Concept2 Forum

Hello all,

I bought a heart rate monitor today and gave it a try on an hour piece. I was initially trying to stay in my UT2 zone, which should be somewhere around 130-140 BPM. However, my actual heart rate averages came out in the 150-160 range. Specifically:
TIME AVERAGE BPM
0 - 12 130
13 - 24 150
25 - 36 154
37 - 48 158
49 - 60 161

I suppose I'm very unclear about the requirement for slow steady state rowing. Is it necessary to stay within a prescribed UT2 heart rate range if I feel I can go faster? Additionally, if I go above the target UT2 heart rate range, will I be missing out on something? Thanks.

If you take your max HR as 208-0.7*age, (188) and your rest rate as 60, then UT2 60-70% of range says 137-150.

This is not so high as to risk your life when working at UT levels, as you've seen; however your real MHR could be less than a formula value. Formulae give averages, and not predictions except in probabilistic terms.

If you're already fit, suggest you use Watts as your main guideline, adjusting up or down next time if HR is too low or increases too fast. UT2 Watts is up to 60% of your last 2k test Watts, or failing this, say 40-45% of a 500m test.

Long Steady state implies keeping lactate production and level low (some say 2 mM/l) so that we can go on for a long time, while still loading and hence training the lactate clearance system. LSS also implies work on technique; using Watts can help here too if we keep the rating controlled.

Lactate is a proxy for Watts and HR is a proxy for Lactate; by watching Watts directly on the erg you can do without all the proxies (note the common root with "approximation") and use HR as a day to day early warning system and long term progress report.

Look at the top line of your logcard for you heartrate average for the row.

A UT2 row for the 60min can be quite low intensity and you HR had quite a rise over the duration of the row so it was more like UT1.

After 12minute I would typically see only a 10bpm rise from here at the end of the row for a true UT2. RowPro is good as you get a graph of the HR so its a gentle sloping straight line from about 5minutes into the row to the finish.

Hi,

Fascinating thread and one I'd like to jump into as there are so many here with far greater experience and understanding than me.

I, too, am like the original poster in that when I do a longish piece that my HR rises steadily over the piece with figures very similar to those of the original poster.

Should the aim of UT2 to be such that you try to keep HR within a select band and as such in order to achieve this you attenuate power output downwards over the piece to do it? Another person I am in contact with suggests that this is the approach they take for their HR based training and that another says that I should aim to maintain power output levels and let HR rise.

Then, if HR rises to beyond the levels outlined by UT2 but you have maintained power output levels throughout the piece - does that defeat the purpose of using HR ranges as a training parameter?

As a complete newbie to all this, the emphasis of HR capped training on long pieces is evident, but there seems to be various interpretations of this.

I am scheduled to do a 45r20 today (45 minutes @ 20 SPM) and I'm wondering how I should approach this HR or power-wise in order to improve base fitness.

I was told by my adopted mentor that I should try to keep my splits as even as possible during the piece which implies maintaining a constant level of power, but confusingly, I've also been told to watch HR and keep it within a certain range - I cannot see how I can do both.

So, in a nutshell, what approach should I take in order for these long pieces to actually build endurance?

Any and all clarification welcome please.


egards

Steve

You cannot do both.

What you will find however is the fitter you are the flatter the HR will be and the longer you can sustain that HR will be and the slower the rise.

I find there is no point capping the HR because you simply have to decrease the pace to do this. I just use the average HR for the row in the results to determine the UT2, UT1 training band.

Its just about choosing the right pace to suit the distance to give you a middle HR average for the band your training in.

Carl Watts wrote:You cannot do both.

What you will find however is the fitter you are the flatter the HR will be and the longer you can sustain that HR will be and the slower the rise.

I find there is no point capping the HR because you simply have to decrease the pace to do this. I just use the average HR for the row in the results to determine the UT2, UT1 training band.

Its just about choosing the right pace to suit the distance to give you a middle HR average for the band your training in.

You can, the point is to choose a pace that stays below your upperlimit for the major part of the row, around 2/3 in you should reach you cap and from there possibly slow down a bit.

