Heart rate debate lands on use it, just a lot less
Ross Tucker says proper use of heart rate means using it less rigidly, less often and with other metrics given more priority.
A week of running Twitter arguing about heart rate ended with the loudest voices in it agreeing more than the posts made it sound. Ross Tucker, posting as @scienceofsport, put the closing line on it. Proper use of heart rate, he says, means using it less rigidly, less often, less prescriptively, and with other metrics given more priority.
It started when Brady Holmer was asked what runners obsess over and answered with two words, heart rate, followed by "Yeah, I said it." That earlier post was the spark.
Bitter sharpens it
Zach Bitter went next, and went for the image people will remember. He compared heart rate as your primary performance guide to breast feeding, useful very early, something you need to be weaned off or you fall behind. His line about not wanting to be the ten year old still breast feeding did the numbers.
Heart rate as your primary performance guide is like breast feeding. It might be useful very early, but you need to be weaned off it
He also pushed back on how the argument gets framed. Bitter says heart rate purists build a strawman, treating anyone who calls heart rate a poor race day guide as if they think it is useless. Nobody is arguing that, he says. His actual claim is narrower, that heart rate is not nearly as valuable as some would like you to think for guiding workouts and races.
What it actually means
Read the three posts together and there is no call to bin the monitor. The disagreement is about who is in charge of the session. Tucker's framing is that understanding heart rate properly is what reduces how much you lean on it, which is a strange sentence until you have watched someone slow a tempo down because a wrist number drifted up on a hot day.
It also lines up with what Steve Magness said earlier in the week, when he argued almost no elite coach prescribes heart rate zones. The pile-on looked like a fight. It settled as a consensus.
Proper use of HR means using it less, and with more nuance.
Nobody is arguing heart rate is useless, or not an option/tool to be used in training.
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