Beats Per Purpose: Back to the Basics of Heart Rate, in Practice

Martin Buscheid, high-performance lead at Aspetar Sports Medicine Hospital, shows performance staff in football and other team sports how to use heart rate for two separate jobs: measuring what a session costs and tracking how fitness responds over weeks.

Martin Buscheid is high-performance lead at Aspetar Sports Medicine Hospital. Talking with Firstbeat exercise physiologist Tina Hoffman, he splits heart rate monitoring into load, measured during the session, and response, the change in fitness over weeks. He covers how many minutes in the high zone a player needs each week and how a 4-minute submaximal run tracks fitness. He shows data from Aspire and PSG and an analysis of close to 1,000 anonymized microcycles from male European football. He has also used the test at Lille, Lyon and Aspetar. The webinar runs about 47 minutes and was recorded on 3 Nov 2026.

What you will learn

• Why a measured max heart rate, not 220 minus age, has to come before any zone or training impulse (TRIMP) number
• Why match heart rate is the wrong target for training, and where the 30-minute weekly high-zone dose comes fro
• How to run a 4-minute submaximal run at 12 km/h and read heart rate in its last minute
• How a 4% drop in heart rate on that run relates to 0.5 km/h of maximal aerobic speed, and why 5–6% is the change to act on
• How to find the weekly dose each player needs, from 15–20 minutes to 50

Practical examples from the recording

1. The 4-minute submaximal run. At PSG in 2014 the warm-up was a 4-minute run around the pitch at 12 km/h, always at the same pace, with heart rate read in the last minute. With young players at Aspire, heart rate on the run fell by 10 beats, or 10%, a few weeks into preseason. Buscheid used to add heart rate recovery after the run, then dropped it: across 15 years of data it never told him more than exercise heart rate, and it kept players standing for another 3–4 minutes.

2. Turning the drop into a number the coach understands. Telling a coach that heart rate dropped 4% gets a “so what”. Buscheid links the change to maximal aerobic speed (MAS) instead. On average, a 4% drop in exercise heart rate on the test goes with a 0.5 km/h gain in MAS, and an 8% drop with 1 km/h. A change of more than 4–5% is some signal but still close to the noise. Above 5–6% he reads it as a clear fitness improvement, and that is where he starts to act.

3. The weekly high-zone dose. For the same work, heart rate in a match runs 5 or 10% higher than in training, so copying match heart rate into training does not work. Meta-analyses point to one or two HIIT sessions a week, or 10–20 minutes in the high zones, and dose-response work puts the broad average at around 30 minutes a week. In close to 1,000 microcycles from male European football, starters and non-starters both spent about 35 minutes a week in the high zones in training. Starters added a match median close to an hour, and little replaced that for non-starters. His conclusion: substitutes need metabolic compensation too.

4. From 30 minutes to each player’s dose. With a few training blocks of time-in-zone data and a submax test before and after each, Buscheid draws a regression for every player. In his example some held fitness on 15–20 minutes a week; others needed 40, 45 or 50. He keeps match and training minutes apart, as AZ Alkmaar sports scientist Denis Noor does, and gives training minutes more weight. Session targets follow, for example 30 minutes on matchday minus 3, so the weekly dose is in place before the lighter days.

Questions answered in the Q&A

Should the high-intensity zone be set at a % of max heart rate or at a threshold? Use VT2 or the lactate threshold if you can test for it. Fixed cut-offs of 80, 85 or 90 %HRmax are broad but a reasonable start when there is no time for individual testing.

How do you correct submaximal test heart rate for temperature? Adjust heart rate by about 1% for every 10-degree difference. A 30-degree difference means heart rate at least 3% higher from heat alone, so take that off before comparing.

What if the coach won’t give up 4 minutes for a run? Use a standardized passing drill repeated for 4 minutes and track a ratio of work done, from GPS, to heart rate response, as time in zone or TRIMP. At PSG this tracked improving fitness from early July to early September.

How should a substitute’s missed match minutes be compensated? Cover the metabolic side, not only high-speed running and sprints. Players need their 20–30 minutes a week in the high zones, so Buscheid suggests about 10–12 minutes in the zone, roughly a HIIT session.

Where does the 30-minute weekly dose come from? From a meta-analysis of 12 dose-response studies. Their average regression line shows fitness dropping below about 30 minutes a week. Treat it as a starting point.

Who this webinar is for

Heads of performance, sports scientists and S&C coaches at professional clubs and NCAA Division I programmes who collect heart rate and want to plan the weekly high-zone dose, test fitness without losing training time, and keep non-starters fit.