Heart-rate training zones

Five zones from your own resting rate, not a formula that ignores your fitness.

Your endurance zone

133–145bpm

Zone 2, where aerobic base is built and where most long days on foot are spent. Calculated from an estimated maximum of 181 bpm.

Zone 1 — Recovery: 122–133 bpmConversation is effortless. Between hard days, not instead of them.
Zone 2 — Endurance: 133–145 bpmYou can talk in full sentences. Where the aerobic base is built, and where most of a trek is spent.
Zone 3 — Tempo: 145–157 bpmSentences get short. Useful, and the easiest zone to spend too much time in.
Zone 4 — Threshold: 157–169 bpmA few words at a time. Intervals, in measured doses.
Zone 5 — Maximum: 169–181 bpmNo talking. Minutes a week, not more.
Heart-rate reserve: 119 bpmMaximum 181 minus resting 62 — the range you actually train in

Worth knowing. An estimated maximum carries about ±10 bpm of error, so treat the edges of each zone as soft. Heat, altitude, illness and poor sleep all lift heart rate at a given pace.

See endurance trainingZones are only useful once there is a week's structure to put them in.

How this is worked out

Karvonen, using heart-rate reserve

Each zone is resting rate + (maximum − resting) × the zone percentage. Plain percentage-of-maximum zones ignore your resting rate entirely, so a fit person and an unfit person of the same age get the same zones — which defeats the point.

Tanaka, not 220 − age

Where no tested maximum is given, maximum is estimated as 208 − 0.7 × age. The familiar 220 − age has a standard deviation near 12 bpm and reads increasingly low past 40, which quietly makes every hard session easier than intended.

Getting resting rate right

Take it lying down before you get up, or read the overnight low off a watch. Taken sitting at a desk after coffee it can be 10 bpm high, and that error moves every zone boundary with it.

Other tools

Trek readinessWhat the trek asks against what you are doing now — the gap, named, and the weeks to close it.
Hike timeNaismith's rule, corrected for descent, pack and the stops nobody plans for.
Daily energy and proteinWhat a day actually costs you, and how much protein supports the training on top.
Body compositionBody fat from a tape measure, and the fat-free mass index that actually tracks your training.
One-rep maxYour working maximum as a range, from two formulas that disagree — plus the percentages to train off.
Interval timerTabata, EMOM, hill repeats — with sound, a wake lock, and a clock that stays right in your pocket.

What would you do with this?

That is the part worth talking through, and the first conversation is free and takes half an hour.

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