6:28 2K

[aharmer]

Ah, now this is something I can get interested in. In another life I was very involved with this testing and based my running exclusively off these numbers. I'll have to dig up old notes because I admit to forgetting most of it.

When I was testing we were interested in finding the HR you were capable of averaging for a marathon. On your data sheet, you probably have an increasing value of HR's. You should also see a corresponding RQ for each HR. Starting at about 0.70-0.75 and moving up to and above 1.0. The HR that corresponds with a respiratory quotient of 1.0 is the point where your body is burning almost exclusively carbohydrate. The lower the RQ, the more fat your body is burning for fuel. Unfortunately I can't remember all the percentages at different RQ's.

At the time, the theory was that by running big volume at low intensity (under 70% max HR) you were able to teach your body to use fat more effectively, allowing you to run faster at lower HR's, allowing your glycogen stores to last longer in a marathon.

I'm sure many of the same principles would apply to rowing, assuming we were all interested in rowing the fastest marathon or ultramarathon possible. With a fast 2K as most people's goal, optimizing glycogen stores has little meaning so I don't know if any of my prior knowledge has any value whatsoever:)

Not all, but many labs will allow testees (not testes) to continue beyond that 1.0 level to achieve their true VO2 max, true max HR, etc. Until somebody has done an incredibly grueling session of incline sprinting, I don't know how they could ever confidently tell you their max HR.

[NavigationHazard]

Well, I've thrown up into Declan Conolly's mask during a step protocol. That was pretty close to passing out exhaustion.

For current thought on some of the zillion issues surrounding HR and blood-lactate levels see
http://physiotherapy.curtin.edu.au/reso ... actate.cfm

[chgoss]

guarantee that Rich's response will be along the lines of: "you can keep all your fancy measurement protocols, here's the _bottom_line_ any pace that I can maintain at 70% of my max HR for 60 minutes is UT"

and, we already know that's 1:44

[aharmer]

Well, I've thrown up into Declan Conolly's mask during a step protocol. That was pretty close to passing out exhaustion.

For current thought on some of the zillion issues surrounding HR and blood-lactate levels see
http://physiotherapy.curtin.edu.au/reso ... actate.cfm

Nav, I'm not familiar with the step protocol but would like to hear more about it. I believe it will get you to the same point because I assume it involves you being in the upright position. Any activity allowing a participant to sit (biking or rowing) makes it very difficult to reach your true max HR. Do we agree on that point?

[mikvan52]

Therefore I consider (roughly)

100 meter sprint/20 seconds An pace
400/500m TR pace
20min 5k ish AT pace
between HM and fm time UT1 pace
pace you should be able to do for hours UT2 pace

The trouble with this is that you have to be able to row that long to use these I myself can,t even row a Fm without rest.


No doubt NaHa will come around and correct (slap me on the wrist) me

Can I slap first?

IMHO:You've left out how hard the heart is working and fall back on using pace as an imprecise measure.

When describing bands of effort I maintain that we have to measure the body's response to work:

Look at these two examples using your methods to determine what you call TR

#1 Long interval workout 2k-1500m-1k at max (pace for me) 1:37 - 1:43

#2 5 x 500m heart rate at max (pace for me) 1:36 - 1:40

Now ask yourself: When erging at 1:42 pace am I in a max training band or not? Relying on pace alone: the answer is yes in one case and no in another. That's not a valuable answer in my book.

Also:
Watching the HR monitor, By definition: your have not reached 95-100% until a considerable length of time has passed in each of these intervals.

Also, say you are rowing a 5000m piece, the effort can go to max there too (at a longer workout distance) for a valuable length of time.... (say, in the final part) where you will be rowing at slower pace than many TR paces.

Also you can reach AT without having to row 20 minutes.

Looking at your quote again:
........you did say "roughly".
Exercise physiology tries to avoid "roughly".

"Roughly" tends to hide physiological facts.

