Training Zones and How to Use Them

00:00.00
Chantelle
Our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Chantelle Robitaille and I will be co-hosting with Alyssa Clark today, who is of course our most familiar voice on the Uphill athlete podcast. Hello Alyssa.

00:20.43
Alyssa
Hi Chantelle, thanks for joining me for this episode. I think that this episode in many ways has been a long time coming and it’s something we’ve touched on many times in other podcasts and many conversations, but the other day we were discussing our most frequently asked question and points of confusion that we see for our athletes.

00:49.51
Alyssa
you in particular answer these questions, I’m sure, multiple times a day. And so I’m hoping that we can use this podcast as a way that our athletes can have a reference point and maybe we can lessen a few of those questions for you and just have a handy podcast to be ready for people.

01:13.15
Chantelle
Yeah, I’m excited to dig in.

01:13.28
Alyssa
So, yes. Our real main topic today is training zones and how to use them. So Chantelle, I’d love to hear a little bit of how this topic came up as we were discussing. I mentioned that it brings up a lot of questions, but what do you see just in everyday conversations?

01:39.61
Chantelle
So I think, Alyssa, this topic came up when you and I were talking about some of the frequently asked questions that we get um in a couple of ways. you know Frequently asked questions we get from athletes that we coach one-on-one.

01:53.39
Chantelle
It’s a question that comes up in our daily um inquiry list when we do one-on-one consultations with people who have questions. The number one thing, hands down, far above the rest, um it’s maybe a little bit of a two-parter. One, did I test and analyze my zones, test, analyze, and determine my zones correctly? Kind of part one, right?

02:22.82
Chantelle
And then part two, how the heck do I use these zones in my training? And so I will say that I spend a lot of time talking with people one on one about this.

02:33.81
Chantelle
looking at their data and um maybe a theme that will come through today is a little bit of brain deprogramming with people where they’ve sort of internalized things that they’ve heard or done or read about and thinking about things like what actually is going to work better in reality.

02:55.01
Alyssa
I love it. Yeah, I think it’s funny when I first started working for an uphill athlete and I remember getting these questions initially and I was so nervous to answer them and now it’s like second major.

03:10.76
Chantelle
Yeah, definitely.

03:13.13
Alyssa
But I think that one of the things you say all the time is that it’s not good or bad, it’s just more information, which is one of my favorite sayings from you. And I feel like one of the things that we can say about training zones is that there’s no good or bad. Again, it’s just more information. So let’s dive into this topic. First off, what are training zones? And then how do we use them in our actual training

03:42.55
Chantelle
Yes, I think the simplest way is to think about training zones as different levels of effort that you put out while you’re doing physical activity. And we have these zones in terms of like delineated by levels of intensity.

03:59.98
Chantelle
So for an uphill athlete, we typically use four zones. We have some coaches who like to use five zones, seven zones, 12 zones.

04:10.75
Chantelle
I think I’ve even seen up to 17. I can’t imagine why you would want to have that many. However, like most things at uphill athlete, we try to keep things you know as simple as possible to make it easier for people.

04:16.14
Alyssa
Wow.

04:23.98
Chantelle
So if we think about the fact that we use four zones and those are typically sort of from a lower intensity, lower intensity to highest intensity. So from one being lowest and four being the highest.

04:37.43
Chantelle
So we think about zone one, that is typically a recovery sort of zone that might be walking the dog. Alyssa and I, if we wanted to, we could actually probably record this podcast, walking outside, which we probably would like to do sometime. And still stay in zone one, right? We’re breathing nice and easy, it’s really comfortable.

05:01.23
Chantelle
Then when we get to zone two, that’s where we are, zone one, I should ah start with also, that’s an aerobic zone. So we are working, still working on our basic endurance um at that level of effort. ah Predominantly, we’re burning fat also at that effort. um If you’re thinking about what’s happening within the body from a metabolic perspective,

05:27.28
Chantelle
Zone two, we’re still working on our endurance and our aerobic fitness. Still, for the most part, we are burning fat for fuel and for energy. And in terms of the effort that we’re putting out, it should still feel pretty comfortable. And that’s also an effort that we can sustain for a really long time. So for a lot of mountain athletes who are ah doing very you know long distance activities over a couple of hours. These are really the two zones of effort that we use the most, zone one and two. That’s something that we could sustain all day for or for quite a long time. you know We’re talking a number of hours.

06:13.64
Chantelle
And so those that’s where we’re going to spend a lot of our time because that’s really what we’re focused on doing.

06:15.41
Alyssa
you

06:20.13
Chantelle
Then when we get into zone three, now we’re talking about ah we are in rather than training our aerobic fitness or aerobic capabilities, now we’re training our anaerobic capabilities.

06:31.75
Chantelle
So another word for this ah could be a threshold or anaerobic threshold, threshold pace or threshold heart rate, lots of different thresholds that we bandy around. But let’s think about this in simple terms, like your anaerobic threshold or your lactate threshold is the hardest you could work for one hour. So pretty hard, you know, not even really comfortably hard, like kind of uncomfortably hard, but you can do it by the end of the hour. You’re really glad that it’s done.

