Cardio Pacing Table
Run/Bike/Row Efforts
It takes a while to really dial in and know the metrics of your paces. A common way to pace in endurance sports is to use metrics like heart rate, lactate levels, or watts to determine different power levels, but when mixing modalities, which we very commonly do, no one of these metrics can provide us the whole story, which is why we don’t hand out heart rate monitors to everyone. The pace we are looking for may come with different heart rates on different exercises, but will also highly depend on when we are performing the exercise in the workout. For example, an easy pace performed after a max effort sprint, may have a heart rate that correlates with a medium pace. Additionally, a max effort pace or a hard pace, as defined below, are relative to the time domain or distance prescribed, so will have different power outputs. All of this is to say, that you’ll learn how to dial in what your different paces feel like as you gain experience.
From the table, here are the general guides to our descriptors:
Pace Descriptors that are more about RPE and Strategy in the Moment
Max Effort Pace - This is an all out sprint. Let’s say the workout calls for 20sec Max Effort Air Bike. Regardless of what else we are doing in the workout, we are going to put the rest of the workout out of our mind and go as hard as we possibly can for that 20 second interval.
Hard Pace - This is the fastest, sustainable pace for the prescribed distance or time.
Max effort pace and hard pace is very similar, but there’s one important distinction, a max effort pace is more strategic and competitive as it is OK to change your pacing throughout the interval where as with the hard pace descriptor, you are trying to find the fastest pace you can maintain. For example, if there was a 1 minute Max Effort Air Bike, you may start at a higher pace, drop off a little bit in the middle, and then finish really hard. If it was instead a 1 minute Hard Pace, you’d be looking to hold a steady pace for which in the last 15 seconds you couldn’t go harder if you wanted to. The effort required between these two is similar.
These two pace descriptors, because of the many different time domains and distances prescribed with these descriptors, will not have a consistent wattage to use. The average wattage of a 20 second Hard Effort will be very different than a 5 minute Hard Effort.
Pace Descriptors that are more consistent, regardless of what workout or when.
Medium Pace - This is using the fastest, sustainable pace that you could maintain for 20 minutes to 1 hour. Surprisingly the pace that you could sustain for 1 hour is typically about 95% of the pace that you could sustain for 20 minutes. So, regardless of the amount of time prescribed, your pace will be long term sustainable.
Easy, Talkable Pace - This is using the fastest, sustainable pace that you could maintain for 2 hours or more. Again, this is likely faster than you think, but should put you in the mindset of a slow pace that you could keep doing long-term. We also call this pace talkable pace because you should be able to hold a conversation, but the other person should also be able to tell that your up to something. This is the pace we target for our Lactate Zone 2 training.
Very Easy - This is the pace we use for cool-downs and would be a pace that you could hold all day long. The muscle contractions are great for circulating blood, circulating lymphatic fluid, and also to recycle lactate, removing it from your bloodstream after a hard effort (described in the Lactate Zone 2 training article).
With these paces, you could dial in your average watts, average cadence, average row pace per 500m, average calories per hour, etc. For example, for an Easy, Talkable Pace, you may know that you row 2:25 / 500m pace or that you Air Bike at a 50 cadence, so when a workout calls for an easy pace, regardless of how you feel, you dial that pace in as best you can. As you get fitter, you’re very easy, easy, and medium paces will improve.
Our Recommendations for Tracking Paces:
Max Effort and Hard - We like to simply take notes whenever there is a workout we feel gave us valuable information. We like to know for various distances and time domains what our paces are. If we have in our notes that we can held an average cadence of 72 for 5 minutes, then we can guess what cadence to use for 3 minute effort, or, the next time we do a 5 minute workout, we could shoot for a cadence of 73.
Medium, Easy, Very Easy
Rower - We like tracking our 500m pace. As you row, the rowers’ monitor will provide you with a time and then “/ 500m”. For example 2:30 / 500m. This pace is constantly adjusted to represent your current pace as you row and represents how long it would take you to row 500m at that pace. Watts and Cals/Hr are directly correlated with 500m pace, so if we ever wanted to know what our number are in those units, we can simply pull up conversion charts.
Air Bike - There are no gears on an air bike, so we like tracking cadence as it will directly correlate with power. Watts is exactly correlated with cadence, so like the rower, we can always pull up a conversion chart if we want to know our wattage.
Run Scaling
In addition to prescribing paces, we’ll also prescribe distances in workouts for you to pace however you’d like. For a given run distance, we will also provide run scaling options. For example, you may see something like:
800m Run
*Run Scaling:
Sub 7:30 Best Mile: 800m Run
7:30 - 10:00 Best Mile: 600m Run
10:00+ Best Mile: 400m Run
Because we are trying to dial in exact stimuli from workouts, depending on your running fitness level, you’ll select a run distance that optimizes your workout. If you are on the border of a level, say you may be around a 7:30-8:00 best mile or maybe just unsure, you can always mix and match run distances. In the above example, you could run 700m. Or, more likely, if there are multiple run intervals in the workout, you could alternate running 600m and then 800m in the workout.
Now that you understand our cario references, if you want to get a better feel for how we customize the other parts of your workouts from selecting barbell weights, selecting dumbbell (DB) and kettlebell (KB) weights, what height box to use, and how to scale bodyweight exercises like pull-ups and push-ups, you can explore more through the buttons below: