00:03.19
Steve
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete podcast where our mission is to educate and celebrate all mountain athletes. My name is Steve House and I will be your host today along with Alyssa Clark and Chantelle Robitaille. Today we will be continuing our series on training for mountaineering. In the last episode we covered the fundamentals of aerobic base training and we will now dive into the aerobic threshold test, discuss some of the different methods of testing, talk about how to assess your test results and cover the how and why of setting zones. Welcome Chantelle and Alyssa. Chantelle would you like to start us off by talking about what an aerobic threshold test is?

00:44.20
Chantelle
Yeah, absolutely. So last in the last episode we talked a lot about how when we are doing longer events, we are really relying on our aerobic metabolic pathways. So the more energy our aerobic metabolism can produce and the faster that it can do it, the longer we can sustain higher outputs. That’s endurance and an aerobic threshold test helps us determine our aerobic fitness and it also helps us determine appropriate training intensities so that we can have the opportunity to improve the health of our aerobic engine. If we don’t know where we’re starting, it’s hard for us to know how much we’re improving so we’ve got to have that start point to help guide us along the path.

01:39.51
Steve
That’s great! Alyssa, do you have any observations to add about that?

01:44.14
Alyssa
After being a part of the coach email, I think it’s one of the questions that we get the most because it is what we start out with for most of our training plans and all of our coach training. We start with the aerobic threshold test and I know that it can cause quite a bit of confusion like how do we run it? What are we aiming for? Why is this important? Because most people get into the anaerobic threshold test or they think that’s what they need to do. So I think that this is such a great way to clarify some of the confusion and just really get into the reasonings of why we do this test and its importance in especially the type of training that we have our athletes do. So with that being said, there are a couple of different methods that you can use to conduct an aerobic threshold test, like the MAF method, nose breathing, the heart rate drift test, blood lactate, gas exchange etc and I’d love to hear if you two, maybe Chantelle can take the first 3 and Steve you could take the second 2, and kind of give the plus and minuses of each. We also have a great article on Uphill Athlete explaining these as well but would love to hear you talk about this.

03:02.79
Chantelle
Sure all right I’ll start off with the MAF test and that is probably how a lot of people remember this maybe from even school days where you would take a formula with one hundred and eighty minus your age. If you’re training consistently and then that would be you know your magic aerobic heart rate number. So you know on the positive side, it’s very easy to calculate and it’s very easy to understand what it is, but it is also the way that formula is written that kind of suggests that as you get older, you get more efficient at fat burning. But there really isn’t any evidence that shows us that a thirty year old would burn fat at a heart rate of one hundred and fifty and a fifty year old would burn fat at a heart rate of 130.

03:52.62
Chantelle
So there’s a lot of variability with this since it’s a formula and you know we’re all complex human systems. So it’s a little bit hard to predict and also if we think about the fact that heart rate is affected by a lot of different factors right? It’s affected by our caffeine consumption, maybe the last meal we ate, how well you slept, the temperature that’s happening when you’re out doing your exercise, altitude, for women menstrual cycle. Lots of things so having just one number rather than testing in a way where you get a range is a little bit maybe oversimplified and so maybe there are better methods that we could use to be more accurate.

04:45.72
Steve
Yeah I’ll also if I may interject, we have a great podcast from an earlier episode where Phil Maffetone who developed the maffetone aerobic function formula. Scott Johnson interviewed Phil Maffetone on the podcast and Scott and Phil actually met back in the 70s in Boulder Colorado so they had some history and Phil has a great podcast. We’ll link to that in the show notes because I think it will be really interesting for those of you that are interested to know more about it. There’s also some modifiers that we suggest that are just on the web page but about aerobic threshold self-assessment. We won’t go into those but there are some possible modifiers if you’ve been sick or you know if you’ve been already training for a long time. Those kinds of things that Phil recommends, just wanted to highlight that.

