Hey Athletes! Want to learn more about zone 2 and target areas? Then tune in to this week’s episode of Ask Me Anything.
Episode 39 of Ask Me Anything is up!
Ask Me Anything: Zone 2 and How To Target Areas
This week’s question is from Mark. He wanted to know if you can use Zone 2 in a local, targeted area. Jerred and Joe go over Zone 2 and how it works in your body overall.
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Jerred
Transcript:
Ask Me Anything: Zone 2 and How To Target Areas
[00:00:00] Jerred Moon: Welcome to garage the math. He asked me anything. It’s pretty simple. I’ll be answering questions from the thousands of athletes that follow our daily programming. If you have a question or topic you want submitted, go to dot com slash AMA. Let’s get started.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast. Jared moon here with Joe Courtney, Joe.
Joe Courtney: How’s it going, Joe?
Jerred Moon: Good man. Yep. Still in Texas. So we’re to good. A question today from Mark Mark asks, I was doing some deep thinking during his own to jog today. Happens a lot, a lot of time to think in zone two intensity levels he says or asked, does the body target fat fuel from certain areas of the body during zone two conditioning?
I E if I’m running well, my body target fat stores in my legs or glutes. And if I’m rowing well, my body target fat stores in my legs, arms, et cetera. [00:01:00] Me are you first?
Joe Courtney: Well, I don’t have too much to say about this specifically, except, you know, check out our zone two episode, the one of our first ones on how to, uh, how to burn fat and we just all about breathing.
Cause you’re breathing the fat out. When you, when you burn the fat, it’s just going to come from wherever your body’s going to get rid of it. I don’t think there’s a way to target it. Although if we could figure out how to do cardio in the mid section, right. Just blast that real quick instead of the legs.
Other than that, I don’t really, I don’t really know too much on this.
Jerred Moon: Yeah. So, and I’ll answer to the best of my ability, my ultimate answer. See, I know Mark and I know Mark is really a really fit. So Mark is asking, I think just from a general sense of curiosity, uh, so. Um, some people ask that question because like you’re saying they to have a fat stomach, so they want to do AB exercises to try and reduce their abdominal circumference.
And I get that. Um, my overall answer, this is just focused on being fit, [00:02:00] uh, is or anyone else out there listening? Who’s wondering if you can kind of target certain areas. Um, The answer is yes and no, but if you are just consistently doing zone two training, your body overall is becoming more efficient at, as using at using fat as a fuel.
That is not an easy thing to do to use fat as a fuel, your body prefers to use creatine phosphate, and then glycogen before it uses fat. So that is something that you need to continually do that zone to conditioning for your body to utilize more fat. Now, back to the specific. Can I target these areas?
There is conflicting research research. It some said like back in the day, the research was like, you absolutely cannot target fat, like in an area, but the more recent research says that you can to some degree do that, but it makes sense to me because if you are, if I was doing a, like a lot of the studies look at, if I was doing a quadricep extension, Your skeletal muscle [00:03:00] score stores glycogen.
So it would have no reason to, to pull stored glycogen from my lat and start using that as energy when I’m in my quad. That makes sense. So your body from a direct energy fuels standpoint should utilize, um, the. The energy that’s stored in that skeletal muscle already. It wouldn’t pull from a different source, but that’s when we’re getting hyper local.
I think it does get a little more convoluted when you’re talking about something like rowing, like you mentioned, arms and ROIC, but rowing is everything like rowing is it’s your abdominals. It’s your legs. It’s your hamstrings. It’s your quads? Arms back like. So your body’s just probably utilizing all of it pulling from skeletal muscle and then also your fat stores, wherever they are located are pulling from your body and breaking those carbon chains down and utilizing them for energy.
Uh, so I think. I don’t think that, to be honest, I don’t, I haven’t seen a study where they’re measuring full body usage of these fuels. It’s always like hyperlocal like that when it’s hyper-local [00:04:00] I answer your question is yes, it’s going to be pulling from those sources, but when you get full body exercises, I don’t think we really know my assumption is it would be pulling from every, like every guy, every area kind of needs to pull its own weight if you will, from energy.
And that’s also where you find limits. Um, this is primarily in strength, but it can come from energy sources too. Like if you’re doing rowing. And your lower back is like feeling it more than anything else. Like that area needs to be trained a little bit more, but how could I put more glycogen there? The only way to put more glycogen there, if I wanted to pull glycogen would be to build more muscle there, more skeletal muscle can store more glycogen.
It does kind of have that circular logic there. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I don’t think it really matters because I think just doing zone two is the most important part because it makes your body overall more efficient at, uh, becoming a fat breather.
Joe Courtney: So to oversimplify things, it’s not about exercise. It’s about execution.
Jerred Moon: Yeah. And that’s why zone two is so important.
Joe Courtney: Yeah. And then if you [00:05:00] really want to target those areas, that’ll be a more of a strength, accessory work. You’re not necessarily burning fat then, but your telling your body to use that area more and to build a muscle there more. And then when you, you’re going to burn fat from your zone two though.
Jerred Moon: Yeah. And what’s another study that was done that I saw. We burn more of what we consume, which is interesting. So like, if you were paleo super low carb, but you ate a lot of clean fats and we were to test you doing, uh, just on the biker, you would burn more fat and primarily because you eat more fat.
Right. So it’s, it’s sometimes it’s just straight pulling from our, our diet, not necessarily from whatever stored. Um, but if I was the opposite, super high carbohydrate athlete, very low fat, I’m going to burn more carbs, uh, during the same amount of exercise, because the body’s using what it has, especially when the, the leaner you get the body’s just trying to pull whatever the hell it can, it can take and utilize this energy.
Um, so your diet factors into that. Um, and that’s why I [00:06:00] go back to. It doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that you are practicing these intensive where your body does become more efficient at utilizing fuels at different intensities. Cool. Yeah. Cool. That’s it. I go to garage gym athlete com slash AMA.
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