EP 100: Zone 2 Cardio Made Fun - 3 Ways to Keep It Interesting & Effective

0:00From athletic stuff like a full-court pickup game, swish to athletic-ish stuff like a half-mile stroll. Get those steps in! Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic-ish, Sierra's got it. Is it three ways to do zone two cardio? Hello, my friends, and welcome back to my YouTube channel. If you're new here to my channel, I'm Dr. Lysloneck, I have a PhD in exercise physiology. I'm a lifting, running cardio, and hybrid training coach. And today, I'm going to walk you through three different ways that you can do zone two training, as part of your own cardio training routine. Zone two has become all the craze recently, and everyone's obsessed with doing enough zone two, and or thinking, well, this is kind of boring and mundane, and I don't really love doing this. So I'm going to walk you through three different ways that you can implement this and your own training routine for the most simple, classic form of doing zone two training, to making it more variable or more interesting so that you're more likely to do it. Now, when I'm talking about zone two training here in this video today, I am talking about lower, easy year study day, continuous cardio modalities,

1:00where your heart rate is roughly between 60 to 70% of your heart rate max. Now, that isn't perfectly true for everyone and the exact zone for everyone, and recognizing that that might be variable person to person. If you're interested in learning more about zone specifically and or zone two training, be sure to go and check out my other videos on those topics or the link for my zone's mini guide below, which will walk you through all the zones and applying that specifically for your training and are helping you find your unique and specific training zones, including your zone two. But for all intents and purposes of this video today, we'll be thinking about that 60 to 70% of your heart rate max or training below your lactate or ventilatory threshold one for my physiology nerds, or an effort of 4 to 5 out of 10 roughly in your training. So more of an easier, talkable, continuous style of training. And that's what we mean when we're talking about zone two. So the first way to do zone two training is your classic, boring, continuous, steady state training. When we think about doing true zone two training, this is what we're going to be thinking about or referring to most often. You're going to be either sitting on a bike,

2:01going for a run, the rower, skier, swimming, incline walking, hiking, maybe power walking depending on your own pace and effort if your heart rate can get high enough. And doing just some sort of cardio that is continuous in steady state for somewhere between let's say 20 to 60 minutes of time. Now recognizing that zone two can be lower, you know, maybe going below 20 minutes might not give you enough of a dose to really get in what we're looking for from a training adaption, but we know any dose of exercise is good for you. And you can go up to hours and hours. I'm a self-runner and I am the queen of going out for a zone one to zone two effort for hours and hours. So it's not like it's only time-capped at 20 to 60 minutes, but I think that's a really good guideline for the most average or regular people looking to implement zone two and their training and the gym. So you would simply hop on your urd or cardio machine of choice and keep your heart rate or effort level at that steady state continuous effort for that period of time. You'll free to entertain yourself with YouTube videos such as my own TV or other things that distract you, listen to a podcast, chat with a friend,

3:02it's supposed to be an easy conversational steady state way of training. However, some people tend to find this way of doing zone two training boring. Personally, I recommend going for a run or doing a bike in front of a TV because I think that's the easiest way to pass the time. But I recognize this might not be for everyone, but you might need some easier cardio days as part of your cardio training because we're starting to recognize that we all can't do hit every single day of the week and get the adaptations and or a cover that we're looking for. And you might be wanting to implement zone two and to other styles of training that you like in a more interval style fashion. So number two and three are both going to be different forms of interval based training that can allow you to break up the monotony of that zone two training and make it more enjoyable and still get the same adaptation, stimulus, or training goals from that training session as you would a steady state session that might be a little bit boring for you. So the next one is going to be interval based zone two training on multiple ergs or multiple forms of cardio. So this might look like for something like 20 to 60 minutes similar to that in the steady state session before. You are moving between a bike and a skier in a row or a runner or something like that in a gym.

