Debbie has a conversation with her old friend and mentor Sally Edwards of Heart Zones USA training systems. Sally is the originator of heart rate training, and she literally wrote the book on it, called The Heart Rate Monitor Book back in 1993. She was the first athlete to recognize the value of heart rate monitors and keeping track of where your heart rate is when you are training.

She and Debbie talk about the current training situation which emphasizes HIIT too much. As a result, people are enjoying workouts less, doing high intensity to burnout. Or else, because they are doing it constantly, they are actually training at a moderate intensity, and never get to a high intensity because they are so determined to do high intensity every day.

The common feature of these approaches is the lack of recovery time. In fact, the pendulum has swung too far to one end of the spectrum. As Debbie points out, it was once common to train exclusively for endurance, for very long periods with minimal intensity. Now it is expected that you will exclusively be doing short and intense workouts. Neither is a good approach, as the body responds better to variability and what Sally describes as “variation training.”

As with diet, the body responds better to changing things up. The result is that doing too much high intensity will either exhaust people or leave them working out in only moderately intense ways because they are unwilling to let themselves recover. What is more valuable is variation between different heart rate zones.

Sally identifies three zones that you can move through: the blue or least intense zone, the yellow or moderate intensity zone and red, which is high intensity. No zone is a goal in itself, rather you will need to be able to move between zones either in one workout or between different days. Each zone has advantages, and you’re only able to effectively utilize those advantages if you make your workouts variable.

You can find Sally at www.heartzones.com and through her website at http://thesallyedwardscompany.com/.