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By Craig Friedman, Athletes' Performance

Preparation for your next workout begins with your previous workout. Finish each cardio session strong by completing a full recovery in the Blue Zone. You’ll typically spend about 5 minutes in the Blue Zone, during which your heart rate will slow and your body will clear waste products from your muscles to help you avoid soreness. During the cool-down, it’s okay to walk or slow down, but it’s important to keep moving. Don’t just stop. The result: You’ll feel reenergized and ready for another fun workout!

To learn more about the Blue Zone, read “The Benefit of Training in the Blue Zone.”

By Craig Friedman, Athletes' Performance

No matter your speed or fitness, miCoach uses a unique method of cardio training that’s valuable for you. You won’t compare yourself to others or follow a general workout designed for the masses. Instead, your training is designed specifically for you and dictated by your current cardiovascular fitness. How can it be so individualized? It’s a matter of physiology—yours.

The way your heart responds to exercise is based on your body’s unique makeup—your actual heart rate in beats per minute (BPM) is relevant only to you and your body. The harder you exercise, the faster your heart beats to supply your muscles with energy and oxygen. As you improve with training, your heart rate response decreases over time, meaning your muscles are better able to extract oxygen from the blood, and each pump of the heart delivers more blood to the muscles.

Since this response is different for everyone, miCoach measures heart rate and lets you know how hard you’re working. miCoach designs cardio workouts that utilize four personalized heart rate zones (Blue, Green, Yellow and Red) that vary in intensity and guide you toward your goals. Also, miCoach guides your efforts with real-time coaching, telling you what to do while you’re working out. If you’re going too fast, miCoach will tell you to slow down. If you’re too slow, you’ll be coached to speed up. This makes it easier to stay within the training zones that miCoach prescribes.

By using heart-rate based training, miCoach takes the guesswork out of working out. You’ll immediately see how your body responds to exercise, so regardless of your experience or fitness you’ll know if you’re training right to get the results you want. And since heart rate training helps you keep track of your improvement, you’ll continually make strides and avoid plateaus in your training, while reducing your risk for pain and injury. And it’s fun!

Here’s a closer look at the benefits of heart rate training.

Avoid overtraining

It’s counterproductive to push your body’s limits every time you train. Some workouts should feel easier, while others should challenge you in new ways.  Using your heart rate as a training guide provides the right mix of effort. For instance, on days when you may feel sick or tired, your heart rate may be higher than normal during exercise. You’ll need to reduce your overall effort to stay in the same zones, so your body will get the break it needs. And on days where you feel better than usual, you can really train hard while staying in your training zones. As a result, you’ll make gains, feel fresh, and avoid burning out mentally and physically.

Know your body better

Sleep, caffeine, and other factors can affect your heart rate, but if you’re training consistently you should begin to notice how your heart responds to exercise. If training becomes less of a challenge and you stay within all your zones easily, you’ll know you’ve improved and you may need to adjust your zones by taking a new Assessment Workout.

Track your progress

As your fitness improves, you’ll be able to stay within your training zones more easily. For instance, early on in your plan, it may be challenging to train in a higher effort zone for more than a few seconds, but as your plan progresses and your fitness improves, you’ll be able to handle harder workouts, spending more time training in the more intense Yellow and Red Zones. miCoach tracks your progress with a history of time spent training in each zone, as well as your percentage time spent in each zone. So you can view how hard you work in a particular workout, as well as how you progress through your miCoach plan.

Pick up the pace

A true measure of fitness is being able to do higher amounts of work (pace) at the same level of intensity (heart rate). miCoach shows you how to see this change by comparing your heart rate to your pace. For instance, when you begin a miCoach plan, a brisk walk may feel hard, and your heart rate will be elevated as a result. As you improve, you can see how your pace changes at various heart rates. In a matter of months, you may be able to jog or even run at the same heart rate at which you previously walked.

By Kevin Elsey, Athletes' Performance

The miCoach Assessment Workout is quick and easy, and it will help determine all the cardio training you do with miCoach. No matter which type of training plan you choose or how you prefer to be coached (by heart rate or by pace), the assessment is key to unlocking your personalized training zones and performing workouts that are efficient, effective, and right for you. Here’s a guide to the workout that personalizes your miCoach experience.

How it works

The Assessment Workout helps miCoach understand how your body uniquely reacts to various levels of effort. More specifically, miCoach will measure your heart rate and speed throughout the entire assessment (as long as sensors are available).Once this information is captured, your training zones are personalized for both heart rate ranges and pace ranges.