07:00.70
Chantelle
Pretty hard stuff. So this is something that we’re still very useful to bring into our training because our anaerobic threshold or a lactate threshold is still very trainable throughout our lives.

07:12.22
Chantelle
um Doesn’t matter if we’re north of 50, we still have a chance to improve it.

07:12.58
Alyssa
So, I’m going to go ahead and do it.

07:16.82
Chantelle
We can also, with targeted work, we can improve our lactate threshold in a pretty short time. So it’s a really effective place to work um in a strategic way.

07:29.34
Chantelle
Compared to zones one and two, that’s our aerobic work. And that’s something that we’re gonna have, that takes a long time to build, it takes a long time to change, and it takes a long time to move the needle there.

07:42.24
Chantelle
So again, we wanna think about how we use these zones strategically.

07:43.04
Alyssa
That’s it.

07:45.89
Chantelle
And then once we get, oh, I want to come back to one more thing.

07:47.92
Alyssa
Wooo!

07:50.28
Chantelle
If you’re kind of testing how that feels, ah pretty uncomfortable, and you would be able to say, instead of like ah zone two, where you could say a couple of sentences between breaths, you would be able to say maybe one sentence and then need to take a breath.

08:05.84
Chantelle
um If you say a four letter word, and that’s all you can say, you’re beyond zone three, right? So that’s moving us into, you know, above our lactate threshold, we’re heading towards our maximum capability, potentially even VO2 max. And that is not an effort level that we can sustain for very long at all, you know, we can get a few minutes at that level of intensity. VO2 max is about 80% genetic and about 20% trainable. So we want to spend a little time there sometimes, but not too much. So thinking about the zones and how we use them, one, it gives us

08:44.34
Chantelle
a way to kind of delineate the types of intensity that we should be working at. It also kind of reminds us how much time we need to spend in our training to be the best that we can be. And so since we need the most time to develop and continue improving our aerobic capacity, we want to spend most of our time in those lower levels of effort. We want to spend a little bit of time in zone three, which is lock tape threshold, because we still have the potential to um improve our efficiency there. And the better we can train our bodies to process lactate, it actually helps our aerobic metabolism. So we can, you know, we can improve our aerobic fitness while still working on improving our lactate threshold. um So it doesn’t mean like if you

09:34.64
Chantelle
You know, sometimes when you get into zone three in a workout it’s gonna throw the whole workout out of the window and you fail. No, it didn’t. They work together. But we wanna use that strategically. And then at the higher end, the VO2 max work, we wanna use, you know, we, it’s still 20% trainable. We wanna spend a little bit of time there, but just a little bit. Overall, we wanna be probably 80% of the time in zones one and two at the easier efforts. And we wanna spend about 20% of our time at the higher efforts like zone three and zone four.

10:08.52
Alyssa
Wonderful. Yeah, that’s a great explanation of that. And it’s hopefully hopeful for our athletes out there. So getting into actually setting up these training zones, how do we go about doing that? And what are the procedures we can use to get this aerobic threshold and anaerobic threshold that you were talking about?

10:35.28
Chantelle
Yeah, good question, Alyssa. And it’s a little tricky to maybe explain that process. And actually, that would probably be a whole process, right? Or a whole podcast, walking someone through that. Um, we do have a couple of great articles on our website and we’ll link those in the show notes about how to set your training zones and also how to do the aerobic and anaerobic threshold tests.

10:57.04
Chantelle
But in a nutshell, um, we, as I explained at uphill athlete, we typically use four training zones and we delineate those training zones with two benchmarks.

10:58.92
Alyssa
Thank you.

11:07.97
Chantelle
One is doing anaerobic threshold test. And so that’s seeing like, what is the upper limit from a heart rate perspective and effort perspective? What does that look like? And so typically you’ll go out and you know do a little bit of a warmup and run a jog or a hike for an hour. And then we’re going to see the difference between how the heart rate responds in the first half of that workout compared to the second half of the workout.

11:38.79
Chantelle
So we have that number and that kind of gives us one of those benchmarks. It gives us the aerobic threshold. then if someone is capable, they can also do an anaerobic threshold test. And so remember that the anaerobic threshold is equivalent to lactate threshold. That’s the hardest we can work for an hour. Pretty tough test. So if someone is capable of doing it, they could do that and they can get that number. We have a great little calculator on our website where you can plug in your

12:11.11
Chantelle
aerobic threshold and your anaerobic threshold. And then it’s going to give you four different zones. And then that way you’ll see what the heart rate range is likely to be. And we’ll get back to why I’m likely to be within those four zones to give you some good guidance in your workouts. But for those who are curious about that, I would say take the time to read those articles and check out the videos on the website to read through how to do those. But it’s a pretty simple process, but it’s not something that everyone can do. Not everyone who’s starting training is even able to do an aerobic threshold test.

12:52.43
Chantelle
Because they may not be able to sustain one hour of exercise at a stable heart rate just yet. And again, it’s not good or bad. It’s just information. It’s just that you’re not ready yet. It doesn’t mean that you’re not ready to train. It means you have work to do.

13:10.28
Alyssa
Excellent. And I want to throw a bit of a twist in. Do you say, hey, you’ve done the aerobic threshold test and the anaerobic threshold test, and you might have time, a lab accessible. What test within a lab would you recommend for someone who is looking to kind of take things to another step or just have more information?

