I believe that performing the bulk of our training at a low heart rate under your
zone two heart rate cap is the key to success in endurance sports.
So it might surprise you to hear me say that I think that there is a major problem
with zone two running that is causing people to underperform,
become frustrated and rightfully give up on low heart rate running before seeing
the benefits that they can achieve with it.
Zone two training has become such a thing
that it's even grown into a number of different forms.
Maffetone method training, 80 20 training,
primal endurance or polarized training all promoting largely the same thing.
But I believe that they are all sending the wrong message.
What's up, Motivator?
My name is Taren and when real people want to accomplish something amazing
in endurance sports, they choose motive training plans.
Let's get into it in a five zone training intensity model where zone one is very low
exercise intensity and zone five is max effort intensity.
This easy effort zone two intensity is said to be the key to health and racing
success for beginners all the way through to advanced athletes.
Some of the best athletes in the world
spend as much as 96% of their training time under their zone two threshold.
This large study of studies found
that polarized training distributions, where roughly 80% of athletes training was
done at a low heart rate, is better than training harder more of the time.
And study after study after study comes to the same conclusion time and time again.
So then why am I saying that zone two doesn't work?
The problem we see is that all of these branded training methods,
zone two training, methatone method training, 80 20 training,
primal endurance, CrossFit endurance or polarized training,
talk almost entirely about zone two, low heart rate training being the key.
So athletes focus only on that zone.
We hear a lot of people say,
I want to focus strictly on zone two over the next few months and this is the worst
thing we could do for ourselves as athletes.
Why zone two training works is because it
builds a lot of mitochondria in your muscles.
Mitochondria are the energy producers of our body.
So more mitochondria should mean better performance, right?
Not so fast.
Those mitochondria don't just need to be there, they need to be taught how to work.
And they only get taught how to work
by high intensity, zone four and five training.
This is where methods like 80 20 training,
primal endurance and polarized training get it right because they promote a good
chunk of time spent at this high intensity.
But these methods also lead to underperformance because you don't race
down in slow zone two intensity or up in zone five fast intensity.
So when all we do is really low or really
high intensity, we never actually learn how to race.
Well, that's where the method we promote,
the pyramidial model comes in and works so much better.
The Pyramidal model of training is different because instead of spending all
of your time in either low or high intensity training zones leaving our race
pacing abilities underdeveloped, the Pyramidal model spends a good chunk
of time at this moderate pacing zone as opposed to a strict 8020 breakdown.
A puremyal model would look more like 70 515 ten.
A typical running workout from our app that we'd have in the final few months
of our training plans would look like this where we spend a lot of time at low
intensity, but then build in a period of time slightly at or above your target
race pace, developing your ability to hold that target race pace.
We do this in our run training plans,
our triathlon training plans, our Dothlon plans, our cycling plans,
and our swim run plans, because it's so important for athletes
to build and refine their ability to hold their race pace really well.
How you would effectively do this in your training is by spending the majority
of your time in the offseason and the basebuilding season either at very
low intensity, the zones One and two, or very, very high intensity zones four
and five, developing your aerobic system and your top end speed.
Then, in our training plan,
starting anywhere from three to six months out, depending on the distance of the race
that you're training for, we start including longer and longer
periods of time at and above your taren race pace.
This does several things.
First, it allows you to develop
the sensation of what race pace should feel like, so that when you get
into the race, you know how to use the effort level
that you are able to achieve that day to dial in your best possible race.
And it develops the ability for your body to actually hold that race pace
for a really long period of time so you don't fade towards the end of the race.
Depending on the race that you're training for, the pace and time that you'll spend
at and above this race pace will be different.
For somebody training for a fivek or tenk
running race, it's going to be quite fast, and the amount of time that you spend
at and above race pace might be quite short, as little as five to 20 minutes.
At the very opposite end of the training spectrum would be an Ironman athlete,
where they might still be doing a fairly low intensity relative to what they're
capable of doing, but it's just slightly faster than their target race pace.
However, they might hold it for as much as 2 hours.
The bottom line is that you don't just want to do really high or really low
intensity running and certainly don't do just low intensity running.
You want most of your training to be
at the really low zone two intensity, then refine your top end and your race
pace with all of zones three, four and five running.
How we do that exactly is for another video.
If you're a beginner or age group runner, consider subscribing to our YouTube
channel for weekly videos made specifically for real people looking
to accomplish something amazing in endurance sports.
And if you want to dive more into how
to get started with Zone Two running properly, click the video on the screen
right now and see our full guide on how to do that later.
Motivators.