During the autumn and winter months, many of us turn to indoor training as a means of maintaining our fitness levels. Structuring indoor training can be difficult with many riders wasting hours with ineffective sessions.
Luckily, there are plenty of apps that offer a range of training suggestions and plans. But with many of these basing their training plans around heart rate and power training zones, it’s important to understand what these are.
Below is a guide to what heart rate training zones are and how they’re used for training. You can find more advice on power training zones over on our advice guide. This advice isn’t restricted to indoor trainers and can also be applied when training outdoors.
How do heart rate monitors work?
During exercise, your heart pumps oxygenated blood to your muscles and is a key factor in your performance.
Through a heart rate monitor, you can measure how fast your heart is beating - in BPM (beats per minute) - which indicates how hard your body is working. With this information, you have the necessary performance data to create a more effective training plan.
Heart rate monitors come in a range of styles, including chest straps, arm bands and wrist watches, and the majority will connect to the app you’re using for your indoor training to give you live heart rate data.
How can I use it for training?
To use a heart rate monitor for your training, you’ll first need to establish your heart rate zones. These are five levels of exertion that can be calculated using your heart rate and it’s these zones that you use when creating a turbo training session. The five zones are:
Zone 1: Active recovery
- 50-60% of max heart rate
- For recovery rides
- Improves recovery after hard training sessions
Zone 2: Endurance
- 60-70% of max heart rate
- Exertion you can maintain for long rides
- Improves endurance
Zone 3: Tempo
- 70-80% of max heart rate
- Hard riding that is noticeably difficult, but can also be maintained for long periods
- Improves aerobic capacity, power and strength
Zone 4: Threshold
- 80-90% of max heart rate
- An effort that can’t be maintained for too long as it’s close to your limit
- Improves lung capacity and high-speed endurance
Zone 5- VO2 Max
- 90-100% of max heart rate
- A real leg burning effort that can only be maintained for a matter of minutes
- Improves heart’s ability to quickly pump oxygen to the muscles
As you can see, the different heart rate zones improve your performance in different ways, which is why knowing them and creating training sessions around them is so important. Afterall, there’s no point only doing zone 2 riding if you’re aiming to compete in your first race or hill climb, and equally a sportive rider aiming for their first 100-mile ride won’t need to be incorporating much VO2 max training.
Therefore, when creating training sessions, use these heart rate zones to help guide you.