Zone two, zone two. We hear it absolutely everywhere. But how much zone two riding should you actually be doing?
The debate rages. Time crunch riders always lean towards extra intensity. Others ride around in the small ring for half the year.
But what is the actual answer? What does the current science today? Today we're cutting through the noise to help you train smarter, not just harder.
So stick around and we might just change the way you plan your training. Anthony. Yeah, this topic really has been splitting groups and blowing up for forums for a long time, for years.
There's writers out there who swear by all zone 2, you know, all of those miles saying kind of you have to go slow to go fast. And then you've got the other side of the fence and they're preaching intervals and very high intensity, those pain fests. They kind of believe that that's the only way that you're going to get race fit.
So the big question I think is how do I know how to allocate my training time and how much time should I be spending in zone one, zone two and then beyond that doing any intensity if any at all. There's a crazy stat to kick things off and not tease the answer down the line. exercise scientists found that the ideal allocation of slow work to fast work, and we'll go on to define slow work in a little bit because that is important to make sure it's slow but not overly slow.
We'll talk about that in a little bit. They found that the perfect allocation is 80% of your time, we'll call it for now, easy, and we'll define that later. And 20% hard, and we'll go on to define that later as well.
So 80% slow, 20% fast seems to be the real split. And that's a finding from Professor Steven Syler who we've had on the podcast who studied this extensively and he kind of pioneered the whole 8020 approach in endurance sports. I think that's going to be really surprising for a lot of people to hear because we do assume that the pros for instance they're all out there kind of hammering it and their training sessions every day.
They're going out and having really hard days of training seven days a week and that's how they get so good. But you're telling me the secret to this pro level of fitness is just a bunch of slow rides. No, it's not just a bunch of slow rides.
There's a little bit more nuance to that. But yes, we found that the distribution of training easy to training fast should be about 8020. And it's not just Steven Syler with one bias opinion.
He's studied data from top athletes across different s across different sports and he's seen a clear pattern. In fact, there's also been multiple followup studies to validate Siler's work and we can link some of them uh below. Veron Bal and Jonathan I'll butcher his name, Jonathan Estz Lenano had two big studies as well which both confirmed Siler's 8020 style work.
Don't forget we had him on the podcast as well and he helped me really understand why slow riding works. As athletes we have three levers which we can pull. We have intensity how hard we train.
We have frequency how often we train and we have duration and we have duration how long we train. So intensity frequency duration. What defines an athletes long-term progress is their frequency.
How often they ride over a long enough time period, whether that's months or whether that's years. So, we need an athlete to be training quite often. And the thing that most often derails frequency is intensity.
So, by pulling back on the intensity lever a little bit, it allows us to push forward on the other two levers of duration and frequency. Yeah, it's a good idea. was the first time it really made sense to me as to why we really prioritize it's a costbenefit analysis essentially.
Yeah, it's something that helped me think about it as well. I know this year I had a big winter of zone 2 training and you know as I'll talk about later I found I was pretty skeptical at the beginning about you know why I was having to go out and do such long rides at such low intensity and you were saying to me that it's just so well look you're going to be able to get up tomorrow and train your blessings it wasn't zone one into a headwind into a headwind 4 km an hour but that actually before we jump on that's a it is a point because there's a humble to riding that slow as you found right there. Like we call ourselves bike riders.
We dress up in the Lyra. We go out in our expensive bikes. And to ride slow enough in zone one or zone two, that could mean that like, you know, the old granny walking her dog is walking past.
Not quite, but you know what I mean. Genuinely, there were ladies on city bikes passing me by when I was in zone 2 when I first started. It's like a meme.
Yeah. And I re I I agree with you. You totally have to leave your ego at the door.
What I did find when I was doing it though, after I kind of got used to it and settled into it, I really enjoyed it because I wasn't kind of thinking, "Oh, there's a green light uh 200 meters away. I must get to that as fast as possible to get through the light." You're just kind of I don't know, it's a nice relaxed spin.