13:38.40
Chantelle
Yeah, that’s a great question. And ah I want to start with the fact that lab tests are absolutely not necessary. But for some people, maybe they work in a university near university.

13:48.35
Alyssa
Exciting. yeah

13:49.82
Chantelle
Yeah, it’s maybe, so you know, for a lot of us, like looking at data is fun and looking using data to quantify our improvement for some people is very motivating.

14:02.60
Chantelle
So there are different lab tests that people can get that could be helpful. um I would say one of the more common ones that people are getting, even some gyms are offering now even VO2 max test. So the VO2 max test would be helpful to tell you that I’m going to put this in big bold letters. um In under those specific settings, it’s going to tell you what your maximum capacity is. So that’s useful for telling you what your VO2 max is. And the the test facility can look at that data and give you some approximations of your other

14:42.30
Chantelle
ah training zones based on what they see from the VO2 max test. During the VO2 max test, depending on how the data is collected, they may also be able to identify what’s called the ventilly Ventilatory Threshold 1 or VT1 and Ventilatory Threshold 2.

15:02.70
Chantelle
And again, it depends on how they’re collecting the data and how the data is coming back. But typically speaking, VT1 and VT2 correspond with the aerobic and anaerobic threshold. So that also can be helpful to set your training zones. Remember that in a lab, it’s very controlled conditions. You’re going to be on, for the most part, a treadmill. Some people are doing it on a bike.

15:27.98
Chantelle
Um, but it’s a very controlled situation. So if you are, you know, you get these training zones and you are in a lab and it was 65 degrees in that lab. Um, and you’re going to go with these brand new shiny training zones and you’re going to go train outside tomorrow and it’s 85 degrees. Guess what? Those hearts and numbers aren’t going to mean anything because now your environmental conditions are different. So it’s useful to test. It’s useful to give you some guidance. It’s useful for you to understand um how hard different intensities feel. But it might only be useful in terms of doing one test now and doing one test later. It might not be that helpful for giving you training zones.

16:16.51
Chantelle
Especially the aerobic threshold is a little bit tricky. You might need a little bit longer warm-up time. And when people are taking a VO2 max test, the goal is getting to the end as quickly as possible. So the warm-up period may not be long enough to accurately give you an aerobic threshold.

16:37.65
Chantelle
And then another one people often get could be a lactate threshold test. Sometimes a lactate threshold test is done at the same time as a VO2 max test. So they are gathering, when you do a VO2 max test, they are measuring how much oxygen you are taking in, how much carbon dioxide you are putting out. um They’re also monitoring your heart rate throughout the test. They might also be poking your finger or your ear to get lactate values as well and see where the lactate values fall. And sometimes that can be helpful for trying to correlate if the data isn’t

17:16.93
Chantelle
entirely conclusive for those different thresholds, the lactate information might give some additional context or some additional cues. But again, it’s going to tell you like where that lactate threshold is, which is where your and anaerobic threshold is, under those conditions, you know at that particular heart rate, under those conditions.

17:38.83
Chantelle
And keep in mind another reason why sometimes these values are not very well correlated to our training, training efforts or training zones is that how does it feel when you’re taking any kind of test?

17:54.71
Chantelle
right It’s a little bit stressful.

17:54.99
Alyssa
Stressful. Again.

17:56.27
Chantelle
Yeah, it’s a little bit stressful, especially if you’re doing a VO2 max test. You have a mask on your face that covers your nose and your mouth. For some people, that’s really uncomfortable.

18:07.52
Chantelle
You’re on a treadmill. Maybe you’re not used to being on a treadmill, particularly for trail runners who are used to having their arms out on the side, they’re banging the bars. And you know it. It feels really funny.

18:18.25
Chantelle
For some people, maybe you’re not a runner. um So all these different confounding factors right can apply. So again, I think it’s useful if you’re planning to test again, to test and compare lab data to lab data, rather than this being helpful to um set your training zones to actually use out in the wild.

18:40.65
Alyssa
Excellent. Yeah, I think that just gives people a bit of an idea because I’m sure you do. I often get asked like, Oh, do I need to get in the lab? It’s like, well, you know, if you’re excited about that, awesome.

18:53.24
Alyssa
I can say I had a lactate test done about maybe two a month and a half ago.

19:05.03
Alyssa
And that was the first time I’d had one done since I was 50.

19:05.23
Chantelle
Mm-hmm Yep

19:09.57
Alyssa
And it really just confirmed most of the, or all the information I already had. And it was cool to see. I’m glad that I had the opportunity to do it, but it did not reveal particularly incredible information that I already wasn’t pretty well aware of. And so I think it was interesting to get that confirmation, but it certainly was not telling me something that I hadn’t already figured out through training and just kind of recognizing effort levels.

