Hey, Athletes! Listen to this week’s Ask Me Anything to hear about the differences of High-Intensity training vs. Zone 2!
Episode 11 of Ask Me Anything is Up!
Zone 2 vs. High-Intensity Training
This week Jerred answers a question from Oliver. The topic is differences between zone 2 and high intensity training. Jerred gets specific on the post workout effects of high intensity workouts. He defines each one, talks about how to use both, and explains our views at End of Three Fitness.
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Transcript:
AMA 11 – Zone 2 vs. High-Intensity Training
[00:00:00] Jerred Moon: Welcome to garage gym athlete. Ask 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 garage dot com slash AMA let’s get started.
What’s up ladies and gentlemen, Jared moon here from inner three fitness and welcome to a garage gym athlete. Ask me anything. Episodes. So this week we have from all over, basically asking about zone two versus high intensity training I’ll ever want to know. You know, cause we, we talk about that a lot.
If you listen to all the other podcast episodes, if you’re only catching this on YouTube, maybe you haven’t heard us discuss it. But we talk about. Zone two training and the importance of that. And then we also talk about not the importance of not doing high intensity training all the time. And all of our was talking about, you know, he had picked up some [00:01:00] information about high intensity training.
The aftereffect of high intensity training is supposed to be the major benefit, not the, you know, during the intercession, like, benefit. So the, you know, having a higher metabolic rate. A metabolic rate after or exercise post oxygen consumption. all the, all these things after high intensity training.
He said though, he’s, he’s like, I thought those were all the benefits of high intensity training. We’re the ones kind of saying, Hey, don’t do high intensity training all the time. and you know, we’re a big push. We push his own to training a lot. When prescribed appropriately. So let me just real quick zone two training.
a lot of research on it right now that it’s improving mitochondrial efficiency, which is what you, what you want. You want your body to be able to partition fuels and utilize them better. And in a metabolically unhealthy person, what happens is you don’t burn fat very well. You actually transition to burning sugar very fast.
You have a huge increase in lactate very early in the onset [00:02:00] of exercise. So that’s what happens in metabolically unhealthy people. And. When you, if you aren’t the most metabolically healthy person and you go straight to high intensity training, you’re doing a lot of those same things. You’re not, you’re not teaching your body how to better utilize fuels, specifically burning fat.
So zone two, your body likes to pull a majority of its energy from a fat in zone two. And that’s a big reason that we like it, is there’s a. An associated burning fat for fuel, but also, the mitochondrial efficiency and teaching your body how to better Lise, better utilize different energy sources during different activities.
if you are already really healthy and a very, a well trained athlete, your body might already know how to do these things pretty well. Now the way I look at high intensity training, there’s, there’s kinda, there’s really two, two parts that I like to make very clear. So high intensity training. Is just high intensity and it’s training.
So this could be 2030 minutes of [00:03:00] high intensity activity, little breaks. There’s, it doesn’t say it’s just high intensity training. So first you have to define what that is. Now, if we’re talking about high intensity interval training, which could be 10 seconds on, 60 seconds on, 90 seconds on, followed by.
Recovery period, you know, could be full recovery. That is going to be a little bit more useful in training your metabolic system than just high intensity constantly. And so that is, the big difference there between zone two. Now there are pros and cons like Oliver, talked about. So in zone two training, when you’re doing zone two training, you are burning calories.
A lot of them coming from fat. and. That happens while you’re doing the zone two activity. but after the activity is over, because zone two is not super intense. There is not a lot of posts exercise burn. That’s why when zone two is prescribed, it’s typically the longer in duration. So we’re talking about, you know, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever it is.
That’s our [00:04:00] prescription. Typically, you could do it much longer. You could do two hours, three hours of zone two, something like that, depending on your time. So that is the probes on two is it’s utilizing, it’s a very particular macronutrient fuel source. but at the same time, it, there’s not a lot of post-exercise burn, but however, you are typically doing it on a very long timeline.
