The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 388 - Zone 2

Transcript:

Pete: Hello, Jen.

Jen: Hello, Pete.

Pete: A few months ago, we did an episode about things I learned during my first triathlon.

Jen: Oh, yes.

Pete: You may recall.

Jen: I do.

Pete: And it was one of those episodes that we finished and I was like, "Oh, that was so un-insightful, self-indulgent, not helpful for anyone."

Jen: No.

Pete: "But whatever, let's release it to the world." That's one of the stories I told myself.

Jen: I thought it was interesting.

Pete: Well, and since then, I've had multiple people reach out to me and say something like, "Oh, that insight you had around tapering forced me to consider tapering for this upcoming fitness event that I have. Turns out, it worked. So, thanks for that reminder." And a whole bunch of other emails that are sort of that adjacent. And so, I've been thinking about that. And I've been thinking about the fourth learning that I have had since then about triathlon training. And I want to share it with you, and maybe we can see if it applies to other parts of our work / life.

Jen: Ooh, I love it. I love hearing about things that I'll never do, like run a triathlon. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: I love that. It's like when you start talking about, you know, how you were a star on Broadway in Wicked, or like the people you're coaching, you know, singing and dancing all day, every day. And I'm like, "Wow, things I'll never do in my life." Isn't that crazy?

Jen: Right?

Pete: Ah, that's funny. Okay, so I feel like I need to apologize upfront for anyone who understands what I'm about to say in way more detail and scientific depth than I do, because I'm coming to this pretty fresh.

Jen: Okay.

Pete: And there'll be people out there that are either endurance athletes or triathletes or bike riders or runners that are like, "Yeah, Pete, no shit." So, I just want to put that out there. Okay, so the thing I've learned in recent times is about what is called Zone 2 training in the fitness world, particularly in endurance sport world. And what that refers to is a particular zone of your heart rate that you train at. So essentially, there's this idea of there's five different zones of what one's heart rate is, from resting right through to like, you know, I'm at like my max heart rate, is number five, Zone 5. And the idea of training for an endurance event like a triathlon is, what I'm learning is it's more about consistency at low intensity than it is about intensity. So how I have for a long time trained myself, be it when I was playing football, when I did a bit of running, when I joined a CrossFit gym, was essentially, you've got to go to Zone 5 every single time you even remotely consider exercising, because that's how you get fitter and stronger. And there is a case for training in that zone, but it is so unsustainable. Because in order to get any benefit from fitness, we have to recover. That the gains in strength and the gains in cardiovascular fitness come in the recovery phase, not actually in the exerting yourself phase. So, we do something. We break down a bunch of muscle. Again, I'm so sorry, any scientists out there. And then, in the recovery phase, our muscles heal and they either get stronger or hopefully are able to, I think, maintain or produce more oxygen. And thus, our fitness increases. Okay, so if we want to be able to train consistently, what we need to be able to do is back it up, day after day after day. In order to do that, we can't train at a high intensity all the time. Enter: Zone 2 training. The idea is when you are riding a bike or running, in my case, you want to be able to do so at a pace where you can either hold a conversation or breathe only through your nose, or if you're like super technical and you have the ability to check your heart rate in real time, keep it below a certain percentage of your max heart rate. I'll include a link to the actual science behind this in the Box O' Goodies, by the way. And when you do it, what you realize is it feels embarrassingly slow, to run at this certain pace or ride a bike at this certain pace. And I feel myself wanting to go faster. And there is so much research and evidence and science, and I have a lived experience behind the fact that if you do this, you get dramatically fitter, dramatically stronger, and dramatically faster at that discipline, even though you've only trained in Zone 2. So, that was a mini lecture. I had no intention of going into so much detail. But the point, I feel like, is, where are we trying to do things at an intensity or at a difficulty that is far greater than actually needs to happen in order for us to make progress?

Jen: Wow. My mind is like kind of blown. Because when I think about triathletes (which, by the way, I know nothing about), it would not occur to me that on a range of heart rate, they would be at the second lowest heart rate. Like, that's where you want to be. That's crazy to me, but amazing.

Pete: Yeah. I mean, that's the whole point. Keep your heart rate as low as possible for as long as possible, because that's the only way you can complete it.

Jen: That is wild. So, let me just reflect back to what I think I am hearing. That when we overexert ourselves, we have a longer recovery time. And this is me adding something. You didn't say this.

Pete: Please add.

Jen: And it is a potential road to burnout, when we do it consistently.

Pete: Yeah. Injury in the context that I'm talking about, burnout in the context of not.

