If you spend a lot of time exploring fitness content online, you might have come across the concept of heart rate zones. Heart rate zone training has become more popular in recent years partly because of the boom in wearable technology which, among other functions, allows people to easily track their heart rates.

Heart rate zones reflect different levels of intensity during aerobic exercise. They’re most often based on a percentage of your maximum heart rate, which is the highest number of beats your heart can achieve per minute.

But what are the different heart rate zones, and how can you use these zones to optimise your workout?

The three-zone model

While there are several models used to describe heart rate zones, the most common model in the scientific literature is the three-zone model, where the zones may be categorised as follows:

• zone 1: 55%–82% of maximum heart rate
• zone 2: 82%–87% of maximum heart rate
• zone 3: 87%–97% of maximum heart rate.

If you’re not sure what your maximum heart rate is, it can be calculated using this equation: 208 – (0.7 × age in years). For example, I’m 32 years old. 208 – (0.7 x 32) = 185.6, so my predicted maximum heart rate is around 186 beats per minute.

There are also other models used to describe heart rate zones, such as the five-zone model (as its name implies, this one has five distinct zones). These models largely describe the same thing and can mostly be used interchangeably.

What do the different zones involve?

The three zones are based around a person’s lactate threshold, which describes the point at which exercise intensity moves from being predominantly aerobic, to predominantly anaerobic.

Aerobic exercise uses oxygen to help our muscles keep going, ensuring we can continue for a long time without fatiguing. Anaerobic exercise, however, uses stored energy to fuel exercise. Anaerobic exercise also accrues metabolic byproducts (such as lactate) that increase fatigue, meaning we can only produce energy anaerobically for a short time.

On average your lactate threshold tends to sit around 85% of your maximum heart rate, although this varies from person to person, and can be higher in athletes.

In the three-zone model, each zone loosely describes one of three types of training.

Zone 1 represents high-volume, low-intensity exercise, usually performed for long periods and at an easy pace, well below lactate threshold. Examples include jogging or cycling at a gentle pace.

Zone 2 is threshold training, also known as tempo training, a moderate intensity training method performed for moderate durations, at (or around) lactate threshold. This could be running, rowing or cycling at a speed where it’s difficult to speak full sentences.

Zone 3 mostly describes methods of high-intensity interval training, which are performed for shorter durations and at intensities above lactate threshold. For example, any circuit style workout that has you exercising hard for 30 seconds then resting for 30 seconds would be zone 3.

Striking a balance

To maximise endurance performance, you need to strike a balance between doing enough training to elicit positive changes, while avoiding over-training, injury and burnout.

While zone 3 is thought to produce the largest improvements in maximal oxygen uptake – one of the best predictors of endurance performance and overall health – it’s also the most tiring. This means you can only perform so much of it before it becomes too much.

Training in different heart rate zones improves slightly different physiological qualities, and so by spending time in each zone, you ensure a variety of benefits for performance and health.

So how much time should you spend in each zone?

Most elite endurance athletes, including runners, rowers, and even cross-country skiers, tend to spend most of their training (around 80%) in zone 1, with the rest split between zones 2 and 3.

Because elite endurance athletes train a lot, most of it needs to be in zone 1, otherwise they risk injury and burnout. For example, some runners accumulate more than 250 kilometres per week, which would be impossible to recover from if it was all performed in zone 2 or 3.

Of course, most people are not professional athletes. The World Health Organization recommends adults aim for 150–300 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week, or 75–150 minutes of vigorous exercise per week.

If you look at this in the context of heart rate zones, you could consider zone 1 training as moderate intensity, and zones 2 and 3 as vigorous. Then, you can use heart rate zones to make sure you’re exercising to meet these guidelines.

What if I don’t have a heart rate monitor?

If you don’t have access to a heart rate tracker, that doesn’t mean you can’t use heart rate zones to guide your training.

The three heart rate zones discussed in this article can also be prescribed based on feel using a simple 10-point scale, where 0 indicates no effort, and 10 indicates the maximum amount of effort you can produce.

With this system, zone 1 aligns with a 4 or less out of 10, zone 2 with 4.5 to 6.5 out of 10, and zone 3 as a 7 or higher out of 10.

Heart rate zones are not a perfect measure of exercise intensity, but can be a useful tool. And if you don’t want to worry about heart rate zones at all, that’s also fine. The most important thing is to simply get moving.

Hunter Bennett, Lecturer in Exercise Science, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One in three of us will develop cancer at some point in our lives. But survival rates have improved to the point that two-thirds of those diagnosed live more than five years.

