What Is Zone 2 & How Can You Find Yours?

train Slow Ride fast an age-old Mantra that through new scientific understanding is becoming increasingly popular again and it's now got a catchy name zone two so the theory goes train for 80 of your time in zone two and you become more efficient at utilizing fat for energy and at higher intensities plus you'll also be able to clear lactate faster raise your FTP and even live longer apparently the reason for it is to improve your mitochondrial function what are mitochondria so after me your sales power plants yes that's right now question is what is zone two though and how do you find it Well in this video I'm going to tell you I'm also going to run through the accessible method which requires zero Tech at all and then I'm going to do a metabolic test in a lab to accurately pinpoint what my zone 2 is so I can see firstly then whether or not I've estimated it right and following that can I offer you any tips on having estimated it and then found out my actual result refining that accessible method foreign but what is it though it's a good question zone two is that exercise intensity where you're burning the maximum amount of fat that you can a lighter intensity and you simply wouldn't have as much energy need so you wouldn't be burning as much and at a higher intensity your body would have to switch into burning principally glycogen so it's that point at which your type 1 slow twitch muscle fibers are working at their capacity and that is the point of zone two training basically is to stress these type 1 muscle fibers as much as possible without then recruiting those glycogen burning fast twitch fibers and having to switch into a completely different metabolic system so how do you find your zone two then so according to Dr Inigo Sam Milan who as well as being many things is today pagacha's coach and has now become the kind of unofficial poster boy for Zone 2 training he says that if you don't have access to a lab the metabolic testing or lactate testing that you can find it with a very simple conversation test so if you're riding along and you can have a normal conversation then you're going too easy what you want is to be able to have a conversation but to it to feel a little bit forced at times and then if you're going so hard that you can't have a conversation well that isn't zone two either so for me riding along talking to you now I'd say I'm probably at the bottom end of zone two I reckon about 250 Watts a heart rate of about 160 is my zone two but a bit of a curveball I've noticed that on the indoor trainer if I'm sat about 220 ish I'm at a similar level of out of breathness a similar level of perceived exertion so maybe that's my range then 220 to 250. but then there's another method which I've read about particularly on running blogs and that's the nose breathing method so if you can ride an intensity that allows you to just breathe through your nose so not at your mouth than that is also about zone two but you see maybe I've just got massive nostrils but I can definitely get another 20 watts out over the conversation method when I'm nose breathing so I'm not entirely convinced by that one now what you can't do to find zone two is to use power or heart rate and try and work it out as a percentage either of your FTP or of your maximum heart rate because it might be that some people Zone 2 is in a broadly similar range not everyone's and I'll give you a really good example why because the fitter you are and the more Zone 2 training you do the better your mitochondrial function will be but Therefore your Zone 2 will be a higher percentage of your maximum heart rate and also will be at a higher power as well so the more Zone 2 training you do the higher your Zone 2 power will be and the higher your Zone 2 heart rate as well and I think this confuses a lot of people because it might seem like someone is training too hard for zone two when in actual fact they're not it's right for them foreign as I said I think from my nose breathing and conversation experiments that my zone 2 is about 240 to 260 Watts but now I'm actually going to find out so I can't up to Bath University which is gcn's local University that also happens to have awesome sports facilities and the home to a lot of high performance Sports they're going to run me through a metabolic test where they'll gradually increase the wattage I need to ride at on a static bike whilst recording a load of data particularly expired gases because what we're looking for remember is that point at which our bodies are burning the maximum amount of fat that they can before the intensity then forces us to burn more carbohydrate and we can't sustain that fat burning any longer your expired gases can be collected and analyzed with the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen indicating whether primarily fat or carbohydrate is being used for fuel it's called the respiratory gas exchange ratio and an rer of 0.7 would indicate you're basically not moving and you're burning primarily fat where there's rer of over one would suggest that you're primarily burning carbohydrates so we're looking for something in the middle we also collect my lactate levels from my blood using little Gizmo like this so typically someone in zone two would have lactate levels in the region of 1.7 to 1.9 millimoles but it does vary from person to person so Pro cyclists for example might have much lower lactate levels for their Zone too even though their wattages would be high enough to make You Weep so Jonathan what's our test protocol today how are we going to do this so what we're going to do is a kind of a step test a progressive step test so it'll start really easy and gradually get harder in stages which are about five minutes long and then we'll go up kind of 20 watts each stage so we'll start about 160 and go 160 180 um 200 and go through like that you'll have a face mask on which is going to record how much air you're breathing in and