Why You Can’t Stay In Zone 2 (4 Fixes)

[00:00:00] This is a real comment from a real runner that’s about to quit zone 2 forever. And there’s thousands of these runners right now convinced that their body is broken and convinced that the science doesn’t work. They are wrong. I’ve coached hundreds of runners over the last decade, and everyone with this “I can’t run in zone 2” has the same four problems.

[00:00:20] It wasn’t genetics, it wasn’t the age, and it wasn’t bad luck. They just didn’t do zone 2 right. They would do, I don’t know, 20, 30-minute runs once, twice a week, and then take a four-month break and go, “It’s not working.” That’s not how zone 2 training actually works. So if that’s you I’m gonna help you with four fixes over the next few minutes.

[00:00:39] Learn how to train in zone 2, build up your aerobic fitness, and start running easier and faster with less effort. And just to prove to you that zone 2 can be trained if you have the patience and the time, I’ll be doing this while running in zone 2. Uh, I actually fell, um, early on trying to capture this, as you can see right here.

[00:00:57] All taped up now. I’ll call this Conversations While We Cool Down. It’s a new format that I’m testing out, and you can come on me, and we’ll be doing a really easy jog and some walking around beautiful Pyrmont Bay here in Sydney, Australia. Maybe you can see the Opera House right there. And the shoes that I’ll be rocking on this run and cool-down session are the Saucony Endorphin Speed 5.

[00:01:20] Oh, no, actually 4s. 4s. Yeah, love these shoes. These are, like, my all-rounders. A bit on the faster side. Oh, and if you stick around until the middle… Actually, you know what? You can do it right now. I have a how to run faster and farther with low heart rate easier, et cetera, less effort training plan. You can get that right now.

[00:01:38] It’s a QR code right here, or you can, uh, wait till the middle, or you can get it at the link below. Let’s get into exactly what zone 2 is in the five heart rate system. So zones aren’t one, two, three, four, five. It’s not just, like, these little steps. It’s actually based on percentages of your maximum heart rate.

[00:01:56] And the thing is, most people actually don’t know what their maximum heart rate is. So you should go out and do a bunch of different tests. So if you’ve done a 5K, you can know your maximum heart rate kind of. If you went 100%, I like to do a bit shorter going 100% at, like, a mile or two miles, and you’ll definitely know at that point if you have gone 100%, and maybe do a hill right at the end.

[00:02:16] And also, it’s usually zone 2, between 60 and 80% of your maximum heart rate. Again, you need to know your maximum heart rate. So that does slide for different people. The more fit you are, you can be closer to 80%. I am. I’ve been doing this for 15 years. And if you’re not as fit, you’re more sedentary getting into zone 2, it might be closer to 60, 65%.

[00:02:35] And the last thing is you also wanna do a lactate threshold test. That’s why I say 5K. So you can kinda figure out your zones based on all that. Lactate threshold test will get you right there. All right, now that we know our five heart rate zones, let’s get into the first fix: technology and gear. Most people don’t even know that their heart rate monitor is wrong that they’re using.

[00:02:55] So technology. Everyone loves a smartwatch. It’s easy. You probably have a smartwatch, Apple Watch, et cetera. There’s a lot of cheap ones, a lot of expensive ones. Garmin, Coros. Pick your watch. All the different Apple Watches. And they have an optical heart rate monitor sensor on them, and they are not that accurate for running.

[00:03:13] Like, they’re kinda accurate up until you get to probably zone 2. Depends on a lot of factors. Um, skin tone is actually one of them. If you’re dark or you have tattoos there. Another factor is, uh, if you’re running on kind of like pavement versus gravel, um, how high you jump. There’s all these different factors.

[00:03:32] How much blood supply, how high up your wrist. There’s just too many factors that it throws it off. It’s really good for walking, and sitting, and laying, and sleeping, and bedroom stuff that we won’t get into. Try to keep this PG. But outside of that, it’s not, so I highly suggest you get a actual heart rate monitor sensor.

[00:03:51] And you know what? Let’s get into a little jog here. If you end up using a heart rate monitor sensor, just go buy one. There’s some cheap ones out there for 30, $50 US, or you can get a bit more expensive in the 100, $150 range, and it’s just gonna be more accurate. You can get the chest one, which some people, a lot of people say is more accurate than the, the arm-based one, which I actually have on here.

[00:04:10] Try to get you- image of it. So I got the arm one here. It’s kind of like a cheap E- uh, Amazon one, not a eBay one . And it’s actually been pretty good. It’s called KOOSPO, but I- no affiliation. They are not sponsoring this. Um, I also have the Wahoo one, and I’ve got a bunch of different Wahoo ones. I’ve had the Garmin one.

