Zone 2 Is IRRELEVANT For Most Triathletes

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. Zone 2 training is all the rage in endurance sports right now, with people swearing it is the secret sauce for better performance. And it's often hailed as the cornerstone for building aerobic capacity. And while there's no denying its overall benefit, especially for elite athletes at Trivala Coaching, we believe it's nearly irrelevant for most amateur athletes. For those with busy schedules or varying fitness levels, including limited training hours, focusing on Zone 2 can be inefficient and even counterproductive. You've got a life, you've got a job, maybe a family, and not a ton of time to clock up relentless hours of Zone 2 work. So today we're discussing why you might need to do less zone 2, and cut to the specific stuff that actually gets you results. Very interesting one from us, dad. Very welcome back to another episode. Can you start us off with what.

Are you grateful for after all these last six to eight weeks of not being able to ride my bike? Finally got to ride on the weekend. Happened to be at one of the races in Northern Australia, the Sunny Coast, 70.3. And it was a great feeling to go and ride your bike again and you don't realise how much you miss it until you can't do it. And so, yeah, super grateful that a. It was beautiful day to ride your bike outside, got to ride with your brother Liam and just side by side, the sun on your back, wind in your hair, it was, it was fantastic. And it's been a while since I've been able to do that, so very grateful and hopefully I can start to get some. Some fitness back again and start again from. From zero. So not complaining about that. Very happy to be out there.

I will say that. Yeah, you. When you can't train and, and you. You miss sucks. But there's not much of a better feeling the first time you get to go back out again. And whether it's the first run back or the first ride back or sometimes it's not the first one either. Sometimes it takes a couple to get.

Back used to it.

But that first time you get to get that feeling again of, of being out there, it's just, it's, it's. It's an overwhelming feeling of positive emotion, which I guess is a silver lining for what you have to go through and, and yeah, it's scary when you didn't know if you were going to get back out on the outdoor bike. Um, so I would totally agree with that. And mine is similar to the weekend actually. Just very grateful for our tribal athletes. There's a few races on over the weekend. We've had a big 70.3 in Queensland in Australia. And just to see all the positive messages and positive experiences from athletes up there, we definitely felt a lot of gratitude coming our way from our athletes and honestly not even our athletes, people outside of our community sending us nice messages over Instagram or email about the podcast, about the event, about seeing you ride dad and seeing you outside. So definitely felt overwhelming gratitude of messages coming our way and very thankful for that. Before we get into the topic, we want to cut to what has caught our attention and something that we really wanted to talk about was this post Olympics form form stuff we're seeing from athletes where the post race, post Olympics form of a lot of athletics athletes is so fascinating and so interesting and it's very relevant for age group athletes to remember. It's a really, really important lesson to not get caught in the trap of yourself of making this mistake. And the Diamond League races have continued. There's already been two rounds of Diamond League since the Olympics. And that just keeps going where because not every athlete that competes at a Diamond League level makes the Olympics know generally top two or three from each country. And so these races continue. It's, it's how a lot of these athletes earn their living. And then a lot of Olympic athletes want to continue their season and keep making money. And you don't actually make money from the Olympics. So even though it's the pinnacle of their year or their four years, they still need to make, keep making a living and hopefully work towards the Diamond League final which potentially win some cash. And so we're seeing both Olympic athletes and non Olympic athletes keep competing. I mean I'm talking about the Diamond League specifically here. We're where if we look, if we take the men's 1500 meter example, which was one of the pinnacle races of the event just because of how it unfolded and the top four guys, Kerr Hocker Ingritzen and Jared Nagus had just an epic face off in that final. It was the culmination of years of media and speculation and rivalry. It just exploded into this final. We feel like they all just gave it everything there. And in these follow up races all these guys are just running relatively horrible times to what they're used to you know, Cole Hawker ran a race and just couldn't keep up with Ingrid whatsoever. Run a 331, four seconds off his Olympic record. I finished the race and just said to be honest I've been celebrating for two weeks and I, I just mentally was not even in this race whatsoever. Ingrid even said it in one of the races. Negus beat him and Ingram just said I'm just tired. I, I just don't have the spring must it right now. You know we tried to pick the Olympics. Kerr said the same thing. He's just said my motivation for turning up these races is at an all time low. Although he just won the New York mile. And so look, regardless of how you feel about them turning up to these races, once you put a number on you're supposed to go your hardest. But it's just important for our athletes to remember and all age group is that the pros don't expect themselves to peak all year. You know they, they, they at the start of the season expect themselves to be slow and they work into the season and they peak at their A race and then once they hit their A race they know that they're probably going to go into a form slump afterwards and that's okay. And I think we see a lot of athletes dad, and I want you to clarify on this. You know athletes have these crazy expectations on themselves sometimes to always be peaking and always be improving and it's just not possible. And you have to expect periods of lulls, periods of downtime after an A race, periods where you're going to have a little bit of a flat period. Periods where you don't improve from a training block. That's actually kind of a good thing. But I wanted to talk about that because it's a really dangerous mindset to get into and we're just seeing really good example of it playing out right now and how these Olympic athletes handle it and then what to do.

