With time, you can learn to identify that point as a very specific heart rate.

 

á        & nbsp; Zone 5 is 'very very hard', and is reserved for only a few of the hardest workout efforts and races. This range is beyond our lactate threshold and is used to increase muscle tolerance to large amounts of lactic acid, and to improve sprinting and hard, short effort ability.

 

á          The "all out" or maximum effort work only appears in some very short duration sprints. They are notable because of their infrequent appearance in the schedules. The heart does not have a chance to respond before the sprint is over, so heart rate is not a useful guide for these intervals.