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.
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. And I'll tell you why. Reap is the first company I've seen that isn't chasing sales targets and the mass market. They're chasing something very rare, perfection. Every bike they make, it's crafted in the UK factory. And it's not about slapping a made in Britain label on a bike from a Chinese factory. It's about control. From the first sketch to the final build, they're hands-on, ensuring that every detail is dialed in. That's very rare in an outsourced world of mass production. What sets them apart is innovation. While others pump out the same old designs, reaps pushing boundaries. They're not following trends, they're setting trends. Think precision and performance like an F1 car for the road. Absolutely no compromises. And it shows and you can feel it when you ride the bikes. These bikes are built for riders who demand the best. Whether they're chasing podiums or just want a machine that feels like an extension of your body, a piece of art. It's not hype, it's substance.