Zone training articles

A 2026 study gave 288,000 people in Finland and Norway a genetic score for fitness, calculated from over 900,000 DNA variants. It explained only 0.2% of measured fitness and barely predicted disease, while people who were actually fit were healthier whatever their genes said.

One zone point is one minute of easy training effort. Harder minutes earn more, at a rate that rises with your heart rate, and nothing below half your heart rate reserve earns anything. The scale, the reason for it, and what a week’s total is worth.

What is your maximum heart rate? A calculator for the three most-used age-based formulas, what each was actually derived from, and how far off any of them can be for you. Then how to measure your real one instead.

Orangetheory has a cliff, Peloton has a cap, Whoop has a logarithm and Apple has a flat rate. A tour of how fitness apps decide what a minute of effort earns you, and why ZonePoints scores on a straight line.

Why training time starts late even though the work started on time, why staying in the zone gets easier as a session goes on, and why the cool-down gives the missing minutes back.

Apple, Garmin, Polar, Fitbit, Whoop, Strava and the ACSM all draw the zones differently and score them differently. A tour of the disagreement, and why ZonePoints picked a straight line.

Your heart rate runs lower in the morning, so the same work earns fewer zone points. What the research says about training time, and whether coffee inflates your score.

The Fitbit Air has no screen, so you see its live heart rate on your phone: turn on Share heart rate in Google Health and any Bluetooth heart rate app shows it. Why it then vanishes between workouts, and three ways to keep it: Always visible, Health Connect, or a chest strap.

How to calculate Orangetheory Splat Points (84% HRmax / Zone 4) at home with any Bluetooth chest strap.

How to get real-time headphone audio and vibration zone alerts on Android with a Polar H10 chest strap.

Heat, hills, sleep and stress all change how hard a workout feels. Here’s why measuring effort is fairer than measuring speed.

The easy pace everyone’s talking about, what zone 2 actually is, and where it fits alongside hard efforts.

Can two workouts a week really make you fit? The science says yes, if you make the effort count.