one of the beautiful things about exercise is that it can be done in so many different ways and molded to fit your goals and interests but are there some forms of exercise and principles that should be non-negotiable or absolute Staples in your exercise routine well if you’re not only trying to optimize your Fitness but also your overall Health and Longevity then the answer is yes so in today’s video we’re going to discuss some of these incredible health and fitness benefits that comes with this form of exercise and this will help us to understand why almost everyone should consider it and of course we’ll talk about how to do this form of training and how to incorporate it into your weekly routine we’ll also have a little bit of a fun discussion dispelling some of the myths around lactic acid and what lactic acid actually does to your muscles it’s going to be an awesome one so let’s do this so what is this all-important type of exercise well it’s a form of that dreaded cardio and maybe I should say dreaded only for some because there are definitely plenty of you out there that can’t get enough of this type of training but this type of cardiovascular training is designed to build your aerobic Foundation or your aerobic base and it’s often referred to as Zone 2 training and the zone 2 type of training is a form of steady state cardio done at about a moderate level of intensity and again we’re going to definitely talk about how you can find your own personal Zone tube as well as how to incorporate it into your routine but let’s first answer this question of why should everyone consider this type of training because it makes sense for somebody like an endurance athlete or people who are interested in longdistance running or longdistance cycling makes sense for them to do this type of training but what about somebody like a powerlifter or maybe even someone like me who likes to play a lot of basketball because I can tell you we didn’t do a lot of Zone 2 training to get in shape for basketball well we’re going to answer this by talking about the incredible physiological adaptations and changes that occur within your body due to Zone 2 training and how that translates to what I would consider Universal fitness and health benefits Zone 2 training will strengthen the muscle of the heart which obviously will help to improve Fitness and this can also lead to improvements in resting heart rate as well as even blood pressure which that can help to reduce your overall risk of cardiovascular conditions over the long term zone two training also has an amazing effect on your muscles specifically the slow twitch muscle cells or the slow twitch muscle fibers now if you’ve watched this before you’ve likely heard us talk about slow twitch versus fast twitch muscle fibers and even some of the intermediate fibers but if you’re new to this let me give you a quick synopsis on fiber type if you were to look at a whole muscle you would see that it was made up of thousands and thousands of muscle cells or muscle fibers and some of those muscle fibers would be classified as slow twitch and these would be fatigue resistant think of them as your endurance type fibers because they utilize oxygen are more aerobically based whereas the fast twitch fibers don’t utilize as much oxygen or more anerobic based but they can contract with more velocity produce more Force but they tap out quicker meaning they don’t have as much fatigue te resistance and activities that would engage your fast twitch fibers are things like sprinting jumping or even heavy resistance training and it’s actually good we brought up the fast twitch fibers because again we’re talking about why should everyone consider this type of training especially if Zone 2 is mostly going to cause physiological adaptations directly with the slow twitch fibers well we’re going to make the case that developing those slow twitch fibers through Zone 2 training is going to also have some indirect benefits from for these fast twitch fibers consistent Zone 2 training helps to promote the development of new capillaries which are tiny exchange vessels that exchange nutrients and waste products between the bloodstream and the tissues and muscle tissue would be included in this so think we’re literally growing more of these tiny tubes or tiny capillaries they’re going to penetrate into the muscle tissue bringing in more blood and more oxygen which those slow twitch muscle fibers are going to be more than happy to gobble up that extra oxygen during those aerobic activities and you could see how that could improve Fitness not only can we bring in more oxygen but if we have more capillaries and more blood we can bring in more of other substances like fats in carbohydrates which could be utilized to create the energy currency of our muscle cells or muscle fibers that ATP and fat is going to be more important in just a second because we’re going to talk about how Zone 2 primarily utilizes fat but bringing in more carbs can also be beneficial to those fast twitch muscle fibers because they primarily utilize glucose a carbohydrate and so you can can see that’s one of our indirect benefits to the fast twitch fibers through this Zone 2 training now we also want to think it’s not just about bringing in more substances to the muscle tissue with this increased capillarization it’s also about being able to more effectively pull things out and away from the muscles things like metabolic byproducts so if we’re more effective at removing metabolic byproducts from the muscle that could benefit any of the muscle fiber types and my favorite physiological benefit that occurs with Zone 2 training is that the mitochondria within the slow twitch muscle fibers will increase in size and therefore their work capacity becoming more efficient plus the overall total number of mitochondria will increase in those slow twitch muscle fibers and all of us who have taken Biology are probably trained to think mitochondria Powerhouse of the cell because it creates ATP in the presence of oxygen and that is absolutely true and from an exercise perspective again we’re just building more upon this we’ve increased the blood flow already we’ve increased the amount of oxygen we can bring in and now that oxygen can be funneled into more