How to Run Fast at a Low Heart Rate

if you've ever tried to keep your heart rate low during a run you know how frustrating or even impossible that can feel at times well today we're going to be talking about how slow you should be running your easy runs at and we'll also be going over how to calculate your own personal heart rate training zones as well as some tips on how to improve your running form and how you can ultimately run faster at a lower heart rate mastering the art of running easy or in zone 2 is crucial for building that strong aerobic

base and that overall endurance and by the end of this video you'll know exactly what you need to be doing to achieve this so how slow should our easy runs be well you should be able to hold a conversation at this pace running with a friend or a colleague or just someone you know going out for a little bit of a chitchat and catch up is a great way to tell you're running at the right sort of intensity there's also some calculators online our favorite is the Jack Daniels calculator where you can put in some

recent race results or just some times of where you think your Fitness is currently at and then will give you some rough guides for where it thinks your various training zones are most importantly we're here we're looking for that zone two for that easy Pace but for some people they won the absolute gold standard the most accurate way of doing their easy runs and how are we going to do this well we need to calculate our heart rate training zones there's basically three different ways you can do this the first one being another form of

some online calculators these are very very generalized but they'll give you a rough idea of where you're at the second option which will give you the very very very best data now I've done this a few times who put some footage of me in the lab is to go into a lab and get your lactate threshold and your V2 Max tested and as part of that they will give you your own personal heart rate training zones that you can then take and use those in your training in the UK this is going to be around

about £ 150 to2 200 and then what's going to appeal for most people the middle ground between those two is to test these out yourself and for this you're going to need to know your maximum heart rate and also your resting heart rate rate so to calculate your maximum heart rate and I would always say please get some medical advice if you're at all unsure and definitely you should be doing this in a supervised environment but you basically need to be pushing yourself to the absolute limit this is very very tough on the body please

don't do this if you got absolutely no running Fitness or you're feeling slightly ill now the best thing is to do is to get yourself a heart rate monitor a chest strap or at the very least a arm band these will be far more accurate than the heart rate monitors that are built into some of our watches these days these are very vague at best they're very good for looking at heart rate longterm but for in the moment they're really not going to be accurate enough for what we're trying to achieve here there's a couple

of options here of what to do when you're all set up heart rate monitors ready to go the first one is to run 400 m fairly hard fairly intense and then another 400 m absolutely flat out the maximum heart rate will be somewhere towards that second rep of 400 m and then you can just look through the data and see where your heart rate gets up to and another option you can do here is to find a decent Hill in your local area and then progressively pick up speed pick up intensity as you start running

up that hill do this for around about 60 seconds for that rep and again then look at the data afterwards super fit people might want to repeat this two or three times for those 400 m reps or two or three times to do those Hill reps and just see where that heart rate is spiking to at the end of the data before you do this you want to make sure you're properly warmed up you're going to be getting some very intense running straightaway so i' say at least around 50 minutes of super easy jogging lots

of dynamic stretching as well before you get going if you are a little bit injured or a little bit unwell or don't want to go out and do something like that straight away go back and look at some of your historical data from the last couple of months leading up to where you are now have you done a hill rep session have you done some allout efforts have you done a Max 5K for example just look through that data if you've got reliable chest strap or arm strap data have a look see where it is

peaking some of the running apps as well such as Garing things will be able to tell you what your max heart rate is by reading the data that is fed into it as well so there you go you've got your maximum heart rate data then we need to find out our resting heart rate now what a recommend here is to take your pulse first thing in the morning just over the course of maybe 2 or 3 days most modern watches will give you a resting heart rght data and this is going to be fairly accurate

watches these days with the wrist-based heart rate are pretty good at looking at long-term heart rate data so I would trust the figure that your watch is giving you if you have that available to you so now we've got those two figures and for Simplicity I'm going to say my maximum heart rate is 180 and my resting heart rate is 60 now again there's some online calculators where you can plug these figures in that you've now calculated it will spit out your exact heart rate training zones again we'll link to those down below lot of

links Down Below in this video but for example maximum heart rate 180 resting heart rate 60 gives us a heart rate reserve of 120 beats a minute this is the range of what's available to us in our daily life basically the lowest it will be and the highest it will be in our current state of health so for Zone one this is going to be 50 to 60% of our heart rate Reserve very easy recovery jogging zone two 60 to 70% of our heart rate reserve for our easy runs our conversational pace and also some

of our long runs as well to build that endurance zone three 70 to 80% of our heart rate Reserve this is going to be some moderate intensity we don't spend too much time here in this Zone Zone 4 80 to 90% of our heart rate res this is our Tempo our threshold efforts intervals this builds performance it builds speed it really helps to build our ability to run faster and then finally zone five 90 to 100% of our heart rate Reserve this really is reserved just for those race Sprint finishes and really short intervals as

