On my short list of top conditioning training resources

books:


	• Total Heart Rate Training: Customize and Maximize Your Workout Using a Heart Rate Monitor Joe Friel Ulysses Press, 2006 - 144 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

complete and controversial

The author clearly has a wealth of knowledge and practical experience with heart rate monitors and heart rate monitor training. If you're looking for a "beginner's guide to using a heart rate monitor" this might be a little too complex for you.

However, if you are a serious athlete whose sport requires caridovascular strength and endurance, then this book is a great fit for you.

Very informative - almost too much

As with other Friel books I've read, there is an abundance of outstanding, detailed and reasoned information in this book. Probably more detail than any non-professional athlete needs, but it is an outstanding resource. I think it is well worth the money for someone who wants to understand the physiology and theory regarding workouts in order to maximize his/her fitness.

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On my short list of top conditioning training resources

This brief but densely packed book is a superb reference of conditioning principles for all serious athletes. The reason is that it combines a safe, practical way of quantifying your workouts with a superb overview of the dimensions of training.

Contrary to the impression you might get from the book's title, this book is not a recap of the usual information about heart rate training, it is rather a concise summary of the long experience of the author searching for both effective training strategies and a way of organizing those strategies into an overall system.

The highlights that impressed me:

1. How to realistically and accurately evaluate your own heart rate training zones. "Max heart rate" is risky and unneccessary to test and uselessly inaccurate to estimate from age. Friel's approach is to use lactate threshold and work back from there because it is much easier to determine and more meaningful to most training programs.

2. The physiological and functional effects of each training zone, related to perceived effort and types of training drill. This breakdown tells you exactly how each type of training affects your basic athletic abilities and gives you examples of drills for each zone.

3. An easily understood adaptation of Bompa's system for relating basic athletic abilities (endurance, force, speed-skill) to advanced abilities (muscular endurance, anaerobic endurance, power).

4. Practical suggestions for determining what sorts of training you need to support activity of different durations.

The book focuses primarily on training for endurance sports, but its quantitative approach to training will help anyone in any athletic activity to systematize and improve their own program.

Note that the focus in this book is on the performance abilities common to all physical activities. There is no coverage of skill aquisition, flexibility, mobility, stability, or the functional approach to sports. The training concepts in this book in general assume that you already have the basic functional ability to perform in your given sport. I would say that this fact, more than any complexity or difficulty of the book, makes this a somewhat advanced resource. If you are a novice athlete, you would not want to just jump into the sorts of training program suggested here. You would want to first determine the basic stability and mobility requirements for your sport and be sure you understand and meet those before you go off doing different kinds of intervals and steady state workouts.

This book is a superb mixture of exercise science and the author's long practical experience with athletic training. I highly recommend it to help any thinking coach or athlete better plan their conditioning workouts.

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Total heart review

It's an excellent acquisition for people who like measuring their fitness. Sometimes the book seems to be a little complicated but you can after a second lecture you will find that is no so complicated

reviews: page 1, 2

Total Heart Rate Training shows anyone participating in aerobic sports, from novice to expert, how to increase the effectiveness of his or her workout. It's like having a personal trainer guide the reader step-by-step during exercise. By following the author's carefully constructed program and utilizing a heart rate monitor, readers can coach themselves ? knowing when to push harder and when to back off. This guide teaches readers how to use the latest tools, including training analysis software and new high-tech intensity measuring devices, for precise training that practically guarantees success while minimizing the chance of injury. The author also makes it easy to use new gizmos such as power meters and GPS units that allow readers to compare the body's input, as measured by heart rate, with output. Section for novices show how to use a heart rate monitor for the first time while chapters aimed at experienced athletes describe how to gain that extra competitive edge thanks to heart rate training.

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