mondria and creating more ATP which would increase our fitness and our work capacity but improving and increasing the mitochondria is more than just about improving our fitness and work capacity there are tremendous metabolic long-term benefits that occur from developing our mitochondria that can help reduce our risk of conditions that plague our society and I’m definitely going to talk about those in just a second but first I do need to clear some things up with lactic acid lactic acid is a metabolic byproduct from a form of anerobic metabolism called anerobic glycolysis and maybe you’ve heard of Anor robic glycolysis before but as the name implies this is when the cell or in this case the muscle fiber would break down glucose to form ATP in the absence of oxygen and in general as exercise intensity increases this would cause the muscle fibers to rely more on anerobic glycolysis and would therefore result in a buildup or an accumulation of more lactic acid within the muscle fibers and there are two things that we need to address or clarify with lactic acid one is that lactic acid under physiological conditions primarily exists as lactate in our bodies yes you could likely get away with using lactic acid and lactate interchangeably as most people in the exercise physiology world would know what you’re talking about but they technically are different because as you’re going through Anor robic glycolysis and building up lactic acid it actually quickly dissociates into lactate and a hydrogen ion and it’s that hydrogen ion that contributes to the acidity that’s building up within the muscle fiber and this acidity does need to be dealt with because this could potentially impair or slow the overall function of the muscle fiber and this buildup of lactic acid or what we should more appropriately say lactate and the hydrogen ion can sometimes give lactate a little bit of a bad wrap or mischaracterize it which is the second thing we need to address lactate is sometimes referred to as a metabolic waste product yes we have to manage the accumulating levels that can occur during exercise but it’s not like it’s this toxic substance that our body is trying to rid itself of or excrete it is a metabolic byproduct because we’re going to find that when oxygen becomes more readily available again say like when you decrease your exercise intensity or maybe there’s some cells or tissues that are close by to those exercising muscles that have more oxygen available what we’re going to see is that that lactate can be transported into the mitochondria to make make more ATP so let’s use an exercise example to illustrate how cool this is let’s say we start off exercising at a light to moderate intensity and at that level of intensity we should have enough oxygen available to produce ATP for our working muscles through mostly aerobic Pathways which means we’re primarily going to be recruiting those slow twitch muscle fibers and mostly using fat in the mitochondria as our energy source but as we increase the intensity let’s say we’re jogging and we increase our running speed or this could even be applied to certain weight training scenarios maybe we’re doing multiple repetitions of heavy squats the point is we’re increasing the intensity and as we increase that intensity we’re going to have to start recruiting some of those fast twitch muscle fibers and starting to shift to more of those Anor robic Pathways like anerobic glycolysis and we know that we can only maintain a certain level of intensity for a certain amount of time the higher the intensity the less amount of time that we can sustain it for before we either have to back off slow down or even just rest and what’s what’s happening is is we’re depleting our ATP while we’re accumulating more lactate so what is our body going to do about this so you’ll likely notice that when you pull back from about of high-intensity exercise or enter this rest and Recovery phase that you’ll be breathing heavy and you might think why would I need to breathe heavy if high-intensity exercise is mostly requiring anerobic Pathways or Anor robic metabolism that doesn’t require oxygen well it’s not like the aerobic Pathways just shut down you’re essentially getting to this point of intensity where you just can’t bring the oxygen into the muscle the mitochondria and process it fast enough so then you have to shift to and rely on other energy systems that are faster like the Anor robic glycolysis but the drawback of that is they’re fast but they don’t produce much ATP and so you can only sustain that for a short amount of time and we get to this problem that we mentioned earlier where we’ve diminished the ATP within the muscle and also accumulated lactate and this is one of the main reasons why you’re breathing heavily during those rest periods because you’re trying to deal with this and one of the things you’re going to do is actually replenish the ATP by breathing in all that oxygen and replacing it aerobically by utilizing fats and even carbohydrates but also we can utilize that lactate that we mentioned earlier it’s almost like hitting two birds with one stone we need to bring down the lactate and we can do that when oxygen is present because we can funnel it into the mitochondria like I mentioned earlier and help help to bolster up ATP even further which is ridiculously amazing and so we’re going to talk about two Pathways that we can deal with this lactate one right at the local level at the muscle we just exercise as well as systemically throughout the body so let’s say you consistently participate in zone 2 training you improve the size and quality of your mitochondria and even increase the overall number within those slow twitch muscle fibers based on that you could see that that would make you better equipped to process in increasing levels of lactate that occurs during exercise and even aid in recovery and yes it’s those slow twitch muscle fibers that primarily benefit or have those physiological adaptations from Zod 2 training like creating these higher quality and higher number of mitochondria but again that doesn’t mean that the fast twitch fibers cannot benefit from this the fast twitch fibers actually produce the majority of lactate but they don’t have a lot of mitochondria so they’re going