Zone 2 vs HIIT: How Athletes Structure Sessions and Avoid Overtraining | Inigo San Milan | Be Well Moments

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

0:10You're saying that men and women shouldn't have this really any differently. We should both be prioritising zone two. Yet actually women will struggle more with HIIT because of these muscle fibres to produce the ATP. And that makes so much sense because I went through a phase probably about eight years ago when HIIT was... I don't know if you remember, there was a huge surge in here and everybody, every studio was opening and everyone was doing here. And I felt worse than I've ever felt before. Like awful. And also what was coming up at that time. And I'd be really interested to ask you about this with exercise and also how you train athletes and if it's different from men and women.

0:47I was also fasting before I was doing those sessions as well. So you can imagine I had like no energy in me and I was going off to these ridiculously expensive classes for an hour. and raising into zone four, zone five. And I've never felt worse in my life. Yeah, you're totally right. And this is one of the things that, yeah, I mean, HIIT was a hype. And, you know, it was very popular 10 years ago. But, you know, very few people from 10 years ago, they're still doing it. Or not that many people because, or at least people who were pursuing health benefits through HIIT. You know, it's not sustainable.

1:27and it can lead to injuries. Again, I am not saying that HIIT is bad for you, but any exercise program based on HIIT, right, is not sustainable. There are no athletes in the world who all that training they do is HIIT. It doesn't exist. And believe me, I know a little bit about what athletes train, but it doesn't exist. And in fact, now, and I'm not saying if it's a tendency or not, but what we have seen historically is the 80-20, whereas the proportions of the time, or not the time, the sessions, not the time, because the sessions that you dedicate to different intensities, about 80 % is lower intensity, call it zone two maybe, and about 20 % is higher intensity.

2:19This is the approach that we've been using with athletes forever. and it has worked any other approach of doing 20 80 like 20 lower intention 80 hit it doesn't tend to work it causes overtraining fatigue and i was mentioning earlier but that's kind of what we do with athletes so that the whole thing of now the 80 20 it comes from from again like like as many concepts come from what we have learned with athletes they're now becoming mainstream right But 80-20 is not about minutes or percentage of minutes because, in fact, if we go by the minutes, it's even less. If you look at the volume, just observationally, if you look at the volume of any athlete, whether it's a very high-intensity athlete like a swimmer, 100-meter swimmer or a rower or a marathon runner, about 5 % to 10 % of the entire minutes per season are in high intensity.

3:19right so but we need to think more about sessions so uh it's about 80 of the sessions you contemplate maybe zone two and about 20 of the sessions in content should contemplate high intensity and the way we break it down is to the yes so many times we isolate a session because they have more time to specifically do high intensity because of the demands of competition uh other sessions specifically is how it's zone two training and they can be four or five hours but mere models don't have four or five hours or they even can do four or five hours at that for zone two or high intensity so the way is about to come combining as i said if i do four days a week zone two in combination with high intensity at least two or so at towards the end that's when you start hitting some sweet spot and then that was like the distribution, right?

4:17It's more like 80-20. But again, like, you know, HIIT, it's something that, yeah, it's just a lot of people, you know, did it, but it's just many people don't enjoy it, didn't enjoy it. Have you had to change a lot of these athletes' mindsets on this approach to more an 80 % like lower intensity and the 20 % high intensity? Like, have you seen them have some resistance to that? Because obviously you've seen insane changes. I'd love for you to share some of these stories for our listeners. But how is the mindset approach when you're working with athletes in this sector? Not much, to be honest, because that's been the mentality always like that.

4:56In fact, you know, for, as I mentioned earlier, right, if you watch what swimmers do and have done forever, and they continue breaking records is that you go to a swimming and you see the world-class swimmers, they swim up and down, up and down. And then eventually, obviously they do some intensities, right? But it's not the other way around. So you don't have to convince them to, hey, you can't do 1000 sprints a day. It's bad for you to five or do 10, right? Well, they're already there, right? In fact, what I had to convince him more is that the zone two is a much harder intensity than just cruising, which was what a lot of people were doing.

5:43Because that 80-20, they didn't know it by 80-20, but that's what they were doing, was like more aerobic training, long endurance, run or ride. It was too easy, right? And it was to is it was close to a recovery intensity and that doesn't stimulate uh that bioenergetics of minor kind of function as much so it was about convincing them that they had to go faster and if you look at well you look at if you talk to some other people that i've been working with at zone 2 especially at high high level athletes it's really really really demanding very demanding and until they get used to that but it's not an easy training at all for that we have recovery days okay and what does the recovery days look like nothing no i'm not active recovery i mean you yeah you have to do nothing it's important to that's what i think i remember when i introduced also the concepts are off days you know you know like a long time ago to to the athletes i was working with, it was a crazy idea to have an off day or even a recovery week, like an active recovery, right?

6:52But now everybody does an off day completely and at least a recovering active recovery day, which is, you know, like a light run with friends to grab a coffee, right? Or a light bike ride, you know, to grab another coffee with friends and come back, you know? It's something that is more to me, there's no, there's no difference between an active recovery day than just do nothing. Right. Because when you do nothing, uh, you just rest and we do active recovery days, maybe more psychological because, uh, to break down the, to break out of the routine of training hard, because you need to train by yourself many times in individual sports.

7:32So that day where you're going to have fun and just gather with some friends, uh, that's your recovery day for a coffee ride, for example, or a coffee run. But yeah, you need those too. To make sure you're performing, but also to make sure I guess your immune system and everything, you need recovery for so many different dimensions. You know, your immune system plays such a big role in exercise. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.

8:08Thank you.