19:45.06
Chantelle
Yeah, that’s a good point, Alyssa, because I think a lot of people are very, you know, for people who are interested in data, they love the fact that there’s this number for this and that number for that and oh, this I want the test because I want the number. I want absolutes. And I think some people are really resistant to listening to body cues, to doing some kind of talk test, to training according to rate of perceived exertion, which we’ll get into. But actually, when it all gets down to it, as you say, um it’s not an either-or, right? It’s it’s a good way to like

20:20.87
Chantelle
every now and again, maybe correlate, see how the data looks together. It allows you to calibrate it for yourself in another way. And maybe sometimes it’s annoying that the simple stuff is the right stuff. You don’t need a fancy gadget, actually. You just need to pay attention. Listen to what your body’s trying to tell you. And sometimes it seems just too simple to do that, right?

20:47.35
Alyssa
Totally. Yeah, I mean, I can give just a brief example. I’ve been coming back from, I think at this point, it was norovirus after doing five very hard training days.

20:56.36
Chantelle
Oh gosh.

20:58.23
Alyssa
And I was trying to do some intervals today. And I just, I’d feel better than I had been, but still felt like I was moving through the glasses just couldn’t couldn’t get it going.

21:09.92
Alyssa
And I was supposed to do a long run tomorrow and just went, Nope, I need another day before I can do it. And my coach looked in my hurry and went, but were you using a strap or your wrist?

21:20.38
Alyssa
And I said, oh, I was using a strap. And he was like, yeah, and you could barely get into zone two on your intervals. And he went, you need another day.

21:29.40
Alyssa
So you know it wasn’t that information was just like, oh, yeah, that confirmed exactly as I felt. And it’s just an indication of, cool, these all of these pieces align.

21:45.51
Alyssa
to say I need another day of taking it easy. But it wasn’t like I was sitting there staring at my heart rate trying to get ah up to zone three or anything. I was really just going off the field and that information of wow, I can barely get into the top of zone two is yeah, just just more good information for us.

22:04.54
Chantelle
Yeah, that’s the information you needed to pay attention to.

22:07.21
Alyssa
Totally, totally, yeah.

22:08.45
Chantelle
Yeah.

22:10.65
Alyssa
And to be fair, that does come from

22:15.05
Alyssa
a decade plus of paying attention to that. So I will say I think as people are learning to understand and trust themselves, I understand that can take some time. I think really the trust part takes a while if people just don’t trust themselves.

22:32.34
Chantelle
Well, that’s a big one, right? I feel like in coaching, a big part of our job is deprogramming people from past patterns of training. especially for people who have been collegiate athletes, right?

22:45.56
Chantelle
They’re on a team. They’re always being compared. There’s not a lot of individuality in the training and it’s just a matter of like, you know, and you can get away with a lot of dumb stuff when you’re 20, right?

22:57.28
Chantelle
But as you get older, you have to get better.

22:58.05
Alyssa
oh yeah

23:00.55
Chantelle
But the problem is we have gotten really good at ignoring the signals. we get We’re used to ignoring the alarm bells. and we’ll just push ourselves harder.

23:11.17
Chantelle
And if it isn’t hard, it wasn’t effective. So a lot of what we have to end up doing as coaches is deprogramming people because people have really lost the connection between their brain and their body, which maybe in their younger years, they kind of had to do.

23:21.11
Alyssa
Oh, here.

23:28.32
Chantelle
But as you get older, it gets much more important to be able to really know the difference between what is easy and what is hard. Because if we just collected 20 random people right and put them on a track and told everyone to go run easy, everyone would run medium hard.

23:46.93
Alyssa
hundred percent correct

23:48.78
Chantelle
right that’s That’s the go-to. That’s what feels good. That’s what’s rewarding. And it’s no man’s land. You know talking about our training zones, it’s not low enough to improve their aerobic capacity.

24:01.10
Chantelle
It’s not hard enough to improve their lactate threshold or their VO2 mats. So just running around in circles, literally, getting tired and wondering why they’re not getting faster. And so that’s why I think

24:12.81
Alyssa
It’s 100% correct.

24:13.01
Chantelle
training, understanding training zones and understanding the different metrics, you know, heart rate and others to use this information to make good decisions for your training, but also even sometimes making the right decision to not train or to, you know, dial it back a little bit when, when you’re getting the signals um that, you know, something is a little bit off.

24:41.46
Alyssa
Yeah. So do you think that everyone needs training zones?

24:49.68
Chantelle
Mmm, that’s a good question. I think it’s important that I think it’s important to when you’re training for most people if you’re training and you have a training

24:52.49
Alyssa
Yeah.

25:01.99
Chantelle
program or you have a training plan, you should go out and have an intention. You have an intention, right? You look at what’s the goal today. So even if you don’t have it, for the most part, you’re going to have some kind of goal, right? It’s something that you want to be able to do or something that you want to be able to achieve.

25:20.64
Chantelle
And you have to have some sort of plan to get there. If you’re just out and you don’t have any specific thing, maybe not, but if you are having some goals on something that you want to improve or something that you want to get good at or you want to prepare for, then you’re going to want to have a training plan.

25:36.68
Chantelle
And your training plan should be properly organized so that it’s going to help you get to your goal, right? You want to look at that goal. What do I need to achieve that goal? And then you kind of work backwards, right, to figure out the different steps in between to lead you to being successful. That means that each workout, you should have an intention for that workout. So you know like I said in the beginning, probably 80% of the time you’re going to be doing things in a zone one, zone two, kind of easier effort, maybe 20% of the time you’re going to be doing things at a harder effort. Not all the time. You might have stretches of time where it is 100% all easy work.

