Peter Attia

So hopefully I'll do my best to dispel that.

There's ideas out there challenging the idea that Zone 2 is special or magical or there's anything that's good about it.

And there are certainly people who would assert that high-intensity work produces the same or even greater adaptations.

And I think, honestly, in the framework that some people are proposing that, it is true.

So let's now think through this further.

for the proponents of high intensity exercise, people who say, don't waste your time doing zone two, the shorter the amount of exercise time that a person has, the more true that is.

Because remember something I said a few minutes ago, which is,

If you really want to maximize the area of your triangle, nothing beats volume.

Now, walking won't do it, so you have to get to zone two, this first place where you have some adaptation, but the more time you spend there, the better.

And so if we're going to talk about a professional athlete or even a recreational athlete, if you're going to talk about 10 to 15 years ago, the way I train, where by some miracle, I still was managing to spend 14 to 16 hours a week on a bike, then we can get into the nuance of how that time should be divided.

So now let's turn this over to someone who's going to adhere to the general guidelines.

So the general guidelines says you should exercise ideally 150 minutes per week.

So that's two and a half hours per week.

And I'm sure the guidelines would be happy if you did more, but that's what we're trying to get people to.

Most people are not exercising two and a half hours per week.

And truthfully, if that's all you can adhere to, then zone two is not going to be an efficient use of your time because it doesn't provide a sufficient enough training stimulates to drive the adaptations to make the triangle bigger.

And remember, that 150 minutes is total exercise.

Well, part of that's going to have to be some resistance training.

So even if you said, I'm going to carve out an hour for two 30-minute resistance training workouts in a week, then you've got an hour and a half for cardio.

Truthfully, I would say then all of that time should be done at high intensity.