Another school goes off fast, reach the limit rapidly and bleeds the pace, during the tow you go slower and slower.

I believe in pacing so would say use option 1

Hydration is another factor here. If you are not well hydrated at at the start of the piece, the loss of water by the combination of sweating and exhaling can cause a higher gain in HR than if you are properly hydrated at the start. This does not mean drinking a lot just before the piece. Do it earlier and over a period of time to give it enough time to get into the blood stream.

Bob S.

Carl Watts wrote:Its just about choosing the right pace to suit the distance to give you a middle HR average for the band your training in.

That makes sense. However, my bigger question is - how do I know if I'm getting more value out of a UT2 pace vs (for example) at UT1 pace? From what I've read, the point of UT2 is to be able to sustain a high training volume with minimal stress to allow for recovery. If I only have time for say about 60K per week, does it make sense that I would row my UT2 pieces at a higher heart rate, maybe in line with UT1? In my line of thinking (which may be very flawed since I don't know enough about this topic) is that if the weekly mileage isn't very high I can afford to row harder on my steady state pieces. Or, is UT2 always beneficial even at a low weekly mileage?

-Eric

From a 2010 review article in Sport Science (Vol 13, pp 32 - 53)

Intensity for Recreational Athletes
Elite endurance athletes train 10-12 sessions
and 15-30 h each week. Is the pattern of 80 %
below and 20 % above lactate threshold appropriate
for recreational athletes training 4-5
times and 6-10 hours per week? There are
almost no published data addressing this question.
Recently Esteve-Lanao (personal communication)
completed an interesting study on
recreational runners comparing a program that
was designed to reproduce the polarized training
of successful endurance athletes and compare
it with a program built around much more
threshold training in keeping with the ACSM
exercise guidelines. The intended intensity
distribution for the two groups was: Polarized
77-3-20 % and ACSM 46-35-19 % for Zones 1,
2, and 3. However, heart-rate monitoring revealed
that the actual distribution was: Polarized
65-21-14 % and ACSM 31-56-13 %.
Comparing the intended and achieved distributions
highlights a typical training error committed
by recreational athletes. We can call it
falling into a training intensity “black hole.” It
is hard to keep recreational people training 45-
60 min a day 3-5 days a week from accumulating
a lot of training time at their lactate threshold.
Training intended to be longer and slower
becomes too fast and shorter in duration, and
interval training fails to reach the desired intensity.
The result is that most training sessions
end up being performed at the same threshold
intensity. Foster et al. (2001b) also found that
athletes tend to run harder on easy days and
easier on hard days, compared to coaches' training
plans. Esteve Lanao did succeed in getting
two groups to distribute intensity very differently.
The group that trained more polarized,
with more training time at lower intensity, improved
their 10-km performance significantly
more at 7 and 11 wk.

In other words, according to this article, you don't make more progress by making steady state more intense, you make less.

I've found this discussion very interesting. In the weight loss forum I have been posting my progress along a 23 week 3 session a week Interactive Weight Loss Program. Up until this week I had been doing what for me was well. I was actually bumping the UT1 range (if not exceeding even that) in my attempt to continually improve my pace on what were supposed to be UT2 long duration rows. This week I was scheduled to do a 45' row, 50' row and tomorrow 60' row at UT2. I struggled through the 45' row. Could not finish the 50' row without stopping several times and was trying to figure out what to do tomorrow. My Tuesday and Thursday I was trying to do best effort rows for time or distance. Today I did a 1000m warmup and then failed to better my last 2000m row and struggled through it because my start pace was too fast. I am now thinking I need to significantly back off my pace to build a better fitness base before trying to move into the UT1 workouts which were scheduled to start next week with intervals at a significantly shorter duration.

Please keep in mind I am relatively new at this rowing and have been inactive for decades. I am only relating my experiences so far 5 weeks into a 23 week program. I have been trying to maintain at least a 2:30 pace on all rows regardless the required distance. Faster for shorter rows....at least 2:30 for longer rows. Basically exactly what the trap noted for recreational athletes above.

