Is Zone 2 Training Effective for Women? Dr. Stacy Sims on Fitness & Longevity Training | Be Well Moments

0:00There is a huge buzz online around zone two training. And it's kind of supposedly holds the key to endurance and long term health. And again, the buzzword of longevity that, you know, we all want to have. First of all, like, why should women care about this? And is it, is it important? Does it like fit into a woman's workout routine? Is this what we should be thinking about as the golden child of endurance training? And, and what is it? because I think that some people might not know, but I think generally it's blown up online as like this golden child of women's training or training in general.

0:38And I get so frustrated with it because again, when we're looking at the data of zone two, right, and we see who have pushed it, it's the two primary dudes that biohack and put the words out about it. Very popular podcasts. And everyone falls into it. Can we say who they are? Sure. Huberman and Atiyah, right? We know that they put that out there, very broad science. And as an exercise physiologist, I understand the zones and I understand the idea of, yeah, we have to have base miles. But again, it's coming from that male data. So if we pull it back and look from a physiological perspective of why people are pushing zone two, it's to improve metabolic flexibility and the body's ability to uptake and utilize free fatty acids.

1:25when we look at women who come from XX and I'll apologize in advance because we don't have any data outside of the binary of XX versus XY. When a baby is born XX, they're already born with more oxidative fibers. That means endurance fibers. And we're also born with more mitochondrial proteins within there to be metabolically flexible. Then as we go through puberty and we get the exposure of estrogen and progesterone, we have more influence on being metabolically flexible because these two hormones change the way that our body responds to carbohydrate across the menstrual cycle. Then as we start getting into perimenopause, we might lose those hormones, but we still have the undercurrent of mitochondrial density and better mitochondrial respiration than men.

2:15What we need to do as women is look and say, hey, wait, we don't have a lot of glycolytic or type 2 fibers those lactate producing fibers and we know that lactate production is really really important for brain health and if we don't use them we spend so much time zone 2ing then those crossover fibers are becoming more oxidative and we're losing our body's ability to produce lactate which is a risk factor for dementia and alzheimer's. One billion people worldwide are deficient in this nutrient that so many of you guys might not be aware of. And women, if you're listening, you are more at risk of being deficient in this nutrient.

2:54So I'm going to first of all explain what the physical symptoms are. If you have cold hands and feet, pale skin, extreme lack of energy or fatigue, then you might be suffering with iron deficiency or anemia. Now, first off, please go to your GP to get your iron levels checked. Secondly, please explore a good iron supplement. Many people that come to me are worried about taking iron supplementation because it can cause constipation or GI distress. That's why I'm so incredibly proud to be partnering for this episode with Spartone, the number one iron-rich water supplement. Now, I've personally been using these for years.

3:34The reason why is because they are naturally sourced, highly absorbable iron. that means it's much more gentle on your stomach. There's no harsh tablets. It's just one naturally sourced ingredient that works very well. You can pick it up in boots or buy online at Amazon, but please do not ignore this. It is really critical to make sure your iron levels are in check. Which is the leading cause of death in the UK. I just wanna put that out there because a lot of women in their 30s and 40s might not even be thinking that this is a thing. It's the leading cause of death in the UK. And it is a significant sex difference.

4:12And I mean, there's lots of reasons from sociocultural and mind stimulation to the population that's dying now, but a physiological basis underneath is the plaque development. And that comes from misstep of the glial cells and the metabolism of the brain. we start to become more hypometabolic, meaning that our brain doesn't use blood glucose very well. So it relies more and more on lactate. And because women don't have a lot of those glycolytic type two fibers, we're having more and more difficulty producing that lactate. So if we bring it back down to zone two, we don't need to do the zone two workouts that are being pushed so much.

4:50If you have all the time in the world, right? And you're not working and you can train as much as you want, sure, put in a lot of zone two because it is low intensity. It gets you out in nature and it's great. But if you're looking to maximize health and longevity, we need to take a step back from that zone two training as women and focus more on how are we developing these glycolytic fibers? How are we pushing true lactate production as the mainstay with our resistance training, which is also super important for brain health, as well as maintaining lean mass, right? So those become the mainstay.

