HRM Training-Need Help

[neilkod]

I've recently started road riding-Bought my first bike around 1-Mar-04. Since then, I've logged approximately 1500 miles, including a century and the MS-150.

In addition to that I've also put on about 200 miles on the MTB in that time frame.

I think I've built enough of a base and I'd like to start HRM training. My goal is to lose some more body fat. My current weight is approximately the same as when I started, although my body fat has dropped noticeably.

I'd welcome all any and advice I can receive. I'm confused with all the reading that I've done about 'fat burning zones' and 'endurance zones'-Basically, how does riding at a lower intensity burn more fat? IIRC, I've read that one needs to be at 60% of max HR to burn fat. To me this seems illogical!

Help!!

BTW, I'm 33, 240, Max HR 191 and I think so far I've come a long way!

 

[stowerider]

Originally posted by neilkod
I've recently started road riding-Bought my first bike around 1-Mar-04. Since then, I've logged approximately 1500 miles, including a century and the MS-150.

In addition to that I've also put on about 200 miles on the MTB in that time frame.

I think I've built enough of a base and I'd like to start HRM training. My goal is to lose some more body fat. My current weight is approximately the same as when I started, although my body fat has dropped noticeably.

I'd welcome all any and advice I can receive. I'm confused with all the reading that I've done about 'fat burning zones' and 'endurance zones'-Basically, how does riding at a lower intensity burn more fat? IIRC, I've read that one needs to be at 60% of max HR to burn fat. To me this seems illogical!

Help!!

Hi,

I'll tell you what works for me and you can decide if this will work for you. I use 3 work zones - which is much easier for me to manage when I'm cycling (if you're going up the side of a hill - and you're trying to figure out which of 7 zones you're in it gets kind of distracting); this works well with my HRM which can handle 3 zones; and this is consistent with one of the problems with HR training that HR can vary for a whole number of reasons (tired, humidity etc) so don;t get bogged down with a whole bunch of zones instead keep it simple.

Your anchor point is your MHR. For me its 200 BPM. I first started with zones based on 10% of MHR. However, and you might run into this problem with a MHR of 191, a band of 20 points (MHR 200 BPM) is pretty wide. To fix this, I switched to 10% bands based on the gap between with RHR (50 BPM) and MHR (200 BPM). Each zone is 15 points. My zones look like this -

Zone Range Notes
5 185-200 v.intense
4 170-184 hard work - tempo
3 155-169 endurance
2 140-144 recovery
1 <140 go home this is a waste of time

So if I want to do a hard workout - such as intervals - then I'm looking to book some time in Z5. If I want to go out and put some miles on my legs then I'll be in Z3.

re - your fat burning question. at a lower intensity, your body gets more of its energy from fat but the total number of calories burned is less than at high intensity(ie big slice of a small pie). And at a high intensity, although a smaller percent of calories burned is from fat because the pie (ie total cals burned) is much larger, you will burn more fat at a higher exercise intensity. You can find examples with the numbers to back this up in the literature. So its a fallacy to say that you need to exercise at a lower intensity to burn fat.

SR