These names describe this guide’s five-zone convention. Thresholds, effort and useful session duration vary with your zone system, sport and individual testing.
A middle band does not locate a physiological threshold
The app's five-zone convention places Zone 3 at 70–80% of maximum heart rate, or 70–80% of reserve added to resting heart rate. Tempo is a descriptive name for this band. Different coaching systems use the term differently, and a fixed percentage does not prove where the effort lies relative to your thresholds.
The practical distinction is intention: a steady segment chosen for a specific goal is different from an easy session that gradually becomes harder because you chase pace. Both may create orange chart segments, but the chart alone cannot explain why the work was there.
Calling all middle-intensity work wasted ignores its purpose and context. Pyramidal training includes more work between thresholds than above the second threshold, while polarized training reverses those smaller shares. Both organize most training at lower intensity; neither pattern makes a universal moral judgment about tempo.
Research comparisons also depend on the outcome. A 2024 synthesis found a polarized advantage for peak oxygen uptake but no clear pooled superiority in several other endurance outcomes. A claim that every minute of tempo harms progress goes beyond that evidence.
A planned tempo segment might be used to practice maintaining output, learn pacing, or become familiar with a sustained effort relevant to an event. Write that purpose down. It makes later review more useful than treating an entire band as either essential or forbidden.
Set the target using the metric appropriate to the activity and the segment. Cycling power, running pace and heart rate describe different things; matching their zone numbers does not establish matching physiology. On hills or in wind, a pace target can produce a different effort from the same pace on a sheltered flat route.
Identify which part of the session is the deliberate steady work.
Record whether the effort stayed controlled or became harder than intended.
Keep the easier parts easy enough to preserve the session's structure.
Five-zone Zone 3 is not three-zone Zone 3
In the commonly used threshold-based three-zone model, Zone 3 is above the second threshold. In this five-zone convention, Zone 3 is the middle percentage band. The identical number therefore names different concepts.
When reading an intensity-distribution study, keep its original definitions. Grouping app Zones 1–2 as easy, Zone 3 as middle, and Zones 4–5 as hard can summarize a chart, but it does not reconstruct a study's threshold-based distribution without knowing where the thresholds fall.
Look for whether tempo was concentrated in sessions you deliberately chose or appeared throughout days meant to be easy. Then consider the whole week: total duration, long outings, other hard work and how repeatable the routine felt. A percentage readout does not diagnose fatigue or establish the right next workout.
The training-balance tool groups five-zone minutes using a planning reference. Read it as a way to describe the week and prompt a closer look. Its reference values are heuristics, not a study-derived optimum or a physiological assessment.
Sources and further reading
The examples in this guide illustrate training concepts. Percentage bands and planning heuristics are identified as conventions; they do not measure your individual thresholds. The research library describes study populations, methods, outcomes, and limitations.
Oliveira, Boppre and Fonseca · 2024 · Systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled training interventions; searches through October 2022.
Practical interpretation: Assess the outcome you want to improve. A VO2peak advantage does not establish a universally superior race plan or a mandatory 80/20 split.
Limits: Interventions and comparators differed, participants were predominantly male, and study durations were generally short. Publication year does not mean the search included 2024 studies.
Filipas, Bonato, Gallo and Codella · 2022 · Four-group randomized trial over 16 weeks, comparing fixed distributions and changes between them.
Practical interpretation: The distribution can change across a season. Treat periodization as part of the comparison rather than asking only which single pattern wins.
Limits: Most significant changes were below the smallest detectable change; the relative VO2peak trend was largely attributed to weight variation. The trained male sample limits transfer to other runners.
Jamnick, Pettitt, Granata, Pyne and Bishop · 2020 · Critical review of measurement methods and their relationship to exercise-intensity domains.
Practical interpretation: Name the method and measurement. Do not treat LT2, a fixed lactate value, FTP and critical power as automatically equivalent.
Limits: Method validity for acute responses does not itself establish which prescription produces the best long-term training adaptation.
Seiler and Kjerland · 2006 · Observational training analysis using three ventilatory-threshold zones, heart rate, session effort and lactate measurements.
Practical interpretation: State whether a distribution counts sessions or time, and whether zones mean a three- or five-zone system.
Limits: Small, selected male athlete sample without a randomized comparator. Describing successful athletes' training cannot establish the optimum for all exercisers.
Meyer, Gabriel and Kindermann · 1999 · Incremental cycling-test analysis comparing fixed percentages with individual anaerobic threshold.
Practical interpretation: A percentage band is a starting convention. Its boundaries should not be presented as individually verified physiological landmarks.
Limits: Specific male athlete sample and threshold definition. It did not test whether a percentage-based training plan could still be useful.
