Why Zone 2 Matters for Mitochondria: The training intensity that improves cellular health | Be Well Moments

0:00Welcome to Live Well, Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10Why is Zone 2 training so important for our mitochondrial health? Well, I mean, everything starts with professional athletes. They have taught us a lot, right? I always say we cannot understand imperfection. It wouldn't understand perfection in the first place. Those are the formula one cards, right? Those are the gold standard of what a human should be, right? Metabolically speaking, right? And this is why I've been fortunate for almost 30 years to be able to work with these kind of humans and be able to understand them very well. So they have taught us a lot in order to understand other concepts in different pathologies characterized by these functions at the metabolic cellular level, right?

0:54So performance on one hand, it's about, as I mentioned, about producing ATP fast, producing energy fast and lasting as long as you can. Competition is that, being as fast as you can for as long as you can. Whether we're talking about swimming or rowing or cycling or football, basketball, you need to be fast and you need to sustain that effort. So for that, you need to produce ATP at very high levels and have a very metabolically efficient engine, which is what happens at the cell. And that furnace, that powerhouse, that central part of that engine, the cell is mitochondria. So what do we need to do with athletes improve their mitochondrial function?

1:46So for that, back in the days, I developed these methodologies to try to understand how we can translate what we were learning about cellular metabolism into training. So we know that different exercise intensities elicit different metabolic results. It's not the same result when you go for an easy spin on the bike, for example, then if you do a 30-second sprint, you're mobilizing different energy systems, right? So that's what I saw in the laboratory with these methodologies, with the metabolic heart, with the lactate. And I started to define different training zones because there were different metabolic events.

2:28If you do a maximal, I mean, an incremental exercise intensity, you see this beautifully. And anybody who has done this test or performed this test as an operator, you can see these events happening in front of your eyes, right? And therefore, we're talking about from very low intensity all the way to maximal sprinting, right? So if you put together the dots, you're going to see these metabolic events. That being said, that's why I created different training zones because I couldn't tell an athlete, hey, you're in a high glycolytic intensity or you're in a 100 % oxidative phosphorylation state.

3:10That's why you have to train, right? You cannot speak that language, right? So I had to do something that was very easy to understand. And that's what I decided. Zone one through zone six, right? Then I started by trial and error. okay, now let's try the next step. Okay. What is the intensity that elicits the best effect, not just for mitochondria, but for other intensities, right? Because we always have to remember that when it comes to for athletic performance, you always win competitions at the high intensities. I have never heard about any athlete or seen any athlete winning a competition in the zone two for low intensities.

3:50It never happens. But unfortunately, people are taking to the extremes now and all of a sudden high intensity is gone, it's worthless. It depends. If you're an athlete, you must train high intensity. My athletes train very high intensities. In fact, about 50 % of all the best times, the PRs, happen during training, not competition. So it's very high intensity because you need to stimulate that. So anyways, that's why you set up all these training zones. And that's what I started to see people and their responses back in the laboratory where you can study that metabolic response very closely and see which trainings have improved the most.

4:30So what I saw is that that zone two, that was the one that improved the most. Two parameters that I mentioned earlier, fat oxidation and lactate clearance capacity, which both are surrogates of mitochondrial function. I was seeing these over 25 years ago. And then obviously working with athletes, you saw that also in the competition, that's where you saw that the action right and so that's why the zone two came along but of course you have higher intensities from four some five which are you know that that turbo you need to improve that that turbo right the important thing is that you also have to train the turbo which are like the high intensities that's on five some four because you need to stimulate that tour because that's where you're going to improve uh competition as well but then you need to stimulate also the sprint because sometimes you need to sprint, you know?

5:22Anyways, but when it comes to mitochondrial function, that's important. But when it comes to VO2, right, which is the cardiorespiratory adaptations, training high intensity is very efficient. That's probably more efficient, if not more efficient than training at zone two. But as I said from the beginning, that's how you express your cardiorespiratory adaptations to exercise, right? But another thing is like, how well mitochondrial function works. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.