But what I want to do is go back a couple of steps just to clarify for people, you know, the zones. So, we're going to be talking a lot about zone one and zone two training and some of the other zones because these terms are thrown around a lot and I'm not sure that all of the audience will understand what what they mean. Yeah, it's a good point.
Zone one and zone two, it typically refers to an effort on a training scale and these are different zone systems, but if we keep it simple and we say zone 2 refers to an easy endurance pace. It's the kind of ride where you can go out and you can chat with a buddy, you can chat with a friend, you can tell stories, you can respond. Yeah, you could sing.
You could respond definitely in more than broken words. Like if you're if you're if you're replying to sentences with one or two words, typically not zone two, like you're breathing normally. You're able to keep this sort of comfortable conversational pace for a long time.
If you want to go further into the weeds on that, we have different lactate zones. LT1 is our first lactate inflection zone. So, anything to the left of LT1 is typically Siler has a tree zone, which I actually really like.
Almost like a traffic light system, green, orange, red. Our green zone is to the left of LT1. It's easy pace and it encompasses zone one and zone two riding al together.
It's an interesting type of place to train, but regardless of how you break it down, zone one or zone two is conversational pace. Zone one particularly is easier than zone two. Like you talked about, it takes some humility to go out the door and ride zone two.
To go out the door and ride zone one, it doesn't need humility. It needs incredible discipline. We've seen this for years.
The idea of recovery rides. Now, that's been largely debunked. Recovery rides, we're either recovering or we're riding.
The idea of recovery rides, it's an oxymoron. It's like freshly frozen. It doesn't exist.
If you're recovering, you're at home on the couch. If you're riding, you're getting an adaptation. I'll bet just a different type of adaptation.
So zone one would also encompass anything to the left in LT1 that would be the green zone. But if you're using the traditional five zone model like Kogan or Freel would advocate it's under 55% of your threshold power. And to simplify that again because we did kind of get a little bit technical there.
Slow rides are those really low intensity rides. Your heart rate is very low. You feel very relaxed.
Recovery spins and they're they're your endurance rides. And then speed work, that's your high intensity, higher zone stuff there stuff. That's your intervals, your sprints, your hill repeats, anything that's going to get your heart racing or your heart rate elevated.
Exactly. And for the last couple of years, we've seen coaches obsessed with slow rides and this mantra kind of go slow to go fast. And it does seem like a little bit of a paradox, but there is real science behind it because when you ride at a low intensity, especially for long durations.
You're training your aerobic system like crazy. You're getting the adaptations. You'll get an adaptation in each zone.
It just depends on the type of adaptation you're training. But in zone one, zone two, like you're teaching your body to effectively burn oxygen and also to utilize fat as a fuel source. Both really, really important.
And over time, this can literally change your muscle physiology. For example, there's a lot of research that shows that training in zone one and zone 2 for long periods of time increases your mitochondrial density. It's also going to build more capillaries in muscle fibers and boosts lactate clearance as well.
So, there's a bunch of benefits to training there. But in plain English, what you're doing is you're increasing your engine's capacity. So, you're kind of making the engine more efficient and almost bigger by doing this.
Bigger engine. I think that's a pretty good analogy. You're enlarging the fuel tank of the engine.
There's also something fascinating about why pro coaches have started to prescribe it so often. They're emphasizing riding easier than previously taught because it means they can get more volume into a training week. I chatted with Vasilus Anastopoulos who was Cavendish's coach for his record break last season.
He's also the head coach in Aana at the moment. Brilliant interview. It's actually we should link it below because it's worth people going back to watch in its entirety.
But he said what we used to consider junk miles. So people used to be obsessed like let me know in the comments if someone is doing this or used to do this. Everyone's had a training partner like this that say their bottom of their zone two was 180 watts and they wouldn't deviate from that.