This extraordinary shift over the past few decades introduces new challenges. A large and growing proportion of people diagnosed with cancer are living with it, rather than dying of it.

In our recently published research we examined the cancer experiences of 81 New Zealanders (23 Māori and 58 non-Māori).

We found survivorship not only entailed managing the disease, but also “wrangling” a complex health system.

Surviving disease or surviving the system

Our research focused on those who had lived longer than expected (four to 32 years since first diagnosis) with a life-limiting or terminal diagnosis of cancer.

Common to many survivors’ stories was the effort it took to wrangle the system or find others to advocate on their behalf, even to get a formal diagnosis and treatment.

By wrangling we refer to the practices required to traverse complex and sometimes unwelcoming systems. This is an often unnoticed but very real struggle that comes on top of managing the disease itself.

The common focus of the healthcare system is on symptoms, side effects of treatment and other biological aspects of cancer. But formal and informal care often falls by the wayside, despite being key to people’s everyday experiences.

The inequities of cancer survivorship are well known. Analyses show postcodes and socioeconomic status play a strong role in the prevalence of cancer and survival.

Less well known, but illustrated in our research, is that survival is also linked to people’s capacity to manage the entire healthcare system. That includes accessing a diagnosis or treatment, or identifying and accessing alternative treatments.

Survivorship is strongly related to material resources, social connections, and understandings of how the health system works and what is available. For instance, one participant who was contemplating travelling overseas to get surgery not available in New Zealand said:

We don’t trust the public system. So thankfully we had private health insurance […] But if we went overseas, health insurance only paid out to $30,000 and I think the surgery was going to be a couple of hundred thousand. I remember Dad saying and crying and just being like, I’ll sell my business […] we’ll all put in money. It was really amazing.

Assets of survivorship

In New Zealand, the government agency Pharmac determines which medications are subsidised. Yet many participants were advised by oncologists or others to “find ways” of taking costly, unsubsidised medicines.

This often meant finding tens of thousands of dollars with no guarantees. Some had the means, but for others it meant drawing on family savings, retirement funds or extending mortgages. This disproportionately favours those with access to assets and influences who survives.

But access to economic capital is only one advantage. People also have cultural resources – often described as cultural capital.

In one case, a participant realised a drug company was likely to apply to have a medicine approved. They asked their private oncologist to lobby on their behalf to obtain the drug through a compassionate access scheme, without having to pay for it.

Others gained community support through fundraising from clubs they belonged to. But some worried about where they would find the money, or did not want to burden their community.

I had my doctor friend and some others that wanted to do some public fundraising. But at the time I said, “Look, most of the people that will be contributing are people from my community who are poor already, so I’m not going to do that option”.

Accessing alternative therapies, almost exclusively self-funded, was another layer of inequity. Some felt forced to negotiate the black market to access substances such as marijuana to treat their cancer or alleviate the side effects of orthodox cancer treatment.

Cultural capital is not a replacement for access to assets, however. Māori survivorship was greatly assisted by accessing cultural resources, but often limited by lack of material assets.

Persistence pays

The last thing we need when faced with the possibility of cancer is to have to push for formal diagnosis and care. Yet this was a common experience.

One participant was told nothing could be found to explain their abdominal pain – only to find later they had pancreatic cancer. Another was told their concerns about breathing problems were a result of anxiety related to a prior mental health history, only to learn later their earlier breast cancer had spread to their lungs.

Persistence is another layer of wrangling and it often causes distress.

Once a diagnosis was given, for many people the public health system kicked in and delivered appropriate treatment. However, experiences were patchy and variable across New Zealand.

Issues included proximity to hospitals, varying degrees of specialisation available, and the requirement of extensive periods away from home and whānau. This reflects an ongoing unevenness and lack of fairness in the current system.

When facing a terminal or life-limiting diagnosis, the capacity to wrangle the system makes a difference. We shouldn’t have to wrangle, but facing this reality is an important first step.

We must ensure it doesn’t become a continuing form of inequity, whereby people with access to material resources and social and cultural connections can survive longer.

Kevin Dew, Professor of Sociology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington; Alex Broom, Professor of Sociology & Director, Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, University of Sydney; Chris Cunningham, Professor of Maori & Public Health, Massey University; Elizabeth Dennett, Associate Professor in Surgery, University of Otago; Kerry Chamberlain, Professor of Social and Health Psychology, Massey University, and Richard Egan, Associate Professor in Health Promotion, University of Otago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.