Buzz
Monitoring your heart rate is a valuable tool for understanding the intensity of your workout. With the rise of smartwatches and wearable devices, tracking your heart rate in real-time is easier than ever, allowing you to adjust the effort level of your exercise. But to make sense of your heart rate during exercise, it’s essential to understand the different heart rate zones.
When you’re following a workout that instructs you to be in specific zones, such as 'zone 2' or 'zone 3', it’s crucial to ask: how many zones are being referred to in this system?
The most common systems use either four or five zones, though there are also lesser-known systems with as few as three or as many as six zones. Keep in mind, these zones can differ between systems—Orangetheory and Peloton both use a five-zone structure, but the zones are defined in slightly different ways. Therefore, it's important to clarify with whoever designed the workout which zone structure they are using.
With these considerations in mind, let's explore a few typical setups.
When using a five-zone system
Five-zone systems are the most widely used. When a system has five zones, they typically break down as follows:
Zone 1: 50% to 60% of your maximum heart rate (MHR), although some systems may extend up to 65%
Zone 2: 61% to 70% of MHR; some may go up to 75%
Zone 3: 71% to 80%, or potentially 76% to 85%
Zone 4: 80% to 90%, or sometimes 85% to 95%
Zone 5: up to 100%
In these systems, Zone 1 is typically for warming up or light recovery between intervals. Zone 2 is designated for easy aerobic exercises, like a gentle jog. Zone 3 involves moderate intensity, such as a quicker jog. Zone 4 is when the intensity ramps up, and Zone 5 is reserved for brief, intense intervals—lasting only a few seconds at a time. Sustaining effort in Zone 5 for extended periods is nearly impossible.
When using a four-zone system
Four-zone systems generally cover the same range but condense it into fewer, broader categories. This is typically achieved by merging the first two zones, resulting in a structure like this:
Zone 1: anything below 70% (or 75%)
Zone 2: 71% to 80% (or occasionally 76% to 85%)
Zone 3: 81% to 90% (or sometimes 86% to 95%)
Zone 4: Everything up to 100%
In these systems, Zone 1 typically serves for easy endurance activities (instead of warming up in Zone 1 and considering the workout itself to be Zone 2). Zone 2 is for moderate efforts, Zone 3 is for more intense efforts, and Zone 4 is reserved for those short but brutal intervals.
How to determine your maximum heart rate
Now that you're familiar with the zones, there's just one last thing to figure out: your maximum heart rate, which is the foundation of all the zones.
Typically, these systems suggest subtracting your age from 220 to estimate your maximum heart rate. Sometimes, an alternative formula may be used. However, these formulas are often inaccurate because they only provide a figure that’s correct for most people on average. Averages aren’t very helpful when determining your personal zones, as a variance of 10 or 20 beats could place you in a different zone than you intended.
The ideal approach is to take a max heart rate test, as explained here, or refer to the highest heart rate recorded by your device during one of your most intense workouts.
Another method is to assess your perceived effort (in other words, how you feel) to check if you're staying within the right zones. For a five-zone system:
Zone 1 will feel extremely easy, almost like you're not exercising at all.
In Zone 2, you’ll start to feel warm and sweaty, but you’ll still be able to chat.
In Zone 3, your breathing will become heavier, and you’ll only be able to speak a few words at a time.
In Zone 4, you’re pushing hard and probably don’t feel like talking, but you’ll likely be able to sustain this effort for a while—or at least a few more minutes.
Zone 5 is your maximum effort, and you can only maintain it for a few seconds before you’re exhausted.
If you're unsure of your maximum heart rate, try using this effort-level guide for a while. When you reach a workout that requires zone 5, give it your full effort—then check your heart rate monitor to see what it recorded.