Well it's a big, it's a big one isn't it? And when you see the actual best athletes in the world struggle physically and mentally post a races and you know, remember they only have a short period of time as a professional athlete. They're not going to be doing it for their whole working life. They're only going to be doing it whilst they're physically fast enough to compete at that, at that level. And for some athletes that might only be five or six years. And so you would expect that they need to make the most of every opportunity and they know that because their window for earning money as an athlete is very small, very, very narrow. Compare that to a golfer or a tennis player who could, you know, look at Djokovic has been playing tennis for nearly 15 or 16 years at the top level. And so they've got a, you know, they've got a big schedule as well. It's hard for them to keep coming up for Grand Slams. But, but as a, as a runner, it's, it's, you know, it's, you've got this small window of opportunity. So to make an income or a living at the very top is only a small amount of people. So, so you've got to actually be informal lot to, to earn good money and to get parents money and prize money. And, and so the expectation is that you need to be up. And that's just really, very, very hard to do. And, you know, you could argue that this is your, this is your career. You've chosen this, you know, you need to have a better mindset about. Sure, the Olympics was the, the pinnacle of your, of your preparation, but now that's done, you need to now focus on the next thing. And I kind of agree with that to a point. But there's got to be a period where you can have some downtime and recover. And it's no different to doing a hard block of training. You just can't keep doing 20 weeks in a row of hard block of training. You have to have a hard period of two or three weeks and then have a little bit of a downtime, a little bit of a revolution deload, almost reset and then allow the training to be absorbed and then go again and do these stepping stones like we always mention the staircase effect where, you know, train hard, recover, train hard, recover, and you're forever improving your form. And so, you know, I think these guys, they actually need to, to have a small period of time off and then go again. And look, the Diamond League Grand Final is on this weekend. So sweet this weekend. So, you know, that's probably. If I was the coach of these athletes, I'd be saying, okay, Olympics are done. Have some time off, maybe not do some, some running for a week or two. And you know, Hawker, you shouldn't have done, you shouldn't go into races when you're not. Not all in. That's, that's my opinion as a, as a coach and as an athlete is if I'm not all in, I'm just going through the motions. Well, I don't know what the purpose of that is, except for mentally making you feel a little bit more depressed about, you know, Hock is great, he's on a high. He's just won the Olympic gold medal. But for guys who didn't win, Inger Britzen and Kerr and Nagus, those guys having to front up from a performance that they're not entirely happy with. Everybody wanted to win that gold medal and now they're having to keep going with this, with this. I'm not recovered yet. And here we are, we're still, we're still racing. So it's a, it's a tough one. And age groupers, you know, we've got so many people who, for example, the weekend just gone 70.3, you know, that's, that's a big preparation. They've been all in for that. And then, you know, right, let's just start training again. Because I'm super motivated. I want to, want to improve on what I've just done on the weekend and I can't wait to get back into it. And I think that's fantastic. That's, that's really great mental strategies. And if you're not, if you're not that happy with what you did, you want to really work hard on getting the things that you weren't happy with, get them to be a bit of a win rather than a thing that's holding you back. But if you don't allow yourself to recover in four or five weeks time, you're going to be that stale and you're not going to be able to perform. Just like we say, if you train medium hard all the time, you don't get to train really hard to improve. If you just keep training medium hard every day, getting very little recovery and you're not pushing yourself when you should be. And this is no different to athletes who do an age group. As I'm talking here, if you do a race and don't give yourself time off, and it only has to be for some people, four or five days of a couple of days off and some easy walking or doing some drills in the pool or just something where there's no intensity, where you're not training with a specific purpose of improving your fitness, you're actually trying to recover. And they're the things you should be thinking about. Post these big races that you've been working towards and for you to just keep going straight back into your program. I just think it's crazy. And I just happened to look at someone on Instagram who raced on the weekend and here they were doing a high intensity session on Tuesday. And I just thought, oh boy, who's looking after that athlete? That is a really bad idea. After doing a half iron, half a 70.3, half Ironman, you just, you've got to allow your body to recover from that. It's, you know, for a lot of people it's somewhere between 3 hours 40 and 6 hours 50. That's just not a walk in the park. That's something that needs respect. And if you don't pay the respect to it, you're going to actually be a worse athlete because you don't recover enough. You can't actually start to improve again. Recovery is the cornerstone for improvement. And once people understand that and learn that, then they're going to be better athletes.

