The Zone Underneath Zone 2 (And Why Zone 1 Matters)

[00:00:00] Runners are pretty funny. We drive a quarter mile, AKA 400 meters, to get a coffee, then take the elevator up to lift weights. We then sit an hour in the car Eight hours at the desk and then three more on the couch. And then we wonder why our knees are aching and why our 75-year-old self might not be able to get off the toilet alone.

[00:00:20] There’s one zone almost nobody’s running in consistently, and it’s not just going to make us better runners. Everyone’s pushing zone 2 down our throats. Huberman, Rhonda Patrick. I myself have said that zone 2 is amazing. But as Key & Peele would say, “What about zone 1, though?” I’m gonna be going over four specific things in this episode.

[00:00:39] One, why zone 2 gets all the attention and what it’s actually good for. Two, why zone 1 is technically better than zone 2 for some people and some runners and who it’s not good for. Three, how to microdose zone 1 into your daily life for more than just running gains. And the last thing, my free base training plan built so you can actually train the right zones for the right seasons.

[00:00:59] I’m Daren D. Lake, certified run coach, and I’ve been running for almost 30 years. I stumbled into zone 1 training by accident. I was training for an Ironman triathlon about 10 years ago, and I had to run and bike commute to work and everywhere else just to fit the training in, ’cause it was quite a lot, 15 hours of training a week.

[00:01:15] And I was pushing my kid in a stroller, stopping at lights, and sometimes walked the hills because I had to. It’s pretty hilly here in Sydney, Australia. And the whole time I thought I was wasting my time and it wasn’t real training. I was so focused on zone 2 that I figured that all this zone 1 commuting was junk.

[00:01:30] Then I finished the Ironman in 10 hours and 50 minutes, and over the years I researched, talked to experts, and realized it was the accidental zone 1 work that was holding the whole thing up. I haven’t stopped run commuting since I learned that, and I wanna be absolutely upfront and clear with you, this isn’t a zone 2 is dead hot take.

[00:01:49] I love zone 2 training more than anything else. This is just way more nuanced than the internet wants to make it. For some runners, lots of zone 1 is a superpower, and for others it’s a time waster. But most runners can benefit from a little more zone 1 training as the payoff goes way beyond running, and I’ll talk about that very, very shortly.

[00:02:06] All right, so what is zone 2 training? Zone 2 is the you can hold a full conversation and say a lot of words without taking a breath zone. A lot of quotations there. This is based on a five heart rate zone system, ’cause there’s the three, the four, the five, six, seven. I’m sure there’s a 10 heart rate system.

[00:02:21] But it’s on the five one and most people follow this, so zone 2 is usually within the five. And for most it’s between 60% to 70% of your max heart rate. For some it’s 75 to 80%. For me, it’s 80% of my max heart rate because the more experienced you are and also just everyone’s very individual. So make sure you do your test right to know where your zone 2 is, because you might not actually have the right zone 2.

[00:02:43] You might be using a generic one. So you could do the Maffetone test, which I’ll talk about in a second, based by Phil Maffetone. You can also do a max heart rate test. You could run a 5K all out, a 3K, two-mile race, a one-mile race, then a hill at the end. Find your max heart rate and then reverse engineer from there.

[00:02:59] So 220 minus age isn’t really a great way to get your zone 2, but I digress. Zone 2 is the easy stuff. It’s the base, the miles you stack to build your aerobic engine. It’s not new. Dr. Phil Maffetone put low heart rate training on the map back- Back in the late ’90s with his MAF or MAF method, run slow to run fast was the concept, and it built a cult following with endurance athletes who actually saw the results.

[00:03:21] Hell, I drank and preached the Zone 2 Kool-Aid since 2013, and I still do. But it went totally mainstream around 2021. Inigo San Milan, a researcher at the University of Colorado, was publishing on Zone 2 driving mitochondrial growth. He also happens to coach Tadej Pogačar. I probably said that wrong. Sorry, you hardcore cyclists out there.

[00:03:40] He was the cyclist who has been winning Tour de France since 2020, and the sales pitch was super simple. If you train Zone 2, you build mitochondria, you live longer, and you race faster. Some other big names out there said it, Rhonda Patrick, Andrew Huberman, Dr. Peter Attia Which we won’t talk about right now

[00:03:58] And then over the last, I don’t know, five, seven years, Garmin and Apple Watch and Coros and all the other ones, they built zones right into the watch face so your heart rate zone is glowing at you every second of every run. Now your dentist is talking about mitochondria and capillary density. And look, they’re not wrong.