well and potentially some Hill reps and things like that just when we're peaking right at the top of a rep so let's calculate our Zone 2 heart rate using our data of 180 for our maximum and then 60 for our resting heart rate so our really simple formula here for calculating it is that percentage of our heart rate Reserve plus adding back on our resting heart rate so here we're looking for that 60 to 70% range so 0.6 for our 60% Times by 120 for our heart rate reserve and then add on 60 which gives

our lowest value of 132 beats a minute which is where our Zone 2 Section starts and then our upper end of that zone here we're looking for that 70% so 0.7 times 120 for our heart rate Reserve adding on that 60 for our wrestling heart rate gives us 144 so our Zone 2 heart rate section in our example is 132 to 144 beats a minute but what do we do with this data now we've got it well like with anything the more you practice something the better you're going to get at it and in this

instance it's that zone two that easy Pace running we want to be practicing so for your easy runs around about 80% of our total weekly volume put your heart rate monitor on your chest strap or your arm strap we link to recommended heart rate monitors down below as well stick to that zone to running you can set up alerts on your watch if it goes too high or too low just to keep yourself dialed in in that exact right zone now for some people especially when you start out me definitely included in this running in

zone 2 will feel painfully slow and it can be quite frustrating you feel like you're hardly moving but believe me stick with this and you will speed up over time your easy runs will get a lot faster because over time your Fitness will grow your body will be adapting and you'll be able to run faster at this lower heart rate so practice and be patient you might need to walk I definitely did when I first started out doing this just to bring your heart rate back down get it dialed in back in the correct Zone

you also really need to lose the ego and have some patience as well a lot of people putting their runs on social media on straa want to be running fast all the time that's not how you're going to improve you need to lose that ego you might be running a lot slower than you're used to for those first few weeks but stick with it you will improve you will get faster and you will see yourself naturally running at a faster speed at a lower heart rate eventually over time you'll know what this will feel like

and this is why a lot of elite runners or more experienced Runners will say I just run on feel and I do a lot of my running now like that I know what easy Pace feels like I know how my body should be feeling and so when I'm out on my easy runs I don't always need to be monitoring this sort of stuff because you just get a good feeling of what it's like but for some beginner Runners some people trying to improve learn more about running use that technolog to monitor it make sure you

know what you're doing your body will adapt and then you'll start to understand what it all feels like quickly guys if you are finding this video all please smash that like button potentially share it with a friend that's always running too fast on their easy runs and also check out my website benp parks.com we've got five star rated training plans on there helping Runners all over the world improve their running we've got awesome running hats and some of the very best technical gear out there to help you with your running thanks very much guys right

back to the video there's also some other really important things we need to have our chat about when we're trying to run at a nice low heart rate in our easy Zone too there's some things that might be affecting as well such as temperatures high temperatures high humidity as well the body is going to have to be working a lot harder so when we are running in the summer or warmer climates you're going to be running again a little bit slower as well this is when heart rate monitor training could be really really good because

you always know you're going to be training in the right Zone but you might be running a little bit slower as you're used to because your body's having to work that little bit harder to keep cool also hydration is really important if you do become a little bit dehydrated your body's going to have to work a little bit harder to deliver that oxygen to the muscles so make sure you're definitely hydrated and keep hydrated when you're going out in your long runs the elevation of the route you're running on will play a big factor as

well if you're going up a hill your heart rate is going to spike you might need to have to walk or slow it down a lot just to bring that heart rate back down and I would say if you are running on a particularly hilly course you could just look at something like your average heart rate over the course of a run it' be how hard if you're having to stop all the time just have average heart rate potentially on the data field on your watch also altitude if you are running up in the mountain

somewhere again there's less oxygen available you'll be running a little bit slower as well and then finally things like caffeine alcohol lack of sleep and fatigue these are going to affect how your body is going to be feeling these are other things we have to factor in of why we might be running a little bit slower Right Moving On Let's have a chat about running form and efficiency this is all about how we can cover the ground from point A to point B using as little energy as possible keeping that heart rate nice and low

there's some really good things we can do here to improve our running form very very simple the first one is all about strides running at a very fast rate just for very short burst of time about 20 seconds maximum also doing things like Hill reps as well super important it's very hard to run with bad form with Hill reps both of these things will get you running well and also get you nice and strong some other things we can focus on as we're running making sure we're Landing nicely under our Center of mass not out

in front of you which can be a bit of a breaking force and then finally all about increasing our Cadence potentially depends where your Cadence is a lot of people when they start out their Cadence is quite low in the 150s the 160s which just means we're not moving in the most efficient way possible the area we're going to be focusing on for a lot of our easy running is around about sort of 175 up to 180 potentially just over 180 we've got a whole video on how to improve your cence again we'll link to

that up here and down below as well so lots there to get stuck into hope you found the video useful please let me know any questions down in the comments we'll hang out down there to answer your questions we're always here to help with your running that's it guys keep on working hard K wa down we see you very soon in the next one