Lydiard's effort translated into heartrate

Keith Livingstone attempted to do just that in his recent book "Healthy Intelligent Training". His book is endorsed by the Lydiard Foundation, and I suggest you pick up a copy. It adds some nice updates and a comprehensive explanation of the Lydiard method. It is even geared toward "middle distance" training, so perfect for your event.

Anyway, he has a chart on page 54 to establish your training intensities, and it's based off heart rate reserve (HRR).

He says the weekly "3/4 effort" run would be between 75% and 80% of maximum HRR. In the example he uses, this is a full 6 beats lower than a typical threshold zone (around 85% HRR).

The "bread and butter" aerobic zone is between 60% and 75% HRR.

I second 'thanks's' post. Get Keith Livingstone's book Healthy Intelligent Training. It's an easy read and brings Lydiard's VERY layman and sometimes seemingly vague explanations to today's language.

You can buy it off Amazon and I think the HIT website!!

'75%' is spot on.

The Lydiard Foundation site it

www.lydiardfoundation.org

you can ask on their forum. Also there is a Lydiard FOundation facebook group too....

Recently Nobby Hashizume and Lorraine MOller, cofounders of the Lydiard Foundation put together the only interactive training tool that is online called Master Run Coach, check it out at:

www.go2lydiard.com

.

Here is a (long) explanation of Master Run Coach: http://www.flotrack.org/article/5101-Master-Run-Coach-Interactive-Lydiard-Coaching

Thanks for the answers, the book has been ordered :)

thanks! wrote:

The "bread and butter" aerobic zone is between 60% and 75% HRR.

60% is very slow, for recovery purposes mostly and 75% is not the upper limit, that's about 1 minute per mile slower than marathon pace which is around 86-88%.

Oh I see, heart rate reserve.

Just to be sure - HRR = max heart rate - resting heart rate, right?

and resting heart rate = pulse measured after few minutes of lying motionless?

I always have problems with this, as I have low resting heart rate (around 40 or so), yet while walking it jumps up to 110, with my max around 190. Don't know, I think perfect heart rate zone calculation should include resting, max and basic activity heart rate, i.e. measured while walking.

deleuran wrote:

I have a masters degree in sports physiology,

This is not a plus. I"m sorry but it's just not.

I my opinion, HR is by far the best way to determine intensity when running, instead of running after a specifik pace fx.

Not in Lydiard's.

Sorry to be so glib. but if you truly fancy the man's method then embrace it. Ditch the HRM and go by feel, the way he did. The way his athletes did. You need to learn to run without a device telling you how fast.

reviewer wrote:

Not in Lydiard's.

Sorry to be so glib. but if you truly fancy the man's method then embrace it. Ditch the HRM and go by feel, the way he did. The way his athletes did. You need to learn to run without a device telling you how fast.

Interesting theory. Lasse Viren and his coach measured adaptations via heart rate constantly. Viren is often included in the list of successful Lydiard-method athletes.

I'm also quite certain that I've read/listened to at least one interview with Lydiard where he said a HRM could be a useful tool. Not the best, (perceived effort is probably the best), but that he didn't have access to monitors when he was first refining his method. If I get time, I'll try to dig up a source/link for that interview. No doubt there are valuable uses for HRMs, not to the exclusion of pace and perceived effort, but as a tool to complement those other tools.

However, since you made the statement, perhaps you could link your source of where Lydiard said heart rate should NOT be used, and that the HRM should be ditched.

HRR = Heart Rate Reserve, the beats between resting and max.

Eg:

Max 188

Rest 35

HRR 153

The best time to get your resting heart rate is when you wake up in a calm manner and have moved yet. No jarring alarm clocks.

Lying motionless can count however, if you are thinking about work or relationship your or have had coffee or something, then it may no be truly at rest. Also, a small amount of alcohol can add bpm....so try no booze, go to sleep, wake up calmly already wearing your hrm.