DuffyF56 wrote:I've found this discussion very interesting. In the weight loss forum I have been posting my progress along a 23 week 3 session a week Interactive Weight Loss Program. Up until this week I had been doing what for me was well. I was actually bumping the UT1 range (if not exceeding even that) in my attempt to continually improve my pace on what were supposed to be UT2 long duration rows. This week I was scheduled to do a 45' row, 50' row and tomorrow 60' row at UT2. I struggled through the 45' row. Could not finish the 50' row without stopping several times and was trying to figure out what to do tomorrow. My Tuesday and Thursday I was trying to do best effort rows for time or distance. Today I did a 1000m warmup and then failed to better my last 2000m row and struggled through it because my start pace was too fast. I am now thinking I need to significantly back off my pace to build a better fitness base before trying to move into the UT1 workouts which were scheduled to start next week with intervals at a significantly shorter duration.

Please keep in mind I am relatively new at this rowing and have been inactive for decades. I am only relating my experiences so far 5 weeks into a 23 week program. I have been trying to maintain at least a 2:30 pace on all rows regardless the required distance. Faster for shorter rows....at least 2:30 for longer rows. Basically exactly what the trap noted for recreational athletes above.

Shorter for interval work means a lot shorter. Think 1 minute to 500 meter intervals. Doing a bit of those will help, those use a different energysystem which will make you fitter, doing a few of them teice a week after your main session helps. Pace should be a lot faster.
Re pace, don,t race your training, go by feel, a fixed pace is not needed and in the longer run yor pace should improve, but don,t compare every training with the one before. Go by how feel thst day.

If your plan says 60' UT2, could be you've input incorrect data on yourself. These IA plans (there's lots of them) are very sensitive to data, as you can see if you make some adjustments. Suggest you try a 5-day schedule (a "week" can have ten days in it if you like) and take it easier. Also have a hard look at the wording, the meanings are not always 100% clear.

Also suggest you go very slow when warming up (part of the 60' in LSS) and indeed for most of the rest. As the article cited by GS says, there's no point in overloading the Lactate clearance system. Once saturated it's doing all it can and any more overload will accumulate Lactate and make you suffer for your efforts and even stop, as you've noticed. Training means making it easier to carry loads next time, or even next month or year, not killing ourselves today.

Short follow-up. Did the 60' row today and lowered the pace to a 2:37.1 pace average and finished all 60 minutes. HR slowly rose slowly throughout the row and I maintained below 135 for the entire row. Most of the row I was in the high 120's. Moral of the story for me is that I was too aggressive in trying to maintain a pace I did not have the foundation to do. Now I have to work on my base conditioning.

DuffyF56 wrote: Moral of the story for me is that I was too aggressive in trying to maintain a pace I did not have the foundation to do.

This thread has been really valuable for me, and your comment really gave me a better understanding training. I've been rowing and erging for about 10 years now, and I've always been under the impression every piece should be a 90-100% effort. I always wondered how people could stand to do, for example, an hour 4-5 times per week at such an intensity. Like you, I did my first actual UT2 pace hour piece yesterday, and I had no problem or doubt in completing the piece.

On a similar note, when I rowed in college I training hard over the summer, but would never make any progress. Then, during the fall rowing months (where we did a lot of long, slow rows on the water) I would improve quite a bit. I would put in a few extra hard sessions in the evenings during that time, and always attributed my improvement to those workouts. I guess it is all about the base conditioning.

As someone looking to improve endurance by doing long pieces, I was wondering what rate are your UT2 sessions rowed at?

I've been instructed to maintain a 20 rate for all such pieces with the idea being that by keeping the rate a constant that measuring progress is more accurate as one less variable is present. It was also explained that a 20 rate fits nicely into 1 minute with a 2:1 recovery to drive ratio being the ideal rhythm if possible.

So, I do 30r20 and more recently moved up to 45r20 all maintaining a 20 rate as much as possible. I tend to chase split times on this type of workout which I've been chided for BTW.

My last 30r20 done yesterday saw my HR rise to a high of 170 with an average around the 150 mark. I was wondering if this was too high and as such whether I should back off on the pace a bit?