[00:04:27] So I am agnostic when it comes to heart rate monitor sensors because they all work very well. These wrist-based ones are really, really good. Um, I think they’re actually sometimes more accurate than the chest one, but I’d say they’re about 90, 95% accurate ’cause you always get interference. It’s Bluetooth.

[00:04:45] It’s, uh, radio frequency. Like, things just get wacky. If it’s cold and you’re dry, um, and you don’t actually have sweat in there, it doesn’t have actually electronic sensors to really connect to, and you just end up getting a lot of issues. But I highly suggest running by feel a lot and knowing with technology, okay, this is my heart rate at this zone.

[00:05:04] Flat, you know, on a nice day, cool day. And then you actually can start like, if your heart rate monitor is not working, you can start going, okay, I know my heart rate’s here. If it’s like off or whatever, you forgot it, it’s not working for a race, you know where around your heart rate is ’cause you have effort.

[00:05:17] But that takes experience, and that takes time. So if you’re like, “Hey, I wanna improve my zone two right now. How do I do that?” I got you. Free training plan. Helps you run faster and farther with less effort. All the zone two goodness. You actually will be able to do it. It’s 30 days, and you can extend it out, remix it, do whatever you want with it.

[00:05:34] Again Go get it right now. Description below if you’re watching or listening somewhere else, or if you’re on YouTube, you should’ve gotten that link up here, or there’s a QR code right here. And with experience and time and wisdom comes self-awareness and knowing yourself and realizing that you may not be fit enough and that you aren’t a non-responder.

[00:05:52] So you’re not some special person that it’s like, “Oh, it doesn’t work for me. I just, I’m just accepting that I run in zone four.” No. There is zero literature that I’ve found, and I’ve got studies to back all this up, that say that there are people out there that don’t respond to low heart rate aerobic-based training, and I’m actually gonna back it up with proper science.

[00:06:09] So tell me if this is you. You have been training for, I don’t know, like one to two months. You just started running, and you were running twice a week for, like, 20, 30 minutes because it’s new. You don’t wanna do too much. And then you take three months off, and then you come back, and then you run again twice a week, 15 minutes here, 20 minutes here, take a week off, and then you go, “Zone two training isn’t working.”

[00:06:34] If that’s you, that’s probably why it’s not working, ’cause you don’t have enough consistency. You gotta be consistent. Like everything in life, it needs to compound. So Think of it more like two to three days a week, 30 to 40 minutes, and really keeping that zone two and not letting your heart rate go higher than zone two.

[00:06:52] And if you do, you walk. It’s okay to walk. Walking’s fine. And then compounding that over 10, 12, 16 weeks, that’s how you do zone two training because that’s patience. Patience is doing something when you’re waiting for things to actually grow and build, and that’s how aerobic base fits. And again, patience is the fourth pillar in my book, and I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again until I release this book and maybe even after, but gotta have patience.

[00:07:15] Patience is the last ingredient. It’s like the secret sauce. It’s like the sprinkles on top, uh, the frosting. It just makes everything so much better. So here’s the science that actually proved that people are not non-responders. They actually ended up taking these non-responders, the people that are like, “Oh, zone two training doesn’t work,” or just in general, aerobic fitness doesn’t work.

[00:07:34] And what they did was they, like, bumped it way up. So I think they were training 40 minutes, 60 minutes a week. You can check out the study. I’ve got a link there. They ended up bumping it up to two hours, uh, not a week, a day training, and then they compounded that, and then guess what? Boom, they actually got fitter.

[00:07:51] They tested them over and over again, and it was like, “Look at that.” The non-responders went to zero. Brady Holmes told me all about that study. Um, he’s great. If you wanna check him out, I will definitely have him on. I’ve already had him on. Uh, love talking to him. He really dives deep into the science of exercise science and fitness and all that stuff, so go check him out.

[00:08:09] Give him a follow if you can on Substack or somewhere else. The link is below for Brady Homer. But that leads to my third point, which I touched on earlier, which is consistency. So this is the third fix. Gotta get consistent. Consistency is key in pretty much everything in life and especially zone two training.

[00:08:26] So what you need to do is actually get out for at least, uh, like, 25, 30 minutes for at least three days a week, uh, in the beginning, and you want to be super consistent. So you wanna get your sleep right. You wanna make sure you’re eating well. You wanna make sure that you’re doing all these things that actually compound and help you train better at zone two.

[00:08:46] So it’s not like a magic fix. It’s actually just showing up day in, day out when you don’t feel like it. You don’t wanna be injured, don’t wanna be sick, don’t wanna be burned out, but you need to get out there and do the thing, and you need to Walk. That’s huge. If your heart rate goes over, obviously, zone two, you start slipping into zone three, zone four, you need to just walk.