[00:04:13] Zone 2 is great for building aerobic capacity. But check this though. Most runners, they can’t actually stay in zone 2 while running. They usually drift into zone 3. The easy run isn’t easy anymore. It becomes gray zone. Not hard enough to build top-end fitness, not easy enough to recover from. You’re paying the cost without getting the reward.

[00:04:31] I did an entire episode on this called Zone 2 Lies. You can get that up above or there’s a link below in the description or whatever you’re listening or watching this. And here’s a quick action that’s actually a real challenge for you to take away right now on your next run. Try running slow, keeping your heart rate in zone 1 and maintaining good form without walking.

[00:04:52] So you’re still running, you’re just kinda doing this weird little Kenyan shuffle as it’s called. Uh, look that up. Kenyan shuffle. It’s pretty cool. It’s way harder than you think, and the key for me is to shorten my steps, make sure I’m driving my knees up. I’m doing that. You can’t see my knees. Uh, as high as I practically can because you’re running so slow you actually can’t drive your knees up or you’ll just be marching and look stupid, uh, and feel stupid, and you’re not actually running at that point.

[00:05:13] So try doing one minute on running super slow with good form because it actually gonna take a lot of brainpower and energy to do it, and then four minutes running normal on a flat course. And then you wanna progress that, so next week do two minutes on, four minutes off. Get up to five minutes on with probably four minutes off or three minutes off, whatever, and you might see some decent gains.

[00:05:32] And you wanna obviously keep your heart rate low. If your heart rate starts climbing up, then you’re doing it wrong or you might just need more reps at it and your body needs to get used to it, ’cause that’s another thing. You just need to do it more to get better at it. All right, so this is a lot of information and theory, but at some point you actually have to go run and do this thing.

[00:05:49] So before you close this episode out and forget everything, ’cause you’re gonna hit that four-minute mark and go, “Dah, I’m done with you, Daren,” I got for you a free zone 1 and zone 2 base training plan, and I’ll help you learn how to cycle and run commute. It’s like a starter guide. Get it here at the QR code or the link below wherever you’re listening, watching, et cetera.

[00:06:09] I’ll wait. Okay, I’ve waited. So if zone 2 is the famous one, what’s underneath it that nobody’s talking about? The whole point of this episode, zone 1, roughly 50% to 60% of max heart rate. Again, might be a little bit higher for some folks like me. It’s pretty much walking pace or kind of walking at a good clip.

[00:06:28] Like, you’re actually like, “I gotta get that bus,” so you’re still doing that power walk like, uh the Olympic marathon walkers. So it’s a super easy shuffle too, if you can do that, which I’ll talk about why it’s so hard to do. It’s the kind of effort where your watch buzzes at you to speed up and you ignore it.

[00:06:43] It’s like if you have the pace locked in, and then like, “Eh, you’re going too slow. Slow… You gotta speed up.” So writer Inaki de la Parra, the 2016 Ultra World Champion, he has a VO2 max over 70. He does 80% to 90% of his training in this zone. Yes, zone 1. Mike Trees, who is a co-host of this YouTube channel and podcast, et cetera, he is, I think, 64 years old, possibly 65 years old.

[00:07:09] He runs 17, 18-minute 5K still, mid-60s, and he can run at the pace of four minutes and 30 seconds per kilometer. So that’s about 7:10, 7:15 per mile at a heart rate of 105. He calls himself an aerobic monster. And he got there by doing literally tens of thousands of hours in low zone 2 and definitely a whole lot of zone 1 work because he cycles and swims.

[00:07:30] He’s done a bunch of Ironman triathlons, et cetera. Here’s my take after 30 years of running and looking at the research. Zone 1 gives you most of the same aerobic base adaptations you get from zone 2. More mitochondria, more capillaries, better fat burning, bigger engine, et cetera. But it’s at the fraction of the recovery cost.

[00:07:47] So when you run zone 2 and you start getting fast and really fit, the pros, it actually wears their body down, so they actually have to slow down or they can’t do as much zone 2. I know, it’s crazy, right? You can stack way more hours of zone 1 without breaking. That’s the unlock. It’s the same foundation, less damage.

[00:08:03] And to be clear, zone 1 will not build your threshold or your VO2 max the way zone 3, 4, and 5 work will. That’s a different job. Zone 1 builds the basement, the intervals build the top floor. We wanna get that frame right. And Strava just rolled out a feature where you can see your zone distributions over weeks, months, and the year.

[00:08:21] And I actually just realized that I train zone 1 and zone 2 about 90% of the time now. It’s wild to look at, but it took me years to get this profile. Here’s the science of why it works. A 2014 study by Stoggl and Spurlatch, published in Frontiers in Physiology, compared four training models in endurance athletes.

