Shakeout: Training Jargon

Zones, thresholds, and other (sometimes) useful concepts

This week’s running schedule is filled with all kinds of training variables, abbreviations, and acronyms. We’ve got aerobic progressions, heart rate (HR) zones, lactate threshold (LT) efforts, and treadmill vert (VT) to name a few. If you’re interested in exploring the ins and outs of all this training mumbo jumbo, we have a more in-depth conversation waiting behind the paywall.

Before we embark on a journey beyond the jargon, it’s useful to think about training principles as permeable zones rather than rigid sets of rules. For one thing, your GPS device is hardly infallible. For another, there’s not even complete agreement in where these zones lie or how to measure them. As Steve Magness pointed out, there are 14 different ways to measure lactate threshold.

Most importantly, highly trained athletes don’t perform workouts to fall precisely between arbitrary zones. They run workouts to challenge themselves and push their limits. They ebb, they flow, sometimes they hammer, and occasionally they crash. Rarely do they fall perfectly in line with their training objectives.

One of your primary challenges when you add workouts to your running routine is understanding what all of those variables, abbreviations, and acronyms mean for you and your running. Without a baseline level of knowledge, HR Zones are useless concepts. With a little bit of work and attention to detail, things like Zone 2 and Zone 4 will not only make sense intellectually, they’ll resonate intuitively.

That’s when things really start to click and you begin to enter a running sphere similar to what the Zen Buddhists call The Gateless Gate where form has no meaning and meaning has no form. You’re just there, man, which is kind of the whole point.

The training discussion continues behind the paywall along with a conversation about finding the “right” time to work strength training into your routine.