So they'd be on downhills like crushing the pedals 80k an hour trying to ride 180 watts on a 18% incline downhill. They're going through the city like trying not to freehel like front brake back brake on still pedaling trying to keep watts because they thought that if they drop below 180 watts there was a somehow like a magical edge here that you stepped off and you're no longer getting adaptations that you're into junk miles. But Vasilus told me like that's absolute nonsense that you're getting amazing adaptations in zone one.
And he started prescribing six, seven, even eight hour endurance rides at that very low intensity because guys can come back from the rides and they're tired, but they're not ruined and they're able to go again tomorrow. So when you look at that cumulative load over the course of a week, it's massive. And it's all to the left of that LT1 that we talked about.
So an effect of training there is it pushes the LT1 zone to the right which we're all looking to do. Even if you don't have means you're still looking to do it because it's increasing that adaptation. It's a sign the adaptation is the training stimulus is working and you're getting an adaptation.
So these pro riders are literally rolling around at what we would call coffee shop pace. Yeah. pretty much like their training very easy and you might go out and be surprised if you're riding, you know, zone 3, you might be surprised that if you go to one of the popular cycling locations, you're around Nice or Jirona that you just pedal past one of these guys at 220 watts because they're that disciplined and they're doing it because they don't want to come in shattered.
They're tired at the end of a session. They're not coming in and reaching for the takeaway menu busted on the couch for the rest of the day like a lot of us find ourselves when we come in from spins like me last Saturday, but they're able to go and repeatability is brilliant for them. Yeah, it's funny that you were kind of mentioning earlier as well.
I just want to go back to it really quickly about the mitochondria and how you know this zone 2 zone one riding actually promotes um mitochondria. And so we're talking about performance here, aren't we? But all zone one and zone two riding and being th in those zones is actually very good for your overall health and not so health as opposed to just for performance as well.
So there are other benefits rather than just kind of you know smashing your friends up that climb to working in these zones. Yeah. And I think most of us that are listening to this podcast, if you're not a pro bike rider and will define pro bike rider as you're getting paid a living wage to ride your bike, not you're unemployed and you happen to be riding 25 hours a week.
If you're not a pro bike rider, you should be optimizing for health. And downstream of health is performance rather than optimizing for performance because downstream of performance isn't always health. Yeah.
So, if going slow is so beneficial and it's basically the magic sauce, why would we do any speed work at all? Like, could a cyclist just ride slow forever and continually get better and faster? Well, two points to that.
One, at some point you're going to come up against diminishing marginal returns. So, the more you do of something, the less benefit you get of it at some point. That's me and a little bit of use of my economics undergrad.
So if you keep piling on more and more zone 2, at some point it's going to you're going to hit a threshold where you're not getting as much benefit from that. But it's essentially back to what we talked about that each of those zones, if we work off that five zone model from Kogan, we talked about zone one and zone two and the adaptations you get in those, which are brilliant and we documented those. But if you only trained exclusively in zone one and zone two, you're leaving the adaptations for zone three, four, and five on the table, and you're not getting any of those adaptations.
So what the science is telling us is that 20% should be devoted to the zone three, four, and five, getting those adaptations. And some of those are like neuromuscular power, their V2 max, their lactate clearance. They're stuff you won't get in zone one and zone two.
They're exclusive benefits to training in these zones. Why you want those is if you need to sprint out of a corner, if you need to position yourself into a climb, if you need to climb, all the stuff that happens in bike races, that happens in fast group rides, that happens in your sports. So, if you train exclusively at zone one and zone two, you're not going to be well adapted to your events when it comes up.
Yeah. I think as well, the other point that we should talk about is zone three, isn't it? Because we do see people the 8020 and you put zone 3 firmly in that 20% place, didn't you?
Whereas I think a trap that a lot of people do fall into is that they ride around only in zone 3. So they're not in a super low heart rate or zone and they're not in a super high zone and therefore as you said they're only getting the adaptations of zone three kind of used to call it headless chicken riding just going out and going kind of hard. Well, the issue with that is it's that working in the narrow band and getting a narrow set of physiological adaptations associated with working in that band.
