Ross Tucker on heart rate, using it properly means using it less

Ross Tucker has weighed in on the heart rate argument, and his answer is that the better you understand the metric, the less you use it.

Responding to the claim that heart rate is the most overrated thing in running, Tucker wrote that proper use "almost always involves using it less rigidly, less often, less prescriptively and with other metrics given more priority." He added that understanding heart rate effectively diminishes its value.

That lines up with where this started. Brady Holmer named heart rate as the most overrated thing in running, with the follow-up "Yeah, I said it," in a post we covered earlier. Since then the names backing him up have stacked up.

Bitter goes after the strawman

Zach Bitter's contribution was to clean up what the skeptics are actually saying. He argues heart rate purists build a strawman, treating "it is a poor guide on race day" as if it meant "it is useless."

"Nobody is arguing heart rate is useless, or not an option/tool to be used in training," Bitter wrote. "It's just not nearly as valuable as some would like you to think for guiding workouts and races."

Zach Bitter

@zbitter

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Nobody is arguing heart rate is useless, or not an option/tool to be used in training.

So the position on the table is not throw your strap away. It is stop letting a number that drifts with heat, sleep, caffeine and fatigue decide what your session looks like, and stop racing to it.

Fitzgerald is enjoying this

Coach Jason Fitzgerald mostly finds the whole thing funny. He framed the debate as elite-level coaches, high level marathoners, national champs and PhDs on one side, and on the other, in his words, a hybrid athlete with a cartoon avatar.

That is the shape of the argument now. The people pushing back on heart rate zones are the ones who coach and study athletes for a living, and they keep saying some version of the same thing. Steve Magness has already said almost no elite coach prescribes heart rate zones, which we covered earlier.

What it actually means for your training. None of these people said to stop wearing a watch. They said heart rate is a background check on effort, not the thing that tells you how fast to run your intervals or your marathon.

Ross Tucker

@Scienceofsport

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Proper use of HR means using it less, and with more nuance.

Jason Fitzgerald

@JasonFitz1

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One one side, you have elite-level coaches/high level marathoners/national champs/PhD's.... and on the other, you have a hybrid athlete who has a cartoon as his avatar