Have you experienced it yourself before? The ecstatic feeling of euphoria following a good run, and feeling light as a feather during the last quarter of your run? What if you could recreate this feeling more reliably? For that we need to ensure to provide our body with enough of a challenge. But what is the ideal runner’s high intensity? Let’s discuss the importance of intensity and how to properly structure our workouts.
The Importance of Sufficient Intensity to Achieve the Runner’s High
Exercise intensity, in its raw form, is the subjective experience of how difficult an activity feels as you are performing it. The more energy you expend over a given period of time, the greater your exercise intensity. Exposing your body to exercise intensities greater than what you are used to poses a challenge to your body.
And your primal brain is alarmed when you are being challenged. After all, it wants to provide you with the resources that allow you to survive for as long as you can! Hence, it quickly initiates adaptive processes that allow you to overcome this challenge in the future.
As a thank you for exposing a part of your weakness and trying to increase your survival, your body releases happy hormones. So, the better you are able to control your exercise intensity (more about this later), the faster you will be able to reach your pot of gold at the end of the field.
The reason why greater exercise intensities do not feel pleasant to us is because our bodies are designed to only use the necessary resources to complete a task and to conserve as much energy as possible. Our primal brain believes that resources are still scarce! Hence, using more energy than required for a task would not make much sense.
The Effects of High Intensity on Your Body
With higher levels of exercise intensity, you fatigue your muscles and cardiovascular system more rapidly. This allows for positive adaptations once you recover from your workouts. You tax your body significantly more than with higher exercise intensities. A prime benefit of this is that it allows us to significantly shorten our workouts, make them easier to adhere to and provide greater bang for our buck.
Additionally, muscle cells will need more time to recover following high intensity workouts, leading to an increased consumption of bodily calories by your cells (to create more energy) after you have stopped exercising. This can help reduce your body fat percentage, improve your overall body composition, and keep your reward system turned on for longer.
Accurately Judging Your Exercise Intensity
Before we go into the how-to on structuring our exercise intensity to facilitate the exercise high experience, we need to know how we can accurately and reliably judge our intensity at any point throughout our workout. Let us go over two useful methods that you can use to judge your exercise intensity.
1. The Talk Test
The talk test is a great tool that you can use to classify your current level of exercise intensity. It assumes that there is a linear relationship between the rate of your breathing and your current exercise intensity (i.e. the harder you work, the greater your breathing frequency will be). Despite not being the most accurate test, it is an easy and reliable method of judging your exercise intensity. Use the classifications below to guide your intensity.
- Light intensity = There is no significant change in breathing rate. You should be able to hold a conversation without having to take breaks to catch your breath.
- Moderate intensity = There is a slight change in breathing rate. You may be breathing a little faster and your speech may be affected slightly. You should, however, be able to keep a conversation uninterrupted.
- Hard intensity = Once the intensity turns hard, you will start breathing more heavily. You will notice that it starts to become more difficult to hold an uninterrupted conversation.
- Vigorous intensity = You have significant difficulties speaking more than 1-2 sentences without having to take a break to catch your breath.
- Maximum intensity = You will be unable to speak more than one or two words at a time without catching your breath.
Although the talk test can provide you with reliable information regarding your exercise intensity at the moment, did you know that your body already has a built-in system to monitor your exercise intensity? Your heart.
2. Monitoring Your Heart Rate
Monitoring your heart rate is the most reliable way to judge your exercise intensity. This is because your heart rate will increase proportionally to the increase in exercise intensity (at least until it reaches ~80% of its maximum). Adding this to the fact that it is a comparably easy physiological sign to monitor through widely available heart rate monitors (e.g. smartwatches, chest straps, etc.), we can use it to reliably monitor exercise intensity.
In the right column within the table below you can see how your heart rate relates to ratings of perceived exertion (left), as well as the talk test. For simplicity sake, I recommend that you start judging your exercise intensity using the talk test and then move on to monitoring your heart rate.
Rating | Talk Test | Heart Rate Equivalent (~) |
1 | Light | 60-73 bpm |
2 | 73-86 bpm | |
3 | Moderate | 86-99 bpm |
4 | 99-112 bpm | |
5 | Hard | 112-125 bpm |
6 | 125-138 bpm | |
7 | Vigorous | 138-151 bpm |
8 | 151-164 bpm | |
9 | Maximum | 164-177 bpm |
10 | 177-190+ bpm |
The Runner’s High Intensity Formula
So, now that you know how to calculate your exercise intensity, I bet you want to know about the ideal intensity in order to experience the most intense Runner’s High. What is the right runner’s high intensity? As a rule of thumb, you should aim to devote the first quarter of your workout time to performing exercise at moderate intensity, the next two quarters at hard to vigorous intensity, and the last quarter at a mixture of light-to-vigorous intensity. Use the equation and table below for your reference.
Ideal Intensity ¼ moderate intensity + ½ hard to vigorous intensity + ¼ light–vigorous intensity |
First Quarter
Here, we slowly start to warm up our bodily systems and prepare ourselves for greater levels of intensity. In the first quarter, you should stay within the moderate intensity zone (rating of perceived exertion = 3-4/10; talk test = moderate; heart rate range 86-112 bpm). This section should not feel too strenuous on your body. If your workout is 20 minutes in length, approximately spend your first five minutes in this intensity range.
Second and Third Quarter
This is the key section of your workout. After you finish the first quarter of your workout, slowly increase your exercise intensity to hard and vigorous (rating of perceived exertion = 5-8; talk test = hard – vigorous; heart rate range = 112-164 bpm). The section that will be most rewarding for you following your workout. If your workout is 20 minutes long, approximately spend 10 minutes in this intensity range.
Fourth Quarter
Congratulations. You are past the hardest part of our workout. In this last phase, you will want to slow down a bit and engage in activities ranging from light to vigorous (rating of perceived exertion = 1-2; talk test = light-vigorous; heart rate range = 73-164 bpm). By now, you should already start feeling the rush of happy hormones come on. If not, at least a feeling of calmness and relaxation, accompanied with the relief of mental or physical stress. In this phase, your heart rate is unlikely to come down to the “light” intensity range.
This is because your body is recovering from what you just put it through and is perfectly normal. If your workout is 20 minutes long, approximately spend your last five minutes in this intensity range. Considering that the variability in intensity is the greatest here, experiment to see if staying in the lower or upper half of your intensity ranges provides you with the greatest exercise high. This is how you can make your runner’s high last.
Conclusion
I hope now you are aware of the importance of proper exercise intensity during your runs. Did you know you could also enhance your runner’s high experience by properly timing your run? One important point I want to make is that your exercise intensity will change during your workout. An activity that you perform at moderate intensity initially may be classified as vigorous by the end of your workout.
Try your best to continuously judge the intensity of your workout until it becomes natural to you. Adjust your intensity as needed. You will get better at it over time as you gain experience. For more information on what you can do to maximize your runner’s high, check out my article on how to maximize the feel-good sensations of exercise.
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