05:47.18
Chantelle
Yeah, that’s awesome and it’s always great to understand where and how these formulas are derived and the science behind them, the ideas behind them and how they can be used, but it’s you know? Nice easy quick calculation you know.

06:04.43
Chantelle
Some modifiers can be helpful for people to use. tThe next one on your list, Alyssa, was nose breathing and this is nice and simple and you know the concept of this is if you’re out running or doing your activity and you can breathe through only your nose, there’s a strong chance that you’re in an Aerobic state. Ah, but there are some caveats to this of course. Like, what if you have asthma? What if you’re recovering from a flu or a cold or things like that that might not really work for you. What if it’s really cold or hot outside.

06:40.52
Chantelle
And also I don’t know if you have any of you have seen those videos of some collegiate athletes that were training like this and you see these athletes speeding around on a collegiate track with tape over their mouths. They are definitely not running within their aerobic zones. So I don’t think it is a good test but I do think it is a useful check-in for yourself if you are out on a run and you’re supposed to be within your aerobic range training zone you can test yourself to see if you’re just breathing through your nose and so that’s a nice easy kind of check-in.

07:18.81
Chantelle
But I wouldn’t say that it would be an accurate method to determine your aerobic training bandwidth.

07:34.63
Alyssa
Yeah I would add on to that. That’s one of the cues I often use, especially with people who are starting to learn what that means. I said, “Okay, can you have a full conversation? Is it starting to get harder to talk? Can you breathe out of your nose” and so I think it’s a great way because I think especially for newer athletes and myself included in that it can get tiring and sometimes sad to just constantly be looking at your watch being like oh my gosh am I still in my zones. And it is important to check, but I do think that’s a great way to just kind of recenter yourself like okay am I breathing way too hard, can I hold on to a conversation, and so that’s one of the ones I really like. It kind of goes into perceived effort as well. But I like to use that one as a cue.

08:32.65
Steve
Just to go off script here for a second. Okay, those of you that have been following uphill athlete for a long time will recall that when we published the Training for the New Alpinism book. We relied almost exclusively on this test and the reason we actually kind of started to move away from it is when we found with athletes that were really new to training and didn’t have much fitness coming in that it wasn’t reflective because there almost couldn’t be any intensity zone and still be in conversational pace and it wasn’t that they were doing anything wrong. It’s just that at lower levels of fitness this test seems to not be as good as for people who have a more developed fitness base.

09:43.92
Alyssa
Definitely and I think that Zoe Nance, one of our coaches is working really hard on a great rate of perceived effort chart that I think will be really useful for people to see and take as well.

09:57.58
Chantelle
I think that’ll be really useful for our athletes because it’s important to not only know the goal of your workout, but what zone you’re supposed to be in and you know what those are and being able to trust that information for yourself. But also to be able to check in with yourself when you’re out doing your activities and making sure that you’re in the correct zone. As Alyssa said it can be kind of tiresome sometimes to continually look down at your watch so being able to make kind of a mind body connection with how you’re breathing and how you’re feeling is really good and I think it helps build our confidence too right? when we’re out there feeling good about the fact that we’re doing the right things for our training.

10:48.21
Alyssa
Definitely yeah I feel it’s always like to think of it as an honesty check.So the next one I have is the heart rate drift test. Chantelle if you want to take that one on.

10:56.51
Chantelle
Yeah, absolutely, so the heart rate drift test is a really nice, simple and reliable test. It’s a great way to determine your aerobic threshold. But it’s also, again, another great tool that you can use as a check-in and due to the fact that it is a simple and reliable test that has kind of become the go-to at uphill athlete for determining the workout zones. There are definitely a lot of great articles on the website you can read with some really good instructions on how to do this.

11:34.17
Chantelle
Basically this simple test uses the idea that when you’re able to hold your aerobic pace your heart rate will remain fairly constant for as long as an hour and maybe for some you know, really experienced athletes longer than that if your heart rate rises more than 5% at that steady pace.