to need a little bit of help processing the lactate they produce and one of the cool things that can happen is that the lactate produced in say like a fast twitch fiber could be transferred to a neighboring slow twitch fiber within the same muscle therefore making it easier for the fast twitch fibers to also recover more quickly and effectively between bouts of higher intensity exercise now there are going to be limitations to this and what I mean by that is limitations on how much lactate we can process at the local level within that actual muscle yes if somebody is more fit and they have higher quality and a greater number of mitochondria they could process more of that lactate but eventually no matter who you are you’ll get to a point where it’s too much and you’ll get some spill over and what we mean by spill over is when that excess lactate that can’t be processed in the muscle alone will spill over and move into the bloodstream and you can actually measure lactate levels going up as exercise intensity increases I actually have a lactate meter at home where I can poke my finger get a little blood and see what my lactate levels are at and that’s one way to figure out your zone two we’ll get into that in just a second but once it’s in the bloodstream you now have the ability to have multiple other cells and tissues help you process this lactate and one of those is the Amazing Heart and yes I’m a little ashamed of this because we are in an anatomy lab and I tried to draw real hard just just didn’t work well so this is what we get but the amazing heart has these cardiac muscle fibers that also can improve their mitochondrial number and their quality through cons consistent training and so that lactate can go into the muscle cells of the heart get into the mitochondria of the heart muscle fibers and make more ATP we can also send that lactate to the liver now the liver does something a little different instead of funneling it into mitochondria and creating more ATP out of it it will actually convert that lactate into glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis which is pretty beneficial because that can help maintain blood glucose levels and that glucose could be utilized later on for future production of ATP so how do you actually do Zone 2 training and find your own personal Zone 2 well at the beginning of the video we mentioned Zone 2 is a form of steady state cardio done at a moderate intensity and that steady state is important when you’re doing Zone 2 training you don’t want to be bouncing between the different training zones or different training intensities and just average it out to zone two you actually want to stay just within that zone too throughout the duration of the exercise session and that will give the most physiological benefits and adaptations now if you’ve never heard of the different training zones that’s okay the endurance athlete World talks about these training zones a lot sometimes they have five zones six zones seven zones I personally like the five but one would be the easiest five would be the hardest and again we’re going to mostly focus on this own too obviously and we’re going to talk about how to find it with the cheapest way just by yourself all the way up to paying people and buying your own equipment so let’s start with the least expensive way and actually one of the most effective ways to find your Zone 2 and by least expensive I mean free and that is the talk Test Zone 2 should be done at a level of intensity where you could still maintain a conversation with someone not at this level of conversation it needs to be more difficult than that but if you were on the phone with someone while you were doing Zone 2 training they could tell that you were exercising they could tell that you were breathing more heavily but you could still maintain the majority of that conversation you might have to take a few breaths in between sentences but you could get full sense sentences out and the nice thing about this is it’s actually fairly accurate when you compare it to Laboratory Testing which we’ll talk about some of those tests after we get to my least favorite method of checking for Zone 2 and that is based upon heart rate zones using heart rate zones or I should say a percentage of your max heart rate to find your Zone 2 isn’t my favorite at least initially because there’s some variation in this some will say that 60 to 70% of your max heart rate is where you’d find your Zone 2 other will say 65 to 75% so you can see there’s a wide range there plus you would need to know what your true max heart rate is there are crude equations to help you with this like 220 minus your age and some other equations there are plenty of people where these calculations are quite a bit off and so if you just don’t have any of that data and you’re just basing it off of these percentages you may not be in your true Zone too now if you were to go to a lab and find your actual max heart rate that could start to narrow it down and make this way of finding your Zone 2 a little bit more accurate but taking it a step further to the next testing method to get what we call lactate testing is even better lactate testing is when you test the amount of lactate in your blood and we know that zone 2 occurs at a blood lactate level of about 1.9 to 2.0 milles so you’d want to stay in that 1.9 to 2.0 range throughout the duration of your exercise now are you going to go to a professional lab and have this done are you going to buy your own blood lactate meter those are questions you would have to answer for yourself but the limitation of going to a professional lab is it would tell you your blood lactate on that day in that moment and you could correlate your 2.