26:17.17
Chantelle
You’re rarely going to have 100% of the time that is hard work, but maybe you’ll have, you know, maybe it’s three short weeks while you’re focusing on something.

26:28.63
Chantelle
So that being said, I think it’s important to have a plan if you’re working towards something. Do you, you know, if you, how does that thing go? And I’m French Canadian, so I often get things backwards. So it might take me a minute to get it in my brain.

26:40.94
Chantelle
But if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. So you should have a plan, right?

26:44.59
Alyssa
Got it.

26:46.10
Chantelle
to get to your end goal and that way you’re probably going to need to have um some training zones to get there. And that doesn’t necessarily mean zone one, two, three, four. It might mean, you know, easy run, easy hike, a little bit harder hike, hike with weight. It doesn’t have to be zone one, two, three, four, right? It just has to be, be mindful of the effort that you’re extending and make sure that 80% of the time it’s done at a lower intensity.

27:18.98
Alyssa
Perfect. Yeah, I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be named Training Zones. But yes, that intention is behind what you’re doing. And I think that that’s the real differentiation.

27:31.78
Alyssa
differentiation I’m a native English speaker, and I have multiple degrees in English. And here we are. I think that that is the piece that is really key.

27:46.94
Alyssa
Do I think the difference between someone who is going out and just doing exercise? Yeah, that’s kind of how it’s like, oh, you’re exercising versus training.

27:57.11
Alyssa
Is that intention behind the decision making and the ah workout itself?

28:03.37
Alyssa
Yeah, and I think it’s always fun when you have people who are like, yeah, I just do a lot of working out, but I want to actually train. I think that’s always kind of a fun, fun moment of like, oh, cool, we can help.

28:12.64
Chantelle
Yeah, let’s put some intention behind that.

28:20.20
Alyssa
Exactly. So here at Uphill Athlete, we have emphasized pretty strongly heart rate training. And I would say within the last, I don’t know, something like two years around there, we are moving away from heart rate training as the only method by which to train. And I’d love to hear a little bit more about these three little letters RPE.

28:49.30
Alyssa
and how that has come into our vocabulary a lot more.

28:54.76
Chantelle
Well, I might be a little bit responsible for that.

28:58.04
Alyssa
I’m super happy about it.

29:00.34
Chantelle
I might be a little bit responsible for that. So I think heart rate training with heart rate and understanding how your heart rate performs and having some general idea about heart rate zones for your training is really helpful. But I don’t think only focusing on heart rate is helpful for a couple of reasons. There are a lot of things that influence our heart rates.

29:24.90
Chantelle
So, I’ll start with some. How well did you sleep last night? How much did you sleep last night? Did you have coffee before your workout? How much coffee? Did you eat? What did you eat? Is there something on your mind? Are you stressed about something? What time of the day is it?

29:45.31
Chantelle
What’s the temperature? What’s the humidity? What elevation are you at? If you’re a woman, where are you at in your cycle? um you know For women, women’s bodies are much more sensitive to different things. So at different times in the cycle, our body temperature shifts, right? Our body temperature might be up or down. um That’s stressful. Menstruation, that’s a stressful time on the body. Natural process.

30:12.67
Chantelle
stressful situation. Exercise, stress. Your body doesn’t know the difference between all these different stressors, um even being a little bit dehydrated. So I could keep going. There are lots of things. So how often do you think any of those things impact you on a daily basis, Alyssa?

30:32.64
Alyssa
Yes, I’ll just say yes to the whole list.

30:35.43
Chantelle
Yes, right? All of them. So we have to be aware that our bodies are a little bit different every day. Our bodies are different at different times of the day. So we have to be aware of that. And if we’re only, if we’re overly focused on heart rate, we’re not really giving ourselves a chance to work within our bodies daily variability because there are going to be some days that naturally we feel really awesome. We’re going out and we’re training and it’s 40 degrees Fahrenheit and we had amazing sleep and we didn’t overdo it on the caffeine and we feel like a rock star and we we go and we do our six mile run around the neighborhood and we realize like, whoa,

31:18.32
Chantelle
That wasn’t even an hour. Usually that takes me an hour. Weird. I felt totally comfortable. And that’s the way it would be, right? If you were trying to stick within that narrow heart rate zone all the time, if you do have a day where you’re feeling particularly great, you’re not going to get the most out of yourself.

31:31.73
Alyssa
Thank

31:35.81
Chantelle
And you’re not going to ah you know be able to account for that shift.

31:36.17
Alyssa
you.

31:39.27
Chantelle
On the other hand, if you are really stressed about something or something’s bothering you and you’re already starting at a higher heart rate, just when you start your activity, you’re going to have a very narrow band for how much you’re going to be able to perform on that day.

31:55.19
Chantelle
So I think that’s why it’s important to use um to think about both. So if you think about the rate of perceived exertion, how my ceiling and how am i feeling you know how am I feeling in general, and how hard am I actually working right now? That’s always going to be true.

