Heart Rate Training for Runners (2 of 8)

Your heart is a muscle, and your engine.

Have you noticed in your running ‘career’ that you hit plateaus for a while, and then suddenly something shifts and you have a new PB? Like trying for 4 half marathons to beat the 2:00 mark?!

I personally believe this is about progression in your cardio capacity.

Our heart is a muscle, and as such, it responds to periodization much like our leg muscles do. We need to take a disciplined approach to training our cardio capacity whereby we have different kinds of cardio in our runs (ex. long slow run is steady state, hill training is more anaerobic) and in our strength training (HIIT).

When running long distance, our cardio vascular system is operating very efficiently at low intensity, which is why we can sustain that effort for longer periods of time. Slow steady state exercise creates very little metabolic afterburn (or EPOC) once you stop the exercise (which means you stop burning fat when you stop your long run).

On the other hand, shorter intervals of higher intensity, such as hill repeats, speed work, or HIIT strength training, push your heart rate into 80 or 90% HRM. This is just for a short period of time, then give your heart the required time to recover to 50% HRM. Repeating this process of HIIT trains your heart capacity. It also creates 143% more metabolic burn for up to 3 hours after the exercise, burning more fat.