In the world of fitness, understanding your heart rate zones is essential for maximizing your workouts and achieving your health goals. Heart rate training is a powerful method that allows you to tailor your exercise intensity to improve cardiovascular fitness, burn fat, and enhance overall performance. By monitoring your heart rate, you can identify your optimal training zones-ranging from resting to maximum exertion-enabling you to train smarter, not harder. Whether you're a beginner looking to lose weight or an athlete aiming to increase endurance, knowing how to utilize heart rate zones can significantly impact your results. In this blog, we will explore the different heart rate zones, how to calculate your target heart rate, and tips for incorporating this knowledge into your fitness routine.

HR zones are purely various percentages of your maximal heart rate, with various zones offering different levels of effort as well as working to bias a certain physiological response in line with what needs to be improved or optimised further in accordance with a certain event or activity. Now because it is likely that you are a beginner and heart rate training might inevitably be novel, it’s important to understand that to get a definitive and extremely accurate max heart rate reading you must be placed in an environment in which you have to exert yourself maximally to identify this figure. Now it’s unlikely that you’ll have access to a state of the art lab to engage in a treadmill stress test or alternatively a VO2 max test, but it’s important to know that this will yield the most reliable results and allow for a reliable identification of your maximal heart rate or alternatively exerting yourself maximally performing a 5k (this seems to be the most common) will also work to give you a reliable figure providing you do actually exert yourself, although being a beginner this may feel like a daunting task. So with that in mind the easiest and most accessible way to identify your max HR is simply using this quick calculation to get you a rough estimation before then looking to increase the degree of accuracy later on when you feel competent enough to exert yourself maximally. The equation is as follows.

AGE – 220 = MAX HR (ESTIMATION!)

For example, if an individual was 30 years old, they would simply subtract 30 from 220 to give a maximum heart rate of 190 beats per minute (BPM). Now it’s important to note that heart rate zones and the percentages used to distinguish each subsequent training zone is a ‘zone’ and not a definite percentage or BPM that you should be on the money with each time. This is because this would be extremely difficult to achieve as we know Heart Rate fluctuates no matter how standardised our effort or pace may be.

There are a total of 5 HR zones, but for this program the goal is to keep it simple so for that reason we will only be utilising two, those being ‘Zone 2’ & ‘Zone 4’. Let’s have a little look into these two zones and find out why they are important and the relative system/ component of performance they are seen to improve.

ZONE 2

Zone 2 is the most commonly discussed heart rate zone. This is because it has numerous benefits yet doesn’t require high exertive effort, so therefore can be conducted frequently yielding an adaptive response especially for those who engage in endurance events whilst optimising recovery.

Zone 2 is 60-70% of your maximal heart rate, once again in the case of our 30 years old example discussed above this would be between 114-133 (roughly) beats per minute (BPM). Mitochondria are responsible for something known as oxidative phosphorylation which is the process by which adenosine-triphosphate (ATP) is created by using the energy that is released from our food. ATP is the primary energy source that is utilised to provide us with, you guessed it, energy. Zone 2 is responsible for increasing the number of these mitochondria as well as improving and optimising overall mitochondrial efficiency, as a result this allows for an increased conversion of ATP meaning increased energy availability allowing for optimised performance. As well as this, an increase in size, density and overall number of mitochondria will result in increased metabolic efficiency. This will enable you to preserve more glycogen and instead bias the utilisation of fat as energy. If you are an individual that engages in endurance events or wishes to, then this is paramount. This is because this will enable you to utilise glycogen during the periods of the event that require elevated levels of effort under increased levels of fatigue, glycogen will then be able to be used resulting in the maintenance of performance and an ability to exert ourselves maximally resulting in optimised performance. When this glucose is used it creates a product known as lactate, this lactate needs to be cleared as accumulation leads to muscle fatigue and contractile ability decreases. Increased density of mitochondria will increase the ability to clear this lactate, the more efficient this process the less accumulation of lactate which accommodates for the maintenance of performance. As well as this an overall improvement in mitochondrial function will allow the body to clear lactate more effectively allowing you to sustain a higher level of performance.

ZONE 4

Zone 4 is 80-90% of your maximal heart rate (30yr old = 152-171bpm). Zone 4 is often used in an interval setting because it is too intense to engage in for prolonged periods of time within a training environment due to the effort and intensity required to do so. An example of this would be 1km at zone 4 followed by 1km at zone 2 for a total of 6 kilometres (KM). Zone 4 is predominantly utilised to increase your lactate threshold. Your lactate threshold is a point in which lactate builds up within your bloodstream faster than it can be removed. Increasing your lactate threshold will allow for increased time working at a harder intensity before performance begins to be impaired due to lactate accumulation.

When it comes to heart rate training of course you will need a wearable device to monitor it to ensure a high degree of accuracy but it’s also important that you can get results live and in real time when carrying out you’re training for quick feedback and assurance you are in the correct ‘zone’. For that reason, a watch or a wearable wrist device is a very useful tool to enable you to do just that. Now it is important to note that heart rate is very much relative from person to person due to age and varying levels of fitness. So, it’s important not to look into other individuals’ heart rate metrics or worse follow them in their entirety as this is going to greatly inhibit your ability to achieve that end goal especially if it is endurance focused. Instead follow this guide on how to calculate your max heart rate and calculate the necessary bpm zone that you need to stay within mirroring the percentages outlined in this guide and you’ll have the assurance that what you are doing is correct.

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