this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Get a heart rate sensor (wrist or chest) and train by heart rate. Most of your cardio should be heart rate zone 2 on the 5 zone scale. This builds your aerobic capacity with minimal damage and can be done almost indefinitely. Harder efforts do more damage and add recovery time so should be limited to about two a week.
If you’re going slow you’re doing it right, it will suck less, and you’re more likely to continue. Your slow speed will get faster over time.
Generally agree, but the breakdown should be 80/20, 80% easy and 20% hard. It'll be real difficult to get faster without the 20% hard.
How do I work out my personal heart rate zone boundaries?
There are a few levels of accuracy. Simplest is just using your max heart rate according to the equation (or trying to actually see how high you can get your heart rate), and basing percentages off of that.
Slightly better than that, most heart rate monitors/apps have some analytics built in that can factor in stuff like speed to approximate metabolic cost, and predict your lactate threshold. That's the heart rate that corresponds to the workload at which your body can't keep up with processing lactic acid (a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism). It's an important threshold cause you want some of your workouts to be definitely below that limit, and some to be definitely above.
There are ways to actually test that limit, often involving finger pricks to get blood samples while running on a treadmill.
The most accurate way (and what elite athletes will do), is a full metabolic test involving running on a treadmill with a heart rate monitor and a mask to measure oxygen consumption/co2 expiration.
For most people who just want to be healthy, and maybe get a little faster, it's not that important to be super accurate. The main thing is that in order to improve cardiovascularly, you basically need to activate the signaling pathways in your body that signify that you can't take in and process as much oxygen as you'd like to be able to. That involves high intensity work that is really hard on your body (muscles, joints, cardiovascular system) and it can take a few days to recover.
If you do most of your work in that low intensity zone, you give your body time to recover from high intensity while keeping overall volume up.
If you try to go too hard every time, you never recover, and never adapt.
Many apps will estimate them for you. The general formula for max heart rate is 220-age (if you’re 30, your max is probably around 190 bpm).
From there, the zones are usually calculated as % of max HR. Zone 5 is 90-100, 4 is 80-90, 3 is 70-80, 2 is 60-70, 1 is 50-60.
For our 30yo above, zone 2 would be around 114-133 bpm. That will feel super slow but that is the point, this is something you could do for a while and it should account for about 80% of your total exercise time in a week.
Edit: if you determine through training that your max is different, adjust it accordingly.
I feel like if one wants to truly train based on heart rate, then I wouldn't recommend going by an estimate like that, but just go out and do a workout designed to push the heart rate to its limit.
It’s a good starting point at least. Some folks are lower or higher. If you regularly exercise your max is probably higher than estimated. You can definitely test it with an all out workout such as Tabata intervals and use your real max. The formulas will get you close enough until you’ve tested it. You will also find different max HR for different sports; I found I can get an extra 2bpm running vs cycling, either because biking uses fewer muscles or because I was better at it that running.
I was under the impression that the maximum heart rate is something that can not be trained. This source suggests that if anything training regularly would lower a persons max heart rate.
I just think that either one is serious enough about trying to optimize ones training efficiency, at which point the formula wouldn't be accurate enough for me. Or one takes a more causal approach at which point doing most runs at "conversational pace" is a good enough rule of thumb.
I have read sources in the past that suggest endurance exercise can slow the decline in max HR. If I find them again I will share here.
In my own experience, I have not lost a single bpm in a decade of tracking.