Zone 2 training is one of the cool buzzwords in fitness industry social media circles at the moment and rightly so.
Utilising Zone 2 training properly will be beneficial for every single person with a heart beat and a body made up of cells (so everyone…)
If you want to have higher daily energy levels, you need Zone 2 training.
If you want to burn more fat on a daily basis, you need Zone 2 training.
If you want to live longer, you need Zone 2 training.
If you want to enjoy exercise and feel like you’re not hitting a wall early on, you need Zone 2 training.
If you want to improve sports performance, you need Zone 2 training. Yes, even if you’re a sprint based athlete! You will recover faster between intense bouts of effort, enabling you to get more into your training sessions and execute more sprint-based actions in a given period on the sports field.
If you want to avoid diabetes, you…get the picture!
However, all of this comes with some terms and conditions which you need to understand to avoid potential negative side effects.
Whether you are a beginner struggling for energy on a daily basis, or an athlete wanting to improve endurance, you’ll learn something from this article that you can use to your benefit!
WHAT IS ZONE 2 TRAINING?
Zone 2 refers to the heart rate zone that a person reaches when they exercise at what is best described as ‘conversational pace’. You know you’re doing some exercise, you’re starting to breathe harder than you do going about your day, but you’re still able to hold a conversation and keep doing so for an extended period.
This usually sits around 65-75% of your maximum heart rate, but to truly know your Zone 2, you need to have a metabolic test done.
Suggested zoning on heart rate watches and gadgets are always based on averages for your age, weight etc. rather than individual variances which can be significant or at least enough to affect accuracy in training, thus missing the details outlined below.
In metabolic terms, Zone 2 starts about 10 beats below where you burn the highest proportion of fat for fuel (against carbohydrates) and the crossover point where your body starts to prefer glucose/glycogen as fuel.
This happens because the intensity of the activity you’re doing becomes too difficult for what is usually described as the ‘aerobic’ system.
The aerobic system uses stored fat and incoming oxygen to create energy and whilst it can’t produce large amounts very quickly, it can keep producing it for a very long time.
At a certain intensity, your cells become unable to process oxygen and fat to create energy and so start to rely on the anaerobic system. This one primarily uses glucose in your blood stream and glycogen (glucose stored in your muscles). It can produce large amounts of energy but only for a limited period of time which is why you can’t run hard for very long.
(The truth is, we’re never fully ‘aerobic’ or ‘anaerobic’ but the terms help you visualise what’s happening.)
If you’re not sure where you’re at, we can perform a metabolic test based on breath analysis.
In a healthy person we would expect a 70/30 split between fat and carbohydrate utilisation at rest and an endurance athlete would likely be closer to 80/20 (at rest).
Numbers below 70/30 such as 60/40 would indicate metabolic health issues that need addressing.
WHY SHOULD I CARE IF I’M A BEGINNER AND JUST WANT TO LOSE WEIGHT?
The chances are that if you’re starting out on a fitness journey one or more of the following are present in your life:
- You lack energy in daily activities and routine things get you breathing hard
- As soon as you start to exercise, it becomes uncomfortably difficult within minutes
- You have metabolic issues such as high blood sugar (known or unknown)
You may have been told you have Type 2 diabetes which is where the cells in your body (that produce energy) have become insulin-resistant. This is common in people who have eaten a high carbohydrate diet for a long-time (standard for our times in the western world).
Insulin is a hormone that pushes blood sugar into your muscle cells for use in creating energy. However, if you keep flooding your bloodstream with glucose, eventually the cells get like you would if someone kept knocking on your front door…they start to ignore the knocking which leads to the consistently high blood sugar readings that your doctor has warned you about.
This can cause any number of issues particularly once you pass your 40th birthday!
If you’re at this point, you need to do two things as a major life priority.
First, reduce your carbohydrate intake, particularly simple and processed sugars.
Second, perform Zone 2 exercise sessions 2-3 x 30-60 minutes each week.
This will start to improve ‘metabolic flexibility’ which means your body is able to use fat for fuel at lower intensities as well as using carbohydrates for fuel at higher intensities. This is an absolutely crucial goal if you wish to live for as long as you can and not have the years you do live, affected by diabetic and other metabolic health issues.