[NavigationHazard]

Step protocol in that the intensity is stepped up incrementally. I forget the gory details of the U VT test in question -- it might have been something like 2-minute intervals and 25-watt increments. And it was on an erg.

IMO, maximum HR has no upper limit save heart attack. When people talk about "maximum HR" they really mean "maximum HR achieved during exercise while healthy." That's always going to be exercise-specific. You're right that posture affects HR, and that in general heart rates achieved while rowing are less than what you'd get for a similar effort on a treadmill. It follows that if you buy into HR-based training for rowing/erging, you should be looking at HR values you get while rowing/erging.

[mikvan52]

maximum HR has no upper limit save heart attack. When people talk about "maximum HR" they really mean "maximum HR achieved during exercise while healthy."

true, and very funny, in a morbid way.

I've "tricked" my hr before:

Too much caffeine + too little rest + dehydration = extra beats and consequently (off the charts) high heart rate.

Back "on planet earth", slowly working my heart rate up during a longer workout that a sprint TT: My HR consistently levels out and creeps to the same number of bpms each and every time I do it this way...
THe safest way without going into Declan's Den of Pain

Some people lose their lunch others their consciousness...
I'm of the latter persuasion.

[Nosmo]

Well all of this is entirely off topic. This thread is about ranger, and here we are polluting it with talk of HR and training bands.

But seriously it is a bit of a shame all this discussion will get buried in this thread.

After using a HR monitor for many years, I've got to disagree with MVB about the primacy of HR. After a while the monitor did not tell me anything I don't already know.

One reason I started following the Wolverine Plan is because I agreeded with MC's perception that subjective effort is the best guide. He uses Levels 1 through 4 for a reason, and avoids all the UT2/UT2/AT/LT descriptions. Pace is of primary importantance, HR is a crude approximation of effort. I think it is more useful for coaches and useful if the workouts change all the time, but I really think MC's approach of focusing on pace is a much better way to go.

I really think using a HR monitor would only marginally help my training, and really only as supplemental information when I'm getting sick or over training (but since I am usually chronically under trained it won't help there much in my case). It is supplemental, it only helps to tell me what I should already know.

[leadville]

Nav, I'm not familiar with the step protocol but would like to hear more about it. I believe it will get you to the same point because I assume it involves you being in the upright position. Any activity allowing a participant to sit (biking or rowing) makes it very difficult to reach your true max HR. Do we agree on that point?

Aharmer - it isn't the sitting position, it is the load on the cardiovascular system. Rowers and Xc skiiers typically use more muscle mass than other athletes doing endurance sports (running, swimming, cycling), so they stress the heart and lungs more readily. Although cyclists can produce higher VO2 levels, that is only if measured on a ml/kg level, as they tend to be pretty light and have very low % body fat. Rowers produce among, if not the, highest maxVO2 defined as total liters/O2; again this is due to their size (NavHaz is the prototype) and the use of the muscles of the legs, back, arms, and in some cases facial ones as well.

From way back in my days in grad school, I tested higher on an erg than on the treadmill or cycle - all to max, all using respired gases as the measurement of AT and maxVO2. I was cross training extensively, so I don't think it was due to specificity of training.

And to the rest of the posters, hats off for adding to the conversation. this is a very useful discussion and one Ranger would do well to contemplate.

Alas, that ain't going to happen...

[aharmer]

leadville, interesting information that I definitely would not have guessed. The only time I've worn my monitor on the erg was before I had any idea how to row (probably still don't compared to many here). I'd bet my low hr readings had something to do with not being efficient.

I need to get in out again and do some testing. I just installed my CBreeze as well so I'd like to do some HR testing there too. When I used to run on the treadmill quite a bit there was a dramatic difference in HR between when I had a fan on me versus nothing at all.

A few pages ago there was a debate over sweat rates on the stationary bike. I could walk at 4 mph and be pouring sweat with no fan. I could run at over 8 mph with a fan and be basically dry aside from my shorts.

