No Pain...Lots of Gains?

1 Mar

Zone 2 Training in the High Frequency Training Model

You may have noticed an Instagram training phenomenon: People tend to post their heaviest lifts, their fastest interval movements, and their fastest running times. Who can blame them—It’s cultural, right? We celebrate the strongest, the fastest, and the most enduring, from kids’ sports, to the Olympics, to professional sports. And the path to greatness has been ingrained as a mantra in our subconscious from an early age: “No pain, no gain.” But if you scratch below the surface of elite athletes, and really take a look at their training, the majority of it (80%!) is at an easy pace, or a fairly light weight. It has to be. As we’ve discussed in previous posts, if you increase the frequency of training, you have to decrease the intensity—otherwise there will be sickness or injury. We preach daily movement and quality of movement. You should move often, with purpose and intention. But in order to do so, you need to lower your training intensity. The beauty of this approach is, that it applies to couch potatoes and elite athletes.

The best athletes in the world have an intensity distribution that looks something like this:

80% easy training (you can have a conversation)
10% moderate training (you can speak in short sentences)
10% hard training (congratulations! You’re in the pain cave!)

This is the distribution that we recommend for almost everybody. Most days are easy, with some hard sessions sprinkled in for good measure.

Spend most days building your aerobic engine, and once or twice a week, you can work really hard. Many call this approach “polarized training” because you don’t spend much time in the middle. This approach has yielded great results for the best endurance athletes, and we believe that this is the best training approach for most people. The 80% “easy training” is called Zone 2 training (approximately 65-70% of your maximum heart rate, or maximum lifting potential). We have been discussing Zone 2 training a lot lately, and we both came to it the hard way—first we broke ourselves not doing it, now we’re rebuilding ourselves by doing it.

Scott’s Zone 2 Story

I have always been a sprinter. I have never been a long-distance runner. You can pretty much lay that blueprint over my entire life—always short bursts of intensity, then collapse. After experiencing a heart attack at age 53, I was ready to try something new. So, I started running 5km at least three times a week—and I got faster and faster at it. Then I started noticing other people’s per/km paces, and they were going a lot faster than I was. I got trapped into the same old competitive hole I usually find myself in—and I was starting to feel exhausted. My wife asked me to go running with her one day, and I decided to do it. We usually don’t run together, because of my maniacal insistence on a faster pace. I decided to let go, and just run slow—my heart rate averaged about 130 bpm. We did this every day for a week—and I felt (strangely) great! It was giving me energy, not exhausting me. Of course, I had to tell Lennart about it, and he said, “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been telling you to do.” As usual, I had to be “tricked into” doing something in a different way. Then, as it happens, I started noticing more and more research, podcasts, and articles about Zone 2 training—and I excitedly delved into the scientific part of it—but more on that later.

Lennart’s Zone 2 Story

Running slow is hard for your ego. I’ve never been a good endurance athlete, and I’ve always attempted to use brute force to get through everything—mind over matter as they say.

What I’ve learned over the years is that there is a place for the “all in” mentality, and that’s competition. I once had a track and field coach that told me, that the only time you go 100% is at competitions when you have high levels of adrenalin running through your system. I didn’t really appreciate the wisdom of this quote at that time, but it has grown on me lately, and when I look back on my prior training history, I can see that I’ve made the most progress when adhering to a training program that is high frequency and high volume but has an overall low intensity. The 80/20 distribution works wonders when it comes to training intensity—and I highly recommend it.

The science

Zone 2 training is scientifically defined as the highest metabolic output you can sustain while keeping your lactate level below two mmol/L. What the hell does that mean? Well, simply put, we have different energy systems in the body—and the first system is aerobic, meaning you are using oxygen as fuel. This is also called “the fat burning zone,” because you are also using stored fat as fuel. If you ramp up the intensity of your training just a bit, your lactate levels increase, and you start burning glucose for fuel, as glycogen (the stored form of it in our muscles). The differences you see in elite athletes, is that they can do much more work, while still staying in Zone 2. They develop that ability by doing high frequency training for greater and greater durations in Zone 2, building that aerobic base. So how does this transfer to the average person? Chances are, you don’t have a device to measure lactate levels in your blood—but there are a couple of easy ways to figure out what your Zone 2 is. We mentioned earlier that Zone 2 is 65-70% of your max heart rate. Your max heart rate can be roughly calculated as 220-your age, so for example, if you are 40, your approximate max heart rate is 180 bpm. So, your Zone 2 is 180 x .65 to 180 x .70 (117-126 bpm). An even easier method is to think of Zone 2 as a pace where it’s easy to have an ongoing conversation while you are training. You aren’t gasping for air—it’s a comfortable pace you can sustain for a long time.

As your body becomes able to do more and more work without increasing lactate levels, your mitochondria in your cells are working more and more efficiently. Mitochondrial health and efficiency is critical to longevity, and because of that, many doctors specializing in the field of longevity are recommending Zone 2 training. Many diseases that affect our lifespan are considered to be due to metabolic dysfunction. Mitochondrial dysfunction is relevant to cancer growth, immune system function, dementia, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and much more.

The takeaway…

It takes discipline to go slow. Running or lifting at 65-70% can be hard on the ego and it’s no joke holding back 80% of the time—but trust us on this—it will be worth it. You'll need discipline to hold back most of the time and discipline to train with a high frequency, but after a while, it becomes a lifestyle, and no one doubts you when the results start showing.