Obviously he is still getting to know me and where I am with my fitness - having explained to him I've been unwell. All the work at the moment is around building my aerobic endurance, each ride is under strict instructions on heart rate zones and the highest I have been allowed to go so far is level 4 (i.e. below anaerobic threshold). Which brings me onto zones...
My coach does do proper HR / VO2Max (etc) testing, but we are leaving it a few more weeks before I get that done (in order to allow the benefit of these first few structured weeks to take effect). In the meantime he has used one of my spin classes to roughly determine my zones. The class was a "race day" class, its the nearest you get (with these instructors) to a full balls out session. The goal here was 30 minutes of very hard (sustainable - just!) work, taking average HR%'s for each 10 minute section. My averages were 88%, 89%, 91%. Given my known max HR of 189 this lead to the following zones being defined:Zone 1 : 123-137 (recovery)
Zone 2 : 138-150 (aerobic)
Zone 3 : 151-157 (tempo)
Zone 4 : 158-168 (sub threshold)
Zone 5a: 169-171 (super threshold)
Zone 5b: 172-177 (aerobic capacity)
Zone 5c: 178-189 (anaerobic capacity)
So now its no longer about HR%, its all about these numbers and zones. I am trying very hard to remember them! It does help though that most gadgets will display zones as well as HR. Although the ones I have have a max of only 5 zones, but I will worry about that later.
One misc note here about the best gadget I have, the Garmin 705. Not only has it let me define my zones but I have been able to completely re-design the two data screens to show the information I now need, ordered exactly as I like. I have even managed to reduce the amount of information I have displayed, so the data at the top is automatically made bigger to fill the space. Bloody fantastic device that, just superb.
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