32:11.98
Chantelle
Because think about someone that lives in Florida, and they’re training in Florida under those particular conditions, and then they go to Colorado on a hike. If they’re trying to stay within the same heart rate zone, well, their zone two heart rate might be the same as them sitting at their campsite in a chair.

32:30.72
Chantelle
Right so we have to think about how my feeling in the moment and that’s why we like to share about rate of perceived exertion or rpe as another method to calibrate your effort so how hard are you working and again a lot of people don’t know the difference right between easy and hard so we give we give people cues in terms of how you’re breathing and how many words you could say. So, zone one, we’re like now, Alyssa and I were probably zone one. We could probably be walking a little bit, still stay in zone one.

33:05.41
Chantelle
Zone two, we’re conversational. So practice this, talk out loud, talk to the tree, talk to your buddy, your dog, or or yourself at the risk of looking funny to others, passerby. And make sure that that is conversational. That means you’re saying two to three sentences before you need to take a breath. And then if you are getting into, if it’s a zone two workout and you do the talk test and you find that you can say maybe four or five words before you need to take a breath,

33:35.43
Chantelle
slow your bleep down, right? Slow down. You’re going too hard. That’s again, what’s the intention of the workout? You’re going too hard and it’s very easy to drift, right? um Drift ahead. And then you know if it is something, um you know zone three workout, we do sometimes have some zone three workouts, you can test yourself during that workout to make sure that you’re not flowing down or speeding up.

34:01.73
Chantelle
So try to come up with a phrase. Mine is usually like a dog. I’m very food motivated. So mine is always how many there could be like, what am I going to eat after this workout?

34:12.73
Chantelle
If I can then start naming foods, I know that I’m still in zone two. If I take a breath after my question, then I know I’m properly in zone three. And if I’m at four letter words, then I know that I’m beyond that.

34:27.19
Chantelle
So you can calibrate that and I sometimes ask people to, you know, for some people that are really becoming slaves to the heart rate, I say, turn your, change your watch screen so that all you see is the time, go out and do your workout, practice the talk test, then come back and look at your heart rate and see how that calibrates with the heart rate zones that you’ve determined for yourself.

34:50.19
Chantelle
And you might start learning that your zones change according to time of day, um weather temperature, weather conditions, elevation, time of the month if you are a menstruating person, um all of those things. So you might start to learn what those are. And if it might sound silly to you, I will say that this has been, there are many scientific studies. It’s quite fascinating and in a lot of the studies they actually use the Pledge of Allegiance. And they found that it was spot on with correlating those important zones. And so it’s scientifically validated. It might sound a little bit too woo or too loose, but it is actually scientifically validated.

35:36.27
Chantelle
It’s a great way to try and um calibrate your zones. It’s also really useful in the field because when you go to a higher elevation, those zones that you know by heart rate, they’re not gonna matter.

35:45.11
Alyssa
Thank you.

35:50.44
Chantelle
Also, you’re probably not gonna be able to even look at your watch, right? It’s probably gonna be buried under stuff um and it’s moving around. You might not even wanna wear a watch. So it’s actually really good to learn about your body and understand the differences between how these different zones feel instead of always relying on your watch. And so also that could be dangerous. If you’re only looking at your watch to know what zone you’re in, you’re going to be on your face, on the ground, right? So it’s a distraction as well.

36:27.85
Alyssa
Yeah, there’s definitely people along the way that have wanted to be like, could we throw your watch off a cliff? Would that be acceptable?

36:39.26
Alyssa
So we have the talk test. How then does the rate of perceived exertion, we have a ah number from one to 10. What does that but do those numbers correlate with, say, the talk tests and zones?

36:53.05
Chantelle
Yeah, good question, Alyssa. So if we think about the RPE, it’s on a scale of 1 to 10. One is really like nothing.

37:03.41
Alyssa
Yeah.

37:03.55
Chantelle
You’re just like a potato, you’re a potato on the couch. So typically we’re starting around sort of two, three would be, ah two to three would be your zone one, like nice and easy.

37:16.44
Chantelle
then we think about like maybe even four, actually, four, you know up to four. When we get into five, six, that’s when we’re more of our endurance or aerobic style workouts. At the upper end of zone two, now we’re kind of getting up to about a seven on that i’m not higher end. That’s kind of just before the crossover happens from predominantly using our aerobic system to our anaerobic system. Once we get to about an eight, nine, that’s pretty much where our zone three is. So that’s our, you know, one word sentence. And then beyond that, we’re talking about the 10, you know, that’s the hardest we could work. So it’s like a scale of one to 10. So again, thinking most of the time,

38:06.22
Chantelle
We’re working between four and seven, that’s our zones one and two. Some of the time we’re working between eight and 10.

38:16.40
Alyssa
Gotcha. And with that being said, there’s always a slight bit of deviation of how people use those numbers. Like I know Trading Peaks has a very different perception of those numbers.

38:28.82
Chantelle
Yep.

38:30.89
Alyssa
I generally say like seven to eight is like seven is borderline zone three.

38:36.52
Chantelle
Yep. Yeah, cause seven is about our crossover point, right?

38:37.30
Alyssa
Yeah, so it’s just, I think, some yeah, it’s right at the crossover point.

38:42.78
Chantelle
And so it’s like, it’s kind of the tipping point right there.

