Hello, I’m a leisure athlete who trains alone (5/7 hours a week) I did this race on Sunday, 11km fast, I took a heart rate sensor, Garmin says my limit is 173, intervals.icu recommended 178, but I was more than 30 minutes above 181… can you give me your opinion, based on this race, to define my 1h heart rate limit?
Furthermore, I felt like I could continue like this for another 30 minutes, but my legs really didn’t want to respond, what should I train in this case?
Thanks!!!
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The most common field test is outlined in Joe Friel’s article: Joe Friel's Quick Guide to Setting Zones | TrainingPeaks
Your HR varies depending on your status, recovery, and level of excitement, including your rest HR, aerobic HR, lactate HR. Considering most people are much more excited when racing, it is reasonable to get a higher HR than usual. If your want to know your accurate lactate HR, there’s test advised Joe Friel: Do 30 minutes maximum output, and take the average HR of the last 20 minutes as your lactate HR. There’s two key-points for the test: First, don’t push too hard in the beginning, your HR should slowly increase. For example, let’s say you can output 200w for 30min, start from 190 could be a good idea. The second one is from my own opinion, this lactate HR is not so accurate since everyday your status is different. It just offer your a rough range but is enough for training and racing. What’s more important is your feeling, such RPE.
For the second question, it seems that your muscle metabolism is weaker than your cardiovascular system. Muscle metabolism determines how efficiency your muscle can use oxygen and level of your cardiovascular system determines how efficiency the oxygen can be transport to muscle. As for the muscle metabolism, what you should consider more is zone 2 and zone 4 training. As for the zone 4, maybe you should consider to train with long interval, such as 4 x 8/2 with 90-105% FTP, 8 minutes workout in zone 4, 2 minutes recovery in zone 1, which I train in my early preparation stage of a race. If this is too hard for you, 4 minutes workout or 6 minutes workout is an alternative choice. The key is to slowly increase your HR but keep lower than or equal to your lactate HR.
Thanks so much for your advice, i will consider, more z4 work as well as strengh workouts !