Yeah, and setting yourself up for mental enjoyment as well is just a really big point that we go on a lot about. And that comes from having, I hate to use the word realistic, but realistic expectations. And we're never trying to dull anyone's expectations or goals for improving and succeeding. But just once again, if you have the expectation that you can always be on, you can always improve, you can always perform your best at six races throughout a year. It's just unrealistic. And there's a reason the pros don't do it is because if they could do it, they would, they'd earn more money and they'd really go for it, but it's just, it's not possible. And so you're really just setting yourself up to be more likely disappointed. And yeah, we're not trying to dull those ambitions or aspirations. You can improve a lot and age groupers have a great chance to improve a lot because there's so much to learn. And, and we've shown case study after case study of athletes improving over years. But like the Steve McMillan case study from a few weeks ago, you know, in his six year improvement, there was massive periods of improvement and there was massive loves and there was massive periods where he was completely out of form, he was injured or he was sick or had a crash or something. So just knowing that that could happen just resets that expectation.

And don't forget, the goal is that we want to continue our journey as an athlete where we're continually doing a long stair climb over six years. We're trying to get, become a better athlete, but we're not trying to do it with the one set of stairs. We're trying to spread that out so that you get the recovery, get the enjoyment, reset, go again. And the goal is to try and improve. But there was so many things getting to the start lines so hard to do. So you might not even get to the next race. From what's happened to this race. It could be something that's create caused you to, whether it's injury or logistics or whatever, but you can't get to the next race. So all of a sudden you've got to redo your schedule. So there's all these things that could cause you to not have that expectation of last year I did. This time I expect to do better than that because I'm one year on as an athlete. Well, let's just ask what's happened in that 12 months? Did you train consistently in that 12 months? Did you have any periods where you were injured? Did you have any periods where you didn't want to tr. Did you do the work you were supposed to do? So if you can say yes to those 54 questions that we're going to ask you, then sure, the expectation should be that I'll be a better athlete than last year. But my thought process is that that's our goal. But it may not end up being like that. And you could have years where you do have three years in a row where you just continue to improve. You started off at the 6 hour 30 half Ironman, you've done 610, then you've done 550, then now you're down to 530 and all of a sudden you do a 542. You know, the world has just stopped. I've gone backwards. Well, not really. What happened in that period between last race and this race and what was the day like? Were the conditions harder? You've got to take all these factors and you're not just going to be determining your happiness by the outcome of the time. It's got to be the journey has got to be playing some part in this whole journey. Journey that you're on using the same word. You know, you've got to understand all the time that there's going to be highs and lows. You're trying to, you're trying to prevent them, but they're just going to crop up. And it's just how you manage that is going to make the actual a race more special. If you do a good job of and some of the things are out of your control. You know, it's not you've done anything wrong, it's just things have happened. You know, your kids come home from daycare sick and you lose three weeks of training in the middle of the most important period of your race. Ready, you know, what can you do about that? Not a lot. You know, lock yourself away from your kids. That's just not, that's just not feasible. It's not realistic like you were using the term before. We have to be realistic about what's happening in our world as age groupers because a lot more going on than being a professional athlete. And when we talk about these, you know, we always talk about what's caught our attention. We talk about the professionals and we're trying to learn things and get, get messages across to our age group is in this podcast from what the professionals are doing and learning good things about what they're doing and what works and could be filtering down to an age group or in. And I think you've got to separate those two things. These guys are doing it for a living. We're doing it for lots of reasons. It could be that we just want to keep fit, could be that we love competition, could be we love socializing, could be we love traveling and there's races all over the, all over the place. It could be a hundred reasons why we do it. And that's what we've got to keep in the forefront of our mind is, you know, don't be defined by the outcome all the time. Don't forget about, you know, everything that's going into that final day. Even on the day, you know, the execution. Looking at, looking at the guys executing on the weekend we had, we had again across the board, guys who executed poorly, guys who executed spot on and guys who executed way above their level and fell in a big hole. You know, so these are the outcomes you're going to get on any, any given day, regardless of the preparation. So yeah, it's such a hard thing to achieve. Those PBS that we talk about, that's what we're striving for. There's no denying that. But we're trying to make sure that the athlete doesn't get into a depressed state because they're not seeming like achieving what they are expecting. And you, even when we, I know this is a long winded answer that you've, you've asked me, but even when we're doing testing in between our blocks of training, we have athletes with wrong expectations about what they should be doing compared to what their last. If we tested them six weeks ago and they did 250 watts in their 20 minute FTP and their natural assumption is that I should be doing 260, 270 or 280, and I would say, what are you basing that on and they would have to say to me, well, in my training sessions I've been doing regular threshold work at 260s and 270s. Great, well that's probably right. That's going to happen. And if they tell me, well, I haven't got any real reason except that I think I should improve, that's just not good enough. And if I look at their sessions and they've not been able to achieve anything in that three week block, I'd be saying to them, have a look. This is part of the preparation, part of your planning for this training week. What did you do in those three weeks of your training or in those five weeks if you did a six week testing period, you know, have you trained really consistently? And the answer is yes, no or maybe. And so whatever the answer is will determine how you go about executing that next testing session. And unrealistic expectation is based on you not knowing what you've just done in five or six weeks of training and will give you a poor result which will get you depressed, which you start questioning everything you're doing about, about your performances and it's a spiraling down effect rather than a have a realistic expectation and be happy with that and then understand that I can do better if I train more consistently, etc. Etc.