38:46.05
Alyssa
Yeah, but I will say that I think sometimes, like I know, uh, train peaks have been put in an RPA chart, which I think is awesome. Um, but there are a lot of different things.

39:00.59
Alyssa
people have just slightly different numbers as people have different zones. So it kind of is like using it as it’s useful to you, whatever those numbers, like if you have a sense of what those numbers are and they correlate to what makes sense to you, fantastic.

39:04.63
Chantelle
Exactly.

39:17.80
Alyssa
But there is also not as much of a universal agreement on that spectrum as I would expect. So just as a warning to people out there.

39:28.83
Chantelle
And I think that’s because, Alyssa, they are different, like you think about the original training peaks. When training peaks first came out, they were using a seven zone system. So if they’re starting with a zep seven zone system and they’re building their RPE schedule on top of that, that makes sense, right?

39:38.17
Alyssa
Yeah, that would make sense.

39:44.13
Chantelle
That it’s going to vary because they have more delineated zones.

39:47.41
Alyssa
Totally.

39:49.21
Chantelle
We’re using four, so that means that that’s going to condense what our zones look like. I think the most important thing is it’s not like that so none of this is rocket science or new, right? It’s just a different system, different numbering system in a sense. So if you’re following one system versus another, just be consistent with what you’re using so that you are comparing apples to apples day after day and not apples to bananas.

40:16.21
Alyssa
Yeah, and now I want an apple, but here we are.

40:19.40
Chantelle
Yeah, same.

40:22.70
Alyssa
So I think the book has scared more than one person into thinking they need to go to the hospital for aerobic deficiency syndrome. But we are here to tell you that you are safe. You’re safe, you’re not, you’re good, don’t worry. With that being said, ADS, which is short term for aerobic deficiency syndrome,

40:45.30
Alyssa
comes up pretty frequently for athletes. It was pretty prominently featured in both books. So Chantel, can you break down what does ADS mean? And why are we kind of rethinking using that term specifically?

41:04.35
Chantelle
you are all marked safe from aerobic deficiency syndrome.

41:08.01
Alyssa
We need it on Facebook.

41:08.42
Chantelle
Let me say it again, yeah. So aerobic deficiency syndrome, first of all, syndrome, this is nothing, this is not a medical term. There’s actually no existing um scientific study on aerobic deficiency syndrome.

41:23.77
Chantelle
I think this hearkens back to some of the philosophies of Phil Mafetone from his coaching career and things that he was noticing and observing with some of his athletes. um And he was a coach and chiropractor, and I think you know over time working with people, he was making certain types of observations.

41:49.56
Chantelle
um The use of syndrome is kind of deceiving for people because then it seems like, oh my gosh, something is wrong with me. So let’s just get rid of that word.

42:00.33
Chantelle
However, if there is more than a 10% difference between your aerobic and anaerobic deficiency, you might be aerobically deficient.

42:14.47
Alyssa
You mean anaerobic and aerobic threshold?

42:17.26
Chantelle
Yeah, sorry, aerobic, sorry, sorry about that.

42:17.55
Alyssa
Because you said deficiency. Yeah, yeah. You’re good.

42:20.70
Chantelle
See, it’s messing with my brain. All right, let me try that again. If you have more than a 10% difference between your aerobic and anaerobic thresholds, What you might see in our book is that you have aerobic deficiency syndrome. So let’s just scratch the syndrome part. And if you do have a 10% difference between those two thresholds, it may mean that you are aerobically deficient.

42:48.15
Chantelle
And again, it’s not good or bad. It’s just information. It just tells you where you have room to work. And that’s a good thing, right? If I know that I can improve, that I’m going to get the best results by improving my aerobic engine as a starting point, that’s given me a starting point. Like that’s really powerful. That’s a good thing. So i Think I see so many questions coming into our inbox about this or people worried about this and how can they how can they get over this and You know a biggest big part of of me is like trying to reassure folks that it’s just giving us a starting point It’s actually really good information because it tells us where you have room to work and where you have room to improve and so that’s why we are a you might even see on our website in some places rather than saying aerobic deficiency syndrome. It’s just aerobic deficiency um and you know not something that anyone has to worry about and certainly you know ah good information on what kind of training is going to help you and where to start.

43:53.97
Alyssa
And what, to go right into that, what kind of training does help with someone who has greater than a 10% gap?

44:02.36
Chantelle
Yeah, so it could be like, um where we see this quite often is someone who comes from um a very, like a non-endurance sport. So like a powerful sport, maybe it could be powerlifting, Olympic lifting, it could be um something like

44:18.72
Alyssa
Crossfit.

44:20.30
Chantelle
Yeah, CrossFit, tennis, quick movements, fast twitch muscle fibers. Do you know about sports where running was a punishment? That’s the best way I could think about it.

44:30.98
Alyssa
hahaha

44:32.41
Chantelle
For a lot of those sports, running was a punishment if the coach wasn’t happy with how you were training or what you were doing. So for those who don’t have a long history of doing endurance sports, and longer, slower efforts, naturally, right?

44:50.19
Chantelle
Naturally, they’re not gonna. Their aerobic system is not going to be as developed as someone who has always been running or doing some other form of endurance sport, right?

