zone two training only for 6 weeks what has it done for me 6 weeks ago I went to sports science lab I did a step test and a ramp test to find out my fitness levels and my zone two since then I have tried to train in zone 2 and Zone 2 only not as easy as it sounds it's meant that sometimes I haven't even broken a sweat but has it made me any fitter I'm heading back to the sports sence lab to find out so what have I been doing for the last 6 weeks training in zone 2 of course but if you are unfamiliar with what zone 2 is then make sure to head over and watch my first video where I explain what zone 2 is and why I am doing this challenge so I was coming from a period of not riding my bike very much so the plan consisted of ramping up the hours throughout the weeks and I think the shortest ride I did was 1 hour and the longest ride I did was just over 3 hours and the biggest week on the bike was a total of 9 hours I did the majority I'll say about 80% of my rides on the indoor trainer because I found it was so much easier to stick to Zone 2 on the indoor trainer cuz turns out it is very hard to stick in zone 2 when you head out to the real world and start riding up a hill thankfully I had coach Laurence planning and my training out which helped massively he even added some intervals into my my training sessions which really made it a lot easier than just sticking to one power throughout the whole thing so essentially I guess one of my training sessions might have looked something similar to this so I'd have an hour and a half on the turbo do a 10-minute warm-up and then I'd do a 20 minute block right at the top of Zone 2 so the aim of the session was to hold my heart rate between 150 to 155 beats per minute which is a 5 beat margin which is quite hard and then I'd have a 5 minute rest and then repeat that through three or four times within a session and that just mentally helped break up the time and it felt a lot more manageable than just sitting on the turbo doing one power for an hour and a half so did I actually manage to stay in zone two for all of my training I caught up with Coach Lawrence to find out so so I've taken your all your rides from from um that you've uploaded and had a look at them and put them into these graphs here so we can visually see it a little bit and what stands out is that you really have spend most of your time in zone 2 which is good that's the point of it so if you look at heart rate obviously we got heart rate and power but if we look at heart rate half your training was in zone two another 25% in zone one and then quite a bit of time in in what I class as a recovery zone but that's just things like freewheeling or descending it's going to happen when you start off obviously heart rate takes time to get up at the end of other bits and Bobs um set of Junctions all those bits so a load of training in was in zone two and at the bottom and we can see then I've sort of put it below lactate threshold and we'll see that on your results and that's kind of the top of Zone 2 and almost 95% of the training there was in that zone so Absolut heaps of time in that zone which is what we're looking for I had quite a lot of people on stra commenting and analyzing my training and being like oh you've gone out you you're in Zone 3 for a few seconds here and there and kind of pointing it out does it really matter that much if I went into Zone 3 for 20 seconds 30 seconds here and there yeah absolutely not it's there's no really like hard line although we call it a Zone 2 and there's a power number that might be two WS different the body doesn't work like that it's a bit of a transition you can spend time there and nothing too much happens if you had if you weren't just doing zone two training let's say you had a really big day of efforts planned for tomorrow and today's ride you pressed on a bit too much and spent a load of time in zone three that might tie you out for that hard ride um but even then not for a few seconds you know and if you think about going up a hill if you think about it's pretty impossible to say Z two get up a hill exactly you've got to keep moving going away from traff lights you've got to put bit more power down all those bits so no don't worry about that it's just about the idea of it being a steady ride something where you can go longer rather than harder I like to see it as quite a realistic well what I've done is quite realistic cuz if anybody else was going out to do this they'd have to go out of Zone 2 for a little bit so that's how I'm looking at it anyway I've had a few easy days leading up to my next lab testing and I'm nervous but I think I feel good but at this moment in time it's really hard to know whether my results are going to be better because it literally just feels like I've been riding my bike it doesn't feel like I've been training I've not done any hard efforts I've not reached my Max it's just a weird really weird position to be in but I'm feeling positive I'm really hoping they're going to be better but there's only one way to find out it's back to the lab we go and this time I have Coach Lawrence to give me some extra motivation and encouragement and of course take me through my results right we're back in the lab I'd like to say it's nice to be back I'm a little bit scared and I'm going to be doing exactly the same test as last time but Lawrence give us a run through of what exactly I'm going to be doing today so Manon you're going to start with the step test so there'll be 4 minute stages where the power increases by 20 WS per stage just nice and gradually until you're above threshold so getting towards a bit of a hard effort but not quite not quite there Max yet bit of a rest and then you're go into the into the uh ramp test that'll be 1 minute stages increasing by 15 wats a stage until you can't go anymore that's the fun one that sounds quite hard not looking forward to that one but I'll get a good warm up in I think my legs are feeling good but it's hard when I've not I've not done any hard efforts I've just been sitting at you know 150 heart rate for the last six weeks so it might be a shock of the system going out of that today but we'll [Music] see so today what we're hoping to see is some changes in the blood lactate curve for Manon so we hopefully see a a higher power output for a given blood lactate concentration and we'll see the the curve shift that would mean that the zone 2 power an intensity has increased as well as a consequence of the training we might also see some changes to maximal oxygen take with V2 Peak and the power output there and that'll be in the ram test but more likely what we're hoping to see and what we expect to see is the the bottom end changes which is where manon's done most of her training any encaging worse than Manon I feel the pressure now the pression