By exercising in your prescribed zones, miCoach will challenge you in every session, pushing your fitness at times and challenging you to save your efforts at other times. This will help you reach your goals faster and avoid overtraining.

What to expect

The Assessment Workout is roughly a 12-minute training session in which you’re coached by audio instructions. Although miCoach normally coaches you based on your choice of heart rate or pace, the Assessment Workout uses a scale based on your perceived effort. This is a more accurate way to assess cardiovascular fitness and build your personalized training zones than using general formulas.

You’ll start with a walk and slowly transition to higher levels of effort, and then you’ll cool down with a 2-minute walk.The efforts are described on a scale of 1 to 10 where 3 out of 10 is a walk and 9 out of 10 is considered your top speed. It’s up to you to interpret the scale, so when miCoach says to speed up to 5 out of 10, make sure this is roughly half of your best effort.

miCoach will never push you to 10, as this is considered your absolute maximum effort, and the likelihood of your technique breaking down at this point increases significantly. Injury risk rises as a result. So miCoach won’t ask you to push yourself to the limit.

How to do it

To schedule an assessment, log in to miCoach.com and visit the Schedule. The Assessment Workout appears in Single Workouts and can be dragged over to your schedule.

The Assessment Workout can be done outdoors or on cardio equipment in the gym. For best results, use the same style of exercise as you plan to use in your regular workouts.For instance, if you primarily run, don’t cycle for your assessment—the emphasis on your legs and lack of upper body work would not allow your heart rate to get as high as in running. Your heart rate numbers and pace numbers should reflect the activity you will be doing most often.If you run inside, do the Assessment Workout on a treadmill set at a 1 percent incline. Conversely, if you plan to run outdoors, run outside on a relatively flat surface for your Assessment Workout.

To get the most out of your Assessment Workout, listen carefully to the audio instructions and be sure any equipment you’re using (Heart Rate Monitor, Stride Sensor, miCoach Mobile [GPS], etc.) is connected and functioning properly. If you use miCoach Mobile, make sure you’re outside and on a relatively flat surface

Like any workout, eat a snack before and after exercise and go through a series of dynamic stretches to prepare your body to move (try a warm-up from the Single Workouts). There’s no need to warm up with a walk or jog since the Assessment Workout starts easy and progresses gradually.

Coaching keys

Think of the first few minutes of this workout as your traditional warm-up. In other words, start slow. You don’t want to overexert yourself too soon. If you go too fast too early, you won’t be able to finish strong, and miCoach needs your speed and heart rate to increase throughout the workout.

miCoach will tell you when to transition to higher levels of effort, such as 3 out of 10 (walking at this point) or 5 out of 10.This scale helps you gradually transition to a strenuous effort. Simply focus on putting forth greater effort as you progress along the scale.It’s up to you to interpret the scale.

Not sure if you’re going too slow or fast? Be cautious. Slow down at any point before you reach 7 out of 10 if you feel short of breath or feel like it might be too hard to maintain your pace. That way you save your harder efforts for later in the workout.

When you hit 7 out of 10, you should be breathing heavily. If you were to try to talk at this point, it would be quite difficult.By the final stage (9 out of 10), you should feel like you’re near your top effort. You should be exercising almost as hard as you can. It’ll be over before you know it so give it your best shot!

After your workout

Once you’ve completed the Assessment Workout, make sure you explicitly finish the workout. (For miCoach Pacer, turn off the device. For miCoach Mobile, end the workout.) Even if you want to continue running, this ensures that your workout is recorded properly and stored separately from other workouts. Once you’ve ended the workout (or turned off miCoach), you can begin another workout immediately if you want to keep exercising.

Afterwards, sync your workout to the website. miCoach will analyze your data and personalize your zones for heart rate and pace accordingly, as long as miCoach was able to collect that data. The updated zones will affect all of your future cardio workouts. Remember to sync again to make sure your miCoach device receives the new updates

If miCoach was unable to successfully record the data from your workout, you’ll need to retake the assessment. There are a number of reasons why data is not recorded properly, for instance, if you go too hard too soon, accelerate at the wrong times, or experience a technical error, such as lost GPS signal or heart rate. If this happens to you, re-read the instructions and follow the tips above before retaking the assessment.

Once you’ve used miCoach for two or three workouts, you should be able to tell how challenging the workouts are for you. If your workouts feel too hard or easy, you can fine-tune your zones manually. Under Settings, go to Cardio Training. Remember to save and sync any changes. Alternatively, you can retake the Assessment Workout.