You read that Wall Of Text?!!?
As we discussed a bit in the "Heart Rate Monitor" thread, there are some roughly-coincident heart rate "zones" available to guide us. Much like the Maffetone Running derived 180 minus Age formula for staying solidly aerobic dominant, they'll be close for most people most of the time which I say despite my recent experience indicating my wife and my daughter both have heart rates seemingly more closely related to field mice than any of these "zones". The "scare quote" quotation marks around the word "zones" is to reiterate the fact that all energy systems operate all the time, just to widely variable degrees. I am guessing that in the Maffetone running session there is a tiny bit of glycolysis going on, and there's lactic acid being produced, but it's far, far below the production that would overwhelm your ability to clear it. That's just for clarification: there is no "fat-burning aerobic zone". Okay, so we've decided to train at a higher intensity because the intermittent, repeated, very high force production nature of our sport require it or because we want to kick butt on our snatch test and be able to recover to kick it again during the Grad Workout. How do we visit this "alactic, glycolytic" training intensity wherein we produce significant lactic acid, but through repeated exposure become much better at processing it thereby keeping it from degrading performance? We can use heart rate as a proxy for intensity, backed-up by what we actually feel going on in our bodies.
I'm referencing a piece by Matt Reynolds, owner of Strong Gym in MO, called "Death By Prowler". It's available here: http://startingstrength.com/articles/death_by_prowler_reynolds.pdf
The programming late in the article is obviously specific to the Prowler, but earlier in the piece there's the best layman's description I've yet seen of cell energetics and what we're actually trying to accomplish with "conditioning" or "MetCons" and how to tune them to meet your goals. The various heart rate zones described therein would be widely applicable to your chosen activity, be it swings, hill sprints, crawling dragging a chain, rowing, whatever. Matt and the rest of the coaches over there clearly believe in the efficacy of sled pushes , but the principles are clearly applicable across them all.
For the record, I consider it somewhat bad form for me to have linked an article from another site, but I think cutting and pasting the content would have been even poorer form. I go kinda ballistic about protecting intellectual property and want to make sure authors get due credit and an accurate presentation of their material.