Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [33]
The only way to reliably determine your personal max, it turns out, is to actually get your heart pumping that fast. That typically requires a cardiac stress test, usually performed in a lab with a treadmill. You can also get a decent estimate by wearing a heart rate monitor for a 15- to 20-minute run in which you gradually accelerate from a jog to an all-out sprint for the last few minutes. Ideally, finish with a couple of laps on a local track, advises veteran Atlanta-based running coach Roy Benson: “After every hundred meters, look at your heart rate and accelerate as hard as you can,” he says. “You’re looking for your heart rate to peg at an upper limit.” You could do this at a local 5K race, where the crowds and competition will help motivate you to reach your true maximum—but the key is beginning gradually, so that your legs don’t fail before your heart maxes out.
Knowing your true max allows you to get a more realistic sense of what training zone you’re in. Still, there are other pitfalls you need to watch out for. In hot and humid conditions, sweating can reduce your blood volume and cause “cardiac drift”: your heart will beat faster even though your effort stays low. In cool and dry conditions, the opposite can occur, keeping your heart rate artificially low even when you’re going at the desired pace. That means that, while the heart rate monitor is a useful tool, the final judge of training effort should always be how you feel.
What’s the best way to breathe during exercise?
Birds do it, and so do horses. So it seems natural to expect that humans would synchronize their breathing with rhythmic activities like running, cycling, or rowing. Sure enough, decades of studies have found links between stride rate and breathing rate for both novices and experts, at slow and fast speeds, in many different activities. Some studies suggest this unconscious synchronization makes your movement more efficient—but the latest research suggests that trying to force yourself to breathe in a certain pattern can backfire.
Horses maintain a fixed one-to-one ratio between strides and breaths because their lungs and breathing muscles are shaken rhythmically by the impact of their hooves on the ground. Flapping wings put birds under similar constraints. Humans, on the other hand, walk upright, so the jarring impact of each foot-strike doesn’t directly interfere with breathing muscles. Still, a series of studies in the 1970s showed that if you put subjects on a treadmill or exercise bike, some (but not all) naturally fall into a pattern where their breathing rate is synchronized with their cadence. The ratio of full strides (i.e., counting each time the right foot hits the ground) to full breathing cycles (i.e., counting each exhale) varies widely among subjects, with common observations of 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, 3:2, 4:1, and even 5:2. The most common among runners is two stride cycles for each breath.
A Swiss study in 1993 found that runners seem to burn slightly less energy when their breathing is coordinated with their stride rate—a finding that spurred some coaches to encourage their runners to focus more on their breathing. Numerous studies since then have explored whether synchronized breathing makes movement feel easier or burns less energy, with conflicting results. After several decades of research, the failure to demonstrate any clear link between synchronized breathing and efficiency suggests that if there is any effect, it’s too small to be of practical significance. Still, the idea that there’s a “correct” breathing pattern has persisted