[00:08:39] Polarized training, which is roughly 80% easy work and 20% hard work, it beat threshold-heavy training, high-volume training, and HIIT-only training for both VO2 max and time to exhaustion gains. So it’s like, eh, it’s a bit of an argument against all the VO2 max HIIT people. And Matt Fitzgerald wrote a whole book about this called 80/20 Running.

[00:08:58] Pick it up if you want a deeper dive. Again, this is for trained athletes, so we’re gonna talk about intermediate and experienced athlete. If you’re a brand-new runner, you might actually be better just getting out there and running As best you can consistently for three days And not worrying about heart rate.

[00:09:14] Okay? So that’s the difference. So if you’ve been running for two, three years, you really wanna get better times, you’re able to run five, six, eight, 10 hours a week or train whatever, that’s when doing the 80/20 and more zone one and zone two works. So before you come in the comments and go, “Ah, zone four, zone two, I can’t do da-da.”

[00:09:31] All right? It depends. Like everything, there’s nuance. All right? Depends on what you want, who you are, where you are, how far you wanna go, all these different variables. All right? Life is not black and white. The internet wants it to be black and white. So zone one is the foundation. Think of it like scaffolding around a building.

[00:09:47] Zone one doesn’t make the building taller. All right, here’s more nuance that YouTube hot takes always miss. Zone one only works if you have the volume to compound it, as I just said. Inaki, Mike Trees, and even myself when I was training for my Ironman, were running, riding, and swimming 10, 15, 20 or more hours a week.

[00:10:03] That’s why zone one builds them up. A 2007 study by Helgerud and colleagues found that high intensity intervals built VO2 max significantly faster than steady state moderate training in well-trained runners with limited volume. See? See? There’s two studies that are literally saying two different things.

[00:10:19] So who is zone one actually for? The marathoner training seven days a week, whose easy zone two run days are still too fast, and it’s wrecking their body and not allowing them to train correctly on the hard and long days. Like I said, you start getting so fast in zone two, it actually starts breaking you down.

[00:10:34] Yeah, I know, the good problems, as Prop Joe says to Marlo in The Wire. You Wire fans, if you know, you know. And zone one is also for the Ironman training triathlete commuting to work who can stack hours like I did. And it’s for the runner whose ego won’t let them walk on a recovery jog because they aren’t fit enough to be able to run in zone two.

[00:10:53] So that’s actually most runners. So it’s a tool that can be used for everyone. If that’s you, slowing down is probably the unlock. And if you run three times a week training for a fun 5K, keep those intervals, keep those tempo runs. Just enjoy running. Don’t let me talk you out of your intensity. But you can also have one zone one run every 10 to 14 days, every week or two, in your toolkit to whip out for a proper easy recovery run versus just sitting on the couch and doing nothing.

[00:11:19] Here’s a quick action for you, another one, ’cause I love giving stuff for you to take away that’s actually real world practical versus all this theory. If you have Strava Premium, pull up the new zone distribution feature and look at the last month of your training. Be brutally honest about what you see.

[00:11:35] If you’re sitting 60% in zones three and four thinking you’re running easy, that might be the problem. That probably is the problem. Here’s the real issue, though. It’s not your training plan. It’s what happens in the other 23 hours after you’re done running. Even if we nailed zone one, even if we had perfect intervals, and even if our long runs were textbook, there’s a bigger problem sitting in the way of us living a strong life into our 70s and 80s.

[00:12:00] It has little to do with how you train, but more in how you live. We train five hours a week. We sit the other 163. The coffee run is still 400 meters, quarter mile. The elevator is still right there The car is still parked outside. None of that has changed since the intro of this video. What’s changing is what you now know, and now you know that every elevator ride is a 30-second deposit into a body that can’t hold itself up in 30 years.

[00:12:27] Every coffee drive is a missed walk. Every hour in the car is an hour your hips forget how to move, and your back hurts a little bit more, your shoulder or your neck. Again, that math, it ain’t mathing. A 2004 scientific review laid out the science that might just bother you. After age 30, you lose 3 to 8% of your muscle mass per decade if you’re not actively training against it.

[00:12:48] You also lose 10% of your VO2 max every decade if you’re not actively training against the loss. After 60, that starts accelerating, so we’re back to the muscle mass. The falls become one of the leading causes of injury-related death in older adults. Not cancer, not heart attacks, falls from weakness, from not moving, and ironically, it’s the fall that lands you in the hospital, so the fall didn’t kill you.