11:51.90
Chantelle
Then it’s more likely that your starting heart rate was higher than your aerobic threshold and if your heart rate drift is less, then maybe your starting heart rate was a little bit too low. So it’s really easy for you to administer this test to get started.

12:11.58
Chantelle
If you’re looking at your data and Training Peaks after the fact, there’s even a pace-to-heart rate ratio where you can look that up to see that you’re in the right zone and it’s basically seeing how your heart rate responds according to the pace that you’re moving at and it should be able to stay pretty stable for an hour after that point when you’re starting to get tired. That’s where we get the Cardiac drift where your effort level might or even your pace might even be decreasing a little bit but your heart rate is drifting upwards and so that is a really useful test.

12:50.10
Chantelle
Steve, do you want to talk a little bit about how athletes find this test and how you are using this in application?

13:04.91
Alyssa
So I’m actually going to interject because we’re going to get to that later on. But, I was going to say we could really just wrap the podcast after that because you explained it so well of why we use it and what we do but we’ll get into why I think Uphill Athletes specifically take that test if that sounds good to you Steve.

13:23.21
Steve
Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah I can talk a little bit more about the test itself than if you want okay.

13:23.57
Chantelle
Yeah, that’d be awesome.

13:33.18
Alyssa
Yeah, but we’ll go through the next two and then we’ll get into the specifics of the heart rate drift test. So Steve the next one we have is blood lactate if you want to talk about that a little bit.

13:47.75
Steve
Yeah, the blood lactate concentration test is something that’s been around for probably since the late 90s or so and it relies basically on a little device called a lactate plus. So the blood lactate concentration test relies on a little device, a little monitor and it works by doing a warmup and you exercise at an aerobic pace. And as you progress you gradually increase your pace usually in 3 minute increments and every 3 minutes you actually take a little blood sample and you use these little test strips to go with this little monitoring device. It gives you a measure of the actual lactate concentration in your blood. I have one of these at home. I’ve used it quite a bit. It is accurate. It does help set this boundary of where your aerobic threshold is which is also sometimes known as the maximum lactate steady state of 2.0 mil moles of lactate and that does work but the whole piece around having to prick your finger or prick an ear lobe to get a drop of blood. The other problem is that sweat can contaminate the sample and then you don’t get a good reading. It can be actually quite finicky to do.

16:31.32
Steve
And it takes a team of people. You have the person doing the test and then you need a coach or somebody else actually taking the readings. It’s easiest to do it on a treadmill but people often don’t like to do it on treadmills and that makes that hard.. There’s a lot of downsides and while it is accurate, It is a finicky and really very specific type of test that honestly we don’t use very much anymore.

16:59.12
Alyssa
Yeah, kind of a personal anecdote. I went to a ski academy in high school and we used to do blood lactate testing for all of us. I just remember being on a treadmill putting your hand down getting pricked and it did take an entire team. It was quite a process to get it done but it’s just so funny as a high schooler you just kind of are like cool, go for it. But now looking at it, it’s just that’s such a very specific niche to be the high school that was doing blood lactate testing at the age of like 14 years old. It’s just so funny to return to this and be seeing this test coming up. It’s very accurate. But it is finicky and a lot of people don’t really like getting their finger poked while they’re running on a treadmill.

17:47.68
Steve
Yeah, that was also my first exposure as a junior nordic ski racer at a summer training camp and it’s a long time ago and we also ran some training seminars in various locations as uppill athlete and we used to do this as part of the seminar and it would take all day to get everybody in the seminar through blood testing like there’s just no fast way or easy way to do it. So lots of downsides. But let’s move on. Let’s move on to some of the other tests.

18:23.40
Alyssa
Yeah, so the last one which I actually see people do more often as an alternative is gas exchange. So if we can go through just the pluses and minuses of that and then we’ll move on to what we recommend as an uphill athlete.

