What do you know about “zone 2” training?
If you’ve spent much time on the internet in the past 5 years, then you’re probably aware it’s another term for “easy” training.
You might have also heard that it’s one of the best and most important types of training to develop your aerobic system.
But is that actually true?
Maybe not.
According to a new study on the topic, we actually seem to get significantly more benefits from our higher intensity work.
Yet if that’s all we took from the study, we’d be missing a lot of context.
First and foremost, the results of that study are aimed at the general populace.
They’re not aimed at athletes trying to improve at a sport.
When we’re looking at the majority of benefits one can receive from cardiovascular training, it really shouldn’t be all that surprising that higher intensity training will create larger outcomes in less time.
Yet at the volumes we have to train as athletes, we can’t just do high intensity.
If we did, we’d break.
In fact, as someone who trains a lot of non-athletic people, some people aren’t going to do any high intensity because… you guessed it, they’d break.
High-intensity work delivers a lot of results in a short period of time, but we almost have to “earn the right” to do it.
If we start our running adventure with all-out sprints or VO2 Max repeats, we’re probably going to get hurt.
We have to build our ability to handle those types of load and intensity – especially in a high-impact sport like running.
As athletes, we’re also more invested in developing running as a skill.
Which means we need to spend a lot of time on our feet in order to get better and fine-tune our technique.
And a lot of time on our feet demands a lot of easy training because we don’t want to destroy ourselves in the process.
If you want to listen to more about my thoughts on this study, I released a podcast episode about it a couple weeks ago.
But something I didn’t address in the episode as much as I’d like…
I think this study makes a good case for increased levels of cross-training for runners.
A lot of people are limited on how much they can run per week as a result of the high-impact nature of the sport.
So if you feel like you’re approaching your maximum miles per week, cross-training might be a good answer to expedite your progress.
Would it be good if you could run more?
Probably.
Yet even a lot of professional runners spend a decent amount of time cross-training.
And why?
Because they’re able to push at a slightly higher cardiovascular intensity without the impact they’d get from running.
I think we generally undervalue cross-training as a community.
I’ve thought this for a long time.
We say, “Well, it would be better if I ran, but if I run more, I’ll probably get injured, so I guess I’ll just hang out.”
Instead, you could hop on the elliptical.
Or the bike.
Or the rower.
You could get some extra cardiovascular training without hammering your bones and connective tissues.
(Remember you still have to eat and sleep enough to recover – and with increased activity comes increased demands for food and sleep. I know it’s a bit of a non-sequitur, but it’d feel irresponsible not to at least mention it.)
So in short…
We could all probably be cross-training more.
I’ve been spending more time weekly on the elliptical and the bike lately.
As a result, my runs have improved – even without increasing my running volume.
It’s a sometimes underappreciated strategy that I think we’d do well to consider more often.