[00:13:12] But it’s you not being healthy enough and not having a high enough VO2 max and not being mobile enough, you might die from something in the hospital. That’s the crazy thing, so second and third order effects. That’s a slow leak in your tire. You don’t notice it driving to work. You notice it when you need to swerve out of the way.

[00:13:27] You go, “Oh, that’s not adapting and reacting as quickly. Modern medicine has gotten really good at keeping us alive. It has not gotten good at keeping us capable and actually living a good life. So now we don’t die early. We spend the last 10, 15, 20 years of our lives in a body that can’t carry us. If you don’t use it, you will lose it.

[00:13:47] Sorry to sound morbid, but it’s the truth, and the fix isn’t another training plan. The fix is learning to weave zone one movement back into the 160 hours a week that you aren’t training. So here is the move, how to microdose zone one into your days. Stop separating training from moving. Movement is your zone one.

[00:14:05] It’s being human. Some people like Pavel Tsatsouline, uh, who is the kettlebell god, master, czar of sorts, go Google him, he’s hilarious, call this greasing the groove. Brady Homer, who I have on an episode about VO2 max, he’s the VO2 max expert, he calls this fitness snacks. I like to call it microdosing, kind of like microdosing shrooms or THC or whatever.

[00:14:26] But you’re microdosing fitness. It’s just small frequent activities of low intensity work spread across the day instead of one big workout. You’re not chasing a training adaptation. You’re chasing a baseline, and you’re stopping that leaky tire. Go and walk to the coffee shop. Go and take the stairs every single time.

[00:14:42] Yes, every time, no excuses. Maybe nine out of 10 times. Park at the back of the parking lot and walk the extra two minutes. Get a moderate weight kettlebell for you, put it next to your desk, do one set of swings every hour on the hour to break up your workday. Not a workout, just movement. You won’t even be sweating.

[00:14:59] You could even try sprinting upstairs for 20 seconds in the middle of the day to break up sitting. That actually improves VO2 max in sedentary people. Yes, 20 seconds I think two to three times a week will improve people’s VO2 max. Sprint upstairs. You can do it in your normal clothes. It’s crazy. Walk after every meal.

[00:15:15] The– So many things. Now, here’s the part you have to be clear on. Daily movement is not training. They are not equal. It’s not gonna make you a faster 5K runner on its own. It’s not gonna build mitochondria the way a 90-minute steady low heart rate run will. But daily movement is the difference between aging strong and aging fragile, and it’s free.

[00:15:34] And it will also indirectly help your running fitness because you’re just gonna feel better, you’re gonna move better, you’re gonna be able to get to the gym more, you’re gonna be able to go, go out for your runs and feel better and recover better. Here’s the stack you actually want. Structured training builds your aerobic ceiling.

[00:15:48] Your race pace, your engine, your top-end fitness. Daily zone one movement builds your longevity floor, the strong, capable body that’s still here at 75. You need both. All right, here’s a quick action. If running in zone one is hard, it is for most runners, so you’re not alone. It’s hard for me to keep in zone one on hills, so it’s, it’s not easy.

[00:16:07] Do your zone one work cross-training. It’s as easy as that. Like on the bike or in the pool or elliptical in your gym. I found it’s so much easier to keep your heart rate low while doing all those things. And on hilly runs, be okay with walking the climbs to keep your heart rate low. It is absolutely okay.

[00:16:24] Drop the ego. I walk hills all the time to not spike my heart rate. Now, here’s the bridge. Once you stop treating zone one as training you do only on runs and start treating it as movement you can stack all day, the easiest place I found to begin is the commuting you already have to do to get to places each day.

[00:16:41] And to do that, go and get that free base training plan, all about zone one, zone two, and the commuting cheat sheet. It’s all bundled, wrapped together, which will show you all the stuff that I talked about in this episode. And obviously, you’ll build up your aerobic base. You’ll even run faster and farther, easier, what every, every runner wants to do.

[00:16:58] All that is in one free download. The link is right here at the QR code or below in the description, wherever you’re listening or watching. And you also sign up for my free email course to actually get the mental lifelong tactics to do this whole 1% better each day thing. Six lessons, five minutes or less for six days right in your inbox.

[00:17:15] Super easy to read. And then one email a week from me that actually will build on all this stuff that I talk about on YouTube and in that course just every week until I die or you unsubscribe, whichever comes first. Next task for you, watch the how and why you should run and cycle commute episode right now.

[00:17:35] Click the video below on YouTube, or if you’re somewhere else, there’s a link in the description or show notes. It’s the fastest way to start microdosing zone one. Happy longevity. Peace.