Tempocontinuous work, one effort

Tempo means continuous, steady work at a single intensity for a set duration. Thirty minutes of running at a conversational pace. Twenty minutes on the rower just below hard. No rounds, no splits, no rest, no clock to beat. It is the plainest structure on this list and the only one where the absence of structure is the point.

There is a naming collision worth clearing up immediately, because it sends people to the wrong page. In strength training, tempo means the cadence of a single rep: three seconds down, one second paused, one second up. That is a set-level instruction about how you move, and it lives with the exercise. Here, tempo describes the shape of an entire piece of work. Two different things wearing the same word.

One number decides everything: the intensity you hold. Sitting in Zone 2, which is roughly conversational and for most people a heart rate somewhere in the 130s to low 150s, builds aerobic base. Sitting at threshold, RPE 7 to 8, just below the point where it turns hard, trains the pace you can sustain. Both are tempo work and they train different things, so the label on its own doesn't tell you which session you're doing.

The discipline is in staying put. Zone 2 done properly feels too easy for the first fifteen minutes and mildly annoying for the rest, and the failure mode is drifting up into a moderate no-man's-land that's too hard to be recovery and too easy to be a stimulus. Our own Zone 2 protocol carries the conversational test in its coach note, and the test is a real one: if you can't speak in short sentences, you've drifted.

Threshold work is the opposite discipline. The instruction on our twenty-minute threshold row is to find a split you can hold for the full twenty minutes and stay on it, and the temptation is always to start two seconds quicker than that and pay for it in the last five minutes.

Duration is the only lever you have, which is what makes tempo work so unglamorous. There is no clever way to make thirty minutes of Zone 2 take less than thirty minutes. That is also why it gets skipped, and why skipping it is the most common reason conditioning stalls.

Our Zone 2 steady run is thirty minutes of continuous running at a conversational pace, with a heart rate target in the 130 to 150 range. What that means for most people is a pace roughly ninety seconds per kilometre slower than they'd naturally choose, which feels wrong for the first ten minutes and requires deliberate restraint on any hill. The check is speech: you should be able to hold a normal sentence throughout, not gasp out three words. Two things usually go wrong. The first is drifting into the low 160s on a climb and staying there, which turns an easy run into a moderate one and quietly costs you the recovery the session was supposed to preserve. The second is treating the pace as a target to beat next week. The whole value of the session is that it doesn't get faster on purpose. It gets faster on its own, months later, at the same heart rate, and that is the only progress marker worth watching.

30 min continuous running at Zone 2, conversational, HR 130-150 bpm

Tempo runs as a single effort rather than a set of rounds, so the player counts down the prescribed duration and finishes itself at the end. There is no round to end, nothing to tap, and the display carries the intensity target instead of a round counter, because the intensity target is the only instruction that matters for the next thirty minutes.

On efforts of four minutes or longer you get a spoken halfway call. That is restricted to steady work and capped AMRAPs on purpose: structured protocols already announce every boundary, so a halfway marker there would be noise. It exists because a thirty-minute steady effort has no natural landmarks, and knowing you are at fifteen is genuinely useful for pacing.

Classification is stricter than it looks. Our parser will only read something as tempo when the description explicitly says continuous, steady state or tempo. A zone reference on its own isn't enough, because interval sessions cite zones too, and a prescription reading twenty minutes at Zone 4 to 5 is ambiguous rather than steady. Anything ambiguous gets held for review rather than guessed, which is why an unclear prescription won't silently run the wrong clock.

Build a plan and Fire Your Coach will schedule it, hold the prescription on the screen while you work, and record what actually happened, so next time the numbers start from what you really did.