The dietary and exercise aspects go hand-in-hand.
If you struggle to do any type of physical activity before it starts to feel really uncomfortable this means you are essentially zipping through Zone 2 and will feel a need to eat carbs all the time in order to function.
(You may also need to look at structured breathwork to help avoid firing into higher heart rate zones earlier than necessary)
It thus becomes a vicious circle of low mitochondrial density and efficiency, poor fat utilisation, demand for carbohydrates, over-eating, weight gain and medical issues as you age.
You’ll also likely hate exercise because you quickly move into using your anaerobic energy system which comes with more unpleasant side effects in terms of physical discomfort and metabolic waste products that make everything sore afterwards!
The transition to metabolic flexibility can be tough but can save your life and make it a much more pleasant experience, even if you have n desire to be an athlete!
I’M REALLY FIT SO DO I NEED THIS?
Sadly, fitness has developed a ‘Go Hard or Go Home’ mentality.
This shows a lack of understanding of how the cardiovascular and metabolic systems intertwine.
You can become very competent at short, high intensity workouts such as intervals, AMRAP’s, circuits etc but this only shows that you have good tolerance of the metabolic waste products produced by the anaerobic system. Continue for more than 10 minutes and you are likely to experience a rapid deterioration in performance.
Even if you only want to do HIIT workouts and challenges, improving your Zone 2 performance will allow for faster lactate clearance and faster recovery between sessions so it is still a crucial element of your training.
Aside from that, having a functioning cellular / metabolic system will ensure good health and longevity in training. If you’re sick or dead, you won’t be doing any useful training at all!
Finally, Zone 2 is the staple diet of endurance athletes for the simple and obvious reason that we want a system that can produce the energy we need for hours at a time. Your objective is to improve the bike power, running speed etc at which you can remain in Zone 2 rather than dipping Into glucose stores too early.
This topic needs more explanation which is beyond this introductory article.
PROBLEMS YOU MIGHT FACE
Having read this, you may well think you need to start doing as much Zone 2 training as possible.
Hold your horses because too much cardio brings its own downsides.
First, if you only perform Zone 2 work and ignore weight training because you just want to lose weight, you’ll find yourself heading down a dead end road. You’ll probably lose a good amount of fat (if your nutrition is on point as well) but you will likely also lose muscle mass.
Not only do you want muscle for a toned, defined, strong body, but for the purpose of metabolism, more muscle means more cells, more cells mean a bigger engine to fuel and more calories burned doing anything.
Second, if you perform too much Zone 2 work and no HIIT work, you can become so efficient that it becomes impossible to make further progress.
Again program design over a long period of different phases requires much more discussion and questioning about each individual so it’s not something I’m going to cover here.
Just know that choosing to only do Zone 2 steady state cardio won’t lead to the aesthetic improvements you likely want along with improved health.
Another potential problem is winging it and just ‘doing cardio’ for an hour.
Too many people go too hard in what should be an easy session and then are too tired to go hard in what should be the toughest session of the week.
Zone 2 is Zone 2, not slipping into Zone 3 just because you feel like you can or want to show off in the gym. It is imperative to stay in Zone 2 using a heart rate monitor otherwise the metabolic improvements we’ve discussed, won’t occur.
Finally, you must remember to keep monitoring things otherwise what is effective at first can become less effective as time goes on. Not because it’s not working but because it DID work and now a shift is required.
For instance, as a beginner, walking may well get you into Zone 2.
However, as you get fitter, that same walk might not get your heart rate out of Zone 1 and therefore you are no longer making progress.
The solution is to either start jogging, cycling, rowing, swimming etc where you can push the pace more or add weight to your walks with a weighted vest or weighted back pack.
Often referred to as ‘rucking’ you will experience approximately a 20 beats per minute increase from the same walk.
It will also challenge your strength and posture more which is rarely a bad thing.
I recommend 2-3 Zone 2 sessions per week for the average person / gym goer but if you’re a sports person or athlete of some kind we’ll need to put a bit more thought into how it fits with training and competition over a year so it doesn’t mess with other priorities.
This should be complemented with 2-3 non-negotiable weight training sessions and 1-2 x HIIT sessions depending on time availability.