Spot on. It's. Yeah, that was a really good detailed answer and I think I've been having a lot of fun just watching all the post race interviews of these athletes and it's actually been kind of laughable to see some of their reactions where yeah, they, they've just been laughing at their own performances almost and, and it's been kind of refreshing. And I think one other example of, of, of a almost real life case study of how it's playing out is in the PT100 series this year where, and, and the Ironman series actually where they've suddenly offered up a lot of money to turn up to more races. And so athletes are kind of throwing the rulebook out the window and figuring out how can I do more races? How can I put myself in a better chance of earning more income? And we're seeing a wide range of results. We're seeing athletes come into some races in absolute form and come into other races having shocking performances and then having to manage that. And so that's a really good experiment that we've been seeing play out live and it'll be interesting to see how the year actually finishes off and what strategies kind of work best. And I think moving on into the topic, the key to longevity. And getting this right is getting the balance right between your hard periods and easy periods and hard training and easy training. That's where the quote unquote Myth of Zone 2 comes in. And I'm not going to say it's a total myth, because that's definitely not true. But it's become this huge buzzword. And it's so much so that it's one of the comments I get the most from, from casual friends or, or people getting into running or something where they say, oh, I got told I need to do a lot of Zone two. Or. And I go, yeah, I've even run for six months. Like, there's, there's no, you can't just zones, zones. The breakdown of zones is we're talking about, you know, training at certain intensities below or above certain lactate zones. And, and for an absolute beginner runner, if they come and ask us, how do I start running? It's, it's just so much more basic than that. They just need to start walk running, for example, to make sure they're not getting injured. And so that's just an example of how it's taken over. So much so that it's reaching very recreational people. But the truth is, for a majority of triathletes and age groupers and our audience, I would say it's not as relevant as most people think. And I want you to give your kind of overall principle and definition of what you think, how you think Zone two applies to the age grouper.

Oh, boy. It's a troubled.

I always ask you these, these, these big questions.

It's a troubled.

You do have a good definition.