Jen: Is burnout a work injury?

Pete: That's where my brain went to. Yeah, yes. Interesting. Probably not. I mean, I guess you could burn out from fitness too.

Jen: Right. Wow. Okay. And that there is significant discipline required to not push oneself out of Zone 2, that there must be so much trust in the process and in oneself to go like, "I don't feel like anything's happening, but I trust it is."

Pete: Yes.

Jen: That is kind of blowing my mind.

Pete: And then, overlay that with the ego and the, "What are other people thinking of me?"

Jen: Right.

Pete: When you're out there on a running track, running what feels laughably slow and people are literally just flying past you, and you go, "Nope, I'm sticking to my process. I wonder if people think, 'This guy's so slow. He doesn't know what he's doing. They probably are.'" Although in reality, no one is even noticing what you're doing. You know? Like, the story we tell ourself is that we're the center of everyone's attention, but we're not. But there's an ego check part of this, for me personally. Where it's like, you know, I've got my Garmin on and that'll get posted to Strava, which a few friends and I follow each other on Strava, which is like essentially social media for fitness, where it posts your workouts. And it's like, "Oh, my friend Mason is probably going to go, 'Wow, he ran slow today.'" You know? Like, there's this whole weird story we create about that, as a result of that.

Jen: Oh, that is so wild. Now, is there ever a time, Pete, when in your training you are supposed to exit Zone 2?

Pete: Yes. I should say that there are times and places to increase the intensity and go into what I think they call Threshold kind of training, which is where you're pushing your heart rate more than Zone 2, more to like Zone 3 and maybe Zone 4. And that's okay, provided you then give yourself adequate rest.

Jen: Right.

Pete: And so, you need to kind of, from what I understand, sprinkle that in more sparingly than the like Zone 2. Because the Zone 2 allows you to do a run today and a bike ride tomorrow, and then another run the next day and another bike ride the next day. It allows you to compound and be more consistent over time, versus, "I did a super high intensity run. Now, I need to take three days off to recover."

Jen: Mmm-hmm. So I'm thinking about this in relationship to the world I work in, and I'm thinking about this right now specifically in the context of singers. That sometimes, when someone comes into class and I don't know them, I'll ask them questions about their voice because I'm trying to understand what they're about. And I'll ask, "What's the top of your range?" And sometimes, people will say, "Do you mean eight times a week, or do you mean once?" Because the eight times a week top of the range is the sustainable top of your range. That's your Zone 2.

Pete: That's your Zone 2, yeah.

Jen: Right. Where you can do it every day and it doesn't exhaust you, and it doesn't create vocal fatigue. You're not at risk of hurting yourself. Or like, once in a while, you pull out something that you don't intend to repeat every day.

Pete: Right, right, right. And I wonder, does the same rule apply, in terms of what I described, with like the ego of it all? Where, if I'm in a class singing with other people and I want them to think that I have a really good voice, I might be tempted to sing at a higher pitch than my sustainable pitch. Is that a thing? Did I make that up?

Jen: No, you didn't make that up. And actually, Pete, it's so funny. Back in the day when I was directing a lot more and was in audition rooms more frequently, one of the phenomenons that I observed is that in auditions when singers are able to select their own songs, very often they try to select a song that has the highest possible note and the loudest possible dynamic. And like, it's just not necessary at all. You do not need to sing your loudest and your highest in an audition. I'd rather take a very well-sung lower note.

Pete: Huh. Yeah. Okay, I love the application to singers. And I'm also thinking now about this as leaders in organizations or employees in organizations, people working in a nine-to-five, traditionally, because that's where I've spent a lot of energy, supporting leaders and executives in that world. And I am like thinking about how most high-performing leaders that I work with, I would say are trying to operate in Zone 5 every day.

Jen: Wow.

Pete: Well, they're trying. But I think as a result, that's why they're so fatigued. Because there's no time to recover. They're bouncing between meeting to meeting to meeting, from urgent priority to urgent priority to urgent priority. There's never any time. That's in their head, the story they tell themselves. And part of this is real, with the structure of how workplaces are at the moment. And part of it is self-inflicted, where like then we give ourselves no time to pause, no time for Zone 2, let alone to taper, which is like not even Zone 2. And so, it's no wonder that there's a bunch of research out there...I went to a conference last year in Australia, and the whole focus was essentially how burnt out, how tired, how overwhelmed, how exhausted, how anxious the general population that work in companies is and are at the moment. And it's no wonder because we're trying to operate in our threshold at Zone 4 and Zone 5 all day, every day, without any chance to recover. And so, I wonder, even for me, what does Zone 2 look like in an employee / leadership context? What is your sustainable pace that enables you to go home with energy, as opposed to completely drained? Because the idea is when you finish a run, for example, in Zone 2, you should feel like you can keep going. You should feel quite energized by what you just did, not exhausted and depleted. And I don't know many leaders that would tell me they finished their day energized and ready to do more. I suspect most of them feel like completely depleted.