out how much oxygen you're using how much carbon dioxide you're producing um and we'll get some data from that and then we'll also grab lactate from the fingertip blood sample um heart rate and kind of your perceived exertion because we go through and we don't we don't actually have to go anywhere close to my Max do we this is very much a sub Max test right yeah so very much the sub Max test it's only um looking at what's going on in those early stages and how much oxygen you're using and from that we can work out kind of how much fat and carbohydrate you're using cool and kind of once you reach that fat Mac stage after that the amount of fat you're using will start to decrease and as it gets harder it's not going to come back again it's not going to increase again so we know we've got enough data from there cool so a non-painful fitness test aside from the lactase basically yeah pretty much [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right right then put me out my misery Johnson what is my zone two so I think from the the data that we collected obviously the lactate the heart rate the oxygen consumption data and the the parameters we can work out from that we're probably looking at around maybe about 230 watts to 260. okay that's sort of range so probably about 150 beats per minute to 162. cool okay and so what at what point then did my did my fat Max occur then can you see that on the graph yeah so the graph's quite interesting in that to start off with you obviously it's reasonably easy and you're using some fat but as it gets a little bit harder the energy you need to use to cycle at that speed or that power output jumps up yeah and so probably from about 220 watts to 260 it's a fairly fairly steady at an elevated level yeah and then quite clearly once we go past 260 Watts it starts to drop off yeah and then correspondingly the carbohydrate consumption or usage starts to increase after that yeah so that's probably that that Tipping Point yeah and interestingly when I was doing a test and you were showing me the the perceived exertion score and I pointed to 12 and you were like ah yeah okay so why was that what's what's the significance of 12. so quite commonly on that scale we use which runs from six to twenty so obviously not a one to ten scale but six to twenty twelve is um with athletes who used to endurance training and used to monitoring how they're feeling 12 is quite commonly where they would kind of kind of self um prescribe that top of that zone too yeah so it's it's reasonably easy but just starting to maybe get a little bit harder and actually content to find that out yeah and I think you said as well I can feel my breathing's changed a little bit yeah so you probably are breathing a little bit more yeah at that point as well I feel a bit teary that you're inferring that I'm still an athlete honestly it makes me quite emotional what about um those lactase then so that was like kind of an additional nice to have did that tally up with with the other data that you've measured so it was fairly steady um in the early stages once you got used to riding with the mask on and the blood samples and stuff it was fairly steady and then we did start to see it kind of jump up 240 260 Watts so the point after 260 it makes a clear jump yeah um you're lactate at that level was 1.7 yeah but when you go to 280 it's jumped to 2.4 so quite quite a significant jump yeah great so that has been absolutely brilliant thank you so much pleasure for the data and the insight as well a lot to think about there I think in conclusion then it turns out you really can find your Zone 2 with the conversation method I was really quite pleased with that result I'm not gonna lie I would say though that even though the conversation method is great for finding your Zone too if you can train with a heart Mr an even better a power meter as well I think that'll help you maintain riding in zone two when you're out training and also it gives you that extra Insight so you can actually monitor your training and your progression as well I have learned through filming this video whilst trying to find my zone two that the best way even if you're going for the conversation method is to do a really slow gradually Progressive ramp on the bike so find a really long Flat Road or a very steady climb or even better do it on the indoor trainer and bear in mind as well it's only when you settle into an intensity for five minutes or more that you're actually getting a feel for that particular intensity and not the one that you're riding before before before we leave though two other points about zone two training when you are out on the bike doing your zone two just remember that you need to keep pressing on the pedals in order to stay in it if you're freewheeling or you're riding too easy then you're not making the most of your training time but then even more serious than that if you come out of the top of zone two if you go and smash it up a climb bear in mind that you won't get back into the right metabolic state for 30 minutes or so so it's really worth being controlled whilst you're out there and the second point is keep in mind the big picture so it's all very well focusing on zone two training I think it is really beneficial but you want to keep in mind what you actually want your goal in cycling to be and don't neglect those higher intensities which will be beneficial I think for most of us achieving our goals certainly for me I've been feeling really good after doing zone two training and then I went back and did a particularly grueling session up out there Swift and I found I was not as fit as I thought I was so beware right give this video a big thumbs up if you enjoyed it and let me know how you get on finding your Zone 2 in the comments section down below

Channel: Global Cycling Network

Views: 414,205

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Id: qWSMTbg0P3U

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 09 2022