18:40.20
Steve
Yeah I can talk about that but the gas exchange test is done in a laboratory, you do use a treadmill typically. Well not typically, but you always want to use the modality that you’re most accustomed to. So if you’re a cyclist you would do it on a bike, if you’re a runner you do it on a treadmill. They also make you know big treadmills I’ve seen for testing ski mountaineering athletes and for Nordic Ski athletes and all these kinds of different things I’ve seen big
equine treadmills. I’ve never actually seen one in person. I’ve only seen the equipment like there but I’ve never actually seen it done.

19:20.50
Chantelle
Yeah, for the listeners. You have to Google a horse VO2 max test because it’s unbelievable to watch.

19:33.72
Steve
I can’t imagine what the VO2 max test of a horse must be. It must be like 200 or something like that, it must be just incredible. They’re so strong. So yeah, lots of different ways to do that. We do want to caution people you do need to really prep the lab as to what you’re looking for and that you’re not looking for a max VO2 test per se. Although that can be part of the result you get and we do have information on the website about it including a pdf that you can download and share with the lab that basically lays out what you want them to do. The biggest mistake that we see people running into is a lab increasing the intensity too quickly without enough of the steps from one intensity to the next as they ramp up the speed of the treadmill are too short and duration and they miss the actual aerobic threshold boundary and go right into anaerobic because a lot of them are used to sort of people coming in from a traditional anaerobic threshold first mentality and they’re just trying to get a threshold number or a VO2 max number. But this is a great test because it’s probably the most accurate you’re going to get a lot of information out of the task besides just your zones. The biggest downside is finding the lab and the cost you know it’s going to run you between probably $200 and $400 so it is a commitment in getting that done.

21:07.43
Chantelle
I think it’s important to point out those caveats to the listeners because you know they may be reading things about people getting VO2 max tests or they may be learning about someone doing VO2 max tests in their area. So it’s important to understand how the data is derived from what we’re testing. With the gas exchange where we’re looking at as the person is on the treadmill we’re looking at how much Oxygen they’re using at what rate they’re using Oxygen at different levels of intensity and also the exchange between the Oxygen coming in and carbon dioxide going out so you definitely can learn a lot of cool things right? Like you said Steve you can learn your lactate thresholds. Sometimes they can combine that with this test and you can learn your heart rate and pace for different stages of the test. You can learn what your VO2 max is.

22:03.48
Chantelle
You can also potentially learn if you give the right instructions to the tester. You can potentially learn what your aerobic threshold is and what your ventilatory thresholds are. You know ventilatory threshold 1 and 2 which can help give you some guidance and information for both your aerobic threshold or lactate threshold so that could be kind of useful. But again, it’s really important to understand how the lab is doing the test, what type of protocol they’re doing and for you as an athlete what you’re hoping to gain from the test to be able to share that.

22:42.63
Chantelle
So that the tester can give you the information that you feel you need to carry forward however, you’re planning to use that data.

23:04.37
Steve
Just as a funny anecdote, I’m friends with Reinhold Mesner and Peter Hobbler and one time I heard them telling me about what happened before and after they climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen for the first time. I believe somebody’s going to get mad at me. But I think it was 1978 or 79 but they did these same VO2 tests on them before they left I think in Zurich and then immediately afterwards they flew them back and you know the unsurprising thing is their VO2 max went up because they lost so much weight on the expedition. The surprising thing is they didn’t test that high like Peter was pretty decent but I think Reinholds was like 42 or something.

23:58.55
Steve
You know they were expecting these guys to be some sort of mutants and it wasn’t like that. So I want to say that because it’s important not to get hung up with these numbers and try to connect your value as an athlete to numbers like this that actually don’t really mean as much. Except whether or not we can move them and whether we can improve them and get better and a lot of it and a lot of the results in sport actually have a lot more to do with other factors like your mental fortitude and your technique and your efficiency and whether or not you get to good weather window and all these other myriads of things. So just a little and fun anecdote about that.