So, if you spend 100% of your training time working in just zone three, you're leaving the most crucial lowhanging fruit, which we talked about zone one, zone two, where you should be spending 80% of your time. You're neglecting that, but you're also neglecting zone four and zone five, which is likely depending on your event, unless you're, you know, a ultra cyclist. It's necessary for your event.
Yeah. The problem is it's own three is you kind of think, "Oh, I'm going to go out here and kind of whack it." You kind of feel like you've had a good workout even though, as you said, you're just pigeonholeing your gains into this one area.
Okay. But then back to this kind of raging debate that we were talking about and we've got the people who absolutely idolize the base mile approach, just tons of volume at really low intensity. And then you've got the people out there who, you know, really extol the virtues of high intensity training probably mostly because they're really time crunched.
They're kind of thinking, okay, right, I only have five hours to train, so I'm mostly going to do high intensity. That's where I'm going to get most bang for my buck. And you've got this these two kind of camps within cycling c culture.
Yeah, it's really a divided camp. On one side of it, you have the siler advocates of the polarized training, the 8020 crew, and they'll follow, you know, siler's 80/20 research to the letter of the law. And they'll argue that even if you have limited training time, you should still keep 80% of those rides, super easy.
And then on the other side of that, you have the sweet spot or highintensity proponents for time crunched athletes. and they'll say, "Look, if you're only doing six hours a week and you want to get a training stimulus, you want to build some training stress score, your performance management chart can go up, you'd be better making your time on the bike count with intensity. Otherwise, you not won't create enough training stimulus to actually advance as an athlete.
So, it's the classic quality versus quantity battle. Yeah. I mean, if we're honest, recreational racers or like busy athletes, people with jobs, careers, family, you know, all of those other things that kind of pull you away from training or training pulls you away from them.
You know, doing 12 or 15 hours of zone 2 in a week just isn't going to be possible. And we see people, I know you do, uh, especially with people who come to you that haven't been coached before, they're just trying to do a couple of int interval sessions and then a longer ride on the weekend. And they're real goal is to get that TSS, that training stress score.
That's one of the markers or indicators that we see on training peaks. That's a number that we're all trying to kind of raise up. Like I've even been there.
Well, even to jump in, training stress score is not a number we're trying to raise up. Train and stress score is the number that tells us how hard a session is. So, when we total 42 of those together, that gives us our chronic training load.
Sorry if you're losing us on this, but that gives your chronic training load, and that's the number you're trying to chase normally. Yeah. Yeah.
And the T but the TSS feeds into that. So, it's like Yeah. your daily sessions.
Yeah. You want you want to make sure that your TSS, a couple of them are pretty high in order to increase the number on the back end. And I've even fallen into this trap.
I'm just kind of, you know, if we've got a busy day, I'm like, "Oh, well, I don't have four hours to train, so I'm going to do an hour with a ton of intervals, put myself in the pain cave, and that's going to make up for those four hours of low intensity that I should have been doing. Yeah. Well, that's kind of a common sense approach.
But here's the danger of it. If you only do high intensity sessions and you never go easy, say that's your schedule and it keeps happening that you're doing that the weekend there's always an excuse to ride shorter and free up time to spend more time with family or your side hustles or whatever. And you're never getting those adaptations from zone one and zone two, but now you have the frequency.
We talked about those three levers at the start. Now the frequency of your sessions hasn't changed, but the duration's come down and the intensity has gone up. We can't maintain that intensity every day of the week.
you know, if we're training four days, six days, seven days a week, it doesn't matter. We can't maintain that intensity. Most coaches will say two intense sessions per week.
So now, if you go move to a model where you're trying to train three or four intense sessions per week, what actually happens is the intensity is not as high as it should be. So the sailor model of 8020 and why it works is 80% of your time you're riding easy. Those benefits we've talked about, but a secondary benefit we haven't talked about is now you're fresh and you're feeling ready to rock both mentally and physically for the 20% of sessions, the two sessions per week that you are going to add intensity in and you're ready to go and you can fully commit to them.