But saying that, training by feel is the most effective way to understand how you each day and leading to and during a workout. I would at least tackle that first - you might just find that the hrm tells you what you already can tell by feel.

thanks! wrote:

However, since you made the statement, perhaps you could link your source of where Lydiard said heart rate should NOT be used, and that the HRM should be ditched.

Nevermind. Here's an interview supporting your statement.

About halfway down:

"WRR: What do you think about heart rate monitors?

Lydiard: Wouldn't use them. The important thing is to run how you feel."

I will try to see if I can find what I seem to remember him saying. Maybe my memory is letting me down.

I know that Viren used a HRM for some specific workouts but he did not wear it "constantly" and you can bet your tail that HE knew how to run by feel. What you may not realize, and this I distinctly remember from some article somewhere way back when, is that he did not use an HRM to limit how fast or slow he ran. He used it to measure fitness. No, I don't have a link for that either so believe me or don't.

I think you are overthinking this. Sooner or later you are going to have to learn what "hard" and "easy" mean. For real. Not from a number on your wrist. None of Lyidard's athletes became who they were by allowing a HRM to tell them how fast to run. Yes, I know they didn't have them but the point is they didn't need them. Just as Bekele and Gebreselassie didn't. And if we want to get all "prove-it-to-me" about it, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they would have been any better with them.

I should say I like heart rate monitors. I have one. But when I use it, I do so for feedback after the fact. Using one to tell you how fast to run is almost like trying to be OUT of touch with your body.

reviewer;

Stop listing the best in the world as examples of what to do - few are like them, or ever will be. The OP isn't one of the best in the world, so may like a little help in determining what is appropriate for him. This "run by feel" crap is also what helps destroy so many athletes too. I see this at the HS/College level all the time, where running by feel ("I felt like it") means hammering almost every run. While some have innate senses of pace or learn quite quickly, others (most people) don't - I've known people take decades to learn what effort is appropriate for them. It might be easy to say they are just stupid, but you might be surprised at how many actually fall into this category.

Lydiard didn't have access to HRM's back in the day (at least as we do now), so it's easy to dimiss this technology, as he got away without them - but performance levels should also have gone far beyond what his athletes accomplished, 50 years later. It reminds me of lactate analysers, which can be a very useful technological tool when used properly, but too many dismiss this as well when they really don't bother to learn about them and how they can help athletes train effectively. I also see this at the HS/College level where information from this modality could be very useful for individualizing training, etc. Instead the predominant training tool is to have everyone chasing each other, and this passes for developmental training methodology.

In principle, I think you're dead nuts on. But, some people are more intuitive than others.

The difficulty I had, as a 30-something just getting into running, and not having the benefit of a coach, (or 20+ years of experience like the top runners you mentioned) is in figuring out what "easy" and "hard", and "1/4, 3/4", etc. were supposed to feel like. Easy is so open-ended that it's not very helpful. For me, that could range from laying on the couch up to possibly 7:00/mi pace. Having a bit more structure at first helped me tune into what I should be feeling.

One quick example: I've been running my easy runs by feel and often ended up around 8:00/mi. My HR monitor indicated that I could be going faster. So, I experimented with going a bit faster and found that I've been able to run more in the 7:20-7:40 range and still recover fine. "Easy" is not how I'd describe these runs, but I'm pretty sure I'm running at what Lydiard, Daniels, etc. consider "easy". To me it feels "steady", but that's part of the problem with using a vague term. It takes experience to know what the heck that is.

My approach has been to use the HR monitor, and pace guidelines as an initial guide, to help me learn the proper "feel". My ultimate goal is to wean myself off them as I master the feel.

Maybe if I was a more natural experimenter, I'd figure it out on my own. But I can tell you it would have been a long time, if ever, before I would have been running my daily "easy" runs at the intensity my HR monitor helped point me towards.