24:31.22
Chantelle
Yeah and I think that’s a really great thing to point out right because people might look at someone like Kilian Jornett. He is a very talented athlete in many ways from a physiological perspective but also from a technical perspective. And he has a very high VO2 max right? But for a lot of people, they may be really talented athletes and don’t have such a high VO2 max and VO2 max is to some extent, its genetics.

25:03.98
Chantelle
80% of VO2 max is determined by genetics. 20% is trainable so you can have some influence through your training on your VO2 max, but you have a lot more influence on improving your aerobic capacity and also improving your lactate threshold.

25:21.40
Chantelle
Those things that are not determined by our genetics are those things that we can move right by our training and I think that’s why it’s important to have let’s say our aerobic threshold as our benchmark. We can use that to set our training zones so we can make sure that we’re training the correct amounts at the correct intensities and that allows us to make up the difference right? If we are not genetically gifted athletes. We can still be incredible athletes and we can still make improvements no matter our training histories or even our ages.

26:03.27
Alyssa
I love that. I think that’s really important information for people because it can deter people where they just think ah I’m not capable of accomplishing this. You can outtrain a lot or you can train through a lot and I think particularly in endurance events, the mental component comes into such a strong play that I think it can overcome a lot of genetics I guess is a way of putting it. I think talent matters in some cases but not nearly as much in other cases. So Chantelle kind of touched on this already, but what does Uphill Athlete recommend as the method of conducting aerobic threshold test and why do we recommend that? Steve if you want to lead us off on that.

27:00.76
Steve
Yeah, we mostly rely on the heart rate drift test and the reason is a lot of the points that Chantelle touched on. It’s reliable. It’s simple. It’s not very costly. It’s repeatable. There’s a lot of advantages to it and we like it so much, it basically becomes the first workout in the first week of every training plan and every coached athlete that comes in they go through some sort of aerobic threshold test and usually it’s a heart rate drift test. The only time it’s not a heart rate drift test is if they’re coming in with actual lab results and those lab results look good like you know, hold together. And yeah, it’s just a great way to do it. The only kind of downside is that you do need a tool like training peaks to analyze it quickly and easily measure that heart rate drift or that you know Cardiac drift as it’s sometimes called.

27:55.94
Chantelle
And I would say the only other thing they need in addition to that is obviously their smartwatch that’s capturing that information and a chest strap heart rate monitor so that we get the most accurate information compared to you know the unreliable nature of having the sensor on the wrist.

28:13.40
Chantelle
We want to make sure that we’re getting good quality data that we’re making those training suggestions on.

28:26.51
Steve
Yeah, that is a great point and something we get pushed back on a lot because people don’t like to have another thing and everybody thinks they already have a heart rate monitor on their wrist but you really have to have the chest strap and even if you don’t have a watch. You can buy a chest trap for fifty bucks from Wahoo and link it to the Wahoo app and you can have a better heart rate monitor than you can ever have on your wrist. So I really recommend people to get a chest strap and use that.

29:01.70
Alyssa
Definitely so with the actual test, we recommend 2 different ways of conducting this test but Chantelle, I’d love it if you would be able to explain a little bit of how to do each test so one we have on the treadmill and then it’s basically like inside and outside.

29:23.20
Chantelle
You know if someone is not used to running on a treadmill I would say don’t even think about doing it on the treadmill because it can be stressful for some people to run on a treadmill if they’re not used to it and so that’s obviously gonna affect your heart rate. They’re not comfortable. I remember in grad school working in a lab where we did a lot of testing on athletes and so Steve you were talking about these big treadmills where you could you could actually use inline we had like inline skaters on that and we had Skimo athletes on that as well for some runners doing treadmill tests. We actually had to put them on that really big treadmill because trail runners take up space.

