In this episode of the Athletes Compass podcast, hosts Paul Warloski, Paul Laursen, and Marjaana Rakai dive into the science and practice of zone 1 and 2 endurance training, emphasizing its pivotal role in improving fat metabolism and overall performance. They discuss the importance of low-intensity workouts, the pitfalls of over-reliance on sugars during training, and how calm, controlled sessions enhance physiological adaptations. Through engaging anecdotes and actionable advice, the team underscores the necessity of building a solid aerobic base and offers insights into tailoring training plans with tools like Athletica. The episode wraps up with practical tips for controlling intensity and fueling smarter, aiming to empower everyday athletes to train effectively.

Key Episode Takeaways

• Zone 1 and 2 training is essential for building endurance through enhanced fat metabolism and mitochondrial development.
• Consistency in low-intensity training minimizes stress on the body, enabling better adaptation to higher-intensity sessions.
• Sugar consumption during workouts can stress the body and blunt endurance adaptations.
• Tools like heart rate monitors and perceived exertion scales help athletes stay within optimal training zones.
• Athletica's personalized algorithms and manual overrides allow for flexible, tailored training plans.
• Recovery and mindfulness are crucial between phases and after high-intensity efforts to prevent overtraining.

• Protein, Recovery, and Performance for Female Athletes Dr. Mikki Williden
• The Training Intensity Distribution of Marathon Runners Across Performance Levels
• Mikkipedia | Athletica AI and HIIT with Prof. Paul Laursen
• Paul Warloski - Endurance, Strength Training, Yoga
• Marjaana Rakai - Tired Mom Runs - Where fitness meets motherhood.

What effect do these simple sugars have on the zone one, zone two

So all that work when we started with in the beginning of the podcast, talking about zone one, two,

talked about the stressed individual that heart rate is soaring high.

And now you're throwing sugar at that.

it's you're ruining all of that work that you're kind of doing because sugar is a stress. The body is not accustomed to having sugar and its response is actually the heightened

heart rate.

Hello and welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast where we navigate training, fitness and health for everyday athletes. A research paper by Munoz or maybe 'Muniz'. came out this month showing that fast marathon runners did a lot more volume than slow marathon runners. This is not surprising. What was interesting is that nearly all of the extra volume was in zone one.

of a three zone model. We'll link to the study in the show notes. And in episode 53, we talked about the importance of building a base of fitness primarily by training in that easy endurance zone one and two. And that's in the five zone model that we'll refer to in the rest of the podcast. So Paul, can you remind us in episode 53, we talked about this.

What physiological adaptations occur in zone one and two and how do they improve endurance? How could they make these faster runners fast by going slow?

Yeah, well, it comes down to fat metabolism at the end of the day. And that's really what that is doing. Like aerobic, mitochondrial building, fat metabolism. These are the key things that you get with training volume. So that's what's going on. That's why you want to be spending, know, the majority like that 80-20 rule, you want to be spending 80%.

of your training in that, in general, that lower zone one or two of a five zone model, right? So yeah, that's, we spoke a lot about that before, but it's a key fundamental piece of your training program puzzle.

So how does that fat oxidation support

faster running, especially in longer events?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so Ingvild Odin on the Training Science podcast, she did this cool study. And we might've spoken about it on that base one, but basically what she showed, like she showed likewise that in her, she had these two groups of Norwegian cyclists and they measured VO2 in every single training session across.

you

many, many, many weeks. The study would have taken them two years to do. And they do these in these Norwegian sports schools. It's amazing. But anyways, after all the data was quantified, what they showed was she split them down the middle. And there was a group that adapted and there was a group that didn't adapt. And the group that adapted to the HIIT sessions was the group that had performed more training volume and specifically

more training volume in zone one actually of the five zone model. easy, easy training, right? And it was, wasn't a heap more, but it was close to two hours more than the other group, right? And just that, even just that extra two hours of training, imagine just doing like one extra 90 minute to two hour session of aerobic training. That was enough to support the greater adaptation to HIIT training.

that these cyclists got. And it was notable, right? Like, so if you wanna make gains in your high intensity interval training, you wanna have that baseline level of base behind it. And it's the same with the finding that Paul's describing with that new sort of landmark study that came out with very high sample size.

that it's the same sort of thing. Like you want to have the big training volume. More training volume means better fat adaptation, means more mitochondria, and it means enhanced VO2 max. Remember back a study I did with Steven Seiler and we showed that basically higher VO2 maxes were related to greater fat metabolism. And that...

doesn't get talked about a lot. Usually people think, high intensity exercise, gotta be carbohydrate based, right? No, that wasn't the case. that group of the, was Steven Sahl and I's, where they were the high volume group, like the well-trained elite athletes, they had the higher VO2 maxes in relation to high volume of training behind them, more training sessions.

And yeah, the fat metabolism explained the VO2 max, not the carbohydrate metabolism. So that's why, yeah, that's what we wanna focus on. Protect your base sessions, protect your zone one and two training. It's instrumental. Not that the other stuff isn't important, but yeah, like the science and the data is just so clear now.

Oftentimes you see beginner athletes and even intermediate athletes who haven't done a lot of training. They just, when they start running or cycling, their heart rates just shoot up straight to zone three. Why, why does that happen?

they're stressed and they don't have the adaptations on board to meet the physiological demands, the physical demands, right? So the only way they can meet those demands is through a sympathetic response, stressful response. So the body is working so hard to meet the demand that's being placed on it, right? So they kind of go out there and they're like, I'm gonna grind my way through this and it shouldn't be that way, right? When we coach

Thanks

We're trying to coach through calm, know, zone one, two training, breathe through your nose. You want it to be easy, right? And by doing that, you're keeping that stress really, really low, right? This is classic Phil Mafetone tone, MAF training. So it's, classic zone two training. That's the way you want to go about your, your process. So make sure like HIIT training and grinding and no pain, no gain. Maybe it's got a place as one session.

but the majority just has to be calm. And if you're patient, you will see the gains slowly over time. Marjaana is smiling at me. She's like, you weren't always so patient, were you Marjaana

No, but it's so funny that we're talking about this because this is exactly where I was three years ago.

Thank you.

Yes you were.

But you learned.

learned, but yeah, so it was really hard. I came from over training, so I had to fright myself. And you told me to go really slow, really slow and do walk run methods. But what are you looking at? What kind of signs are you looking for?

Let's just say what signs were you looking for when I came to you and told me to slow down?

mean, the first one is the exact one that you described right off the bat. Your heart rate just goes skyward right off the bat. You don't have that because you think exercise is interpreted by your body as a stressful moment versus something that you're just working through. So we needed to get a hold of that stress and just do the walk runs first, right? You to walk before you run.

Mm-hmm.

So it's the hardest thing to do, right? It's just to go slow in the beginning. And yeah, like you just have to dampen the sympathetic stress. Remember, there's two divisions of the central nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, the fight or flight system, right? That's to protect us and save us. And then the calming parasympathetic system to relax us. So we, of course,

any sort of exercise will trigger a little bit of a sympathetic stress to push us up, but not, it shouldn't be like, know, extreme, right? Where you're constantly in massive fight or flight. there's kind of a degree that you need to, there's, you know, there's different levels of the engine that you should push the throttle, right? So you only want to move the throttle into gear one and two, right? Let's just call it the same with the zones.

and you want the zone one and two throttle just really working like a diesel and humming that engine, just kind of grinding along. And you don't want it to go into zone four and five. And that's what you were kind of having to do when you started out with me, right? That was just the way you went about things. You pushed always towards those really harder zones.

