Zone 2: Do You Actually Need It?

Jas asked me about Zone 2.

Zone 2 is easy aerobic work. For most of us it is easier than you think — you can hold a conversation the whole way through, in full sentences, without gasping. The benefits: more capillaries feeding the muscle. Better use of fat as a fuel. Building a bigger aerobic base under everything else you do.

None of that is in dispute. The question is whether it's the thing you're missing.

The part the podcasts leave out: the people who built the Zone 2 evidence base are endurance athletes training fifteen, twenty, twenty-five hours a week. At that volume, you cannot make every session hard — you'd be wrecked inside a fortnight. So the vast majority of their hours are easy by necessity, and it works well.

You train three or four hours a week. Possibly five.

Your problem is not that you're doing too much hard work to recover from. Your problem is that you have very few hours in the week, and every one of them has to earn its place. Taking one of your four sessions and turning it into an hour of easy pedalling is not obviously the best use of it — and if you're already only training three times a week, it's a bad trade-off. Your class already contains a large amount of aerobic work. You're getting the base. You're just getting it at a higher intensity than a cyclist would.

So here is what you should do, and it depends entirely on how much you train.

If you train two or three times a week: add nothing. Turn up to your three sessions. Adding a fourth easy hour when you're only doing three of anything is pointless. Just go for a walk instead.

If you train four or five times a week and you want it: add one session of 40 to 60 minutes at a genuinely conversational pace. Bike, row, or a proper walk up into the Chilterns. Nose-breathing is a decent gauge — if you have to open your mouth, you've gone too hard. Do it on a day you weren't training anyway. Do not take it out of your class attendance.

That's it.

The trap with Zone 2 is that it's very easy to do, which makes it very easy to feel productive doing it — and it sits comfortably alongside a training week that isn't hard enough anywhere else. I've watched people add three hours of easy cardio and go backwards, because the intensity that was building their fitness got squeezed out to make room for it.

The other trap is the heart-rate monitor. People spend more energy managing the zone than they do training in it. If you can talk, you're in it. That's the whole test. You know my opinion on wearables — an interesting distraction but not really useful.

Zone 2 is a good tool. But it is not the missing piece. For almost everyone reading this, the missing piece is turning up on the days you said you would, lifting something heavy enough to matter, and doing that for a year.

If the thought of walking into a gym makes you wince, this is exactly who we built the place for. Book a free, no-obligation 15-minute chat with Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com — no hard sell, and most of us hadn't trained in years when we started. We'll build a plan around your life, not a generic template.