Training using heart rate zones?

Having had a pretty slow start to the year with the quantity of my riding I have been inspired to take things a little more seriously to up my fitness levels. I was thinking of doing something along the following each week:
3hr Zone 2 ride
1x 1hr interval session
4hr Zone 2 with 10m zone 3/4 per hr
1hr recovery below zone 2

Is this trying to do too much per week to increase speed and endurance whilst shedding fat?
Would i be better dropping the intervals and concentrating on Zone 2 with/without the zone 3/4 periods?

Would like increase my speed and endurance for this summer as being fed up being the slowest in our group 😳

I’d watch you’re not upping your weekly effort too much – you could overtrain, and you should probably have some base before doing intervals. Doing them properly should leave you wasted and is hard on your body in terms of recovery.

Otherwise, zone 2 + some intervals is sensible, unless you are looking to get to a high level I don’t think the precise detail matters too much.

yep as above, careful of increasing intensity and volume too quickly. If you’re coming from a very slow start I’d drop the zone 3/4 stuff from the 4hr zone 2 ride at first. Couple of z2 rides plus one higher intensity short interval session is a good place to start imho. Allow recovery time in between, particularly the interval session. Recovery ride/s if you have the time, but you need to be disciplined to keep them as pure recovery. Listen to your body though. If it’s tired then pull back. Worst thing you can do at this point is go too hard / too far.

Firstly you need to spend lots on a new shiny light bike….

More seriously you sound like you are on the right lines, I’ve been training a bit more seriously the last 2 months and seeing improvements (that and I have identified my knee pain is due to tight ITB)

I don’t have the time to do much more than 2hr rides regularly so I do 3-4 a week adding in things like speeders or power pedal revs every 5 mins, then pushing it hard (flat out) for the last 10 mins if I’m feeling good.

I do one 1 – 1.30 interval session a week – be careful with intervals, first time I tried one, I went a bit mad and tweaked my hamstring and had to have 5 days r&r. I try to hit 10hrs per week on the bike, hoping to increase to 15 with the lighter evenings.

I would say the key is to start with low effort but lots of it, go for quality though – I think 2hrs no messing about, stopping, chatting etc… is better than 4 hours of riding with mates and being all over the place with your HR.

I am no racing god, and only started competing last year in fun (then had 3 months off with a broken collar bone and gained a stone!) this year I’m racing open and placing in the top third or so and finishing fresh rather than dead. Hoping by the end of the year to getting towards the top 10, enduro’s are more my thing though than short course.

Oh – it is exceptionally hard to ride below z2 offroad. The only way I do it properly is on the turbo watching a movie…

I try to hit 10hrs per week on the bike, hoping to increase to 15 with the lighter evenings.

I won the Sport NPS series on less training than that!

OP: You don’t actually say what you’re doing at the moment and how much of an increase that is. IMO just increasing time on the bike will help, structured training can drain the fun out of it. Particularly if you start trying to do long rides in a specific HR, potentially very dull. YMMV.

It really depends where you are and what you would like to achieve. Before you start structured training you really need a reasonable base level of fitness
If you are going to be training 9 hours a week that is plenty to get very fit.
I would build up from say a 1 and 2 and 2 hour ride per week through to 1,2,1,4,1 hour rides in a week over say 8 weeks.
Then think about some higher intensity stuff mixed with Z3 and some recovery rides
My week these days looks something like this –

Mon 1 hour easy Tuesday 1.5 hours with 4×8 min efforts first 1 min hard, race start then settle into 5 mins @85-90%MHR then last 2 min @90%+ 10 min easy inbetewen. Wed Chain gang Thurs 1 hour easy 3×10 rolling sprints Fri 1.5 hours, with 2x20mins @82-89%MHR with 10 sec burst every 5 mins 20 mins easy inbetween then 20 cool down Sat café ride (35 miles easy) clubrun (60 miles 18-20 mph)

I won the Sport NPS series on less training than that!

It does depend on what your base fitness is to start with is! I’m coming back from a fairly nasty smash in the last 12months and gaining more than a stone. Before that I was your typical weekend warrior type rider with the odd weekday evening ride thrown in. Could belt round a trail centre pretty fast but would then need a few days recovery…

Another tip would be to enter an event to train for and focus on.

I’ve entered Torq12:12 with a mate as our key focus. Neither of us has competed in more than 4hr events. Really looking forward to it.

I would include:

Hill work, low cadence but high resistance
Cadence session to develop high speed

You can shorten sessions but increase intensity on turbo. For MTB I would increase number of interval sessions as this best represents the type of ridding you encounter off road.

Cheers for the advice guys, base level of fitness is reasonable, did a mixed ride of on and off road weds night of 32 miles at zone 2, felt very easy and was a struggle to keep HR down on the climbs but felt good at the end, I know it may be a bit boring etc but am willing to put up with that to get a bit quicker and hence enjoy my riding a bit more. As for entering an event I am doing MM as a team of 4 but that is more of a social event than a race for us, team generally manages 16-20 laps depending on conditions, would like to do better there than I have the last couple of years (will be my 7th time)

Have a good set of lights as work and family generally mean evening/night rides

Zone2?
One trainers zone2 is anothers zone 3.