45:00.90
Chantelle
Nordic skiing, um you name it. So for those people, that is probably the best place for them to start is to build an aerobic base. And that just comes with a lot of time doing the, as we like to say, um the slow and sexy stuff, you know? The slow and unsexy stuff. That’s really what it takes um to get there. On the other hand, you might get someone who has a long history of endurance sports, but they’ve never done any high intensity work. And for those people, they are really gonna get a nice boost by spending some time doing some higher intensity work.

45:42.19
Chantelle
So it doesn’t mean like you’re doomed forever to be doing the slow slower intensity stuff, but it does mean that it will be impactful for you to spend a little bit of time there.

45:56.49
Alyssa
Yeah, that’s very helpful. And I think one of the pieces I always like to remind people is that it’s not something that’s going to change in a week or two. it’s

46:10.21
Chantelle
No.

46:10.91
Alyssa
I always say the beautiful part, yes, months.

46:11.98
Chantelle
Months.

46:15.10
Alyssa
I always say that building your aerobic base is both a blessing and a curse. The curse is that it takes a really long time. The blessing is that once you’ve built it, it lasts a really long time too.

46:28.44
Chantelle
Yeah.

46:28.93
Alyssa
So it’s a double-edged sword if it is not something that’s going to change in a month. It’s just not. But if you do that consistent study work, that’s probably way easier than you think it should be. You will get to have that for the rest of your life. I mean, if you keep it up to a certain extent and stay consistent. And that’s pretty awesome.

46:59.15
Chantelle
Yeah, absolutely. And again, like try to find, you know for some people, they just don’t find it mentally rewarding. And I think especially for someone who comes from… ah like one of the faster twitch sports, um, mentally you’re not getting the same reward, right?

47:16.32
Chantelle
And so you’re going to, it is going to take a mind shift.

47:16.40
Alyssa
Bye.

47:20.16
Chantelle
So how can you prepare your brain to slow the heck down? You know, maybe that means taking more photos. Maybe that means, you know, eating more snacks. Maybe that means actually seeing and taking in your surroundings. Think about how good it is to slow down because in life we are doing so many things all the time that are fast, fast, fast. Try to see this as an opportunity to connect more with the surroundings that you’re running or or playing in.

47:55.31
Chantelle
Maybe that’s you’re recruiting a friend to come along and you’re taking the time to have a conversation. You can have a conversation while you’re out there because you’re not breathing so hard that you might pass out if you try to say something. So try to find ways to actually make it fun and enjoy the process.

48:14.62
Alyssa
Absolutely. And I will say that it might not feel hard now, but when you’re out there for three, four, five, six, seven hours and beyond, it’ll feel plenty hard.

48:23.20
Chantelle
Mm.

48:28.93
Alyssa
Don’t worry. I always say, don’t worry. It’ll get hard soon.

48:34.48
Chantelle
Yeah, that’s right.

48:35.24
Alyssa
It’s just, it’s just a different kind of hard than that, like covered in sweat, you know, puking in a trashcan feeling. Which you notice, I really hate.

48:44.45
Chantelle
Yeah, I mean, I don’t really know why some people are motivated by that level of difficulty. I think those days are way behind me, personally.

48:56.53
Alyssa
I think so too, for me as well. Well, Chantelle, any last pieces of advice you’d like to give our athletes and listeners?

49:09.82
Chantelle
Yeah, I would say maybe the biggest one is you know with your training, have some intention. Now you know what your training is all about. Make sure that it matches your objective. And if you are training without a particular objective, try to also balance it out in your regular life you know in terms of like most of the time you’re going pretty easy. Sometimes you’re going a little harder. It’s the same as the approach to a healthy diet, right?

49:37.80
Chantelle
Most, you know, the typical good instructions are like eating mostly plants, right? Eating mostly plants, and then having some good sources of protein mixed in there. Same kind of thing. And you don’t have to be perfect, you know, but if you can be 100% consistent, 80% of the time, you’re gonna probably get the result that you’re looking for.

50:06.41
Alyssa
I love it. Consistency is my favorite word when it comes to training.

50:10.11
Chantelle
Mm-hm.

50:12.73
Alyssa
Well, Chantelle, if ah people want to learn more about coaching or training plans or our training groups, can you tell us a little bit about how they can find out how they might be able to inquire about coaching?

50:27.10
Chantelle
Yeah, thanks Alyssa. I will say don’t forget to check the notes to find some links to some of the things we talked about with our aerobic and anaerobic threshold tests. I will say that a lot of our training plans have been updated so that you can, some of them have an option to choose a heart rate based or rate of perceived exertion based plan. All of our running plans are all rate of perceived exertion based, which I think is really great. If you have questions about how to be coached or you want to join a training group, we have lots of great updated information on the website. But if you feel like you don’t really know what you need and you want to talk to a live human being about it, um you’re welcome to either fill up a contact form on our website or reach out to coach at Alyssa.com.

51:22.85
Chantelle
and we’ll be happy to help give you some guidance along your way.

51:28.08
Alyssa
Excellent. Well, thank you, Chantelle. Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. If you can rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, that helps us help more athletes. It’s not just one, but a community. We are uphill athletes.