Yeah, well, it's really determined by, you know, how much time do you have available to train. And, and so that's my measure is, you know, we, the, the polarized system is 80% at zone 2 and 20% at threshold. That's, that's the method of training that all the scientists have told us. And so obviously, 80% is a lot of time of your training. But if you only have five hours a week to train, then you don't need to spend any time in Zone two. You need to spend all of your time at Threshold. And if you think about that as a triathlete, if you went for one swim for an hour, if you went for two bike rides for an hour each and two runs, there's your five hours. And you've really only done five sessions. So if you did them all at Zone two, you're going to be very good at that level and you're going to stay there, you're not going to improve, you're going to be building a really nice base and at the end of the day you're not going to improve that much. So athletes aren't happy with that. They don't want to be a level of fitness that's adequate. They want to continue to improve. Which is what we just talked about in what's caught our attention is we are trying to become better than we were last week, than we were last year. And so, yes, do Zone two if you like, but if you don't have the time, then it should be the last thing you're doing if you have the time. Great, then we throw lots of Zone 2 stuff in between your Threshold stuff and you could even go lower than Zone two. You could do lots of recovery, easy training if you've got more time. And we're talking about age groupers here. And of course, you know, in triathlon and marathon running and cycling, you know, we've got both, we've got elite and we've got age groupers who are, who are always trying to copy what the elite are doing. And there's some things that they should be copying and there's some things that they shouldn't. And zone two is probably really referring to people who spend 20 to 30 hours on a bike. And those athletes, they need to do hell of a lot of zone two because let's face it, you can't ride 30 hours a week training at threshold, you would last about three weeks and you know, you find yourself in a massive hole. So, so not only is that a problem, but Zone two is actually going to give you that aerobic fitness that, that you need to as an elite rider. And what do the elite riders do? They, they race stage races that go between four and six hours day after day. They do one day classics that are between four and six hours. So they need to spend a lot of time riding for the time that their event is. And so that's, you know, and we, if we took Ironman, where most age groupers are going to ride between five and six hours, 30 or seven hours, then they must spend a lot of time in Zone two. So there's exceptions to this. So depending on what sport you're doing, depending on the time you have available, depending on where you are as an athlete, as an elite or an age grouper, that will determine how much time you should be spending in Zone two. And that's a long winded answer, but that is the principle where we try to really identify who should and who shouldn't be doing Zone two work.

That's perfect. And I like that definition. You keep it really simple. You said the time you spend in Zone 2 is determined by the time you have available to train. And when we say you should or shouldn't do it, you're. Everyone's going to do some of it. It's just how much of it are you actually doing? Because even in an example we spoke about that if you've, if you're an age grouper with more time to train and an age grouper that is committed to the triathlon training and is training a lot, is probably spending 10 to 12 hours, maybe 14 hours if they've got a lot more time per week training. That's a, that's a relatively common amount. We see a lot of our 70 point athlete, 70.3 athletes are training anywhere from, from 8 to 10, up to 14, 16 hours a week on top of their jobs. But even then they're not spending 80% of the time in zone two. If we broke down their hours, even in that amount of hours available, it's still not worth the 8020 rule. They still need to be spending more time on high intensity zones to get the most out of their week. And we actually had Steven Seiler, who is essentially one of the main people responsible for making this buzzword such a thing, on the podcast. And we asked him specifically, we said, when it says 80 20, are you referring to the 8020 of the whole week? Are you referring to 80 20amount of sessions? Are you referring to what is an actual breakdown? And he thought that was a great question because he said that's where a lot of the misconception comes from. But you're definitely not breaking it down into that specific amount of hours or per week or whatever, because we would classify In a Tuesday VO2 session, you actually are only spending 20 minutes of the session in VO2 and the rest of the time is in zone 2. We're doing a warm up and cool down, but that's classified as a hard session. And so he made a really clear distinction that is it a hard session or is it an easy session? That's a really much more simple way to think of it. And for a lot of our age group athletes, they're not doing 80% of their sessions as easy and only 20% hard. They've got a couple of hard sessions per week to do VO2 and they've got their endurance work on the weekend, which again comes to the argument that even though it's easy, even though it's in zone two, it's still grueling, it's still tiring for the age group athletes. So this is where all these caveats come in, where we say, yeah, unless you're in that specific category of pro athlete doing 20 to 30 plus hours a week, could you really specifically say it should be, it should be pretty close to 80, 20 zone 2 and not zone 2. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, that's one of the things you've got to understand. Easy and hard. It's such a great way of differentiating between what is zone two and what's not. And as you said, a five hour endurance ride at zone two is probably one of the hardest sessions you'll do for the week. And so, you know, do you put that in the category of I've done an easy session? No, you wouldn't. And so if you looked at a triathlete who does Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday as their bike sessions, there isn't any zone two in there. There is zone two everywhere in there, but they're classified as a hard Tuesday, a hard Thursday and an endurance Saturday. And by that definition, they're all hard. So, yes, we've got zone two in there, but the definition tells us we've done three hard sessions. So a lot of the time we don't push our runners, our triathletes, to do hard running sessions. A lot of their sessions are very easy in zone one or two. And so we're not trying to make every bike session and run session as hard as possible. And that's a bit of a mistake. I think a lot of the triathletes especially, who don't have a lot of time, you can't just do, you know, two runs or three runs hard, three rides hard, and two or three swims hard. There's got to be some easy sessions in there somewhere. And you know, zone two is good because if you have worked out through the lab testing where your zone 2 heart rate is for riding, running and swimming, then it allows you to control your session that way. And as long as you're, you know, you're, you've done that as a lab test, then then sure, you've got really good control because a lot of the testing we do is great for finding out where our threshold is. But, you know, I would, I would love to see anybody who can determine where their LT1 is lactate threshold one where you're, you're moving out of zone two into that next zone. Of zone three, where you lactate, you know, the graph will just kick up a little bit before it hits LT2, which is your threshold. So we're trying to. We're trying to train below that LT1. And if you haven't been tested in a lab, you're really guessing. And the guesses could be good. They could be if you're a bike rider within 10 or 15 watts, but that's still quite a big range. Or if you're a runner, you're trying to look at heart rate or pace, you know, you could be out by, you know, 20 or 30 seconds per K. And, and, and that's, that's too. It's not accurate enough for me. So, so if you really, if you have a lot of time as an age grouper and you have 15 or 20 hours, I would be pushing you to do more Zone two for sure, But I would also be pushing you to go to the lab and find out where is my zone 2 heart rate, power, and running pace.

