Hi,
At this time of the year most distance ride are Zone 2/3 rides.

I have been looking at the British Cycling zones vs Joe Friel’s zone.

BC Zones

Joe’s Zones

For example Z2 for BC is 68% to 83% of threshold HR.

Whilst Joe Friel’s Z2 is 81% to 85%.

Which is bit of difference to say the least. Anyone have any real world opinions of Z2 / Z3 levels?

some of the difference is due to the no. of zones bc has 6 friel 7.

The Joe Friel zones look very narrow to me and would be really hard to keep to.

I’ve used the Garmin (510) zones but I can’t remember the exact figures for them now but they are closer to the BC ones. Unless you are on a flat ride even these are quite hard to keep within.

The Joe Friel zones look very narrow to me and would be really hard to keep to.

This is what I find, especially on the turbo. I have been using the Fitness & Freshness chart on Strava which shows TSS and Trimp styles scores combined. Whem I ride without a power meter the HR Trimp values (Suffer Score), I believe, is derived from the HR Zones. I am finding that the Fitness level is not going up enough even though my volume has increased. I am thinking this may be because I have been using Joe’s Zone and Zone 2 / 3 workouts are being under represented possibly.

I had a similar question a few months back. Basically I think Friel’s zones are pretty different to most others (e.g. Garmin defaults) and probably only make sense when used with his workouts.

I only use HR for recovery or Z2 rides at a constant level of effort. For anything else I just use virtual power on TrainerRoad as I found HR too inconsistent and too difficult to hit/maintain the correct level of effort.

Athletes trained by British Cycling coaches have won practically everything there is to win in road and track cycling over the last few years.

By comparison

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Friel

😉

I am going to change my HR Zones to the BC setup though combine zone 5 & 6. Thinking being that whilst doing hard intervals I will be focussing on power rather than HR (due to HR lag).

Though this will not change the suffer score and Fitness and Freshness chart for historical ride. Though I have this which is workaround into forcing Strava in recalculating the values. Going to see how it looks afterwards.

reset Strava HR stats

The current thinking seems to be that Z2 & Z3 are fine as targets but for efforts you get better results by monitoring power due to things like HR lag. Unless you live in Holland then any road (or off-road) ride is going to have ups and downs, you try keeping in Z3 on a 8%, mile long downhill. OK that’s a slightly silly example but I’ve been out on a Z2 ride and come to a downhill that’s only a couple of hundred yards long and dropped out of the zone.

Perhaps work to power zones and post ride see how the HR zones match up – this should give you clues to your efficiency, i.e. if you are riding at your FTP but your HR is in zone 7 then something’s wrong or you are about to come down with an illness. Similarly if you are riding at FTP and your HR is in zone 2 then you probably want to retest.

Some good points whitestone, my threshold HR is calculated from an FTP, I have then applied the Zone 2 calculation.

It does seems about right as when I am at 75% of FTP this is bordering on the high Z2 / low Z3 for HR. Looking at this chart it does spot on.

linky

This is fine when on the road with the PM, but when riding off road or on the fixed without a PM it seems that the TSS vs Trimp score don’t correlate too well as the Z2 for the Joe’s zones is quite high compared to the BC ones.

I think the underlying question is exactly what is a Zone 2 ride (rhetorical question alert)?

Athletes trained by British Cycling coaches have won practically everything there is to win in road and track cycling over the last few years.

I’m sold! Going to switch over the BC zones and see how that compares.

A couple of points have just come to mind (slow brain activity day).

Be wary of applying something like the BC training to yourself: yes it works for the Olympic team but then those athletes are already way above the level of most of us and it’s as much about tweeking the performances, the “incremental gains” policy.

Two: There’s a lot of training plans out there, some authors may well be out to make a name for themselves so there may not be the science to back them up.

Going to switch over the BC zones and see how that compares.

any updates or thoughts on this.

There seems to be wildly conflicting information about ‘zone 2 heart rates’. this article might go some way to explaining (or confusing) this issue. Particularly comparison in the apendix