Enter your age, and your resting heart rate if you know it, to see your five training zones.
Estimates are for general guidance only and are not medical advice. For a personalised plan, book a free guided tour at RPM Gym.
Five zones, from easy to maximal, and their job is to make the hard days hard and the easy days genuinely easy. Most people who train by feel end up spending everything in zone three — too hard to recover from, too easy to drive adaptation.
If you supplied a resting heart rate, the zones are calculated from heart rate reserve rather than from percentages of your maximum. That's the Karvonen method, and it matters: for someone with a low resting rate every zone floor moves up by ten to fifteen beats, which is the difference between an easy run and a slightly-too-hard one.
Zone two is where most endurance training should sit, and it usually feels slower than people expect. If you can hold a conversation, you're in it. If you're answering in short sentences, you've drifted into zone three.
| Zone 1 — Recovery | 50-60% | Warm-ups, cool-downs and recovery sessions between hard days. |
|---|---|---|
| Zone 2 — Endurance | 60-70% | The bulk of aerobic training. Conversational, sustainable for a long time, and the zone most people skip past. |
| Zone 3 — Aerobic | 70-80% | Moderately hard. Useful in moderation, and the zone that quietly absorbs sessions meant to be easier or harder. |
| Zone 4 — Threshold | 80-90% | Hard, sustainable for perhaps 20-40 minutes. Where threshold and interval work lives. |
| Zone 5 — Maximal | 90-100% | Short, very hard intervals. Minutes a week, not hours. |
Without resting HR: zone = HRmax × intensity With resting HR: zone = ((HRmax − HRrest) × intensity) + HRrest HRmax is estimated from age using Tanaka: 208 − (0.7 × age)
A 35-year-old with a measured resting heart rate of 58 bpm.
Zone 2 sits at 133-146 bpm. Using plain percentages of maximum instead, it would read 110-129 — nearly 20 beats lower at the bottom. For a trained person with a low resting rate, that gap is the difference between an easy session and one that barely raises a sweat.
Recovery (50-60%), endurance (60-70%), aerobic (70-80%), threshold (80-90%) and maximal (90-100%). The percentages are of your maximum heart rate, or of your heart rate reserve if you've supplied a resting rate.
Not in any way that changes body composition. At lower intensities a higher **share** of the calories burned comes from fat, but the total is smaller — so harder work usually burns more fat in absolute terms as well as more calories. The claim survives because 'higher share' gets read as 'more'.
Sustained work at 60-70%, easy enough to hold a conversation. It's where most endurance training should sit, and it's the zone people most often skip because it feels too easy to be doing anything.
If you know it, yes. The Karvonen method uses the gap between resting and maximum rather than the maximum alone, and it fits trained people considerably better. For someone with a resting rate in the fifties, plain percentages put the zone floors far too low.
Usually heat, dehydration, poor sleep, caffeine or the early stages of illness. Heart rate at a given workload is sensitive to all of them, which is why a single high reading means less than a week of them.
Not well. Heart rate spikes during a set and falls between sets, so a lifting session's average sits in a zone that reflects your rest periods rather than the training you did. Zones are a cardio tool.
Zone discipline is hard outdoors in August and straightforward on an air-conditioned cardio floor. Come and see ours on a free guided tour in Al Manhal.