Effective Training

    EFFECTIVE TRAINING

 

Effective training should increase your breathing volume, lower your resting heart rate, and make you feel overall better.  Keep these aspects in mind as we explain overtraining and undertraining.

            Most exercisers have experienced both overtraining and undertraining.  Many less exercisers have ever truly experienced effective training.  Overtraining means that you are doing more movement, more volume (weight multiplied by repetitions), or more flexibility in your training than would elicit the highest amount of adaptation from your body.  Conversely undertraining is when you are not doing enough movement, volume, or flexibility to elicit any adaptation from your body.  The consequences of both under and overtraining are very similar.  Both categories will decrease your breathing volume, heighten your resting heart rate, and make you feel overall worse than you did before you started the exercise program.  Both overtraining and undertraining can lead to injury.  After understanding the effects of this type of training now consider training intensity and duration or exercise.

 

TRAINING INTENSITY

            When thinking about how to adapt these principles to your exercise program you can use two approaches to gauge exercise intensity.  RPE or Rate of Perceived Exertion, refers to how you would rate how hard you are working on a scale of 1 to 10.  Any training in the 1-4 range would be considered undertraining, while training in the 9-10 range to be overtraining.  Effective training in the range of 4-9 can be used for various desired goals or outcomes from exercise.  The second approach to intensity of exercise is to use heart rate data. 

You can get this heart rate data by using a wearable such as a garmin or fitbit, or by estimating your heart rate at set points during your exercise bout.  First you need to get your max heart rate.  This is found by 220-age.  For example I am 29 so my max heart rate is 191.  This number represents the absolute 100% of my heart rate capacity before my heart does not beat in an effective manner.  In simpler terms, you do not want to be consistently training at this level.  From there we can say that 90-100% of max heart rate would be considered over training, while 0-40% would be considered undertraining.  The exercise that stays within that 40-90% range can be used for various desired goals or outcomes from exercise, which can be tolerated for different durations or length of time.

 

DURATION

As a rule of thumb the lower you are in the effective training ranges of RPE and Heart rate range the longer your body can sustain that exercise bout.  Now with that being said the difference between how long you can sustain 60% of your max heart rate or a RPE 6 and how long you can sustain 80% of your heart rate max or a RPE 8 is a large gap.  For a seasoned marathon runner 60% can mean 4 hours or more while 90% can only be held for about 3-4 minutes.

 

HOW IT WORKS

For the average exerciser sustaining 60% of a max heart rate for 20-30 minutes is a great goal.  Also for the average exerciser sustaining 80% of a max heart rate for 20-30 seconds is a good goal as well. 

When we are talking about the average exerciser we mean someone who has at least worked out 1 time per week at least for the last 3 months or 3 days per week for the past month.  No matter who you are, feel free to use this template to scale how far into your program you are! Have fun and remember to stay safe!!!!!!!!