SmarterFitter

The Ups and Downs of Heart Rate Monitor Training

An article in today’s NY Times discusses the various pros and cons of heart rate monitor training. In my experience, heart rate monitors only work if you know your own maximum and minimum heart rate. There’s a pretty good book that explains how to do this called (and you’ll forgive the title) Heart [...]

Outdoor Magazine exercise programme

I just stumbled across a really great series from Outdoor mag. circa 2002.
The series is called The Shape of Your Life and it presents what looks like a really sensible and long term fitness programme.
Over the months you work from building endurance to strength and on to flexibility before moving on to speed and power [...]

Heart rate training: try and try again

I let three weeks of international travel, a trip to NZ for a friend’s wedding, thoroughly disrupt my training schedule but I’m now back in London so on with it… I walked Saturday and Sunday and went out for my first run back this morning.
The run felt really good, up before everyone else and had [...]

Heart rate training day 15: 4mi (6.5k) @ 151bpm

Quick update, very happy with today’s run. Ran the whole course and managed to stay under my recovery ceiling.
This means:
1) I’m getting better at running slowly (12.5min/mi!!!!),
2) I’m getting measurably fitter at the start of week three and
3) I’ve still got a long way to go.
It is really rather nice having objective metrics like these [...]

Heart rate training day 14: hard / easy

I didn’t run on Friday for a few reasons, mostly though it was because of beer on Thursday night. Didn’t let that get me down but, yeah, been a bit “social” of late so got to reign that in a little so it doesn’t interfere with the plan.
Anyway, I walked Saturday and Sunday with M [...]

Heart rate training day 10: frustrating…

1. I’m getting much better at just getting out and running. So now I’ve got to just give myself over to trusting the programme.
2. Trusting the programme is hard right now because it is really frustrating running at 153bpm. Looking back through these blog entries so far I realise it has only been 6 runs [...]

Heart rate training day 8: timing is everything…

I didn’t run this morning. I thought about it when I woke up and decided that as it looked like it was going to be a nice day and as I was feeling tired that I should just wait until lunch time and run then.
I spent my morning sorta waiting about to run… not that [...]

Heart rate training day 7: a 5km jog

Well, today I was a bit tired and while I wasn’t hung over, let’s just say I had a couple of beers last night. I decided that I just wanted to run and not bother with constantly checking my heart rate.
I strapped on the HRM and headed out at a slow and steady pace [...]

Heart rate training day 4: a pleasant awakening…

The alarm was screaming at me this morning as I came to. Late night last night.
Groggy, unmotivated, I got up and dressed and complained to M that it would be cold and that I was tired and about how much I didn’t want to run… yeah, I know… quit your bitchin’.
Dressed in a hat, full [...]

Heart rate training: index

I’ll keep this post updated with links to each of the posts I make about heart rate training.
Bookmark this link if you want to follow along. Even better, subscribe to our news feed or email feed (1 mail daily only when we add new posts) over in the top right hand side of the page.

Introduction
Heart [...]