#3 TR AINING ZONES
I n 1992 a 23-year-old carpenter from the Wirral and his coach changed British cycling (and British Cycling…) forever. The carpenter was Chris Boardman, whose stunning performance in the individual pursuit at the Barcelona Olympics won Britain’s first Olympic cycling gold for 72 years, and could be argued to have laid the foundations for today’s astonishing success of our athletes. How? The coach was Peter Keen who became performance director at British Cycling (BC) from 1997 to 2003 and employed a chap called David Brailsford…
Boardman was known as ‘The Professor’ because of his scientific approach to cycling. At the time the cutting-edge Mike Burrowsdesigned Lotus bike got most of the press but Boardman and Keen applied the latest knowhow to training too. Keen’s use of four levels of training intensity based on maximum heart rate was integral and later became BC’s accepted standard for training cyclists and the basis for much of our training advice.
T H AT ’S SO 1992 ...
Level 1 is easy riding, at 45 to 50 beats below your maximum heart rate. It should feel like little effort and if you’re well trained can be maintained for several hours. Use to warm up or for active recovery.
Level 2 boosts your endurance and basic aerobic fitness and will help you ride further and faster. It’s even paced, continuous riding at around 40 beats below maximum. Riding at this intensity for 3-5 hours enhances the body’s ability to use fat as fuel.
Level 3 is race pace training and typically a hard effort of around 20-30 minutes at the maximum pace you can maintain. If you feel that you could keep going at the end of the session then you’ve probably not worked hard enough. Typically, your heart rate should be between 15-20bpm below max.
Level 4 is short, high-intensity training. Interval-based efforts of between 30 seconds and three minutes with a full recovery between. This training is at close to your maximum – sprinting and hard climbing for instance.
TIMELESS ADVICE?
Hell yeah! Using heart rate monitors – which were rare and called pulse meters in the early ’90s – and zones for serious training is still highly relevant. The thinking on heart rate has changed slightly and British Cycling’s training zones are now based on functional threshold – the highest intensity you can hold for an hour – heart rate and/or power. Only a lucky few had access to power measurement in 1992. There are now six zones rather than four and they have names not numbers – active recovery, endurance, tempo, threshold, VO2max and anaerobic capacity. Keen’s levels 3 and 4 are even mainstream – highintensity interval training, or HIIT, workouts promising you can get fit in just a few minutes a week are increasingly popular.