[WillB]

Hey y’all,

I had a good experience in the spring with a custom plan to help me meet some ambitious objectives for the summer. Unfortunately I contracted Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever during my first big event. I got pretty sick which pretty much killed my fitness for the summer, forced me to cancel one objective, and may have indirectly contributed to me bailing off the next.

I’ve been back at it rebuilding my aerobic base for the last couple months and I probably need to retest my AeT since my pace at the same HR has increased a bit. I don’t particularly want to pay for the full TP subscription, though, when I’m looking at a relatively simple base-building period at least through the end of this year. I’m wondering- can I just record two back-to-back 30 minute blocks on my watch (which calculates average HR across a workout) and find the % change between the two rather than recording a full hour block which then requires TP to analyze? I don’t see why it shouldn’t work, but also I feel like I may be missing something totally obvious or this would be a common practice. Thanks for the help!

Topic

[depeyster]

depeyster on October 26, 2019 at 8:38 pm #30820

Will,

I just wrote a long, detailed response; hit “submit” and lost it.

More briefly:

Using the HR drift article on this site as well as Scott Johnston’s post here, you can very easily do a HR Drift test without TP.

1. Do it only when healthy and well-rested, preferably after a rest day.
2. Only do it with a chest strap HR monitor. You will be wasting your time with an optical sensor.
3. Take the average HR of the second 30 minutes and divide it by the average HR of the first 30 minutes. If the result of that division is 1.05, then your average HR for the first 30 minutes was your AeT HR.
4. Results will vary day-to-day.

I have done this without TP a number of times on a treadmill.

[derekosborne22]

derekosborne22 on October 27, 2019 at 3:00 am #30823

Hi Will,

I agree with Depeyster’s comment above. Re Heart Rate, I’ve used the Polar app on my phone and Polar Flow on by laptop to log my HR for years – the basic version of both are free. The phone syncs over to the desktop version and then I can easily isolate the first 30 mins from the second 30 mins and do the calculation as per Scott’s note.

I’d also emphasise the “not every day is the same point” – some days working at just under AeT is easy, other days it’s harder so beware false precision.

Hope this helps,
Derek

[WillB]

WillB on October 27, 2019 at 9:02 am #30848

That makes sense, thanks for the replies. I figured it should work but I remembered seeing a post from Scott somewhere on the forum where he said they didn’t include the drift test in the books because they didn’t want to suggest a method that required TP, which confused me.

[Jan]

Jan on October 28, 2019 at 9:46 am #30875

As far as I understood it:

If you have a treadmill (to keep pace constant), you don’t need Training Peaks and you can use the method mentioned above.

If you don’t have a treadmill, you can use a flat course like a running track and the free 14-day premium trial of Training Peaks.