York marathon and ultra distance runner Mark Sullivan joins our bloggers. He offers his views on heart rates following the piece by Babs Shiells last week.

Not every 20-year-old will have the same Training Zone so you need to include the Resting Heart Rate (RHR) in any calculation about training zones so for example:

Max HR is 220 - 20year old = 200 
RHR is 45 so a working HR would be 200 - 45 = 155

Then you can work out the various Training Zones:

Recovery 60 - 70% or 155 x 60%
Aerobic 70 - 80% or 155 x 70%
Anaerobic: 80 - 90% or 155 x 80%

Once you have the results above, then add the RHR to the number and that is the TZ. This then allows each person to train effectively and to also change it as the RHR goes down with increasing fitness.

Better still, why bother with doing all of that (and buying an expensive HR monitor which you will probably never use) when you can do the Borg scale of Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE):

1 = sitting down doing nothing
10 = eyeballs out work (sprinting)

Aerobic zone for this would be about 7 where you begin to feel flushed, breathing rate increases but you can still chat (short sentences), you start sweating but not profusely (glowing I think you could say) and you feel you could keep that pace up for a reasonable period of time (20 - 30 mins maybe to start).

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Readers who submit articles must agree to our terms of use. The content is the sole responsibility of the contributor and is unmoderated. But we will react if anything that breaks the rules comes to our attention. If you wish to complain about this article, contact us here