It's such a brilliant point, and it needs to. It needs to be. The overall theme of this chat is there is just so much discourse and conversation around Zone 2, and none of it refers to the fact that. Hang on a second. Everyone's referring to Zone two when no one's actually getting lab tested. And, yeah, you can't even decipher exactly what your zone 2 is until you go into the lab. We have great estimates for it. And I have been a little bit frustrated seeing some podcasters online in the health space, and not in the endurance space or triathlon space specifically, but more just general health advice, talking about Zone two and jumping on this buzzword. And I listen to them, and I think you're not, You're. You're getting it right for general health. Sure, you, you know, Zone two is great for anyone with general health, but then that's been applied to training and, and, and sports science and, and they're talking about the torque test and, and, and other ways to figure out how I drift and other ways to figure out if you're, if you're in Zone two or not. And these are all great indicators, for sure, but they're not a lab test. They're not telling you exactly where they are. And, and the talk test is very subjective, and for that to be applied to your training for triathlon is a huge mistake. And we don't think it's necessary to get a lab test for a program. But if you are trying to rely on Zone 2 as your core source, of training. It just seems crazy that you wouldn't get a lab test. And that's why we're saying it's not our biggest thing. We're not saying you need to be exactly in zone 2 80% of the time to get the most out of the week. That's our whole point, which is why we don't believe you need lab testing, but super, super valuable. And I can definitely say that when we've done it, you and I. Dad, I noticed a huge difference once I knew the exact numbers of what my zone 2 was. If I did my 45 minute easy zone 2 run on a Wednesday above the heart rate threshold of zone 2, slightly above and slightly below, I noticed a big difference in recovery for the next day. And that to me was a really cool and accurate little experiment of, of what we're talking about and finding that limit. And I probably could have told you regardless of the testing that that pace is a little bit too hard because I was definitely breathing heavier and passing that, that quote unquote talk test. But yeah, I think what you're talking about, there's all this discourse around Zone 2, but the truth is no one actually knows unless you get it lab tested. So you can't base your whole program around it unless you're going to get lab tested. If that was your goal.

Yeah. And as you said, we can get reasonably close, but if you're going to train accurately, train accurately. And for those athletes who have more time and will be spending time in zone two, they're the people we're talking to. They should be the ones who go and get exactly from the lab what their lactate LT1 is. And you know, look at heart rate. If you just used heart rate and you were training in a cool climate and your LT1 from the lab said 135 was your heart rate and you knew in the lab that you did a run test or a bike test in that lab at the same time, it would tell you that your running pace for 135 heart rate is 430 or your power is 200. And the minute you go to a warmer climate, that 135 heart rate might mean you have to run 450 pace as a runner or 150 watts as a rider. So straight away you can't just use the power as the gut as the guide to zone two. You can't just use the pace because you know, depending on the temperature around you, cold or warm or hot, you're going to be going at the Lactate is going to be affected by your heart rate going up. So you've got to keep the lactate down, which is what we're trying to, trying to emphasize. That's how important it is to get lactate test. You're trying to keep that down so that the heart rate can be the indicator for this. And it's one of the few times where we use heart rate and I think it's so valuable metrics for the lower training zones and it's not that good for VO2 because there's so much lag and if you only do a 30 second effort by the time you're waiting for your heart rate to jump up, it doesn't work. So yeah, I think it's really important that we differentiate definitely between guessing where zone two is and understanding exactly where it is.

