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Is it that important to know you bpm?
Would a fit watch or whatever they're known as suffice?
If you want to lose a bit of weight on the bike /through exercise I'm led to believe that you don't want to be overdoing it, nor do you want to be taking it too easy.
Having a heart beat is pretty important unless you are Mr Spock.
For exercise if you can converse but not sing then you are at the right intensity.
Is it that important to know you bpm?
No
If you want to lose a bit of weight on the bike /through exercise I’m led to believe that you don’t want to be overdoing it, nor do you want to be taking it too easy.
Sounds like old zone 2 thinking. Thought it was now accepted that beasting yourself works pretty well too (better)?
Sounds like old zone 2 thinking. Thought it was now accepted that beasting yourself works pretty well too (better)?
So all training should be Zone 4/5?
So all training should be Zone 4/5?
No, but avoid “grey miles”.
So long and slow is good, short and fast/hard is also good. The stuff that’s neither has less effort.
To answer the OP, I wouldn’t worry to much about it. Work hard, exercise a bit more, eat a bit less/better and you’ll be good.
If you're doing structured training to maximise fitness gains, like HIITS days alternating with Zone 2 days then you're going to benefit from something to help pacing like a heart rate monitor, or ideally a powermeter.
But if you're just going for a ride at the weekend to be a bit more active and lose some weight then you should probably don't need to worry too much about that - just ride.
Ride 20-50km most days during the week depending on where I'm working.
Between 10 and 25km to work, generally killing myself because I like laying in bed more than I like being at work. The way home generally more mellow.
Weekend rides with the GF at a more leisurely pace (23kmh average on Sunday, 75km ride).
GF keeps talking about not going over 140bpm. Don't know how true that is.
Think if I cut down on the beers it'd help. Trying to make an effort to open my first one after 1pm, not at 11.
It's important to me. I don't have a power meter so it's the next best way to measure my effort. I'm not just talking training either. For long endurance rides for instance I know I can sustain maybe 2-3 hours at zone 3, 30-60 minutes at zone 4 and the rest (4hrs plus) needs to be zone 2.
GF keeps talking about not going over 140bpm. Don’t know how true that is.
Maybe that's just her comfort level and way of telling you?
Either way a 70km ride is a 70km ride... and 70km better than sod all or laying on your back cracking open a beer.
My usual daily bimble is 35km or so and only average 20 kph (in fact that's a target as it often slips to 19.something...and I end up making a mad dash on the last 3km which is mostly roads/hardpack bridleway and flat. No idea what my pulse is but 35km is better than nothing.
I don't drink much though ... in fact bit of an occasion yesterday when I stopped at a pub doing outdoor garden service on the way home.
Whilst there's some evidence to show that body fat is burnt slightly more efficiently at different work rates, in reality, for most people, work harder = more calories burned = better overall contribution to losing fat when combined with an appropriate diet. Unless you're already circa 10% body fat, where you need all the tricks in the book to continue losing fat (most people get a 6 pack around 13-15%) then making it any more complex than this is concentrating on the wrong stuff. Diet and consistency are the biggest contributing factors. Heart rate zones is the last 1% so only deserves 1% of focus.
Consider an hour long slow steady ride in the optimal 'fat burning' zone. Perhaps you burn 500 calories overall. If you reward yourself with 2 beer's later that evening you've effectively undone all of that work in terms of calories.
The ability to be consistent is much higher with low intensity training.
Lots of people I know are doing the hiit extolling the short term benifits and then soon after find them selves either over trained (not accounting for the increased cumulative fatigue hiit brings for a given training outcome) or worse. Injured because HIIT by its nature beats your body up more.
A heart rate monitor and even better when cycling a power meter allow you to gauge the cumulative fatigue effect better than feel alone.
But if your just going to wear it because someone told you then it provides little help you need to know what your looking at.
Read up on TSS. It can be useful for walking the line between over training and training hard.
Riding hard all the time can make you more tired, it can also make you end up eating more. You can't restrict calories and ride hard all the time, at least I can't.
Also, riding hard has a different training effect to riding slower. If you are training to be a good all round rider then you need both slow (and long) and fast (and short).
Consider an hour long slow steady ride in the optimal ‘fat burning’ zone. Perhaps you burn 500 calories overall.
1 hour isn't long slow, that's short slow. The slow riding does work for training and fat loss but it needs to be long, like 3hrs. And two or three of those a week.
Heart rate zones is the last 1% so only deserves 1% of focus.
I disagree - the kind of riding you do (which you can tell from your HR) depends on how your body responds and the kind of food you need, and the kind of food you'll crave.
Between 10 and 25km to work, generally killing myself because I like laying in bed more than I like being at work.
Sounds familiar! When I first started bicycle commuting I wanted to go as fast as possible all the time. Did that for a while until one day my heartrate jumped up very high after barely any effort. Spent the rest of my commute cycling really slowly as it gradually lowered to normal rate.
Got a HR monitor and learnt the basics of HR zone training after that.
Moral of the story: you can push your effort and thus your HR as high as you can as long as you rest properly (assuming no heart problems). You also won't be able to continually reach that level of effort without resting properly.
Heart rate zones is the last 1% so only deserves 1% of focus.
Which sport science study is that from ?
It's a Basic building block of sustainable exercise -that is to know your effort . Not necessarily the value but where it sits in the perceived exertion zone. So many folk have no handle on this and spend their time unaway thinking they are working hard in zone 4 or 5 and easy in zone 2 when in reality they are sitting in low and high end z3 . Exactly where you don't want to be
Consider an hour long slow steady ride in the optimal ‘fat burning’ zone. Perhaps you burn 500 calories overall.
1 hour isn’t long slow, that’s short slow.
I read this as simply demonstrating the calorie burn for 1 hour of (long) slow riding. I would burn considerably less than 500 calories per hour.
Mol Grips and Trail Rat:
The OP's questions relates to losing weight. Exercise as a whole is not even the most important factor for losing weight. The old adage 'you can't out-run a poor diet' holds true for most.
In addition to diet and exercise, also relevant are sleep, stress, attitude and so on. Roughly in order of importance, likely with many things missed, most people will see the best results from the following:
find a good diet that's sustainable forever or at least a very long time
make better choices in the foods you eat so you can be full enough without too many calories.
drink enough water to be healthy and reduce appetite, snacking etc.
don't snack
reduce alcohol intake
have nice things like cakes, chocolate less often
do some exercise
don't cave in and have a big cheat and undo all your hard work to date
do a bit more exercise
sleep well to keep your energy levels up while eating less and doing more
keep doing all this, weight loss is easy but hard to sustain/maintain
tighten diet up further if it stops working, reduce portion sizes, etc.
are you strength training yet? it's good for body composition / nutrient partitioning
ok now I might consider heart rate zones
I accept heart rate zones might come further up that list for some people, or even further down for others. My point is that if you're out on the bike for a decent amount of time, for at least a few days a week and keeping moving at other times in the day/week, that will cover the exercise aspect to losing weight and making it any more complex often makes people focus on the wrong areas, e.g. what's the point worrying about whether your heart rate is at 130bpm or at 150bpm if your diet means you can only stick to it for a few days but then are tired and hungry and on day 4 give in and eat a whole pizza, chips, desert and a pint of coke.
Really good post Liam.
Only thing I’d add is that if OP gets on well with weight loss (if that’s what they want to do) and then wants to get a bit faster then:
Ride mostly at a pace that is fun, ride occasionally a bit faster than is comfortable for just a bit longer than you think you can.
Unless you’ve got some medical reason to keep an eye on your heart rate that might be indicating something is broken then I agree with Liam that it’s way down the list of what to think about.