So, when you do too much intensity across the week, you fall into this gray zone of your hard sessions not been hard enough. And that's because your easy sessions aren't easy enough. That's it, isn't it?
you feel like you're going out and you're working hard and you're, you know, it's good for your confidence because you think this is definitely getting me places, but in reality, if you're never allowing that full recovery or training in other zones, you're just kind of in this constant middle grind and your body won't adapt in those other zones or it won't adapt further because, as I said, lack of recovery. Yeah. And like to be clear, intensity isn't bad.
Like people don't jump into the comments and kill me for I'm the total low intensity guy. I'm not. It's the proper allocation of intensity is what this video is about.
It's doing your two to max three hard sessions per week and a boatload of stuff below LT1. So zone one, zone two riding cuz no intensity can backfire and too much intensity can backfire. So the takeaway message with it is to do your easy sessions easy and to do your hard sessions hard and not get caught in between.
Now you asked about riders who just ride slow all the time and that can definitely be bad but in a different way because if you only ever ride slow and you never challenge yourself with that intensity. Your performance will eventually hit like we call that diminishing marginal returns. you're going to hit that ceiling and you might have great endurance then and you might be able to ride for 6 hours with your friends, but if they give it a little bit of gas out of the coffee shop, you're going to be dropped.
So, that's the reason why you're leaving those gains on the table. Hey everybody, let's take a quick break to talk about the bike I'll be riding this season, Reap. I've been lucky enough to ride all the top brands in the world over the past few years, but these Reap bikes, they're not the same.
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I absolutely love my one and I couldn't recommend it highly enough. Back to the show. So, do we just do the exact same training every week?
Will that work as well? Yeah. No, this is why cookie cutter plans don't work.
Uh, everyone has probably heard of periodization. There's different schools of thought raging on periodization, whether it's traditional periodization, reverse periodization, random allocated intensity. There doesn't seem to be research points that there's not a lot of difference between what type of periodization we go with.
So, we're going to talk about traditional periodization. The idea with traditional periodization is we don't respond if we just keep doing the same thing over and over. You've probably have a friend or maybe even you've gone to the gym for like 3 days a week for 4 years and you've seen absolutely no difference.
Initially you went in, you got a stimulus, your body responded to that stimulus, but then your body created a new normal. It's able to cope with that stimulus and it's no longer stressed by it. So now you no longer have a stimulus that's affecting your body and challenging your body to create an adaptation.
So what happens is we just stop adapting and we slow down. So to combat that, physiologists a long time ago built something called periodization. And it's hugely important.
It basically means you structure your training plan in blocks. Each block having a specific focus. For example, with a traditional approach, you're going to do a base period, which you'd be more focused on low intensity.
Then into a build period where you'd begin to gradually introduce intensity of like tempo and threshold. Then you're into your peak period where you're introducing more sprint work, race specific work, and then a slight taper where you try to get rid of some of the fatigue. And then you're into your race.
And then you have a little transition period and you rinse and repeat and you're back in again to the start of the cycle. Yeah, I think that that's where people like myself who are new to the sport and you know, amateurs tend to get it wrong. We kind of mix certain types of training al together all of the time because we're not sure what we're going to do or we're short on time.
We're kind of panic training. And I've definitely been guilty of doing that kind of training in the winter for instance. Well, I probably should be doing base miles.
John Wakefield Bora coach was on the podcast and he actually had an interesting take on building those training cycles. We'll call those macro training blocks, building the bigger training blocks of your season. So rather than just saying okay it's whatever date we're on now May 22nd May 23rd rather than saying we're on that date and that's day one and now we'll build in this rigid format to take a blank calendar and now to put in big events around it.
So a traditional block would be four weeks where we have week one, week two builds on week one, week three builds on week two, week four is a slight decompression and then we go into the next block. So it makes no sense that if you have a period of high stress in your life, the goal is to absorb the stimulus to get faster. Stress cortisol inhibits our ability to adapt to sessions.