4:04Now this might work a little bit better for home gyms, more functional fitness spaces, your cross hit boxes, and or gyms that do have access to a lot of machines and ergs. It might not be as ideal for other training situations but if you're in a regular commercial gym this might just look like a 20 minutes on the stair step or 20 minutes on the elliptical and 20 minutes on the treadmill if you're really just looking to break up the monotony and add some variety to your training. But you can make this fun and creative and you can do something like a hundred calories on the bike, a hundred calories on the ski, a hundred calories on the runner and repeat that for as many rounds as possible until you get to your 60 minute time cap or similarly you might do two minutes on each one and rope plate between those every two minutes. You can get as creative as you want going calories, distance, time, every minute on the minutes, anything that keeps you moving and cycling through those different ergs, one at a time and going from machine to machine or exercise to exercise, keeping your heart rate and intensity effort in that zone but breaking that up. You can make it fun, you can do stack calories so you're doing, you know, 50 calories,

5:0640 calories, 30 calories each of each machine, five, four, three, two, one minutes, just keeping that intensity there so you can just break up the machines and make it a little bit less boring and creative and flowing and moving between those. And last but not least, you can simply take more of a MetCon style approach or a more CrossFit style training approach and take those types of training sessions and apply it to a more zone to specific effort. So instead of taking sessions and doing them in an all-out effort for max work capacity or max power or as hard as you can, you wouldn't then just pull back the intensity of them across the board and make sure that you have a large cardio component in that. So that might look like something where you're doing a workout where you're going from a bike to something like farmer's carries or sled pushes or kettlebell swings or med ball cleans or something just allows you to break up that continuous cardio component with something a little bit more interesting and variable that keeps you moving in a cyclical fashion. And while things like kettlebell swings or farmer's carries or sled pushes aren't exactly specifically cardio in itself in the true sense,

6:07the idea is that that cardio component in that training piece there itself being zone two or cardio in itself is giving you that stimulus while you continue to keep moving and keeping your heart rate elevated and keep being active during that say, again, 20 to 60-minute time window. So while this in itself isn't quintessential true strict cardio, it's giving you most of what you need in a way that makes it interesting and fun for you to keep you active, give you what you're looking for but also allow for those of you that love the interval training to scratch that itch while also pulling back that intensity and knowing that we don't need to go all out every single day of the week. Roads! Spring is here and the shopping list is long. Time to make a lows run. Buy three bags, get three free. Stay green, one cubic foot garden soil. Plus, right now, members can earn four times the points on an eligible purchase. Start spring off strong with these deals and more. Our best lineup is here at Loads. Balance the 3.25, while supplies last. Soil offer excludes of Laskin Hawaii. Lowellty program subject to terms and conditions. See Loads.com slash terms for details. Subject to change. Point booster subject to exclusions

7:08and more terms apply. One-time only offer. Again, with a style of training, there are almost unlimited ways to program this to make this interesting working with things like every minute on the minute as many rounds as possible, as many rounds for a time cap, calorie-specific, distance-specific rep-specific or doing X amount of distance. So maybe you're doing, you know, 2,000 meters on the bike into 10 pedal bell swing into farmer carries for a specific distance and repeating that into you reach your time cap or for so many rounds. There's a lot of ways that you can approach and program this and programs like the list method itself on our on-demand cardio library give you unlimited ever-changing weekly options so you can apply this to your own training in a way that makes it more fun or more variable for you. Remember that in the day, the cardio that you do only needs to be super-specific if you have a super-specific goal. So if you are training for a race and you need to do easy effort runs, you're going to have to do easy effort runs. You're not going to be able to sub all of your zone 2 days only for non-running forms of cardio because you're bored with the effort. You're going to have to run to get better at running.

8:09But if you're looking to cross train or add in different forms of cardio across the week or different ways to get in zone 2 because you find it hard even with your running to stay in zone 2, you might be able to sub in these options and for those of you who are just trained for general health and general fitness and you're looking for a way to get this in that makes it interesting and fun but also allows you to get in the cardio that you're trying to get in for your goals. Then you can do any of these modes of fitness rotate through them, change them out, make it fun, make it interesting, the biggest goal and the biggest thing that you should be doing is just simply getting it in. If you enjoyed this video, let me know below what kind of zone 2 is your favorite or which one of these you're going to try. And if you found this video helpful, make sure you hit subscribe and like this video so you can catch all the future tips and tricks for your cardio training. And otherwise, I'll catch you guys on the next one. Thanks for being here. But Ultra is a whole line I'm now. You've got strawberry dreams, blue Hawaiian,

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