Endurance for Mountain Hunting Part II - Training with Heart Rate

In part one of this series I outlined some of the higher level tenets of building out your endurance training program. Over then next few articles we will be a little more specific about what we will measure, using some tools that I have found helpful for doing this.

Why Endurance Training?

Remember, the first principle of adaptation is compliance. You can’t change anything if you don’t work at it every day, this goes for endurance specifically. Now, when you are building your endurance for mountain hunting, you are developing two systems in tandem; the central system and peripheral system.

              Central – this is your supply engine, the heart and lungs. It also includes the muscles  used to move the air into your lungs, and the C02 back out of the lungs. Development here means your heart can pump more blood, for longer, without tiring out and limiting 02 supply to your muscles. It also means your lungs and the muscles that move them can pump 02 into the heart, and C02 out of the lungs without fatigue and decline.

              Peripheral – for our discussion, this is most specifically the muscles controlling your joints, like your quads, hamstrings, calf muscle, etc. Development here means that the muscles in your legs literally grow more blood vessels for delivering oxygen, grow more mitochondria creating energy for the cells, and grow better garbage systems for moving all that junk out of the cells between hard pushes.

Moving blood through these systems causes changes, increases fitness, and hones your ability to perform in harsh environments. By putting yourself through stressful training, both high and low intensity versions, you are building up these two systems so they can fuel you.

HR Zone Training

Using an HR monitor gives us an insight into the central endurance system and acts like a speedometer for our heart and lungs. It lets us know if the workout is training the systems to go harder for a short time, or harder for an extended amount of time.  We orient ourselves within a 3 HR zone model, with zone 1 being the easiest and zone 3 being the hardest. How this works will be explained more in detail for the Blood Lactate Testing article. Many people will take shots at using simple metrics to determine your training zones, like 220-age for example. However, if you’re doing no zone training at all, this is a massive improvement requires no special equipment. Remember, compliance over everything so start simple and don’t miss workouts.  Then you can add complexity, like blood lactate.

HOW TO START: AGE CALCULATED TRAINING ZONES

So I’m 35 and want to get started doing cardio for 2 hours per week. I would do the following worksheet;  220-35 = 185 beats per minute 

 When you look at the breakdown of how we want to split up our week, you can see the ratio of time we train in anything other than the HR 110-150 is going to be almost none. So this gives us an easy to hold measuring stick for using HR as a training tool.   For a mountain hunter getting started, I wouldn’t even bother training in zone 3 until we have built up about 5 hours per week of endurance training. The best way to apply these numbers is to look at what you do right now, this week, for your workouts and build up from there. For example, if you workout 4 days per week, lets make the adjustment.

SESSION 1 – 20M. ZONE 2 + 10M. ZONE 1

SESSION 2 – 20M. ZONE 2 + 10M. ZONE 1

SESSION 3 – 20M. ZONE 2 + 10M. ZONE 3

SESSION 4 – 30M. ZONE 2

So there you have it. You just programmed yourself a measurable and practical endurance training system based on Heart Rate for a 3-zone model. This can be done on a bike, on a  treadmill, hiking, or literally anything you want.  We will dive deeper in the next article into how to be very specific with prescribing intensity with these heart rates, like how fast to run, how hard to bike, or how far to go using blood lactate.