So we want to make sure we're training hardest at periods of our life that are low stress. So John, even with his pro riders, will talk to them and say, "Hey, what's the big events you have in your life? Do you have weddings?
Do you have a birth of a child coming up? Do you have an anniversary? something you can't miss.
Put them in as concrete. And now we start building training plans around that. And the takeaway message for us there is like quarterly reports, anniversaries, birthdays, stressful times in work, end of quarter sales targets, whatever it is.
Put those into your calendar first and then start to build your training plan. You're trying blocks around that. So you're training hardest at times when your cortisol is lowest.
So the goal of each session is to make you faster. It's not just to take a box and say on training peaks you got greens across the board. Each session is designed to make you faster.
And I can't, it's so simple, but Matthew Mo said that took them 10 years to figure that out. The goal of training is to get better at racing, not to get good at training. We all have friends who are just good at training.
They're that's their thing. They're good at training. You put them into a bike race and for some reason they can't perform.
The goal is to get better for your target event. That means each workout should have a purpose that benefits you. It's you don't do junk miles.
You don't do intensity unless it's lined up with your objective. And that starts with reverse engineering what that objective is. Some athletes will brag about the amount of volume they're doing.
And you see this kind of a little bit in the Strava culture of chasing miles and chasing kudos. If a session isn't making you better, maybe it's because you're too fatigued. Maybe it's because it's not thought out and it's not targeted.
reverse engineering the demands of that event. Or maybe it's just box ticking and it's not actually a good session. You've put it in there for no good reason.
It's not joined up thinking at the start. Yeah, that kind of makes me wonder how we know that we're overdoing even the slow miles. Yeah, you can overdo anything.
The poison is in the dose. If you do too much of anything, you're going to fall apart. So, you're looking for signs like the typical overtraining type signs like is your resting heart rate starting to be elevated?
Is your heart rate variability going the wrong way? Using Joe Freel's morning check-in idea of asking yourself like how motivated do I feel to train train today? Can I rate the soreness of my legs from a one to five?
I think all those traditional methods of gauging overtraining. I don't think overtraining differentiates between how you got to a point of overtraining whether it like it doesn't the the symptoms you're going to experience of overtraining aren't different because you've got to that point from training high intensity versus training low intensity. All that really matters is you've got to that point and you need to take kind of like evasive action then so overtraining doesn't become sorry overreaching doesn't go into overtraining or adrenal fatigue or something that's more chronic than that.
So when you're in a hole really just stop digging. Okay. So let's circle back to the time crunch cyclist because I know that that a lot of the listeners are really in that boat.
Let's say you can only train for, you know, six or eight hours a week. With the 8020 formula at six hours, that would mean roughly 4 and 1/2 hours easy at that very low intensity and 1 and 1/2 hours hard. That might be two kind of short intervals, I guess, uh, sessions and then the rest easy.
Is that kind of how you would plan it? Yeah, that's a huge question in coaching right now. And Steven Syler himself has noted that if you're training say 7 hours a week, a polarized or at least pyramidal approach, and we'll get into that, can still work very very well.
It might not be exactly 8020, but the principle of not doing every single ride really hard still applies. In fact, the common mistake for time crunch athletes, it's like we discussed, it's like doing all their rides at medium intensity and neglecting those aerobic miles. And over time, that can bite you.
you can miss out on those deeper aerobic development uh benefits and it leads to chronic fatigue. One thing to consider here is sustainability. If you look at a training week and you can achieve it this week, you know, amazing.
Can you achieve it next week? Amazing. But can you achieve it 10, 12, 16, 18 weeks from now when that motivation has died off?
It needs to be repeatable. If you keep smashing yourself indefinitely, you're going to hit the wall. you're going to hit a plateau or worse, you're risking exhaustion or you're risking injury.
