Zone 2 might be the most repeated piece of training advice in cycling right now. Ride easy, build the base, trust the process. And for some riders it works exactly as promised. But if you've spent six months dutifully keeping your heart rate down and you're not getting faster — you're not imagining it, and you're not doing it wrong. You're probably missing the context that never gets included in the advice.
Key Takeaways
The idea at the heart of this episode came out of my conversation with Mattias Reck, the man who coaches Mads Pedersen at Lidl-Trek, and it's the sharpest framing of this debate I've heard: the zone is relative, but the cost is absolute.
Your zones are percentages of your own engine — everyone's Zone 2 feels easy to them. But the cost of training doesn't scale down politely. A pro riding 22 hours a week at their easy pace is still doing a colossal amount of absolute work — more kilojoules in an easy week than most amateurs manage in a big month. At that scale, riding the middle intensities would be ruinous. Avoiding tempo isn't a philosophy for them; it's survival.
Now flip it. You've got seven hours a week. Strip the intensity out of those seven hours and what's left may simply not be enough stress to force your body to adapt. You end up with the restriction — no meaningful work in the middle — without the thing that makes the restriction sensible: enormous volume. That's the rider who's stuck, tired of being patient, and going nowhere.
For that rider, tempo, sweet spot and upper Zone 2 aren't the grey-zone trap. They may be the most valuable hours on the calendar.
Where The Advice Comes From
It's worth being clear about why the easy-riding gospel exists, because the science underneath it is real. The intensity-distribution research — the stuff we've covered with Dr Stephen Seiler — consistently finds elite endurance athletes doing the large majority of their volume at low intensity. Dr Iñigo San Millán has made the metabolic case for Zone 2 as compellingly as anyone.
None of that is wrong. What goes wrong is the transplant. Findings from athletes doing 900-plus hours a year get compressed into a rule — "80% easy, avoid the middle" — and handed to a rider doing 350 hours a year as if the volume difference were a detail. It isn't a detail. It's the entire mechanism. The pros' distribution is an answer to a problem you don't have: too much total load. Your problem is more often the opposite one.
The Time-Crunched Reality
So what does the middle actually offer a rider with a job, a family and seven hours?
Stimulus per hour, mostly. Tempo and sweet spot generate meaningful training stress in sessions that fit real life — sixty to ninety minutes, done on a trainer before work or in a lunch window. Enough intensity to signal adaptation; not so much that you need three days to recover the way you would from repeated all-out interval days. That repeatability matters more than any single session, and it's the quality that makes the middle intensities such a good fit for working riders.
There's a durability argument too. How you feel in the last hour of a fondo or road race isn't decided by your five-minute power — it's decided by your resistance to fatigue, your ability to hold output on tired legs. That quality responds to sustained, honest work: long tempo efforts, upper Zone 2 rides that don't drift soft, sessions that teach your body to keep working. It's unglamorous, and it's what actually shows up on race day.
One honest caveat: this isn't a licence for every ride to become a mongrel medium effort. The middle intensities earn their place as deliberate work — planned, fuelled, and balanced against properly easy recovery riding. Accidental tempo on every ride is still the trap it always was. Intent is the difference.
Fuelling Makes Or Breaks It
The quiet reason middle-intensity training fails when it fails: riders do it under-fuelled. Tempo and sweet spot burn serious carbohydrate, and doing them chronically on empty converts productive sessions into pure fatigue — you pay the cost without funding the adaptation.
If you're adding meaningful work in the middle, fuel it like it matters. Carbohydrate before and during anything over about an hour, proper eating afterwards, and enough food across the week to actually recover. We've covered the fuelling side in depth across the podcast's nutrition episodes, and the rule of thumb is simple: the harder the work, the less optional the fuel.
What This Means For Your Riding
Start by auditing your actual hours — not the hours you'd like to have. If you're at ten or below and strictly polarised, that's the first place to look for your plateau.
Then rebuild the week around repeatable quality: one or two deliberate tempo or sweet spot sessions, a longer ride with sustained upper-Zone-2 work, and easy riding that stays properly easy in the gaps. Fuel the hard days fully. Protect sleep. And judge the experiment over eight to twelve weeks on the numbers that matter — power late in long rides, repeatability across the week — not on whether the plan resembles what a World Tour rider does.
The zone is relative. The cost is absolute. Train for the life you actually have.
If you've been stuck for months and can't see where the leak is, the Plateau Diagnostic looks at volume, intensity, fuelling and recovery as one system. Three minutes, free.
You Might Also Like
The conversation that sparked this one: Mattias Reck on the training behind Mads Pedersen — where the relative-zones, absolute-cost idea comes from. For the strongest case for easy riding, Dr Stephen Seiler on 80/20 training and Zone 2 is not what you think give the other side its full due — worth hearing before you decide where you sit.
Want help building a week that fits your actual life? That's exactly what the Roadman community is for.