Jen: Pete, I have to say that this whole concept is extremely confronting. And if you had only given me three zones, I feel like I would feel less confronted, if I was like, "Okay, there's only three options here: low, medium, high." But the idea that there's five and that the healthiest discipline that leads to the best outcomes is Zone 2 is really making me wonder, like when I'm looking at my own life, would I even know if I was in Zone 2? Because while I may not operate at Zone 5, I definitely give myself time to rest, my guess is my average lifestyle is a Zone 4. Like, I don't...I wouldn't even know how to get to Zone 3, let alone Zone 2. So it feels very like, woah, there's a lot of adjusting that needs to happen in order to create more time for recovery.

Pete: Yeah. I mean, me too. This is why I wanted to share this with you. It's something I grapple with as it relates to something very low stakes, which is going for a run or going on a bike ride. But then, it's like, what are the higher stakes of how you're functioning in your day-to-day, how you're working, how you're operating? And what does it look like to be more sustainable about that?

Jen: As I'm sitting here thinking about this, I realized that maybe I misrepresented myself just one minute ago, because I think I do know what my Zone 2 is. It just occurred to me, my summer. I plan my summer basically a year in advance, so that I can use it as a time to...like, I work. But I don't work myself to the bone. And I do things I love, with people I'm obsessed with. And I give myself a lot of time for recovery, time alone, doing things I like to do by myself in nature, all of that. But what I hadn't realized, I think until this conversation, is how much discipline it takes me to actually do that every year.

Pete: Oh, yeah. Every single time.

Jen: So, I'm giving myself an A+ on that.

Pete: Please do. I mean, every time I set out to run or bike ride, the discipline to go, "No, don't let that go. Don't get tempted. Don't get your heart rate up." And so, I love that example of that's what you do in your summer. The other parallel it's making me think of is something we've mentioned a few times over the last four-hundred-odd episodes, is this idea of like when something feels easy, it doesn't mean it's not impactful, worthwhile, or effortful. In fact, it could be the sign that it is impactful and effortful, because you're able to be more consistent with it over time. So, I was having this conversation with my brother yesterday. He was playing around with one of the AI tools, and he was thinking about his management consultancy business that he runs. And he was sharing with me a few use cases that he's got with it, for helping him add value to his clients. And I was saying, "Do you ever get the sense that it feels too easy? Because how you used to put those reports together or how we used to do certain work, in the context of my business, maybe it was a day or two of like thinking and writing and researching. And now, it's like five minutes of researching and then writing, because I can get so much information so quickly." And he's like, "Yeah, it feels way too easy. And that creates a story in my head that it must not be as good. It must not be as effective, because I am operating...you know, I don't know, in the case of this metaphor, maybe that's our new Zone 2. But I'm used to operating at Zone 4, where I need to be researching and writing and staying up late at night, getting so much thought in my head to add value to this client. When actually, I can streamline a lot of that now."

Jen: Pete, I feel like this concept of Zone 2 may become a shorthand that one can use. Like, I'm thinking about my own business and the admin side of it. And some of the days where I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I'm bogged down in paperwork. What am I doing?" And like, it might be a good idea to ask myself, "What would this look like if it was Zone 2?"

Pete: I love that. I was thinking, yeah, "What zone am I in right now," as a place of checking. "I'm so overwhelmed. I'm so stressed. I'm so fatigued. I'm so like...I need to get this done." And it's like, "What zone am I in right now? Oh, yeah, I can see I'm pushing Zone 5, pushing Zone 4. I need to just calm down."

Jen: Yeah, I'm actually obsessed with this whole conversation and this whole concept. And now, I'm going to spend the rest of this week trying to figure out how to get more Zone 2 in my life. So, thank you.

Pete: I mean, of course. It's so funny. I'm so glad it was so valuable, too. Because like I said, I know there's plenty of people out there that are like, "Yeah. No shit, Pete. That's how you train."

Jen: Yeah. But truly, Pete, I didn't know. So, thank you to you. Thank you to all the triathletes in this world who are giving Zone 2 energy.

Pete: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.