Heart Rate Training

Feb. 28, 2011

     Curiosity as struck me to a small extent as recently i have had many people coming into the store having questions about heart rate monitors and how to go about using them. From my background as an athlete I can look at training from two separate perspectives; that of pace and that of effort.
     Most runners use a pace oriented system so that they can where there times are in comparison to previous workouts or races. Its an efficient system for runners, especially for track, because it allows you to compare yourself to others fairly accurately. Many runners achieve great speeds and success using this system. This was the system i was accustomed to in high school and was comfortable with. Everyone became equals for the workout and everyone was to hit the stated time. The trouble with that method for me at this point now is that not everyone responds to training the same way and therefore the effort levels for that certain workout can be scattered throughout the group depending on how each of the individuals were feeling that particular day. Come race day, not everyone comes to the line in prime condition and although a group can all run the same workouts and run the target times, they will not finish the race in the same manner. This is of course looking strictly at fitness and taking mentality of racing out of it. There is never just one training plan out there though, so coaches adapt plans to fit the respective athletes over time. The hard part to this method is applying it to beginners in the sport, say a person 40 lbs overweight and looking to drops some pounds and train for a marathon. We have an amazing amount of these types of people.
     Let take 200 45 year old individual males for example, all being slightly overweight and all at beginner fitness levels and split them randomly into two separate training groups.One group follows a pace oriented method and the other a HR oriented method. Let give them 12 weeks of structured training gearing toward a 10k race at the end. We will start with them all running a 10k to get a baseline control time for each individual. The goal is to find out which training method, pace vs. HR, concludes with the highest percentage of improvement throughout the group.
     Lets look at the pace controlled group first. What we would find is that the effort levels of these individuals will be varied for a certain target pace. Although these individuals are of similar fitness background, their body compositions are different from each other. So again with a similar training plan followed over a time period of 12 weeks, we would see fairly different responses from all 100 individuals come the 10k at the end of the test period. At the start of each workout, we will have variances in fatigue levels with the variances becoming greater at the end of each day. On the day of the final 10k, we would see some individuals reach their max potential for the given test period, we would have some individuals perform well compared to the control 10k from the beginning of the test, and some that perform simply "ok" comparatively due to high fatigue levels. With the training in general though, i would expect most of the individuals to improve in time.
     So now we look at the group focused on HR. Lets say we have the Max HR of each individual. With each workout, instead of pace the group is told to stay at a certain percentage of their max HR. At the conclusion of each day. We will see variances in workout times, but similar fatigue levels. This creates less variance among the individuals throughout the 12 week test period. Given an effective training plan, many more individuals from the HR group will toe the line feeling less overall fatigue and allow for much better performances. The end result being more individuals improving a greater percentage time-wise. I would assume with certainty that the HR based training group would provide the greater improvement percentage.
     Just to be clear though, both methods of training are effective and I am simply applying the two to a specific demographic. The increased curiosity of people towards HR based training might mean that  more people are seeing the benefits that this type of training can create for individuals. I was simply inspired to write a comparison. There is so much more that goes into comparing the two training methods, but i wanted to compare the foundations of both in a simple way. Ok.... im done.