[965] Zone 2 Training

I've been talking with a friend of mine about zone 2 training. Since he's the one more interested and perseveres more he's done more research on it. We were talking about it because of long distance bike rides and how some of the best pro cyclists in the world do hours of zone 2 training a week.

So what is zone 2 training? Basically zone 2 is 70%-80% of your max heart rate. I'm 42 years so my zone 2 is around 124 to 142 bpm.

By some amazing coincidence my friend told me it was nearly impossible to achieve zone 2 doing brisk walks, which I could confirm using my Tozo S2 Smart Watch my mom gave me a few months ago. I'm still not sure how accurate it is but I finally found a good position along my forearm that the watch can get good readings during both my walk and cycling sessions.

During this time I was also talking to someone else and he mentioned that if I'm planning to do long bike rides I should go jogging to improve stamina. He did say that this was the training he would do for a few weeks before some of his long rides. I thought this was strange since shouldn't I just ride my bike to build stamina?

So at first I tried riding my bike on the trainer for around ten minutes or so, because I really find it boring and uncomfortable. I've already bought myself a pair of MTB cycling shorts so I'll try riding on the trainer wearing this because it might improve my comfort levels. Anyway when I checked my heart rate from those ten minutes I didn't even go over 100 bpm, though I was sweating and panting hard. Maybe I didn't put the watch on correctly or something, I don't know.

I finally decided to try jogging small sections of my original 1.1 km route just to see my heart rate. Lo and behold I was averaging 130 to 150 bpm during my jogs, which is right around zone 2. Aside from that I was able to jog a relatively longer distance than I remember, roughly 700 meters.

My first "zone 2 training day" I just did two laps where I jogged the 700 meters, and the last lap was a partial distance since I start jogging near the end of my 1.1 km lap. I was pleasantly surprised that I could jog that distance and recover enough to do it twice.

So earlier this morning I tried it again and did it three times. I'll probably stick to four laps for my training and around three of those four laps will have the full 700 meter jog, with the last lap around 250 or so meters since I will end in front of my house.

My goal for this now is not to increase the number of laps I do, I'm perfectly happy doing roughly 4.3 km per training. I'm hoping to eventually be able to jog the whole training session.

Out.