5:27And then we look at zone two as our soul food. Like we want to go out with friends on a hike or a long ride, or we're training for a half marathon, right? Because we have this goal. We still put a precedence on that higher intensity, but we have time and a place for zone two because it does fit in, but it does not mean that that's what you have to do day in and day out for an hour and a half because it's so time intensive and it's not as metabolically stimulating in a positive manner for women because being that cis woman that xx you already have all of the fat burning capacity and the metabolic flexibility that zone two is trying to push so when i say you train for zone two men need to do it to become more like women god that's the best line i've ever heard men need steps to become more like women that's going to be the title of this podcast um okay for any women that maybe are like oh i didn't i'm not quite sure what zone two is can you give the definition of what zone two training actually is and where it like the parameters yeah so zone two is typically said to be the pace that you go that you can maintain a conversation where you're still a little bit breathless.

6:42You might be breaking a sweat, but it's pretty low intensity. If you're looking on a rating of perceived exertion scale of zero being like you're just waking up dead on the couch and 10 being maximum full gas sprint, zone two sits about a four. So you're not going to easy, but you're not going moderate to hard either. And so people are like, okay, I'm going to use a heart rate monitor. So I make sure that I'm going really super easy so they can stay in zone two because a lot of people don't realize how easy it actually is. I'm going to give you two different subgroups. I'm going to give you a woman kind of 30s to early 40s and then going more into perimenopause into kind of the mid 40s to the mid 50s.

7:27How should these two types of women be looking at their training, whether it's zone two or not? What is their kind of, a bit like the plate that we made, how should women be approaching their training in these two different sets? Yeah. So across the board, all women should be doing strength training. And I don't mean our little pink dumbbells and our three kilo weights. They are gone. They're gone. They're gone. Yeah. It's when you're in your reproductive years or your younger years, you can play around a little bit more about like your 10 to 12, your hypertrophy stuff. But as we get into peri and post-menopause, we really need to look at the strength development and do neural adaptations.

8:06So we know that when we're doing the power-based stuff that's more neurally adaptive, we are also going to build lean mass and keep the impetus for building lean mass. But if we're doing more hypertrophy type training, we don't get strength. We just get a little bit of lean mass build. So when we're looking at lifting weights, we want to be strong. When we're looking at intensity and what we're doing, it's paramount that women who are perimenopausal into postmenopause do two to three high intensity interval sessions a week. So this is, you know, either sprint interval, that's your 30 seconds or less as hard as you can, or it's true high intensity work, not a F45 orange theory type class, but you know, you're doing your every minute on the minute for three minutes and then having a full minute off.

8:52And then you repeat that two or three times, done and dusted in 30 minutes. And then for women who are in their, their reproductive years, so their thirties and early forties, you can get away with a lot of stuff and play around a lot, right? So yes, we want some high intensity, we want polarization because we want that lactate development with the eye to, I'm getting older, I'm going to have to train my body this way anyway, but there still is room if you want to go and do ultra endurance stuff, right? You can still benefit from that. The caveat of that is we don't want you to keep training those oxidative fibers so much that you're just going to keep getting slower and slower and slower.

9:29We have to have an eye of peppering it with that high intensity work too. So if we're looking at our 30s to early 40s, have a play, don't overtrain, eat well, you have a little bit of room to do a lot of kind of fun stuff. And then we have to become a little bit more dialed to what is the bread and butter for longevity when we get into our mid-40s onwards. The bread and butter again is that heavy resistance training peppered with some high intensity work. And then if you're someone who's like, I'm training for an ultra run, how do I do this? Well, yeah, we look at what you're doing when your event is.

10:04We can put in time on the feet. But again, we really want to maintain that high intensity quality work and then we see where we fit in the longer stuff. And I think it's important, right, to talk about this through the lifespan, because I guess, you know, we do need to start adapting as opposed to just having a very rigid plan of, okay, I'll do a bit of resistance training and I'll maybe do a run and that's kind of it. And I'm not going to think about changing my exercise routine at all. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.

10:42Thank you.