now just keep pedling thanks laen [Music] [Music] thanks so so when we're thinking about adaptations to training and responses uh they can be quite different between those who have previous been Elite athletes like man on here um and those who are just starting out what we might see is that Manon actually adapts and responds really quickly compared to someone who's less trained uh which sometimes we think about it being the other way but actually our body can remember where it was before and adapt really quickly so we might see some better responses from this test for this test from man on than we might do with someone just starting out [Music] thought it was going to be full a dribble then oh that went on a lot longer than last time so I'm hoping that's a good sign there's a rum test coming up I'm scared then let's do [Music] this so coming up now is the ramp test last time Manon got up to 270 Watts she went about 20 wats further in the first part so my guess now is 300 wats you'll get up to [Music] hopefully so M's currently at 240 WS um so she's got a little bit more to go but she's doing really well go plenty more on the tank now go man up up up go with the change push push push every extra little bit counts let's go that's it man I'm we on Drive keep going going to go up to the next level you can go with it done well done [Applause] [Music] I think they both hit just as much I feel like I could maybe go a little bit deeper in this one like going to the hurt lock a bit more but I mean it still hurts no matter what your Fitness levels it's pretty Grim so that's the testing done and dusted now it's time for Lawrence to analyze the data and let me know the results um shall we get on to the results results right okay is it better or worse so the good news is man on it's moved on a lot good really good um really good here so I'll talk you through so we'll look at the blood lactate curve first so that was the first part of the step test yeah we did 4 minute stages and a and a 20 W increase so we can see on here we've got the blue line was last time and the bottom one is for blood lactate and the top line is heart rate the red line is this time so what we can see is last time there was never really a level bit of line it just went up that blood La was just going up and you know metabolism metabolic profile not really that strong this time a lot better you can see a nice flat line where you've got two stages there yeah which is really good and then it's also a lot lower than before last time it went up to sort of 9 M which is pretty high this time it's peaked out significantly lower there around about 6 mm so really good move on um and if we think about about then your we've got LT lactate threshold and lactate turno on there they've moved on by about 15% so last time your uh lactive threshold was 140 Watts now it's about 160 Watts um and that is the point at which you kind of want to that's the top of zone two is around about that so your Zone 2 power has M on by about 20 watts that's pretty good which is a lot so that's awesome right and then one of the reasons we looked at heart rate zones a minute ago is that your heart rate and your zones kind of stay the same yeah so the fact you trained to heart rate as well as power if you just trained to power you'd have actually been training now 20 wats too low yeah so you used heart rate in combination with power to understand that and see that which is awesome yeah I'm actually really surprised with how much that has changed because well five and a half six weeks is not a long time and plus when you're training at such a low well felt like quite a low intensity it's hard to get your head around how you're going to get fitter and better because in my head to get fit you have to be going full gas all the time which isn't necessarily the case as we've proven and and there's different mechanisms for for the low intensity adaptations it's about the duration not the intensity so there's a minimum intensity after which it's about how long you go for going harder doesn't actually lead to any more adaptation any more signaling when you're going hard it's about how hard you go for and that's the difference so when you're actually riding easy getting the miles in you don't need to go hard you just need to ride so you can have a conversation so you can keep talking and just go longer rather than harder and if I was to do a totally different program maybe doing like lots of intervals or hit workout what do you think the difference would be if I tested again doing something completely different so on here you had about 15% increase in your lactate threshold and that sort of more metabolic peripheral adaptations and your your maximal auction uptake your V2 Peak only increased by about 7 1 12% which is still pretty good there's still a lot I think if you would have done more of the top end stuff I think we probably would have seen a bigger shift in that a bigger shift in aerobic capacity to maybe a bigger shift in your sort of four to 10 minute power output mhm and probably less of a shift in your thresholds okay interesting I reckon yeah and going on now I've done this zone two block what would happen if I carried on doing it for another six weeks would I still see the same improvements I think you started from a level um which wasn't the highest level it wasn't compared to your past thank you for pointing that out but you've got a really good block of training I think it was sort of 33 35 hours of training which is awesome around work doing that if you were to continue it you probably would see much smaller improvements and now it' be the time to go okay what next how do you overload and stress the body so I think that's where you you could either go longer and if you had more time actually extending out to doing to doing more 3 4 Hour rides building up to 10 or 15 hours a week that would probably move this on really well again yeah if you haven't got that time which most people don't with work it's about then building in some efforts so that' be building in the midweek hard efforts to create that overload and keep driving the adaptations on so there we have it zone two it does actually work in my case anyway but a big thank you to Lawrence for helping me out with this video it has been great to have him along but I also want to know what you guys have learned from Zone 2 what are your experiences been have you benefited from it let me know down in that comment section below and I'm also going to do a follow-up video of what I've learned from training in zone 2 for the last 6 weeks because there's been a lot of questions asking how I've managed boredom if I've been training outside if I've been doing it to power or heart rate so I'm going to answer all of those in the next video so I hope you enjoyed I'll see you soon