30:06.35
Chantelle
They don’t run in a really linear form. Their arms are a little wider and so they were constantly banging the bars on the treadmill. Maybe just a weird little anecdote for those particular athletes. It’s really hard for them to run on a treadmill and so they weren’t comfortable and so we weren’t really getting very good information for them. Um, so just something to note. Before we get into the treadmill side of things but for doing the self-assessment, if you’re running outside, we recommend that you do this on a flat surface or even just a moderately rolling surface but nothing that is too steep. Remember that we’re looking for our aerobic threshold and this should feel nice and easy and comfortable.

30:58.96
Chantelle
For this test you would start out with a warmup. As we just mentioned you will also be wearing your heart rate monitor. You don’t have to be wearing it all the time after the fact but to get some good information to set your zones, you’ll want to start your test and at least a few of your first workouts wearing the heart rate monitor to check in with yourself. So you’ll do a nice little warm up for ten or fifteen minutes and then you will hit the lap button on your watch to start your test. So you’re going to be running at a low intensity so you want to have a nice steady heart rate.

31:38.69
Chantelle
Throughout this test you want to be breathing comfortably like Alyssa talked earlier about some you know, talk test you could do to check in with yourself. So how’s your breathing? Are you breathing predominantly through your nose and if you did a talk test, how many words could you say? Do you think you could have a full conversation?

31:57.42
Chantelle
Or an easy conversation if there were someone beside you and don’t feel bad about talking out loud If you’re doing this out in the woods, talk to those trees, talk to those birds. That’s totally fine. The point is to keep the intensity nice and low and comfortable and stable.

32:15.67
Chantelle
Check in with the heart rate and see what that heart rate looks like and try to maintain that heart rate throughout. Once you feel you’ve determined that nice easy low pace where you feel that your heart rate would be pretty stable for an hour and then at the end of the test, hit your stop button.

32:35.51
Chantelle
Continue on with your cooldown if you feel you need one and then you can review the stats for this on training peak. So you’ll see I talked about this before you’ll see the heart rate to pace ratio or rather the pace to heart rate ratio and you’ll want to see that’s within 5%. If it’s higher, then maybe you started a little higher than you should have and you’ll want to redo the test but no big deal. If it’s lower, you may have started a little bit too low.

33:10.76
Chantelle
But again it’s pretty simple to do and it’s something that you can also sort of retest as you go along? Steve, did you want to talk about any other suggestions you might have for athletes doing this outside and then maybe the difference for those that are doing it on a treadmill if that’s what they choose.

33:39.13
Steve
Yeah, absolutely I think that there’s a few things to go through and I just want to reiterate some of these key points. One is that the selection of the course you run outside is pretty important. So ideally, you know we even have people running on a track and it doesn’t matter which lane you’re in. You’re not running worrying about time, you’re worrying about whether you can maintain a given pace at a given heart rate so that should be your goal. Running exactly the same pace for an hour while being aerobic the whole time. That’s your goal. So if you run it on a trail or on a hilly course or out and back on a course and it’s a little bit like along a river if you run up the river to begin and then down the river on the way back, that’s not going to work. You really have to be careful with the terrain that you select and probably the simplest way for a lot of people to just eliminate that is to do it running on a track then I would also say that you know some of the analysis that Chantellel is talking about is a little hard to visualize. If you can’t see the graphs and there is a video on the website if you just search the website for a heart rate drift test or on our Youtube channel and search heart rate drift test. There is a video that shows you how to do this and how to select the data because you actually don’t even use all your data. You want to do the first and then you know, select your data starting between ten and fifteen minutes once you’re warmed up and you’ve settled into your pace. The aerobic system doesn’t come online in 5 seconds right like we don’t need to go into all that physiology but it takes a bit for the aerobic system to get going and your body to get warmed up and to be capable of what you’re asking it to do. So make sure that when you select the data you’re selecting the right piece of the data and you don’t have to select all the way to the end either. You can play with it and I might just look at it super fast and you’ll see this in the video. For example, just select like the first 10 minutes of the video of the test to see what your average heart rate is. My heart avatar rate was 132 select the last few minutes oh there’s my heart rate was you know 142? Oh that doesn’t look so good. Let’s look at all of it and see where the trend was, that kind of thing you can really quickly zero in on this. We do this test also as part of the training groups and so sometimes we’re having one hundred and fifty plus people. I’ll do this test out in the field but we did the same week and then walk everybody through this analysis on their own data. So it is possible but you do need these couple of simple tools to do it. I think if you get those basics right, you’ll be able to find that it’s a really useful way to kind of basically set your aerobic training up correctly.

