Again - My nutrition plan feels solid and somewhat
battle tested. I feel like I can start to weave in more
emphasis on training, without the risk of derailing the
diet. This post is about as bro-science-y as I get!
One of my prized possessions is the typewriter printouts of my coaches training plan when I was 20. We spent a lot of time in two zones called "aerobic 1", and "aerobic 2". Every other afternoon workout was a 60 minute long slow piece, and a few mornings a week, a couple of us would add another one.
These pieces felt meditative, somewhere on the upper edge of 'regenerative', like less of a mental heavy-lift than the speed work we also mixed in.
Training targets @ 20 years old for aerobic 1 was 150BPM or 75% max heart rate (MHR), aerobic 2 was 165BPM or 82.5% MHR.
Using 220-age for MHR estimation that would be currently equivalent to 131BPM (A1) and 144BPM (A2). This paper (which looks suspiciously formatted as a journal article, but is self-published) suggests potentially subtracting 5BPM for being in a 'detrained' (ehem...) state, leaving 126BPM (or 72% MHR) and 139 (80% MHR) at age 46.
For me a single-value target is most useful, so I sort of arbitrarily set that at 70% based on the above, that works out to 122BPM. Right now I'm at 30 minutes, but I'd like to work up to an hour about 4 days a week to leave room for strength training.
What I have noticed is that it takes a 10 minute warm up to get to about 65% MHR, and another 5-8 minutes to feel like I want to go stay around/above 70%. None of this feels really strenuous. I will note that I'm doing this on a recumbent exercise bike, not an erg. It doesn't feel like a good idea to just sit down and try to hit 70% MHR cold.
