crankarmbreaker

When you're going on a long ride, where do you want your heart rate to be most of the time?


Several months ago, I got the Wahoo fitness HR monitor and its smartphone app. I told it my weight and age, and at the end of each ride, it provides a bar chart with the amount of time my heart rate was in each category. The categories are:


>118: Easy

118-137 Fat burn

137-151 Cardio

151-173 Hard

173+ Peak


I have found the monitor an effective real-time reminder that I could go faster. When I start a ride, I resolve to go darned fast the whole time and keep 70 percent of it in Hard and Peak. (And sometimes I manage that when I'm rested and the ride is only an hour long.) But, when I ride more than 40 miles in a day, or two days in a row of 40 miles, my body says, ha-ha, we're not doing that, we're tired, and I end up spending most of it in the lower "fat burn." And, I think it's safe to say that no matter how much you intend to be Superman, when you do a long ride, you will deal with a body that's a little tired. For those of you who use these kinds of monitors and ride centuries, where is it your heart rate spends most of its time? Is there an ideal distribution you try to train yourself for?


Some background on me: I'm 39 years old, 6 feet 9 inches tall and weigh 350 pounds. (Would love to lose a large amount.) My big goal this year is to do the Ride Around Mt. Rainier in One Day, a 154-mile ride that has 10,000 feet of elevation gain and a 15-hour time limit. (I volunteered last year and have the lottery bypass.) Finishing within the time limit has been a big challenge in past years. My more immediate goals have been to get used to going 50 miles without stopping, and I bought a water backpack and I carry two bottles of sports drink (Perpetuem) on the bike. Between the sports drink and the Clif Bars, I've been able to skip lunch while consuming 400-500 calories per hour on the bike. This year I've done a bunch of 40-60 mile rides (works with my kid's school schedule) but now that it's warming up, I'm planning to start centuries.


Any thoughts you can offer would be helpful.

rubiksoval

Those zone names are made up so I'm not exactly sure what they're relating to.

And if your zones, whatever they may actually be, are based solely on an age algorithm, then I wouldn't trust them a bit.

With that said, different rides are used for different things. A 3-4 hour steady ride would probably be zone 2/endurance for me. But I rarely do those and will typically spend larger amounts of time in a Z3 heart rate zone, which is closer to a z3/4/5 power output, which is what I actually pay attention to.

crankarmbreaker

Is there an article describing what those zones mean? Are you working harder as the zone numbers go up?

Seattle Forrest

Usually people break heart rate ranges into 5 buckets. They're called zone 1, zone 2, etc. The easiest way to do that has nothing to do with you personally and is only marginally useful. If you're going to use heart rate zones you should do a LTHR (Google it) test and base your zones on that. Do the test a few times, you'll get better at pacing for it.

That said, you shouldn't be going all out on every ride. Doing that has people get a bit fitter and then plateau. Definitely on longer rides the intensity is going to have to dial back, that's how it goes. You have a long, hard ride ahead of you and volume is probably a lot more important than intensity.
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Carbonfiberboy 

On long rides, I want my HR to stay at a level where when I finish the ride I'm exhausted but still riding as fast as at the beginning.

A very good rule for long rides is to hit the last hill of a long ride as hard as you can, see how high your HR gets. Next long ride, don't go over that HR anywhere.

The only way to learn what your HR should be on RAMROD is to get out there and climb the big hills. The Sunrise road opens to bikes before it opens to cars. Bookmark the Park's Sunrise Road web page and start checking on it in June. Climb it from the Deli Stop. Even better, from the Deli Stop to Chinook Pass for a warmup, then descend and climb to Sunrise. A good loop is from the intersection of 706 and Skate Creek Rd. (Kernahan Rd): enter the Park, climb to Paradise, down Stevens Canyon, right on 123 and 12, right on Skate Creek in Packwood, back to car. Another is starting in Ohanapecosh Campground equipment yard, N over Chinook, down to a right on 12, another right on 123 and back to the car. You do those three rides in the month before RR, you'll know what to do and you'll finish within the time limit. Another surprisingly useful ride is the one-day STP. Very little climbing, but it gets you used staying fed, hydrated, and correctly paced on a long day. Expensive but worth doing it at least once. Pay for the bus ride back.

Meanwhile, ride your butt off. 100 miles/week now, up to 150+ miles/week. Do a long weekend ride of 3-5 hours, riding as hard as you can from the start and just limp into the finish. Give it everything you have, every week. Don't do that on those big training rides above. You'll figure it out. I wouldn't bother with intervals. Just that one hard ride and then a couple moderate rides, 30+ miles each during the week. I was bib 10 last year, registered again this year.

