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By varying the length of your sessions, changing the pace and allowing yourself sufficient recovery afterwards, you can get the most out of your training sessions. Caution is needed if you always train inside your comfort zone.

Anyone who follows a training plan automatically does many things right: exertion is applied at the appropriate intensity and for a sufficiently long duration, the sequence of training sessions makes sense and the individual training stimuli are well coordinated.

Those who train exclusively inside their comfort zone, however, tend – according to US sports scientist Stephen Seiler – not to train intensely enough to achieve performance improvements. At the same time, this pace is still too intense to fully benefit from endurance training and to recover adequately between sessions. This intensity range, which according to a study by the German Sport University Cologne corresponds to the comfort zone for over 70 per cent of athletes, lies between 82 and 86 per cent of the maximum heart rate. The scientist refers to this intensity as the ‘black hole’.

What does that mean for your training?

Training by feel is certainly not wrong. However, it is important to be aware that repeatedly covering the same route at the same pace may not be effective. Most people intuitively train in the moderately hard zone, but a balanced training plan should also include very easy and very intense sessions. Therefore, you should make your training as varied as possible and as specific as necessary:

• Vary both the training pace and duration of your weekly sessions.
• Train predominantly at a low intensity. Ideally, calculate your target zones based on your maximum heart rate and check your perceived effort using a heart-rate monitor.
• The aim should always be to complete 75–80 per cent of training sessions at low intensity and 20 per cent at high intensity (e.g. one intensive session out of four in total).
• Overall, only 10 per cent of your total training time should be intensive and 90 per cent extensive (e.g. 30 minutes out of a total of five hours).