So that pyramidal approach that I talked about, like from a practical standpoint, that might work a little bit better for time crunch riders. Maybe 70% low intensity, 20 to 25% medium intensity, that would be tempo or sweet spot, and a small 5 to 10% high intensity. And that can sometimes suit athletes with limited errors a little bit better.
Yeah, that is that's good to hear because you know it's not just that we're pigeonhold one sizefits-all and we have to rigidly stick to this 8020 number within the training especially for amateurs and leisure riders and I think as you said there that study does show that there is a little bit of flexibility in how you can structure things and you can still get better within all the zones as long as you're not skewing too hard all of the time. Yeah, exactly. The worst thing you could do would be to go hard every single session thinking it's going to maximize your gains.
Because yeah, it will maximize your gains in the very very short term, but those gains will stall out. Like that old adage of it's better to arrive at the start line 5% or 10% undercooked than it is 1% overcooked really holds true. Yeah, I I definitely after doing a whole winter of zone 2 training, I you know really I mean when as I was saying earlier, I really did complain a lot when I saw all of these in my training peaks and everything scheduled.
I just thought that they were boring. I kind of almost felt like they were pointless. I was, as I said, totally skeptical.
But months later, my endurance is definitely improved and I can actually go harder on those interval days because I'm not going into the following training session completely fatigued. Yeah, I love hearing that. And that's actually a really common story, especially when people switch over to starting to emphasize more aerobic development work.
Sometimes doing less intensity, it just gives you more results. And that's really the crux of this debate. It shouldn't be this absolutism.
It shouldn't be a eitheror. It's about finding the right mix that works for you and around your lifestyle as well. Yeah.
And I think if you if you're hearing people say, "Oh, either do only base base miles or only high intensity." Well, they're people you definitely should not be listening to. It's really about balance, isn't it?
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And use best practices. Use the insights from this podcast and the great thinkers we've mentioned, you know, Steven Siler, Dan Lurang, John Wakefield.
Use these as a starting point. 80/20 distribution has worked for a lot of lot of athletes. So take it as your starting point and then tailor it to your reality.
It's about being consistent balanced training week after week, month after month like we talked about. That's sustainability. It's not about doing one super workout or one super training week.
Sailor had a quote that stuck with me in our interview. It was your floor matters more than your ceiling. In other words, it's better to have a solid routine, a high floor than it is to go on this epic training camp where you smash out 35 hours a week in Morca for two weeks followed by burnout.
Yeah, I think that's what you're always saying to me. It is that consistency piece, isn't it? You're always kind of saying your worst weeks matter more than your best weeks.
You say that all of the time to me and that really does put it into perspective. So, I suppose the message for serious recreational and amateur athletes listening is don't be afraid to go slow on your endurance days. Like, let the guy who's going to half wheel you.
Just let them go. It's not waste of time going slow. It makes you stronger in the long run.
And then, conversely, don't be afraid to go super deep and super hard on your hard days because these sessions will stretch your limits and they'll stimulate new gains. Yeah. And we do this for fun and personal improvement.
I mean it's you might as well go and enjoy that Sunday coffee ride. We have a brilliant slow coffee ride Sunday. It's very relaxed and then we go and absolutely smash it on a Thursday.
So Thursday Night Worlds. Yeah. The chop the chop session.
So there is kind of the two polarized sessions right there. Yeah. And don't fall into rigid camps around polarized training versus highintensity training.
Don't let them divide you. Like you can take the best of both worlds. You can build that big base on the slow rides and you can still go and enjoy the chop session with your buddies on a Thursday night and use that session to build speed, neuromuscular power and all those other things that you might need.
Yeah, there you go. Hopefully that has cleared up a couple of questions around zone 2 training. We've dropped in a lot of references to Steven Syler, Dan Lang, John Wakefield, so we will throw all those in the link down below.
And also, if you found this episode useful, please do hit the subscribe button and pass it on to your cycling buddies. There's another video up there which I know you're really going to enjoy. And we will talk to you next day.
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