More to your question, I like to see about 1 hour/week in zone 4, almost none in zone 1, the rest split more or less evenly even between zones 2 and 3. Those are weekly totals. Try to do that. You'll get a feel for it in a few weeks. If that cooks you too much, back off on the zone 3 - back to zone 2 when not climbing, but leave the zone 4, at least 45'/week. Gotta stimulate the aerobic system. In May and June, I'll do some zone 5 work, usually no more than 20'/week.

FWIW (not much), my standard big ride climbing HR is 93% of my LTHR. On a 400k, I'd be down to maybe 90%.

This Sunday, I'm: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/29520487
Next Sunday, I'm: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/19614068

Carbonfiberboy 

Here's your book: https://smile.amazon.com/Sally-Edwar...dp/1558505520/

All your questions answered.

Ignore all the stuff about fat-burning zones. Save that for future years. Right now, just learn to train.

Carbonfiberboy 

Another thing you might do is get a TrainingPeaks subscription. It's worth it. Upload everything you do. Right now it won't mean much, but it'll help you in the future to be able to look back, see what you did, and what that did.

Machka 

When I start a long ride (century and up), my HR is usually quite high ... up around 170. I think that's just nerves.

After a while (maybe 25-ish km), it starts to settle and will head down to about 155.

When I was in really good shape, doing this sort of thing all the time, somewhere around about 75 km, it would drop to about 130 and sit there for the rest of the ride ... unless there was a hill, of course.

More recently, it doesn't usually drop below about 145 on long rides.

canklecat

Since cutting back on Sudafed for sinus congestion and ephedrine for asthma my heart rate and BP have settled down to normal range. When I need pseudoephedrine or ephedrine for congestion my resting pulse tends to be around 80, and after a workout it'll stay around 100 for hours after I've stopped to rest. Now that I'm back on Flonase and albuterol I don't get that unnecessary stimulant effect (and, no, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine made zero difference in my average speed and effort). So it's a little easier to use age based guidelines (I'm 61).

For a 50 mile ride Friday I tried to keep my HR around 130. I don't wear monitors, I just stopped three times for a moment at the tops of hills to check using a phone app. I was mostly going for a moderate effort and saddle time. My HR corresponded with what I'd expect for that perceived effort.

Most of my road bike rides are shorter workouts, 20-30 miles, sometimes mixing intervals, other times emphasizing steady maximum effort for 20-40 minutes. So occasionally my HR will be 170-175 when I stop to check -- same as when I do more structured intervals indoors. But since I don't wear a monitor I don't know how much it varies throughout a ride.

wolfchild

I treat longer rides as a way of doing LISS so I keep my HR on the lower side. I'll throw in a few very short bursts of intense effort on a longer ride ( eg: a hill climb or hard acceleration) but I keep those very short and far in between.

crankarmbreaker

Today I went and did the LTHR test for 30 minutes (recording data for the only the last 20 minutes) and came up with an average heart rate of 173. So that makes my zones:

Z1: >140
Z2: 140-154
Z3: 154-160
Z4: 161-172
Z5a: 173-176

From what people have said in this thread, that makes the Z2 target for a long bike ride 140-154. Is that what you're telling me?

Carbonfiberboy 

For my part, I'm not saying that. Your HR needs to be what it needs to be to get the job done in the least possible time. It'll vary all over the place, depending on what you're doing. Because power is a function of speed cubed, you need to go a lot harder on the climbs then on the flats. Going hard on the spring 40+ mile rides I've been doing, my average HR is 90% of my LTHR. That's how hard I need to go to get fit. That'll come down a little as the rides get longer, but it won't come down as I get fitter, maybe even go up as I get more conditioned.

I'm hitting around LTHR on every major climb and holding zone 3 most of the rest of the time. I regard every long training ride as a TT. Figure out, for you, how to get the job done the quickest. I ignore zones and just go as hard as I can, all the time. "as hard as I can" means as hard as I can and still finish in the least possible time. That takes experience. I call it "titrating the pain." As it is said, experience starts when you begin. Don't overthink it, just ride the hell out of it.

Your LTHR is the first number you need to know. The second is the climbing cadence at LTHR.which gets you up the hill the quickest. I suppose there's a 3rd number you'll learn: what HR you can still maintain on a long hill when you're absolutely exhausted.

Did you do those training rides I posted? This weekend's ride is Roller Coaster. Search for it on RWGPS.

Machka 

+1

If the ride is flat and fairly easy, my HR might end up in Zone 2 for a lot of the ride, but if there are hills and wind it could be a different story.

Also nerves ... if I feel pressed for time or pressure to keep up with people, my HR will be higher.