Yeah, that had to change and we changed it and made a difference, right?

total game changer. And there was a lot of it, like lot of the low intensity sessions. And I had to be really mindful what I was doing. Take off ear pods, don't listen to music that would hype me up and push me to go harder. Like it was like three hour ride and I had to just be with my own thoughts and just calm myself down instead of like, I feel good. Let's go hard.

Thank

So that was a really important learning journey for sure.

just started working with a 19 year old kid who's got some, got some talent and he, he just got a trainer and he's on Zwift and all he wants to do is climb Alptaz, Alptaz Zwift, whatever the Alptaz Zwift, Alptez. And, and that's all he wants to do. He just wants to go hard up that hill all the time. And it's like, no, we're going to go slow. We got to go slow. We got to go slow. And it's, it's, it's a learning process.

to us.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and then the Norwegians call this intensity control, right? And that's what your 19-year-old phenom doesn't quite have yet. That's what you're trying to teach him. And when you get that intensity control, then you give the appropriate signals under a of a calm nervous system and you adapt optimally. And again, this...

So how does training in even in zone three, how does that limit progress and what are some of the telltale signs in performance or, in recovery?

Yeah. Well, back to Steven Siler. He was the first one that did a study that showed this. He used heart rate variability in this study. this was in, well, he did in a couple of groups. One was a really well-trained group and one was a not so well-trained group. But what he really showed was he did four sets of exercise. One was just like a zone two for one hour.

Second was zone two for two hours. Third was zone three and last one was like a HIIT session. And what he showed was that in these well-trained athletes was that when they did one hour of zone two, no heart rate variability response. Two hours of zone two, no heart rate variability response. Just easy, no problem. One or two hours of zone three, big sympathetic response.

response and HIIT session, big sympathetic response. So basically, even though that zone three, if you know zone three, this is like tempo, that zone three, even though it was still, you you can still talk through it, all these sorts of things, it was still stressful. The body still interpreted it as stress. So you can imagine the scenario. This is what Stephen was trying to prove when he was really proving the Norwegian method.

If you're always in that zone three and you always drift into zone three where you can still talk, and you can still hang out with a group that might be faster than you, if you keep doing that time and time again, it just adds to the exact same stress as you would achieve if you were doing a HIIT session. Imagine doing HIIT sessions, that's all you're doing. Well, zone three is kind of like, as far as the body is aware.

it interprets it the same as a stress, a heavy stress. Whereas you can, because consistency of training and, you know, always signaling the body to adapt that we know that's what you want to do, that can be done so much better with the aerobic training, the zone one and two work. So do as much zone one and two work as you want, but limit the amount of training in the zone three and above.

So if a listener suspects they need more aerobic work, what changes do they need to make in their training? I guess this depends on what phase they are in.

Yeah, probably does. Yeah. I mean, if you're in a build phase, if you're in a build phase, think about it. You're, you can see the race on the, on the horizon and you're preparing for it. But if you are, if you can't really see the race on the horizon and you're just going through to train, then you should use the workout wizard on athletica or if you're not on athletica, should, you should switch it up to a zone two kind of.

of training session, right? So that's what you should do. yeah, just be mindful of how much high intensity training is in your training diet in any given week.

we talked about run, walk or walk, run, but is there other practical advice that we, you you talked about that control of intensity. How can we help athletes, everyday athletes control their intensity and stay in the correct zones? I what's the practical advice? I mean, go slow.

For sure. But yeah, we have lots of tools and we use many of the tools in Athletica. But some of the tools off the top of my head would be, well, use a heart rate monitor. That's a great one to have a look at. If you know your zones in Athletica, you know, want these to be in around the zone one to two on the five zone model. You want your rating of perceived exertion, how your brain feels. You want that to be

You know, want it to feel easy, easy to moderate, and you wouldn't really want to push above that. And then there's something else on Athletica called the feel. A session can feel good and it can feel not so good, right? And how that session feels in terms of your interpretation of it also matters too, right? You want these sessions to feel good. It's like, yeah, I felt good to do that. And then there's other factors too that

the usage of the parasympathetic system over the sympathetic system. for example, if you're walking, if you can, you wanna try to cover your mouth and breathe through your nose. And for whatever reason, I think it's James Nestor, the book Breathe, there's a parasympathetic stimulation when we breathe through our nose. And you can do that whilst you're exercising, while you're riding a bike.

