Handy-dandy guide to exercise intensities.
1744 days ago“It was eleven more than necessary.”
-Jacques Anquetil, after winning a race by twelve seconds.
I was having a bit of a throb this afternoon between workouts when a sudden brainstorm hit. Often when talking with someone who’s relatively new to triathlon or running I’ve found myself attempting to explain the appropriate intensity of, for instance, a tempo run or a threshold run. So here is my handy dandy guide to intensity levels. If you follow this, you’ll get really fit without having to spend all of your time ruminating on percentages of your VO2 max. You still can if you want to, but it won’t be a necessary part of the program.
- Not Easy: This is your basic workout level. If you get out the door to go for a run, this is the pace you go. Since it’s a “work out” and not an “easy out”, the pace is more strenuous than what you would choose for, say, walking up a flight of stairs. Some people call this “zone 2″.
- Somewhat hard: Also known as “tempo”. Here’s how you do a tempo run: Go to a half-marathon intending to run as fast as possible. Drop out after seven miles. That was a tempo run. Don’t get pedantic with me on this, you can do a tempo run of just about any distance from two to fifteen miles. We’re working on an effort level, or a pace if you’re more experienced.
- Quite hard: Sometimes referred to as “threshold”, but less so lately since people started asking “Threshold of what?” If you want to think of it in terms of an actual threshold, it’s the point where if you worked any harder you would have to stop after a minute or so. A good way to find your pace for a threshold run is to take the average of miles 2 through 4, inclusive, of a 10k running race. A good way to find your effort is to think of mile 5.
The special secret I will now let you in on is this: these are all you need. You don’t even really need “somewhat hard” and “quite hard” to be separated, but it’s convenient to have two datapoints on the continuum for specificity. If you work out in such a way that you’re not being lazy but also not killing yourself, you won’t have to worry about whether you’re doing it right. The important thing is that you’re out there. Improvement happens automatically.
