Heart rate and zones: how to read them
Where heart rate comes from, what the zones mean, and why you should fill in your date of birth.
If a ride was recorded with a watch, the ride card gets a “Heart rate” block: the ride’s average and maximum, a time bar by zone, and a “Heart rate” mode on the map — the track is colored by zone, and you immediately see which section was hard.
Heart rate is stored only with your separate consent — it is health data. The app asks when you link a watch (or when you enter the “Garmin watch” screen, if the watch was linked earlier) and on the first file import; you can enable or withdraw it in “Settings → Consents and documents” and on the “Garmin watch” screen. Without consent, position, speed, and elevation are recorded as usual, while heart rate is discarded before it is even saved — such a ride’s card shows a “Heart rate not stored” note with an “Allow” button. An already recorded ride can be supplemented with heart rate by importing a file from Garmin Connect; when consent is withdrawn, stored readings are deleted from rides and breakdowns. Only you see your heart rate.
Where heart rate comes from:
- A Garmin watch with EF Live installed — the wrist sensor or a chest strap. The strap is more accurate: a wrist optical sensor lies under vibration, and enduro is nothing but vibration.
- A file import — GPX or TCX from another service, if heart rate is recorded in it.
- The phone doesn’t measure heart rate. But you can record with both at once: watch on the wrist, phone in the pocket. The app assembles the ride from the best pieces: the phone’s track where it recorded densely, the watch’s stretch where the phone went quiet, heart rate and elevation always from the watch. In the log it will be one ride.
Four zones are calculated as a percentage of your maximum heart rate. The same color is used in the zone bar, on the elevation profile, and on the track on the map:
- Warm-up, up to 60% — leaving camp, a transfer along a dirt road.
- Easy, 60–70% — a calm pace, breathing steady.
- Working, 70–80% — the pace most of the ride happens at.
- Hard, above 80% — technical sections, climbs, wrestling the bike, and short spikes like storming a hill.
How to read it. In enduro, heart rate is never flat: the normal picture is a “saw”, where transfers run in the easy zone and technical riding throws you into the hard one. It’s more useful to compare rides with each other: if on a familiar route you spent noticeably more time in the hard zones than usual — that’s about heat, fatigue, dehydration, or tension in your arms, not about the route getting harder. This is an observation, not medical advice.
Where your maximum comes from. We calculate it with the “220 minus age” formula — which needs your date of birth in the profile. Without it, zones are calculated from the ride’s own maximum, and the block header says “zones from the ride’s maximum”: such zones show the distribution within the ride, but you can’t compare them between rides.
Who sees your heart rate. Only you, in your own ride card. Heart rate is not shown on an event’s live map — not to other participants, not to the organizer. Heart rate is health data, so consent to transmit it is taken separately, when the watch is linked; you can withdraw it by unlinking the device in “Settings → Devices”.