[00:09:05] Make sure you’re doing it on a flat course. In the beginning, at least try to stay away from hills for the first 10, 12 weeks. You gotta do it for at least, at least eight to 10 weeks to see any gains. And then you can kinda maintain that for as long as you want. Obviously, then you wanna go do other types of zone three, zone four training, which will improve other areas of your fitness, your aerobic fitness, and you can get better for other races if you wanna do faster races, et cetera.

[00:09:28] But you gotta do that first eight to 12 weeks. And then, I don’t know, every two to three months, I might end up doing like a aerobic base kind of block where I just focus on that for another eight to 10 weeks to kinda top it off throughout the year. And you can maintain that for the rest of your life.

[00:09:43] And then do, uh, race stuff and high heart rate stuff and HIIT training, all that other stuff. Also, with zone two, if you do strength training while you’re doing zone two, you actually can, like, do a little bit of a supercharge in there and get a lot of benefits, and also become a bit more injury resilient, and just overall just fitter.

[00:09:59] Everyone needs to strength train. All right, so while I’m talking about zone three, zone three is actually aerobic. And the problem with zone three, or the gray zone, that a lot of people end up sitting in because it feels kinda hard, kinda easy, especially when you’re starting out, you breathe a little bit hard.

[00:10:12] The problem is that you end up doing a little bit more damage, and then you don’t recover from it. So your cortisol stress hormones spike a bit higher than you’d like. Uh, you do a little bit more damage on your body and, uh, your muscles and tendons and ligaments, and then you don’t recover for the next run.

[00:10:28] So you’re kinda going into every run slightly tired and fatigued, and you’re never really recovering. Zone two is actually the fix for that. You can get most of the aerobic benefits, just not all of them, that you would get from zone three, and not nearly as much fatigue and wear and tear on your body.

[00:10:42] Let’s get into the fourth and final fix. So the last thing that I kinda prescribe to any runners that I coach is cross-training. And cross-training allows you to not- wear and tear your body because let’s say you’re like, “Oh, I wanna get super fit in zone 2, so let me just run seven days a week for 45 minutes.”

[00:11:00] You would wear yourself out if you’re not used to it. Even advanced runners will wear themselves out at, you know, one hour, seven days a week. That’s where cross-training comes in, especially as you get older. I am 44 at the time of recording this and I do a lot of cross-training, especially in the base season or whenever I feel like an injury is coming up or burnout or something’s about to happen.

[00:11:17] And then I go, you know what? I’m gonna hop on the elliptical. Uh, I’m gonna do a bike ride, do a swim, aqua jog. I love aqua jogging it’s like my new favorite thing. Um, strength training, HIIT is another way of cross-training, plyometrics, form drills, all cross-training to support running, and that all can improve your zone 2 if you do it in zone 2, and it’s actually easier to stay in zone 2, uh, usually on the bike and swimming.

[00:11:38] Elliptical can be a bit hard to stay in zone 2, but you can build more volume while wearing your body down less. Look at that. Look how that works. Again, to wrap this all up, we got fix number one, technology. Fix number two, you’re not a special snowflake. You just need to actually do more. Um, and then fix number three is consistency, and fix number four is cross-training.

[00:11:58] Not gonna say too much about that. You just gotta get out there and do it and figure out whatever works for you and how to plan and sequence your life around training. Because if you really wanna run farther and faster, uh, with less effort, you gotta build up the base. And you’re not special. I should technically not be able to run in zone 2 because I am a fast twitch monster.

[00:12:19] Like fast twitch is sprinting and power stuff and lifting weights. I have a lot of that genetics, and I was able to build up through just consistency over the last 14, 15 years, just doing a lot of zone 2 training, 80% zone 2, sometimes 90% zone 2, and then 10, 20% zone 3, zone 4, zone 5. And now I can run marathons in zone 2 mostly with a low heart rate.

[00:12:40] Talking to the camera, I did a marathon, actually last year where I did all that. So I won’t beat a dead horse. Let me know if you got any questions about zone 2 training in the comments. Um, or you know what? You can email me if you’re not watching YouTube, daren@onebetterun.com. Um, that’s the number one better run.

[00:12:56] And go get that training plan. As I said before, the link is all below. QR code should be here. And if you actually wanna learn about low heart rate training, I got a video for you right below here if you’re on YouTube or, uh, the link is below if you’re on somewhere else ’cause this was the tip of the iceberg.

[00:13:12] This was more like zone 2 training is actually much easier than everyone thinks, but it’s harder in actual practice. So go check that out right now. Happy zone 2 training. All the best with building up your base. Peace.