I prefer this content because it's possible to learn something. I think I could learn a lot from ranger's training if he ever put concrete training details down. Forget races...if I saw what he actually did at 70% HRR for an hour I could translate that to my own training and get an idea of where I was at, where I need to improve, etc, etc. Unfortunately I'm new but have already realized that will never happen. I can only read the same cut and past statement so many times. I'll check back on January 31st.

[Byron Drachman]

Ah, now this is something I can get interested in. In another life I was very involved with this testing and based my running exclusively off these numbers. I'll have to dig up old notes because I admit to forgetting most of it.

When I was testing we were interested in finding the HR you were capable of averaging for a marathon. On your data sheet, you probably have an increasing value of HR's. You should also see a corresponding RQ for each HR. Starting at about 0.70-0.75 and moving up to and above 1.0. The HR that corresponds with a respiratory quotient of 1.0 is the point where your body is burning almost exclusively carbohydrate. The lower the RQ, the more fat your body is burning for fuel. Unfortunately I can't remember all the percentages at different RQ's.

At the time, the theory was that by running big volume at low intensity (under 70% max HR) you were able to teach your body to use fat more effectively, allowing you to run faster at lower HR's, allowing your glycogen stores to last longer in a marathon.

I'm sure many of the same principles would apply to rowing, assuming we were all interested in rowing the fastest marathon or ultramarathon possible. With a fast 2K as most people's goal, optimizing glycogen stores has little meaning so I don't know if any of my prior knowledge has any value whatsoever:)

Not all, but many labs will allow testees (not testes) to continue beyond that 1.0 level to achieve their true VO2 max, true max HR, etc. Until somebody has done an incredibly grueling session of incline sprinting, I don't know how they could ever confidently tell you their max HR.

Dang, this thread has gotten interesting. The last marathon I rowed, somewhere during the first part, I don't remember exactly where, I knocked over all my drinks. I had some wide-mouthed bottles lined up on the floor next to me. I did not want to get off the erg and waste time getting more drinks because I had a certain overall time in mind so I muddled on and as you can imagine I was badly dehydrated while trying to finish. As I was finishing my heart rate was in the 170s, and the highest I have seen on the C2 is 182. I read somewhere that people used to think that dehydration was a major contributor to cardiac drift, but it is now believed that cardiac drift is due to other causes. Maybe I would have had the same heart rate if I had been better hydrated. I don't know. But near the end of the marathon I wasn't getting the burn that I would have gotten if I had been fresh and holding the heart rate in the 170s. The point I want to make is this:

After a long row and cardiac drift, I suspect a high heart rate does not always correspond to high blood lactate.

Byron

[mikvan52]

After using a HR monitor for many years, I've got to disagree with MVB about the primacy of HR. After a while the monitor did not tell me anything I don't already know.

I'll agree that training plans don't have to be based on HR and that there are rule of thumb equivalences to pace.
But as to what a zone is for exercise physiologists... that's something else entirely. It's good to know when were all talking about the same thing.

If we consider what your "after a while" means...

I also can feel myself moving out of a zone w/o looking at any readout. But, when I'm relaxed about it my HR readings don't mislead... they cannot when you factor in all the caveats... Heat, duration of workout, health, general fatigue,...

I begins to get on my nerves though when someone insists : Your AT is (so many seconds per 500m).

that is to misunderstand how AT is determined.

In the "step" tests that NAV' described and many of us have done: We "step" up the effort and measurements are taken... Indeed: Pace at AT for that test can be gleaned from the information. Let's remember that you also can know you're at AT without knowing pace. And you can be at AT at a different pace.. It's the nature of the beast.



(I promise to stop holding forth here.. Where da man anywho?)

[bloomp]

leadville, interesting information that I definitely would not have guessed. The only time I've worn my monitor on the erg was before I had any idea how to row (probably still don't compared to many here). I'd bet my low hr readings had something to do with not being efficient.

I need to get in out again and do some testing. I just installed my CBreeze as well so I'd like to do some HR testing there too. When I used to run on the treadmill quite a bit there was a dramatic difference in HR between when I had a fan on me versus nothing at all.

