[kocanez]

Would I lose the training effect if I broke up my zone 3 workout?

I am approaching the 5th week of base period training, and following the guidelines, would be doing a 2 hour zone 3 workout. This sounds like a long time to stay in zone 3, to me. Any tips for staying in that range the entire time? I am not much of a runner (although I am going to give it another shot next week) due to knee/ankle pain and have been mostly doing fast paced hiking in the nearby hills; I can only see myself maintaining a zone 3 HR for that long on a stepper machine, if anything.

Topic

[todd.struble]

todd.struble on May 11, 2019 at 10:47 pm #21898

I’ll take a stab at this because I happened to be reading the section on interval training in the new book just now.

I’m not sure what workout or guidelines you’re referring to. I’ve been following the 24 week plan and the Z3 muscular endurance workouts don’t start until the specific period (and even then I’ve read here the vertical beast mode workout is supposed to be Z1 or Z2 in your heartrate but feel like Z3 in your legs).

That being said – that sounds like a lot of time in Z3 to me too. Reading the new book, (p.176 and the review on p.266) Aerobic Endurance/Z3 should be either continuous Z3 tempo for 20-40 minutes or intervals of 8-15 minutes for a total work volume of 40-60 minutes. So… based on that, I’d say not only are you OK breaking it up, it seems like you should.

[kocanez]

kocanez on May 12, 2019 at 5:48 am #21905

Thanks Todd!

I am not following a specific plan on training peaks, just using the book (If you’re reading the new one, I must be reading the old one) and the training log.

TNA training log, p. 64 base period , week 5 “you will have your first zone 3 workout, which should make up 20 % of this week’s volume”

TftNA, p.246 ‘Base Period Training Tasks for weeks 1-8’ “one z1-2 workout compromising 20% of total weekly volume…make this workout zone 3 in weeks 5-7”

I like the interval explanations as you have above; interesting that I can’t find anything about that in the version I am reading.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on May 13, 2019 at 9:35 pm #21992

@kocanez;

Sorry for the confusion and thanks for writing in. DO NOT DO A WORKOUT WHERE YOU SPEND 2 HOURS IN Z3……..yet. Especially if you are rather new to training. TftNA is written for mountaineers and while we advocate running for base training. If you are new to this stuff a long Z3 workout done running will be pretty hard on you. We typically suggest these Z3 workouts for alpinists and mountaineers to be done more specifically. That means uphill hiking.

Those times given in TftNA are for the total workout time not time in Z3. With a warm up and cool down of 20 min each and say 3x 15min in Z3 hiking up hill and back down you’ll end up with about 2 hours.

You do not need to keep your HR pegged at he top of Z3 for these workouts. Use more of Z3 range.

I hope this helps,
Scott