Sorry to hijack the thread. We probably agree more than we disagree.

Carry on.

Lydiard was not keen on doing things by numbers. If you pushed him on the topic of heart rate he'd grudgingly draw a line at 150 bpm and identify that as a general threshold between aerobic and anaerobic running but it obviously was not something he thought about very much.

Later, when heart monitors became commonplace he generally dismissed them as gadgets and thought it was better to learn how to pace yourself than have a gadget do it. He did have a couple of measuring techniques for doing this. But really, he was more concerned with volume than with pace. He did tell me once that he thought monitors might be one way of holding people who tended to run too hard back. He wouldn't have disowned someone for using one. But he would have wanted to make sure the athlete controlled the monitor and not the other way around. If you were "supposed" to run at a particular heart rate and that rate felt either too hard or too easy on a particular day he would not have wanted you forcing or limiting yourself to that rate.

All humans are made up of the same ingredients. Haile is more talented, but the same physiological stresses for his fitness cause the same physiological adaptation...etc etc...within the talent level...cells are cells, mitochondria are mitochondria. I think using the best is relevant however, using an average person as well would balance the argument, showing that, like I said, we are all human.

Running by feel is not crap. Using an hrm for feedback or to hold back from going too hard is not crap either. I don't think people should take sides or something, but just look at whether something is relevant.

There are many more years of proven training without than with hrms.

Snell's 800m time of 1:44 would win him medals in all Olympics so far except Beijing.??? I better go look. And he wasn't running on rubber tracks which is worth at least a second per lap.

It's all relevant.

Snell was awesome.

The Atlanta Olympic 800 was quick. Fourth place was Cuba's Norberto Tellez in 1:42.85, so Snell's 1:44 would not have medalled in Atlanta.

Who knows what Snell could have done on the Atlanta track, which was fast as hell.

Speaking of Snell...

When I had a gig with Dr. Snell in Japan a few years back, he had a chart that explains HR and pace for each effort of running. According to that, Max Steady State running, I'd say this is probably close to 3/4 effort to 1/2 effort, it should be75% of VO2Max and that should be equal to 83% Max HR - 166. For someone whose VO2Max is 65ml/kg/min, that should be about 4:10 per km pace.

Lydiard never liked the idea of relying too much on numbers. But at the same time, his main idea of adding that effort chart in "Run to the Top" was actually to slow people down. We, Lydiard Foundation, actually believe HRM is a very useful tool IF you learn to see what the representing numbers are at a certain level of effort as an individual. A difficult part of relying on HR is that it is so individual. 150 can be on the high end for someone who is very fit and RHR is very low. Incidentally, Lasse Viren classified his workout "anaerobic" if his HR went above 145. It's a very premitive way of determining it and he and his coach may even get repremended if some of today's well-known desk-top physiology experts at letsrun forum find out. It may even turn out that they were doing all their training wrong after all!!

That said, as someone already mentioned, Lydiard himself never had much exposure to HRM in his days. I don't particularly buy into his comment about HRM just as I wouldn't buy into much of his comment about high altitude training simply because he never really had a chance to try out. On the other hand, for a while back in the 1980s, John Davies used to have his runners do their workout based on HRM, not stopwatch.

We recently came up with our on-line training program, Master Run Coach (www.go2lydiard.com), and almost ALL the workouts' pace is laid out based on calculated VO2Max. It actually came out very close to what Snell was talking about but, even then, these are still nothing but a guide. But I agree with Canadeh; it is most probably a good idea to identify some sort of guide-line especially for young aspiring runners. Recently, this high school coach was using this program for his 4:15 miler. He came back and pointed out that the pace for long runs seems very slow for him. I asked him if he's actually doing 120-minute long run program or shorter one like 60-minutes. It turned out his long run was "only" 75 minutes. Naturally, if he's "only" doing such a short long run, he is able to handle it at much faster pace but then the important part of build-up will be lost: volume.