know, Paul would coach on a, you know, a zone one sort of session or out there doing a walk, run. And maybe you, maybe you do a walk, run and you only run until you can't breathe through your nose anymore. And then you, that would be almost like your stimulus to get back towards walking. Like that would be a really good sort of intro set. And then maybe as you develop and build, you get more and more time where you can breathe through your nose when you're actually running. And then that would be, that would be an indicator that you're

probably improving and able to, know, the parasympathetic system is sort of working better and you're able to, you're probably adapting better in terms of your fat metabolism. That's, you know, that'd be a good little coaching moment potentially for coaches and their athletes.

So we established the importance of base work and lots of zone one and two. In Athletica that I'm using to train for my gravel races next year, I had a really short base period. was just a couple of, I think one block. And I jumped right into a long build phase. How does Athletica help athletes individualize their programs to ensure they get enough aerobic base training?

Yeah, that's a great question, Paul. And we get some chatter about this one on the forum sometimes. And really, at this point in the game, in terms of the algorithms that are behind Athletica and when it's determining when you get a base phase versus when you get a build phase, is really proximity to the event itself, right? Athletica thinks that if you plug in a race on a given date,

Well, within about eight to 10 weeks, thereabouts, we're gonna work on building up for that event, right? We're gonna train you with specific training that's probably gonna be of a higher exercise intensity to prepare you for the stress that's about to occur, right? That's the whole goal. That's what it's trying to optimize for. So if all of a sudden you plug in a race and it's in...

It's in March, well, March is just around the corner, right? And kind of like to your point, within one week of base, we're already sort of into building phases because we've got an event right in front of us that we've got to prepare for. Conversely, if you had your event in August, Athletica is going to give you months of base training to adapt. So it really, at this point in the game at all,

depends on the proximity of that race and where it's coming up. if you know, if you're racing in March in the Northern hemisphere and you know you just, that's okay, I don't think I need to start building in that one for a while, you gotta kind of manually override things and you would be wise to go in there and adjust the volume of your training, go down to low or mid volume depending on where you wanna be.

Use train to maintain, which you'll just be flipping around mostly in base phases, which is probably what you want. Or you can also use, if you go to the overview page and you look at the race and all the dates, the weeks, sorry, the dates that are kind of down on your overview and you can look at your roadmap.

and you click on one of those dates, you can actually switch it, swap it to a recovery week. So you could, there's nothing wrong with just, you know, clicking on five or more recovery weeks in a row, changing all those build weeks to recovery weeks. So you have full control, you know your context more than Athletica does, remember that, you and your coach. So...

Mm.

Don't be afraid of overriding some of the things based on common sense. Always let common sense guide your decisions. The three of us, Paul and Marjaana, thank you so much for your help in guiding our athletes to work towards really trusting their own intuition around what's best for them. We're constantly doing that. Because I think

Naturally, we get this feedback a lot. We want to think sometimes the AI must know more than us, right? Well, it's an AI coach. should. Chat GPT is so smart and all the like. But don't let that go. Don't let your feel go. Don't let your wisdom go and your grasp on common sense. Athletica can't beat you in your brain. So if the little man or woman in your head is saying, that doesn't really make sense, trust it.

and make the swap, make the change. Nine times out of 10, you are right and Athletica is wrong. All right, so, and of course always use the form or our help desk and we're always happy to help you if you are in doubt, but yeah, you're probably right is the message. I wanna make clear.

If you're in doubt, reach out.

If you're in doubt, reach

out. Yes!

Yeah, that's what the forums for.

