Pacing Your Leadership: Lessons from Heart Rate Zones

In the immortal words of my former teammate Andrew Salter, running smells like punishment.

I have never liked running. Playing basketball involves a lot of running and it was fun as shit, but when you put the ball down and just run it turns into a nightmare.

However, there are many people out in the world who enjoy running, I call them maniacs. And despite the potential that some of them have some screws loose, there are philosophies from running that can make your team perform better.

Get In The Zone

When training to improve your cardiovascular fitness, there are five heart rate zones. Each zone sits in a different band of heart rate and taxes/trains the body differently.

Zone 1 – 50–60% OF HRMAX (Heart Rate Max)

This is super low intensity. It is for recovery and for warming up. If this is the only intensity you train at, It won’t do a lot for you.

Zone 2 –  60–70% OF HRMAX

You should be able to live here all day. It feels easy and you can hold a conversation. This is where you want to spend most of your time.

Zone 3 – 70–80% OF HRMAX

You are moving from the aerobic to the anaerobic. You are going to struggle to get a sentence out at this point.

Zone 4 – 80–90% OF HRMAX

You are going to be working your arse off here. You won’t be able to stay here for long and you will be sucking for air once you are finished.

Zone 5 – 90–100% OF HRMAX

Full out sprint. This is maximal effort. You are going to want to die after this or kill the person that made you do this sort of intensity.

Beware The Grey Zone

Most people who train their cardiovascular system are trying to improve one of two things. They are trying to go further in a set amount of time, i.e. running more distance over an hour.

Or they are trying to move over a certain distance in less time, i.e lowering their time running a 5km run.

The point for most people is to do that activity better in the future. (Sounds like constant improvement)

The question is what is the best way to build that foundation of fitness, how should you do it? How do you get fitter?

The best benefits come from zone 2 training.

The steady state, not too fast, not too slow, sort of boring level of training.

The trouble comes from zone 2 being too easy. They don’t feel like they are getting a workout.

So people try to pick things up, they want to breathe hard, they want to feel the lactic acid burn through their legs, so they go to zone 4 training.

It is a challenging workout, but you can’t build a good foundation because you can’t keep this intensity up for a long time. Adding to the issue is that it takes longer to recover because of its intensity.

This results in fewer training sessions as you recover from the previous sessions that nearly killed you.

So people fall into the Grey Zone.

They want to feel something. They want to breathe harder than zone 2 effort, but they don’t want to fully exert themselves like zone 4, so they sit in the middle. Zone 3.

It is not easy enough to get a lot of volume to build your foundation, and it is not fast enough to gain much physical adaptation. It is neither easy enough nor hard enough.

You are stuck in the middle, giving your body stress without much upside.

Stress Is The Killer

And this brings us back to your team.

Maybe you didn’t know it, but you are actually managing your team’s stress. If you work them too hard, they are going to blow out.

You also want things done, so you need to work them hard enough.

This is an uncomfortable place to live. It makes you worried because you think you should be getting more performance so you push your team a little harder.

In the short term, it is fine. They can do it. But it is that zone 3 stress that kills them over time.

You aren’t getting much more performance, but it feels better so you leave them there. Slowly accumulating more and more stress for less and less reward.

The long-term play is that you want your team to be in zone 2 most of the time. An amount of effort they can do day in, day out.

You definitely don’t want them zone 1, nor will they.

The work shouldn’t be boring, but the effort should be sustainable all year round. They should be working, but they also should be able to come back tomorrow and do it all over again. Day in, day out.

And when you need to, you turn it up to zone 4 for a specific event for a short amount of time.

Then, after that big effort, you give them some downtime to recover.

The beauty of Zone 2 is you keep getting better. The goal is that you build speed and performance over time. It is the upward march you are looking for.

Don’t get tempted for a slow death in zone 3.