Good morning,
I have a question regarding the physical activity guidelines…
The guidelines suggest 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic activity, or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic activity.
I’d prefer to do 75 minutes of vigorous activity cardio on a Stair Stepper, as I’m able to achieve a higher heart rate with less perceived effort, compared to other cardio equipment (plus it’s half the time commitment).
The American Heart Association considers 70-85% of max heart rate as vigorous intensity.
I saw that your Max Heart Rate & Training Zone Calculator uses a different formula than 220 - age.
I was just wondering what intensity Barbell Medicine considers vigorous?
Also what zone would correlate with a vigorous intensity?
Thanks for your time.
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The nomenclature light, moderate, and vigorous make up the 3-zone model of exercise intensity. In this definition, light activity is < 3 METs , moderate is 3-5.9 METs, and vigorous is 6.0 METs or greater, where a MET refers to the amount of energy being used during the activity.
While we agree that these are reasonable targets, the MET-based intensity recommendations leave much to be desired. We prefer RPE and/or HR targets to generate the desired training stress.
In the 5-zone model, 50-60% (RPE 3-4) max HR would likely be light exercise (zone 1), 60-80% (RPE 4-6) moderate (zone 2), > 75-80% (>RPE 5-6) would be vigorous and include tempo work (zone 3), threshold work (zone 4), and vo2max work (Zone 5).
Our calculator uses the Tanaka equation, e.g. HRmax= 208 - 0.7(age).
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Thanks for the information, Jordan.
I read your article in the heart rate calculator, and here’s your recommendations:
In summary, we recommend that individuals perform at least 150-minutes of cardio per week, with the majority (80%) of it being zone 2, and 20% of it being a bit higher than that. For those new to performing conditioning, we’d recommend starting conservatively, with more zone 1 than zone 2 work to start and gradually working up over time.
So you’d recommend this over 75 minutes of only vigorous activity?
Thanks for your time.
I don’t think it really matters at that volume. If forced to choose however, I would pick the option that has the highest training load that can be tolerated.
75-minutes of vigorous intensity conditioning could be a really brisk walk and/or moderate jog. It could also be a ton of HIIT and SIT work, which is a much higher training load…though perhaps more than you can currently handle.
I’m making an assumption that if someone is asking about the guideline minimums, they haven’t been doing a ton of conditioning. For that reason I think more moderate intensity continuous training (MICT), e.g. steady state in zones 1 and 2 of the 5-zone model, would be well-tolerated and helpful for building cardiorespiratory fitness in the context of someone also wanting to do lots of resistance training.
In a perfect world, I’d have someone lifting 3-4x/wk and doing double the current guideline minimums for conditioning.
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