Yeah. And, and I'd like to add, like, if you have several races, don't be afraid to take a little extra recovery after your first race. Like last year I had April race and then I had August race and I would have been built like if I was listening to...

Athletica I would have been building again to the second race in August right after, but I knew I needed to recover first. So I don't exactly remember what I did. I don't think I changed the plan, but I just did my own thing for a couple of weeks and recovered from the first race. So if you have several races, just know that you should probably do a recovery or train to maintain it in between before you go back to build. Or if you're sick.

That's right. Yep.

or you travel and you miss a start with the base week if you can, or recovery week.

Yes.

For sure, Paul said something that was, I need to go back to as well. He said, that's what the forum is for. And it is amazing how many experts we have on that forum now. So just some really quality, quality individuals. Some are ambassadors, some are coaches. It is just quite the group that we have on there. And I just wanna thank everyone for...

for the work that they do because it's saving so much work for me, which I can't get to anyways. So yeah, I just wanna say how appreciative I am of all the expert coaches and experts that are kind of chiming in there. Like I'm reading all the comments and I'm just going, yeah, yeah, that person knows their stuff. That's great advice. there's just the quality that we have on there is phenomenal.

And so yeah, to Paul's point, if you've got a doubt or query, push it into the forum and watch what happens. will get answered by the appropriate expert and you'll get on your way.

It's pretty cool to watch. I've actually started to wait a little bit because I know that somebody will reply and they're so helpful. It's just amazing. It has taken its own life.

of the things that I, that I have done as well with athletic training plan with the base is that on days that are, you know, more zone three, heavy, more interval heavy in my build phase, if I'm not feeling it, I just make those an endurance day. And you know, that's what I do with the athletes is like, you can always, like Paul said, you can always add more endurance into your days. can always add more zone one and zone two. And if you're.

doing a zone three ride, doing some temple, then don't do it. Do the endurance riding or running. That is going to be more beneficial in the long run.

Agree, agree. And the other thing you can look at too is if you're on the Garmin, sorry, yeah, you're on the Garmin system, you've got like one of the more newer Garmin products, check out your heart rate variability and the recovery profile. And Athletica will be, does a very good job of letting you know and interpreting as well. Check out that new Coach Avatar and what the Coach Avatar is actually saying if you go to that recovery profile. And you know,

it usually will tell you whether you're good to go on that kind of harder session or if you should just, like Paul said, just switch that up to an aerobic development session. And if feel and your HRV are right in line, then you know you've done the right thing, right? Like that's just, almost have to go to the easy session. I have to go to the aerobic session for that, yeah.

Cool. We saved a listener question to last this time. We have a question from Fasol, Fasol, I don't know how to say his name. This is from the forum. A highly trained master cyclist observed high glucose and A1C levels and wondered if this could be linked to exercise induced insulin resistance. Is this a potential outcome of high volume endurance training and what can athletes do to manage it?

yeah.

Well, that's, I would go back and review the Mickey Willindon podcast. also the one that Mickey and I did on the fast talk

podcast. can include those in the show notes. but generally, so if you, let's, let's just interpret this question a little bit more. So if you have a high glucose, usually you're getting that from like a continuous blood glucose monitor. So you can kind of see that.

it's elevated across the day as opposed to just a single blood glucose marker that might just be randomly

high Hemoglobin a1c levels basically mean you've got like a chronically high blood glucose marker. So these are these are good indications that You glucose in general is high in your daily life. Is it exercise induced insulin resistance?

I wouldn't put it, I wouldn't phrase it that way. I don't think exercise per se is what's going to be causing an insulin resistance. I would think it's more sugar and high carb, is the high insulin resistance trigger, not the exercise. Exercise should in theory lower that. Remember that exercise actually opens up the muscles and allows blood glucose to kind of be absorbed or diffused into it.