36:55.63
Alyssa
Awesome! I’m sure that our listeners will find that really helpful to hear you both walk through that. One of the questions we often get is how do you then take these tests and assess your results. What do they tell you? Would love to hear that.

37:24.24
Steve
Yeah, so what we’re going to do with this information is use it to set your training zones and as you’ve heard, we’re mostly interested especially in the beginning stages of training in developing your aerobic system so we want to make sure we know where your aerobic training zone is. This is super important. So what we’re trying to define is the upper limit of that zone 2 in the Uphill Athlete nomenclature that we use in the books and on the website. That is important to know because you want to be training within that or below that threshold below that heart rate. So once you’ve done a test and you’ve found a heart rate which does not drift during the test. Drifts less than 5% then you have set your top of your zone two. Also it is important to note that it might take you a couple of tries at this test. Especially if you go a little too fast and it’s pretty common for people to start to test and end up having a bigger heart rate drift because they weren’t able to maintain the pace. It’s also common for people to do something and underestimate their aerobic fitness. They maybe start off with a guesstimate of their heart rate being 125 and they do the test and there’s zero drift or maybe they’re even running faster at the end of the hour that means that you need to go back and do the test again and just increase your pace or exertion level just a tiny bit. So these things are all normal parts of this process. But once you’ve done this once you’ll be much faster at it subsequently and so we’ll get to this number which is the top of zone 2.

39:29.66
Alyssa
So excellent and then just really quickly how in Training Peaks do you find that number like what does that part look like?

40:07.40
Steve
So what I do is go to the workout. You basically select the period in the middle of the workout post warm up and pre-cool down where you think you were in your aerobic training zone where you didn’t have a drift of more than 5% between pace and heart rate. You look at what the average heart rate is and Training Peaks will just immediately instantly calculate that for you. You know you can look at that number and I want people to keep in mind that we are not robots or something where we’re always going to perform to plus or minus point zero one beats per minute. You know you may look at that number it may say 132 okay well I might just make the top of my zone to 130. It’s close enough and you know it’s also going to be affected by things like sleep and recovery and stress and other things as well. So the exact number and your actual aerobic threshold will probably be a little different every day so this is what I mean by just keeping this in mind that we are not robots. We’re not machines, we’re humans and we’re physiological creatures. There’s a lot of things that affect this number so if you pick and find the average of that number and then if you have to round up or down, go down rather than a little bit up typically and just start there be on the safe side.

41:45.63
Alyssa
So excellent. I think that will really help people to set those zones. With that being said, how do you then take that percentage, which is the top of your zone 2 and determine the rest of your zones from that?

41:57.47
Chantelle
So the reason why we want to start with this test is like I said if we are looking to improve something we have to have some measurement tools right? So if we’re setting our aerobic threshold as our benchmark and that’s going to determine the top of zone 2. That zone then zone two is really what we’ve just determined right? Our aerobic threshold and then you know about 10% below that. So from you know, minus ten percent to aerobic threshold. That’s our zone 2. Then if we look below that for zone 1 then we’re looking at sort of 20% to 10% below aerobic threshold that’s going to be our zone 1 right? So we can see what’s below that so that’s going to be a very easy effort and then if we want to look above that we’re looking at zone 3.

