One of the key ingredients of training well is heart rate, and more specifically heart rate zones. Heart rate zones can be really useful in targeting and understanding the effort type of every workout.
There is a lot of great information about heart rate based training on the web, so we won't get too much into that here. But here's a quick primer: running pace from warmup to sprinting hard usually aligns across different heart rate zones. Heart rate is the primary factor that drives performance, and each heart rate zone is a range with lower and upper threshold based on the percentage of the maximum heart rate. Maximum heart rate itself varies based on factors like age, genetics, fitness, and more. Heart rate zones are termed differently depending on the context/type of training. Generally speaking, there are 5 zones like warmup, maintain fitness, aerobic, anaerobic, and extreme. Each zone requires incrementally harder effort to maintain, and we can sustain working out for much longer at lower zones (lower heart rate range) vs higher zones.
When I started building this feature in Tempo, I knew it would require the ability to change the maximum heart rate, but I quickly realized that it needed to go further into personalization. Tempo's heart rate zones implementation is super configurable to match any athlete's general fitness profile as well as training goals. It enables following options,
- Edit upper and lower limit for each heart rate zone
- Edit name of each heart rate zone
- Multiple naming schemes for heart rate zones
- And of course, the ability to edit maximum heart rate
I am really glad how this turned out. I believe Tempo is the first iOS app for runners to provide such an extensive level of customization for heart rate based training.