I would just take the exercise word out of that. I would say it's more of a sugar or carbohydrate issue. In other words, it's just like the whole load of that carbohydrate is just too high and it's around all of the cells in the body. And that's why this gene marker in the hemoglobin itself, right, is elevated. So what can you do to manage it is the question. Well, go back and listen to probably actually one of our

more and higher protein levels ultimately in our diets and alongside of the training and whatnot. yeah, are, yeah, I'm just making sure that that's how you'd manage it. You would, yeah, you basically, you wanna stop your sugar eating and you want to really focus on quality nutrients in the diet.

you know, like imagine being a Tour de France cyclist back in the 80s or something like that, right? Or like, you know, we didn't have gels back then. Sure, we probably find a gas station of a Coca-Cola or whatnot, but like, you know, was back to, it was more old school. Like think of 60s, 70s and whatnot, right? Like it was.

They weren't fueling that way. were, you know, they so, but it's now become just so accepted. that's you've got a, you know, for some reason, well marketing, right? I guess marketing kind of pushes it in there. And yeah, like that's the, that's the only way, the only way is to fuel that ride with a gel, which is just sugar.

No.

Yeah. And some companies market it pretty aggressively, improve your endurance or run new PR, drink our products. no, it's very aggressive marketing.

No

Yeah.

What effect do these simple sugars have on the zone one, zone two adaptations? How do they directly affect the fat metabolism and oxidation that happens?

That is question of the week, that's for sure. And that's the answer is they blunt the response. So all that work when we started with in the beginning of the podcast, talking about zone one, two, work, the importance of that. And we talked about the stressed individual that heart rate is soaring high. And we talked about how you kind of had to bring everything back to kind of calm parasympathetic. And now you're throwing sugar at that.

it's you're ruining all of that work that you're kind of doing because sugar is a stress. The body is not accustomed to having sugar and its response is actually the heightened heart rate. Prove it to yourself actually. Like take, you know, the next time you're monitoring your heart rate and you have the opportunity to have a bolus of sugar in whatever format that may be.

monitor your vital signs and you'll see that your body is rebels to that and it's a stress in the body and the heart rate is elevated as a result. So that's, yeah, that's what you don't want, right? So this is back to, you know, we've talked about this before with the film Aftone, unhealthy athlete, you know, discussions, right? Like you want to, this is what's causing the unhealthiness, right? Like you get this,

hypothalamic adrenal, hypothalamic pituitary adrenal response. Basically your whole, from the brain to the nervous system to the endocrine system, they're all attached and if you have that sugar, it's a stressor and it's just like it adds to the whole stress cascade and you blunt your ability to adapt to your training. So don't do that.

So I have learned a lot in this episode and here are, here are three things that I, there are more than three things in this episode, but because this is such, what we talk about in this episode of the zone one and two is so much of what I talk about with my athletes. So much of what we talk about in this podcast with good health, but one, number one, what is one of the most important adaptations

from zone one and zone two endurance training is improved fat oxidation, which allows us to train on fat stores rather than glycogen. It's not either or, but that's the idea is that we're trying to improve our fat metabolism. Number two, the base season.

Riding in zone and riding and running in zone one and two is a great opportunity to clean up our diets and habits to support more of that kind of training. So go slow, use a heart rate monitor, rely on your RPE. These rides and runs and workouts should feel easy and you should be able to nose breathe. And number three, too much reliance on simple sugars during training can really blunt the effect

of endurance training because the body ends up relying on carbohydrates instead of fats. And we're trying to do the opposite. So you don't need to fuel your training with simple sugars.

Yeah, that's just seems like the beginning of what we got here, but that is all for this week. Join us next week on the Athletes Compass podcast. Ask your training questions in the comments or on our social media. When you finish this episode and you enjoy it, we appreciate it when you take a moment to give us a five star review. For more information or to schedule a consultation with Paul, Marjaana or myself, check the links in the show notes.

Hahaha

For Marjaana Rakai and Dr. Paul Laursen I am Paul Warloski and this has been the Athletes Compass podcast. Thank you so much for listening.