A few pages ago there was a debate over sweat rates on the stationary bike. I could walk at 4 mph and be pouring sweat with no fan. I could run at over 8 mph with a fan and be basically dry aside from my shorts.

I prefer this content because it's possible to learn something. I think I could learn a lot from ranger's training if he ever put concrete training details down. Forget races...if I saw what he actually did at 70% HRR for an hour I could translate that to my own training and get an idea of where I was at, where I need to improve, etc, etc. Unfortunately I'm new but have already realized that will never happen. I can only read the same cut and past statement so many times. I'll check back on January 31st.

I noticed something in the "Marathon Rules" thread in the FAQ forum similar to this and figured I'd throw in my knowledge. Dehydration is a quick way to up your HR. When I was working in a kinesiology lab last semester, there was a definite point when you could see someone's HR spike after losing enough water on the treadmill (in 95 degree heat) while walking for 90 minutes. So by utilizing a fan (or hydrating mid marathon), you decrease water loss by keeping more water in your body (rehydration or just not needing to sweat) and your body doesn't need to increase your HR any more. I don't know the science behind this but I assume it's because blood plasma (or serum) levels begin to decrease and because SV remains the same there has to be some change to keep water/nutrients/oxygen getting to muscles. You will definitely feel a difference with the C-Breeze.

[NavigationHazard]

(snip)
After a long row and cardiac drift, I suspect a high heart rate does not always correspond to high blood lactate.

Byron

Neither does HR necessarily reflect how hard the skeletal muscles are working. Much of the point of low rate/high power training is to work the muscles used in the drive hard. Preferably, considerably harder for much longer than you'd be able to sustain at higher ratings.

At low ratings you get long recoveries between drives. The extended recoveries mitigate the normal ramp-up effects on your CV system of hard, high-power contractions. The upshot is that your HR stays manageably sub-threshold even though your legs, trunk and/or arms are working at intensities that otherwise would send it soaring. Quickly.

There's actually increasing evidence that lactate will get burned in the working muscle cells and/or shunted around within the muscle fibers for immediate reuse before the circulatory system tries to remove it to the liver and heart for reprocessing. I think it highly likely that low rate/high-power rowing promotes this in ways that higher-rate rowing can't....*

And to restate Mike's last point -- HR isn't a cause, it's an imperfect indicator of effect. People sometimes get that backwards.

* Which is not to say that higher-rate rowing has no place. It does.

[Bob S.]

that is to misunderstand how AT is determined.

Where were these zones first defined? I learned about them for the first time a few years ago when I looked into the UK C2 Interactive Programme (IP). At that time, it did not use HR and the zones were clearly delineated as pace zones. I thought at the time that these were invented by the person who designed the IP. However, I have no evidence of this. The designer of the IP may have borrowed the terms from some other source and redefined them use on the indoor rower. After I used that earlier IP, it was changed over to zones based on HR. I was unable to get my HR up to the zones using the suggested paces for them, so I ended up doing each zone at the next higher pace. That worked fairly well except for the TR which is a broader zone (in units of power) than the other by about a factor of 2. To get around that, I used the slower half of the recommended TR pace range for AT and a combination of the fast half of TR plus the AN range for the TR. For the AN, I just went "balls out." Eventually I had to make one additional adjustment and that was to lower my HRM guessimate from 160 to 155. After that, I had my own fairly closely matched HR and pace sets for each zone.

Bob S.

Added note. In the erg practice room at the hotel at the 2007 C-Bs, I was doing some high intensity intervals a day or so before the competition and I observed some spiking in the HR monitor, like in the high 170s or maybe it was in the 190s. It scared the crap out of me and I quit using the monitor for any high intensity stuff for several months after that so that it would not be intimidating. Needless to say, my performance at the actual competition was somewhat short of sterling. I took last place.

Another note: The above mentioned intervals were not just some arbitrary thing that I was playing around with. They were part of a program that Xeno had prepared for people who were doing the Beach Sprints and the C-Bs that season.