Also traffic ... I discovered my HR is often about 10 bpm higher in traffic than it is on a quiet country road.

I don't aim to be at a certain heart rate ... heart rate is not a target.

Hermes

Level Name Average HR
2 Endurance 69-83%
3 Tempo 84-94%
4 Lactate Threshold 95-105%(may not be achieved during initial phases of effort(s))
5 VO 2 Max >106%

I plugged in your 172 heart rate into Coggan's formula for heart rate zones and got your recovery at 117 bmp. https://www.endurancepath.com/resour...ne-calculator/ 140 is too high so check your math and formulation.

If I did not know anything about an athlete and I wanted to hazard a guess or suggest a recovery HR, I would use 120 bpm.

Carbonfiberboy 

Interesting. My HR never varies from external factors, only from internal, like effort, hydration, and fueling. It's usually ~67 standing by my bike at the start. Traffic doesn't bother me. Riders ahead of me, OTOH, raise my HR because my effort goes up. Quarry! I watch HR and cadence all the time. I know just what my HR should be under every condition and point in a ride. That's really helpful because if my HR isn't where I think it should be, i'll know what to do to fix that and thus improve my ride. I have a few standard HRs: 118 is my "ride forever" pace. 125 is my "I can go fast like this for a few hours" pace. 128 is my "I'm tired but still able to climb pace". 135 is my "I can climb 1 pass like this" pace. 138 is my LTHR. 142 is "I can do this for maybe 10 minutes" pace. The concept of zones was invented by coaches who wanted to prescribe approximate efforts for all their riders. There's really no such thing. It's a continuum. Riders have to learn by experience what HRs do what.

Machka 

I've even noticed that my HR goes up a few hundred metres prior to a big climb, stays up during the start of the climb, and then settles down about halfway up. The anticipation and fear of the climb are almost worse than the climb itself.

Road Fan

Is the fear subliminal or overt? The fear seems odd in the first place - we've all had anxiety before hills but also the mental training to know that "one foot at a time will get you over the hill."

signed Road "the extra-continental psychoanalyst" Fan

kcjc

Just out riding and enjoying the day, mostly zone 2. Being more competative on club runs or orgainzed rides (100k, centuries, etc), mixed but bulk in zone 3 up to three hours "cummulative" depending on my fitness. See https://www.powertap.com/post/blog-t...es-no-go-zones

Wattsup

Adrenaline. It's your body's way of "down-shifting" for the hill.

rubiksoval

Ha. On the trainer (and outdoors, but really noticeable on the trainer as there's not much else to pay attention to) I can make my heart rate rise 20-25 bpm by thinking about a race situation. It's hilarious. Stop thinking about it and hr drops back down to the previous levels. I can do "hr intervals" without ever changing power, just by visualizing race situations. Really kind of interesting.

Machka 

I've been on hills too steep for me, riding clipped in, where I haven't been able to unclip and have fallen over. I still have a scar on one elbow because of one of those falls.

I've taken steps to ensure that won't happen again, but the memory lives on.

Carbonfiberboy 

Absolutely. Not that much at my age, but very noticeable. Hence I'm careful not to do that, only concentrate on the job at hand.

Carbonfiberboy 

Back to the OP, we've been doing 40+ mile tandem rides with an hour of Z4. Yesterday we jumped up to 60 miles and 4000'+ but still dong a capacity ride. I dropped our efforts down into Z3, doing 3 hours of that, no Z4. We were exhausted at the end about the same as we were on the 40 milers and average HR was just about the same, since we had to go easy to go hard on the 40s.. Next - working on increasing fitness so we can do some Z4 on these longer rides.

crankarmbreaker

With the ranges I was using, from Joe Friel's Training Peaks, I got Z2 as being 81%-89% of LTHR for bicyclists. But I don't really know if that's the "definitive answer" as I've been thinking about this for only a couple of weeks now.

crankarmbreaker

No, I start all my rides at the house and then go through the backroads of southeast King County, especially the areas around Kangley, Kanaskat and Cumberland. The topography and distance is equivalent to the Enumclaw-Wildwood stretch of RAMROD, and I figure if I get my time down on that, that'll be a time bonus there. If I drove to a start line in the middle of the week, I'd lose half of my available time to driving.

A couple of years ago I drove my car to Grove of the Patriarchs to practice Cayuse Pass in advance and found that it's really quite easy... when you haven't ridden 100 miles first. So I'm more interested in overall nutrition and pacing than I am at hill training. That way I don't show up at the foot of Cayuse half-dead (or so far behind schedule that the ARES guys are trying to sweep me).