What Are Heart Rate Zones and How Do I Find Them?
Heart rate tracking is useful for determining how hard you are exercising, and with all smartwatches and wearables available these days, it’s easy to track your heart rate in real time and adjust the intensity at the moment. But in order to use your heart rate to understand your workout, you also need to know your heart rate zones.
If you’re following something like “you should be in zone 2 here and zone 3 there,” the first question you need to ask is how many zones are in this system?
The most popular are four-zone and five-zone systems; there are lesser known ones that drop to three or six. Zones also don’t always coincide from one system to another – Orangetheory and Peloton use a five-zone system, but separate their zones in slightly different places. So you really have to ask the person who designed the workout what they want from you.
With these caveats in mind, let’s look at a few common settings.
If it’s a five-zone system
Five-zone systems are the most common. If the system has five zones, they usually look something like this:
- Zone 1: 50% to 60% of your maximum heart rate (MHR), although it rises to 65% on some systems.
- Zone 2: 61% to 70% of MHR; some systems will rise to 75%
- Zone 3: from 71% to 80%, or more from 76% to 85%.
- Zone 4: 80% to 90% and sometimes 85% to 95%
- Zone 5: fully up to 100%
In these systems, zone 1 is for warm-up or very light recovery between intervals. Zone 2 is for light aerobic exercise such as light jogging. Zone 3 is for moderate intensity activities – possibly a faster run. Zone 4 is when things get intense and you will only bump into zone 5 for a few seconds at a time during the heaviest intervals. You cannot sustain work in zone 5 longer than this.
If it’s a four-zone system
Quad-zone systems cover the same common area, but break it up into fewer large parts. They usually do this by combining the first two zones to get something like this:
- Zone 1: anything below 70% (or 75%)
- Zone 2: 71% to 80% (or sometimes 76% to 85%)
- Zone 3: 81% to 90% (or 86% to 95%)
- Zone 4: Everything is 100%
In these systems, light-effort endurance work is usually done in zone 1 (instead of warm-up in zone 1 and treating the workout itself as zone 2). Zone 2 is for medium effort, zone 3 is for hard, and zone 4 is for absolutely killer, short intervals.
How to find your maximum heart rate
Now that you know the zones, you are only missing one thing: the maximum heart rate, which is the basis for all of these zones.
These systems typically recommend that you subtract your age from 220 to determine your maximum heart rate. Sometimes they use a different formula. But these formulas are often wrong , as they can only give an answer that is, on average , correct for most people. Averages don’t really help when you’re trying to find your own individual zones, as a 10 or 20 beat difference can cause an entire zone to be trained higher or lower than you think.
Ideally, you should perform the maximum heart rate test as we described here , or find the highest heart rate recorded by your device during one of your toughest workouts.
Another way is to use perceived effort (in other words, how you feel) to gauge whether you are working in the right areas. In a five-zone system:
- Zone 1 will feel very easy, almost as if you were doing it at all.
- Zone 2 will get you hot and sweaty, but you can still continue the conversation.
- In zone 3, your breathing will get a little harder and you will only be able to speak a few words at a time.
- In zone 4, you are working hard and not in the mood to talk, but you probably feel that you can continue this effort for a while – or at least for a few more minutes.
- Zone 5 is your absolute top speed and you can only sustain it for a few grueling seconds.
If you’re unsure of your maximum heart rate, try using this effort level guide for a while. When you do start a workout that requires zone 5, give it your best and then check your heart rate monitor to see which number it gave you.