And I really liked just another quote from Stephen Solar in our podcast where he just said if I only had six hours to train a week, I would just do six flat out sessions, to be honest, and just get the most bang for my buck. Now the problem is if you're training for an Ironman, that's just not going to suffice. Even though you only have that time, it's just not going to get you through an ironman. You become really good at those six hours, but that'll become the max you can do. But I think it's a cool principle to think about and we have athletes where this happens, where some weeks every so often or maybe relatively consistently they just work is too busy and some weeks they can do 10 or 12 hours and other weeks they can do less. And so in that case, in those less weeks, go as hard as you want, you know, because you might as well just get the most out of yourself for that week. And then another week when you've got more time, then you got to get your endurance in. That's where you've got to try and make up for that and get the endurance required to do a half ironman or ironman. But it's just, that's a really simple principle to think about to go that, you know, it's not the end of the world if one week you can train less but don't just do it easy, then, you know, go nuts for it, go hard and have fun with it. Would you agree?

Yeah. And that's you understanding your blocks of training. And it almost seeps into catch up training where I had a really bad week last week training wise, so I have to catch up. So I have to do all These hard sessions. And that's not what we're saying, you know, and some people take away, that's what they thought they heard. And that's exactly the opposite. We want you to, if you're short on time and you have no other choice, and if you only had 30 minutes or 40 minutes, doing that at recovery or zone two is not going to actually, you know, extend you and allow that progressive overload that we're trying to achieve. And look, if someone only has five or six hours of training for an Ironman, my recommendation is they don't do it because they're going to fall short anyway. Whether you train hard or zone two, you just, you're just not going to be well trained enough or equipped for the requirements of a nine to 15 hour event. Yeah, I totally agree.

And so, yeah, I want to keep this discussion about how do you make up your hours and how much zone two do you have? And, and I'll refer back to also the founder of Training Peaks, Joe Friel. And he just refers to the principle of your goal with how much intensity you fit in per week and how much high intensity and hard sessions you fit in per week is basically based around how much can you handle and how much can you recover. And he's got a really conservative approach for the aging athlete. He says that his goal is two hard sessions a week and everything else around that should be easy. And depending on where you're at in your journey, that might be right or you might be able to handle more. Um, but the point is you do want to push your body and see without overdoing it, see how much intensity you can actually handle and back up week after week without putting yourself in a hole. And we do find with more training experience and with the right structure and careful planning that athletes can, can handle a lot and get through a lot and back up the sessions. And so when we're thinking about a 10 to 10 to 12 hour training week, yeah, you might have your two hard sessions midweek, you might do some swims in there where you can afford to go harder, but you still be able to recover from them. There are different, we find it's a different kind of fatigue that you can back up the next day from a hard swim and do a hard ride, but you can't necessarily do a hard ride on one day and do a hard run the next day or two hard rides in a row that doesn't really work. And thinking about all that, then you start asking about the weekend. Is your weekend classified as Zone 2 and Easy or is it classified as volume and pretty tough. And so to finish off, you talk about the intensities of your endurance sessions. How do they imply into the whole picture of the breakdown of the week?