0 or your 1.9 or 2.0 with the heart rate that it occurred at and you could use that as somewhat of a training protocol but lactate levels can change and Vary from day to day for example if you’re more fatigued you had a really intense exercise week you’re more fatigued that could change your blood lactate level and how it correlates with your heart rate and even improvements in Fitness could change us a little bit so the most accurate way you could maybe even consider it the craziest way TR to $400 crazy I guess because that’s what a lactate meter would cost and you could just test yourself while you’re exercising in zone 2 periodically throughout the week and just to reiterate if you’re just starting out with this Zone 2 training that talk test is a really good place to start I’ve actually done some nerdy testing on my own where I’ve run in zone 2 while talking and just trying to see if I can stay in it with doing the talk test and I’ve used my lact tape meter alongside with it and it actually is pretty close to that 2 mol so good place to start and then if you’re using wearables with heart rate monitors you can start to narrow in about that range of where your heart rate would be with your Zone too but one of the things you’re probably also wondering is frequency how often should I be doing this well when people are first starting off and they haven’t done much exercise at all we try to get them to at least 1 to two hours starting off with the ideal of them getting to 3 to 4 hours a week I like to at least get four hours a week and then the next question is people will sometimes say well can I lump that time into one or two sessions especially if they’re starting out that 1 to two hour range and if that’s all you’re going to give me is like one to two days a week then we would definitely take it but the ideal uh way of doing this for the maximum physiological changes and benefits would be to spread it out throughout the week with 45 minute to 60 Minute sessions about 3 to 4 days a week now clearly Zone 2 training isn’t the only form of training that would be recommended if someone’s concerned about their overall Fitness Health and Longevity you’d want to incorporate strength training as well and ideally even adding one Higher intensity cardio day like a V2 Max day that we’ve actually done a video on and we’ll link that to this video and people who are just concerned about this overall General Health Fitness and Longevity and they’re just wanting to have good strength good cardiovascular fitness you can get a pretty good split by doing say like three weight training or strength training days three cardio days and you can almost have your cardio and strength training on different days but if you’re throwing a V2 Max session in there as well sometimes you’re going to have to double up some of the cardio and the strength training on the same day now if you were to do a workout where you did like strength at the beginning and your zone two right after it or vice versa would you make gains in both of those areas if you consistently maintained your routine over the long term absolutely but if you’re one of those that’s extremely concerned about maximizing your strength gains and maybe even hypertrophy train training getting a little bit bigger then it would be best if you actually separated the workouts by a few hours or at least maybe you did your strength training in the morning and your cardio training in the later afternoon and I do want to repeat one thing that I mentioned earlier when you’re doing Zone 2 you really want to stay steady within Zone 2 when people sometimes figure out their heart rate range for their zone two they’ll sometimes get into this workout where their heart rate spikes goes down goes above zone two below zone two but then when they look at their data after they’re like oh my average heart rate was within my zone 2 you don’t want to be doing that that’s not nearly as effective you want to stay right within that zone too I kind of think of it as this churning and this constant stimulation to your mitochondria teaching those mitochondria to utilize and metabolize fats more effectively and creating this metabolic efficiency or even metabolic flexibility and what you can kind of think of that meaning is that you get really good at teaching your body how to maximize the use of your Mac nutrients you’re using the fats how you need to use the fats you’re using the carbohydrates how you’re supposed to be using the carbohydrates which is pretty much the opposite of what occurs with things like metabolic syndrome pre-diabetes and even diabetes and this is one of the most important health benefits with Zone 2 training creating this metabolic efficiency or flexibility and I apologize it took me so long to get here but unfortunately these metabolic dysfunctions are pretty prevalent in our society and someone with like type 2 diabetes the body is not processing or metabolizing fats properly it’s not metabolizing carbohydrates properly and then you get insulin resistance so if there is anything close to a Magic Bullet to help reduce our risk of these metabolic dysfunctions like type 2 diabetes and even push some of them into remission Zone 2 training would be one of the items right at the top of the list and of course it wouldn’t be an Institute of human anatomy video if I didn’t get a chance to say how excited I am about one of my favorite lifelong learning tools and that is brilliant brilliant.org is an amazing interactive online learning platform for stem subjects and I really believe it is one of the best and most fun engaging ways to learn math science and computer science I’ve been using brilliant for almost two years now and it has definitely helped me to refine and sharpen past skills as well as develop new ones I recently started one of their new lessons called exploring data visually which is all about analyzing and interpreting data from visualizing charts and graphs which has definitely been helpful for me plus brilliant is constantly adding more of these lessons each and every month so you’ll definitely find lessons and courses that are applicable to you no matter where you are on your educational Journey so if you’re interested in checking out this amazing learning platform go to brilliant.org to start a free 30-day trial plus the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription we’ll also include that information and the link in the description below thanks for watching our crazy Anatomy videos everyone like And subscribe if you feel the need and of course leave some comments below let us know what you thought of the video what you think of Zone 2 training and if you’re going to incorporate it into your weekly routine and we’ll see you next time [Music] [Music]
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