42:55.58
Chantelle
Zone three is going to be where we have sort of that division between the aerobic threshold and lactate threshold. So that’s going to be a pretty hard effort. Not you know, exhaustive effort but still you know medium moderate effort. We’re going to want to know what that is and we’re going to want to stay out of that zone if we are focused on an aerobic workout. Then obviously if we look at that Uphill Athlete we use four Zones. Zone 4 is really the harder work which is the lactate threshold to our maximum heart rate which we haven’t talked about determining in this test. We’ll follow up on that in a future episode when we talk about setting the anaerobic threshold and looking at the difference in results. When we get looking at our anaerobic threshold compared to our aerobic threshold and if that distance is too great, but that’s another animal and we’ll cover that in another future episode.

44:11.18
Alyssa
For sure and I can attest to the fact that the anaerobic threshold test is not nearly as much fun as the aerobic threshold test. It’s quite painful.

44:16.70
Chantelle
Depends on how you define fun. Some people love to do those.

44:30.30
Alyssa
So true. This is why I run two hundred and forty miles and not like a 10 km for most of the time.
So Steve, now that we know how you set up your zones, how you do the test, the last thing that we’ll wrap up with is common mistakes that you see in testing. Chantelle unfortunately had to head out but Steve can you name some because I’m sure you’ve seen quite a bit of common mistakes that people make while they are doing the aerobic test.

45:27.13
Steve
Yeah I think that the most common mistake is just being afraid of a test. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Put the chest strap on, put the watch on and consider it a pleasant workout. Go out, give yourself a nice, easy warm up. Find a track. Do it at a nice time of day. Do it when you’re adequately fueled and rested and all the things. Just see if you can go for one of those runs where you sort of peg your pace at a really nice, fun, easy pace and just try to keep it there for 1 hour and don’t overthink it. That’s the biggest mistake.

46:09.70
Alyssa
I think that’s great, something I will say is I guess two parts is again using the wrist based heart rate. You really need to do a chest heart rate monitor. It doesn’t work with the wrist heart rate and the other thing is to use the modality of exercise that you’re planning to spend the most time in. So if you are a hiker you should do it at a fast walking pace. If you are a runner, it should be running so really making sure that you are using the modality that you will be training. That’s going to give you the most accurate results. If I went and tried to do it swimming or biking, it would be wildly inaccurate like I’m just not efficient enough to be able to give an accurate test. So I think that’s a key point as well is pick the sport that you’re either working in or efficient in.

47:02.48
Steve
That’s great and I think I could relate to this because it is hard to run around traffic. I don’t like to do that and I’m not an efficient runner. So as a mountaineer I need to do it going uphill and so I found a course. Let’s call it basically just a forest road not far from where I live where I can go and do this test and yes, it’s not perfect. The grade goes flatter and then a little steeper and then a little flatter, but I always do the test in the same place. You can kind of take out the bumps and look at the averages and and these kinds of things will really help you get it done. Don’t think that you can do it hiking and then go do it ski touring or cross country skiing or go cycling and expect to get exactly the same results because you’re just not going to be as efficient in all these different things. All these different modalities are different sports.

48:14.16
Alyssa
Definitely, well I think that that just about wraps up our second episode on mountaineering where we are getting into the actual aerobic testing. Next week we will take on another aspect of training in mountaineering. So thank you for listening to the Uphill Athlete Podcast. It’s really helpful if you rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever you listen to. And we really appreciate you coming on the journey of education with us.

48:50.53
Steve
It’s not just one, but a community. We are Uphill Athlete. Today’s Uphill Athlete podcast was produced by Alyssa Clark. Our mixing engineer is Tim Mclain and our theme song was written and produced by Chase Clark. We’d love to hear from you please write to us at coach@uphillathlete.com. I am your host Steve House. Go simply, climb, ski, run and train. Thank you for listening.