Fit To Race With Coach Tyler - Training And Racing Heart Rate
Fit to Race with coach Tyler is presented by : Maasto Fitness
Together, Coach Tyler and Carly hold dozens wins in motorsports and triathlon, multiple degrees and a master’s in Exercise Science, and have both been coaching athletes for nearly 10 years. Together we’ve combined our passion for motocross with our knowledge and expertise in fitness, anatomy and physiology to craft the perfect roadmap for riders to build fitness and endurance to move up in their class.
If you’re ready, we’ve got the roadmap for you!
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Training And Racing Heart Rate
There is nothing like racing a dirt bike. No other sport requires such a high level of fitness while controlling a motorized machine over all types of terrain at high speeds. On top of this already physically demanding relationship between humans and machines, decisions must be made at a rate faster than those who have never experienced the feeling can relate. No matter what type of racing you do, from races lasting minutes to those racing hours - the physical and mental sides are huge.
I am going to focus on the physical side and discuss how important heart rate training is for racing. Having been an endurance coach for a decade now, working with all types of endurance racers remotely (dirt bikers, runners, triathletes, and mountain bikers to be more specific) I have always seen a huge correlation between the endurance and skill it takes to race a dirt bike and race a mountain bike. Both of these sports require working with a machine and maintaining a high heart rate for a successful day.
So how does one successfully and safely maintain a high heart rate for any distance of racing?
By training the body!
There are other factors when considering heart race such as hydration, nutrition, and rest, yet we ultimately can’t ask our body to do what it has never done before and expect success. This is where the training of a mountain biker enters the dirt bike world. For mountain bikers to give themselves the best-prepared body for race day they spend much of their time training in specific intensity zones on their bike. The training metric that crosses over the best to dirt bike racing is heart rate zones. These zones are specific to every racer and through some basic (yet tough) threshold testing, training zones are established for training off the dirt bike. Once training zones are implemented into a training plan a racer's fitness will accelerate at a level that random training could never reach.
Zone: | Percent Of Threshold HR: | How It Feels: |
Z1 | 50%-64% | Can speak full sentences with ease. |
Z2 | 65-84% |