Heart Rate Training

When you are ready to take training and performance to the next level, turn to Heart Rate Training, and achieve your personal best.

If you are serious about fitness, health, and performance, then Heart Rate Training, Second Edition, is for you. With a myriad of affordable smartphone apps and wearable devices enabling you to track your body’s response to activity, it’s never been easier to use heart rate monitoring to customize your training—and this guide will show you how!

In Heart Rate Training, Second Edition, authors Roy Benson and Declan Connolly combine decades of coaching experience, scientific research, and practical knowledge to help you understand the best way to make your heart rate monitor work for you. They will show you how to get reliable data from your device, dispel myths surrounding heart rate monitors, and make it easy for you to calculate your ideal target heart rate. Then you’ll learn how to customize your training by varying the intensity, duration, frequency, and mode of your exercise sessions as you work toward improving endurance, stamina, economy, and speed.

Information on heart rate variability (HRV) training further prepares you to individualize your training plan based on your personal goals. As a bonus, sample exercise programs will guide you in manipulating training components to design long-term training plans for walking, running, cycling, swimming, triathlons, rowing, cross-country skiing, and team sports.

Earn continuing education credits/units! A continuing education exam that uses this book is also available. It may be purchased separately or as part of a package that includes both the book and exam.

Roy T. Benson, MPE, CFI, is an exercise scientist and distance-running coach. He ran competitively for 58 years and coached professionally for 56 years for military, club, university, and high school teams, including 10 years at the University of Florida. From 1993 to 2008, his boys’ and girls’ cross country teams at Marist High School in Atlanta, Georgia, won a total of 16 state championships, and his cross country and track runners won 21 individual state titles.

Benson was the owner and president of Running Ltd., a company that operated Nike-sponsored summer camps for both adult and high school runners since 1973. He sold the camps to US Sports Camps when he retired in 2014.

Benson has used his expertise in heart rate training as a consultant for both Polar and Nike, and he has written three books about effort-based training for runners. For over 25 years he was a special contributor to Running Times magazine and was a contributing editor for Running Journal magazine. His booklet Precision Running, published by Polar Electro, has sold over 200,000 copies and has been translated into seven languages.

Benson and his wife, Betty, live on Amelia Island, Florida, where he is a volunteer cross country coach at Fernandina Beach High School.

Dr. Declan Connolly, FACSM, CSCS, was a professor and exercise physiologist at the University of Vermont, where he was also the director of the Human Performance Laboratory. He was a consultant for numerous sports organizations, including the World Rugby Union Network, National Hockey League, National Football League, U.S. Rowing, and U.S. Skiing. He also served as a consultant to the International Olympic Committee on several occasions.

In addition to more than 300 publications in scientific journals, Connolly's work was widely quoted in the popular media, including stories in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, London Times, Runner’s World, Prevention, Health, and Self. His work appeared on more than 24,000 websites and has been the subject of news stories on Fox, BBC, CBS, and numerous other TV and radio networks.

Connolly was a lifelong exerciser and athlete, from several national cycling championships as a schoolboy in his native Ireland to triathlons and Ironman competitions. Connolly lived in Burlington, Vermont, with his wife and five children until his passing in 2020.