So it really depends on the experience of the athlete, where they are in the program and what are you trying to achieve in this block. So zone two comes in and out of a lot of programs at certain times. Early on in Ironman training program, the first thing we're trying to get our athletes to do, you know, 25 weeks out is to just to get used to being out there with no intensity. And so it could be anything from zone one to two the whole day. And when we're actually telling them just take, take it easy, just, just try to get two hours in. And we're trying to build this up over a period of from week 25 to week 16 where you're just increasing the duration of your session and it's probably all zone one and two and there'll be, you know, depending on how competitive you are, if you're riding with other people, what the course is, you could end up dipping into Zone 3 and 4 for periods of that. But that's not the intention. The intention is that you're just trying to spend time out there, you know, getting your body used to the training load of 2, 3, 4, 5 hours which is going to be what's the requirement on race day where you're possibly going to be riding between five and six and a half hours. So, so the earlier you start that at the lower intensity zone one and zone two, the bigger your aerobic capacity will be to handle. When we start to, you know, get a little bit more specific where we do some efforts from, from, you know, strength efforts or so we hit some hills a little bit more out of zone two where we're doing zone three sub threshold. And so, you know, you're all the time trying to, trying to dip in and out of zone two and as you get closer, like, you know, that's week eight to 15 and then the race ready period is from, you know, week, week eight down to week one race day where you're actually trying to spend a lot of time at your race pace as an Ironman, that would be somewhere between 65% of your FTP and 75 of your FTP depending on your experience and depending on your level of fitness. And when I say your experience, have you done a lot of these races? Is your fitness optimal? Are you catching up? Have you been doing very little training and that will determine where you sit in that percentage of your current FTP. It could be down as low as 60% of your FTP. If you're absolutely brand new to this and you haven't done any endurance training, you might not be able to cope with anything more than 60% for a four or five hour endurance ride. So you know, zone two technically should be somewhere between 60 and 80% depending on what scientists you talk to. And I've heard a lot of scientists tell me variations of that and you know who is right and who is wrong and as they've always said, look, don't worry about what the percentage is, it's somewhere around there. As long as you've got a lactate test from a lab, you'll know exactly what it is. But, but they're the things you should be looking for in that whole training block where, where you're, the event that you're doing is really in zone two. As, as a bike rider and as a runner and as a swimmer, your, the Ironman is a zone two dipping into zone three. If you're at the elite end and you know the elite bike riders can ride 80 to 82% of their FTP and the really top age groupers can ride 75 to 80 or 79% of their FTP and the average age grouper is 60 to 75%. So you know, you are probably going to be spending a lot of time in your training sessions on the weekend endurance rides around there. But we need to make sure that we're improving our engine the whole time by having a lot of hard sessions somewhere in your training program. And, and it depends on your age, depends on how your body's coping with the load. There's so many factors that it depends on and we say that a lot. You know, it depends who are you, what's your experience, what's your level and how competitive are you and how is your body absorbing this load and what we throw at? What if I gave you the same program as me, Jordan? I would respond completely different to you. You would back up so much quicker than I would as a mid 30 year old athlete compared to a mid 60. I would struggle to keep up with the load that you can cope with, no problem. So we have to account for that and to ignore that would be the detriment to your program. And Joe Friel is so right. You've got to work out how you're coping and you've got to be your own rating system. You know, ask yourself each morning, do I feel exhausted. Am I ready to train or should I have a rest day? And, and if you, if you work that out very quickly in your training career, you'll have a much, much more enjoyable experience on race day and in your, your fun in preparing for your races.

Spot on. And I think, yeah, to your point about what the percentage is, I don't think, let, don't ever let anyone tell you that your zone two is, is 82% or 65% or 71%, because they're not going to know unless there's a lab test. So there's a lot of data out there about what the averages are, but you could be above the average. You could be below the average. So that's really, really important to remember. And look, we, I'm not trying to give Zone to a full bad rap. I want to finish off by saying that, as always, all these things have their place. We're just trying to get away from it being the buzzword and the go to secret sauce that everyone thinks is the magic, the magic pill. There's ways to use Zone 2 to your advantage and there's for a lot of age groupers, reasons why it shouldn't be actually the major factor in your training. And I will say to finish off with as well, we feel a little bit better. We almost skipped over kind of the LT1 and LT2 side of things and the science behind your lactate levels and what Zone one through to six is. But we have done an entire podcast episode on that before and it's called Every Single Training Zone Explained with sessions in brackets, I think. So if you actually don't know what we're talking about in terms of where Zone two is and what those lactate zones are, we have a full hour long dedicated episode to that. So you can go back and listen to that if that's confusing. But any last messages on Zone two that to take home?

No, I think, I think it's got its place in our training program and in any training program. And you need to, as an athlete understand how, you know, if you can just keep working out. How much time do I have available to train and chunk it into times. If you're in the five to 10 hours, the 10 to 15, the 15 to 20, then you will have a much better chance at spending more time in Zone 2 the longer time you have available to train. And that is probably the key concept that I want everybody to get out of this particular podcast is, yes, it is super important. But if you're a busy athlete who's got very limited time to train, it becomes very irrelevant to your program.

Yeah, I would like to finish off by kind of saying the opposite of what I said. The whole episode is that I'm. We've been talking like this because we know the majority of our listeners are in those early categories where they probably only have up to 8 to 14 hours to train. It's just. It's just majority of what we see. But if you have more time, Zone two will absolutely work wonders for you. And we have seen with that. That with our athletes that that can do that. And yeah, if you've got 20 hours to week, then doing all that extra zone two work, you will become an absolute machine very quickly, which is pretty cool.

And Jordan, if you don't, if you. If you have 15 to 20 hours and you spend more of that in zone three and four, you will be worse off than if you. If you did it in zone two. Zone two is where you should be, and that's important. Just because you've got more hours doesn't mean you spend more hours at Intensity. You should be absolutely honing in on being, you know, one of our coaches. Nick Lecandro is the Zone 2 king, and he can ride all day, you know, and. And he's an unbelievably great bike rider, but it comes off the back of years of really getting a really good aerobic bass.

Yep, spot on. That's it for this episode. Thanks, as always, for listening, and we'll see you on the next one.