So there’s a lot of calories being burned. now with high intensity training, what you’re saying is true there is, you know, your body does continue to burn a lot of calories in that recovery period. but what are we talking about? It’s not going to be a one for one. If you’re doing an eight minute Metcon and then thinking you’re good for the day, and that’s going to match, you know, 60 minutes of zone two cycling.
the calorie burn wouldn’t even be close. you know, and so getting more metabolically healthy, I think is the main goal. And. It’s going to take a blend of all these different types of training prescribed and programmed appropriately to [00:05:00] see all the benefits. I don’t think there’s anything that’s inherently bad, but I do know high intensity training every single day, has a lot of bad things that come with it.
It can screw up your gut, jacks up your cortisol, the chances of your recovery are less, could suppress the CNS. There just a lot of things. I’m not inherently bad. It’s kind of like money, like money is not inherently bad, but if you’re a jerk, you might spend your money on jerk things. Or if you are, you know, really nice person, you might donate a lot of your money.
You just need to know how to utilize the tool. The tool itself is not good or bad. So yes, to answer your question, there is some post exercise, caloric burn that you could take into account with high intensity training. What it ever equate to zone two probably not. Now, if you were to do 60 minutes, high intensity for 60 minutes zone two yeah, high intensity is going to burn more calories, but.
At what cost, at what costs to you and your health. is that high intensity training going to take you down? Cause that’s a long time for high intensity training session and I don’t see a lot of [00:06:00] people doing that out there. so I think I would rather focus on mitochondria efficiency, metabolic health, by blending in some high intensity interval training and then a lot more low aerobic based training that’s going to just help you kind of be a better human for lack of getting into any more science there.
so. What you’re saying is true, but it’s not going to equate to being the same and you got to think about longterm, you know, what can you do? The only arguments I ever see of doing high intensity training over zone two is people are always like, you’re crunched for time. Why don’t you just do high intensity training?
You could do much less and get the same results, and it’s like, well. That’s not how biology, biology works. Like where in the human biological system has tried to shortcut, things ever worked out. Like this is not some sort of hack. You know, you, you will burn some calories, but everything comes with a cost.
If you want to burn, if you want to red line your engine on your way to work every single day. that’s fine, and it’ll be fine for a while, right? But then eventually your car will crap [00:07:00] out. And, I don’t think your body is too much different, too much different, unfortunately. And the real problem with these things is you might pick up a study that says high intensity is good.
but just for another analogy here, like coffee, like coffee, you could pull a lot of studies saying coffee is good for you, that the caffeine is fine. And so you read a study, your mind says, coffee is good. Okay, good. Coffee is good. But if you’re to be, if you’re pounding 10 cups of coffee every day, you could get heart palpitations.
You could have an very increased level of anxiety. they’re just a lot of other things that could come, you know, jacking up your cortisol. There are a lot of bad things that come with consuming that much coffee every single day. And so if you read a study that says high intensity training is good, what were the parameters?
Who are they studying? How frequently? You’ve got to look at all of those things because high intensity on Fridays. Sounds good. You know, like is it high intensity interval training? Even better getting those full rest and recovery periods. But are you doing high intensity training every day? Because [00:08:00] somewhere it said high intensity is good, but you didn’t look at all the details.
that post caloric burn is not going to be really a factor anymore cause there’s too many other bad things that happen when you’re doing high intensity training every single day. So I know that was a ramble, but hopefully that cleared up the zone to very high intensity. there are pros and cons to each one, and, you kind of have to decide what your goals are and what you’re looking to do, but that is it for zone two, first high intensity.
I don’t think that that topic is over probably covered in more detail. as time goes along. But you know, we at least got it started there. So if you are enjoying these episodes and you want to ask a question, go to dot com slash AMA on top of that. If you are listening to this on, say your Apple device, iTunes, something like that Apple podcast, leave a five star review, positive comment, and really does help the show out.
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