Zones
5
From recovery through to VO₂max, as a share of your maximum heart rate.
Feature
Training zones
Most amateur training weeks are middle-heavy: too hard to recover from, too easy to adapt to. You cannot fix that until you can see it.
Training zones reads the heart rate recorded through every workout in your week and reports the minutes spent in each of the five zones, the easy / moderate / hard split, and a verdict on the shape: polarized, middle-heavy, or too much hard work. It also tracks zone 2 base work against a weekly target of 150 minutes. Zones are built from your highest recorded heart rate where that exceeds the age-based estimate.
Target shape
~80 / 20
Roughly 80 % of time easy, most of the rest genuinely hard, little in between.
Zone 2 floor
150 min/week
A widely used weekly base target, consistent with public activity guidance.
The middle-heavy week
The most common failure pattern in amateur endurance training is a week where every session lands at a moderate intensity. It feels productive. It is tiring, which reads as effort well spent.
The problem is that this intensity is badly placed on both counts. It is hard enough to accumulate fatigue and compromise the genuinely hard sessions later in the week. It is not hard enough to drive the adaptations those sessions exist to produce. You pay most of the recovery cost of hard training and collect a fraction of the benefit.
Almost nobody plans this. It emerges from easy days drifting slightly too hard, week after week. It is invisible without measurement, which is the entire point of this screen.
How the verdict is decided
- Polarized. At least 70 % of your recorded time is easy, and the hard work is genuinely hard. This is the shape that builds an aerobic base without burying recovery.
- Middle-heavy. More than a third of your time sits in zone 3. Push the easy days easier and the hard days harder.
- Too much hard work. More than a third at threshold or above. A fast route to flat HRV and stalled progress.
- Not enough data. Under 45 minutes recorded. Apex Health: Recovery Coach says so rather than judging a week it cannot see.
Each week is compared with the one before, so you can see whether a deliberate change actually landed.
Where the zone boundaries come from
Zones are percentage bands of your maximum heart rate: zone 1 below 60 %, zone 2 from 60 to 70, and so on. The maximum itself is the harder problem.
Apex Health: Recovery Coach uses the higher of two figures: the age-based estimate, or the highest heart rate actually recorded in your Health data over the last six months. Trained people routinely exceed the formula, and an observed maximum beats a predicted one. The screen states which it used, so you know whether your zones rest on a measurement or an estimate.
You can compute the same bands yourself with our free zone calculator.
Common questions
Why is my zone 2 time lower than I expected?
Two common reasons. First, if your maximum heart rate is estimated rather than measured, the band may sit in the wrong place; check it against the talk test. Second, and more often, easy sessions genuinely drift into zone 3 without feeling hard, particularly on hills, in heat, or when dehydrated. That drift is exactly what this screen exists to surface.
Does strength training count?
It is included, since Apex Health: Recovery Coach reads heart rate through every recorded workout, but it tends to land in zones 1 and 2 with occasional spikes, which is expected and not a sign of good aerobic work. The zone distribution is most meaningful for cardio training; read it alongside Strength Load for lifting.
What if I do not record workouts on my watch?
Then there is no heart rate series to analyse and this screen will be empty. Zone distribution depends entirely on heart rate sampled through a recorded session, so it requires an Apple Watch, or another device that writes workout heart rate data to Apple Health.
Wake up to a verdict, not a spreadsheet.
Apex Health: Recovery Coach turns the Apple Health data you already generate into one clear decision each morning. Free, private, and entirely on your device.
Apex Health: Recovery Coach provides general wellness and fitness information computed from your own data. It is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition. Always consult a qualified professional for medical concerns.