How are you setting your zones?

This month’s What MTB comes with a fitness supplement which explains the training zones and plans which you might find useful.

I can ride 3 x per week, and after winter (Nov to Feb) where I spent most time doing road solo in z2, I have six weekly plans with events at the end. It basically goes like this:

Weeks 1 to 4: Ride solo MTB hard effort 30k mid week, 70-100k Z2 road on Saturday, Social MTB Sunday or hard 50/70k on road or mtb if no ones out

Weeks 5& 6: Ride solo MTB hard effort 30k mid week, 70-100k Z2 road on Saturday, 50-70k MTB solo Sunday

5 days before event day – hard MTB ride at race distance

2 days before event day z2 road short distance (30k)

Race day!

Repeat as necessary. Seems to work for me, cardio improved massively since introducing the road bike last october, and after filling up on Powerade and Clif bars pre-race I’m a bundle of harnessed power (well, kind of) 🙂

Edit: By “hard” I race against my own times for the distance / use a garmin virtual trainer.

Shit all this sounds complicated. I just ride up and down hills and when I feel like i’m going to gag I get off and push. But then I am not serious about fitness, just enjoy riding. Is it not possible to use your body’s feedback to gauge these HR zones? Like fat burning is just chugging along, top end is sweating, straining, feeling sick etc. Do we really need another gadget?

WillC9999 – Member
Shit all this sounds complicated. I just ride up and down hills and when I feel like i’m going to gag I get off and push. But then I am not serious about fitness, just enjoy riding. Is it not possible to use your body’s feedback to gauge these HR zones? Like fat burning is just chugging along, top end is sweating, straining, feeling sick etc. Do we really need another gadget?

No, as long as you can very accurately gauge your RPE with certainty.

Not really, according to the books I’ve read / trainers I’ve spoken to, even if you accidently drift out of L2 (very easy to do) it can take upto 30mins to shift back to the fat burning zone.

And yep it is complicated, but getting a decent pt and a training tool (like a garmin 800) helps a lot.

Interestingly over the last few months of training I’ve spotted that it now takes me longer to move into z2. I used to just shoot straight through z2 into 3/4 within about 5 mins on the bike. I’m hoping this is a sign of improved fitness….

DT78 – Member

Interestingly over the last few months of training I’ve spotted that it now takes me longer to move into z2. I used to just shoot straight through z2 into 3/4 within about 5 mins on the bike. I’m hoping this is a sign of improved fitness….

I got the same. After another month or so I notice my average times during a Z2 ride started to creep up. In the last 2 months, my road rides (at z2) have gone from a 25kph to a 27.2 kph average. When I started this malarky last october I was at 23.5 – 24kph. Thats over a 70k distance, so a fairly significant change for a sofa surfing office worker.

If I ride say Afan my ride is almost totally zone 4 & 5. I think I tend towards the short but intense work outs. There’s some good argument both ways but relying totally on zone 2 won’t give you the strength and burst speed you need for those short sharp climbs. My off road rides are far from long and steady like the road.

I would be very careful with intervals if your not ready, i tried for the first three months this year, got faster initially then became slower! (to much to soon).

Have a look at a site: ‘soc doc’ read his take on aerobic training, he uses formula 180 – age to set max aerobic heart rate or the Joe friel method to determine Zone 2. He basically advises to stay in Zone 2 training till your not making any further progress (you time yourself on some circuit of your choice each month working at zone 2) then and only then add some intervals. Of course if you were planning for a race you would what the intervals to take place just before.

I personally think this is quite a nice and good approach. However as DT78 said it is very hard to stay in Zone 2 off road. If you do it properly and stay below Zone 2 then prepare to walk!

You can always use strength training to maintain and improve leg strength power if using above approach.

Sensible advice DIS gym is good for developing strength in legs for climbs. I noticed the difference. Ideal for strengthening core, back, arms etc. Being stronger overal seems to reduce fatigue on the longer events and means I can go faster for longer.

The problem with a training plan is that it’s for life. You can’t just train, get fit then stop doing the training that got you fit because you’ll go backwards.

I’d go for a ‘bastardized’ version of the time crunched cyclist if anything at all. There’s zero point into turning your cycling week into a week of purgatory just to go a little quicker.
The lights with us now, I’d ride more. Ride a little further. Ride the hills a little harder when you can.
If you hit a programe now, you’ll be looking at a two month schedule (I think)minimum. You’ll see improvements quite soon, then you’ll hit the fatigued stage before you pick up again.
Mine goes something like this.
Sunday Road 60-100 miles
Monday turbos 45/60 min (whatever the plan calls for HR based)
Tuesday off road night ride
Wed rest
Thursday Turbos (session as above)
Friday rest or summer slow ride, very slow let all the punters pass.
Sat turbos or fast road ride on race bike 40 miles

This all gets shuffled soon. Vets road racing Tuesday nights and XC racing fridays.

I find it hard to ride at lower intensities unless I go out with someone who is slower than me. If I go out on my own I tend to ride pretty hard. Not sure I could stick to a training plan like you mention though. Do you commute? I use that for 30 minute intervals sometimes.