Zone 2 Target: → 3-4 Hours Per Week (Heroic +1 #1878)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. I type this while dripping with sweat after a quick little trail walk workout after lunch. It's 101 degrees in Austin today. My all time favorite temperature. Inside joke. Check out the plus one called my all time favorite temperature. Now the 42% humidity has my iPhone weather app telling me it feels like 105 degrees. Perfect. Seriously, I love it. I don't understand why people complain about any temperature, but I especially don't understand why those of us into optimizing our lives would ever complain about a free sauna session. But I digress from the point of today's one. So let's get to work. Today I want to chat about why I'm going on more micro trail walk workouts. I got the inspiration to do so after reading a couple of books in my recent Energy, Longevity Nutrition binge those books, Peter Attia's Outlive and Kasey Means Good Energy. In Outlive, Attia tells us that optimizing our exercise is, from his perspective, the number one way to increase our longevity. Nutrition is of course incredibly important for a range of reasons, and Attia makes a very compelling case that exercise is even more important than nutrition. So as part of his protocol in a chapter called Training 101, he encourages us to focus on three aerobic efficiency, maximum aerobic output, and strength. Then he has another chapter all about mobility. Now we measure our maximum aerobic output via a VO2 max test. I just took my first one along with Alexandra and Emerson and we'll talk about that more in a moment. And then we dominate our aerobic capacity via Zone 2 training. As you may know, Zone 2 training is essentially defined as exercising at 60 to 70% of your max heart rate. Your theoretical max is 220 minus your age. Then you times that by 60 to 70% to get your Zone 2 range. I have my suunto set up with this as my zone 2 note. 60 to 70% of your max is not very hard to hit at all. It's basically a brisk walk and or a super light jog walk or a light row bike ride, whatever. Now I'm a reasonably fit guy and I show up and do my basic fundamentals very consistently. I do my one sun salutation, my 10 pull ups, 100 burpees, 11 at a time, a thousand meters of rowing and 10,000 steps every single single day. I also get my heart rate up at least 101 beats from its morning meditation measured low, which ranges from 40 to 49 depending on what slash when I ate and how I slept every single day. But for the last X years, I've basically had fun trying to do as little as possible to feel great. My approach appears to be working pretty well as A I consistently feel great and B my VO2 max was in the highest range for my age. But Atiya says that if we really want to live for a really long time without succumbing to debilitating chronic disease that shortens both our lifespan, how long we live, and our health span how long we're healthy, we really need to step up our Zone 2 game. Specifically, he says that we should target getting three to four hours of Zone 2 every single week. Now, that's an issue because I used to only get a little over an hour in my do as little as possible to feel as good as possible gain. Now I do a bunch of super micro workouts with all the burpees spread across my morning. But I wasn't even meeting the basic standard recommendation to get 150 minutes or 2 and a half hours of moderate exercise a week. So when Atiya said we needed at least three hours of Zone two, I was like, I've got some work to do. Let's go Hiro. And I've gotten to work. I hit three hours in my first week. That's my new baseline. I'll hit four hours this week. Now Atia says he gets his four hours per week of Zone 2 via four one hour long rides on his indoor bike. I'm getting mine via a longer AM workout than 15 or so minute micro walk workouts around our trail. I'll tell you more about how I time those micro workout walks in our next one for today. How much Zone two are you getting? If you're already hitting it, nice work. If you're not already hitting it, let's go. If you have no idea because you don't measure it, let's get on that. It's day one. We're all in on having as many of those heroically energized day ones as we can create. So let's go.