In general in young and fit adults this ’switchover’ occurs at about 120 beats per minute. My feeling is that as you get older this decreases slightly. My switchover point is around a heart rate of 11o.

The significance of this is that if you want to train ‘in the zone’ your heart rate needs to remain below 120. Most modern training methods don’t allow this, so most people when training hard will have a faster heart rate and this means necessarily training ‘out of the zone’. Above a heart rate of 120 your mind and body start to shift from ‘relaxed, focussed’ mental state into ‘fight, flight’ mode. Your nervous system switches from parasymathetic to sympathetic, body muscles tend to tighten and stress hormone levels rise.

So training in the zone requires a different approach. If you can design most of your exercise around nose-breathing and thus a heart rate below 120 you will notice a considerable improvement in training enjoyment.

Next time I will look at how to design a training regime that keeps you in the zone whilst improving your overall fitness performance

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