I am new to biking and running. Had my first decent length bike ride today (41 Miles). I was pretty pleased with it, since I did a 1.5 Mile swim before it. I downloaded both workouts and noticed on the bike leg it had a 5 under Training Effect. Clicking on the icon brought up a chart and 5 was at the top with overreaching as an explanation for what a 5 represents. I read the explanation next to it and realize it has to do with my heart rate being too high. However, the same thing happens when I run…I can’t keep my heart rate down. If I were to run at 60% of my heart rate, I feel like I wouldn’t be moving (I am not a fast runner 9:00 pace, or rider 16mph.).
One thing I’ve noticed with the Garmin HRM is that if the electrodes arent absolutely soaked in either tap water, spit or sweat it will read consistently 12-14 BPM high. So maybe your data just isn’t accurate, though usually after about 30 minutes of exercise you will generate enough sweat to fix those, so you would most likely see a big drop.
Read the Mark Allen article (google Mark Allen heart rate) about how much he had to scale back when he started training by heart rate. Lots of people on here are going to tell you ignore heart rate, but if you are doing long course stuff there is a certain range where you are more efficient metabolically, so you need to slow down to speed up, whether you do this by HR, watts or RPE. You also need to be strategic about when and how much high intensity stuff you are doing, you can’t just go with the hammer down all the time or you will 1) hurt yourself 2) sacrifice quality (get slower at the high intesnity) 3) not build aerobic endurance
Brian…Thank You! Great article and I am going to force myself to try it until and see where I am in a few months when training begins for my half IM! Probably going to feel very lazy though…guess I can put in more distance this way.
Did you do this? Did you have a hard time feeling like you were not “working out”? It has to be tough as I try to push every workout I do. On a bike…do you just go slower and drop your cadence, or choose an easier gear and keep the cadence up?
Yes, I did try, and continue to use this. It (along with power on the bike) happened to be the missing piece of the puzzle for me. Getting my body (and my overeager ego) used to working in this zone solved my inability to run due to nutrition issues after a solid bike leg. I chock it up to efficiency gains, in form and in metabolism.
On the bike, I have found 85 to be my natural cadence, but I always mess around with higher and lower RPMs, I think it is good to have a range rather than wearing yourself out trying to shift around and stick with one spin. As I said, a power meter was key for improving my cycling, if they had similar for swimming and running I would be first in line to buy it, the insight power gives is invaluable.
As for the boredom, not all your stuff has to be in the slower zones (you should also check out Jack Daniels running formula and calculator if you haven’t already), and I think you will find this approach makes the fast days feel that much more fun. Plus you will really start to enjoy the feeling you get from a well paced effort. You gotta log the miles to do a HIM, and as the Garmin software told you they cant all happen at or above LTHR.
Thanks…Jack Daniels book on hold at Barnes and Noble! How did you incorporate Power. Honestly, I feel like HR is enough for me to work on for now…but since you said you found the missing link in Power…wondering if I need to figure out how to incorporate that now as well.
If you go online and read the user manaul there is an explanation. Basically, when you first use your training effect number maybe high. As you use it more it will stable out after it has enough workouts for a better baseline
I wouldnt worry about the Training Effect. It seems essentially worthless to me. Anything over 30 minutes seems to hit the 5 mark. Most of my work outs end up being a 5.
Ditto. The last 8 workouts I’ve done have been 5’s with the exception of a 4.4 for my most recent.
Just started using the Garmin 2 months ago so perhaps it still needs to ‘learn’ me. Definitely made me think I was crushing it for a brief moment though… haha
I just logged into Garmin to check this out, and training effect only shows up on one of my hundreds of workouts I have logged in there (not sure why, anyone got ideas?), and the training effect for that workout was an 8.8. Weird, given the scale goes from 0-5. Also weird, given I didn’t have HR data for that workout. Must be a glitch in the software…