A Zone Two Training Hack (Anyone Can Do)

Summary

In this episode of the RCA podcast, host and coach Ben Treble discusses innovative techniques to enhance cycling fitness through zone two training, focusing on the importance of proper breathing. The conversation explores how diaphragmatic breathing can improve performance, lower heart rates, and enhance overall cycling efficiency. Listeners are guided on how to implement these breathing techniques during their training sessions, with practical advice on intervals and progression. The episode concludes with real-world applications and benefits observed by athletes who have integrated these methods into their routines.

Takeaways

Zone two training can become monotonous, so mixing it up is essential.
Breathing techniques can significantly impact cycling performance.
Diaphragmatic breathing is crucial for improving VO2 max.
Proper breathing can lower heart rates and improve recovery.
Breathing exercises can reduce perceived exertion (RPE) during workouts.
Integrating breathing techniques into training can enhance overall fitness.
Focus on breathing through the belly for better oxygen intake.
Progress breathing exercises from zone two to higher intensity efforts.
Athletes have reported lower heart rates and improved performance with breathing techniques.
Adding breathing exercises has no downside and can only improve cycling efficiency.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Zone Two Training
02:59 Understanding Breathing Techniques
06:02 Implementing Breathing in Zone Two Rides
08:51 Progressing Breathing Techniques in Training
12:06 Real-World Applications and Benefits of Breathing Exercises

RCA: https://roadcyclingacademy.com/ 

Cam Nicholls (00:00.12)
Welcome back to the RCA podcast where today I'm joined in studio by RCA coach Ben Treble. And today we're going to talk about a zone two training hack you can use to boost your overall cycling fitness. Apparently that's what I was just hearing about offline, which I'm interested to learn a little bit more about. And I think it's a good one as well for a lot of people out there that get a little bit bored is the right word with zone two training, but

You know it can be a little bit monotonous so something that we can use to mix things up So Ben, what do you got for me? We're doing some zone 2 maybe we should Preface this one by talking about what do we mean by zone 2 because there are many more other versions of zone 2 There's a scientific model There's a heart rate model. There's a power model like are we talking about? Something specifically here, or we're not getting too carried away. We're just doing like aerobic work

Yeah, don't need to get too carried away. I where this idea came from, I mean, it's not my idea. It's not a new idea, but I had an athlete that, you know, you do zone to ride, let's say it's one hour, two hours on Swift and it gets a bit boring. Like how do you make it more interesting? whilst being productive. And the idea that I ended up with was, you know, I learned this actually over at the UCI level three course around.

you know, often a low hanging fruit that's missed is learning how to breathe properly on the bike. Hmm. You know, like particularly let's talk about VO2 max, you know, hot topic at the moment, you know, everybody's pretty good at doing some sort of VO2 max intervals, but we don't, and we often only think of, we're fairly narrow minded in thinking about to improve VO2 max, we do intervals on the bike. don't think about how else could we improve.

VO2 max from, because it's not just how you push the pedals, right? It's, there's a lot more involved in when we think about what VO2 max is, your, you know, your maximal volume of oxygen consumption that involves your whole cardio respiratory system. key, very key component of that is breathing. So the idea was let's try and break up the zone to ride by adding in some intervals at the same intensity, but there's just simply, you know, the, the,

Ben Treble (02:25.794)
wording on the interval is a reminder to just purely focus on your breathing for say it's a five minute interval and then we progress to longer intervals.

Okay, so when we say breathing, are we talking about like, are we working, you know, breathing through the chest? Are we focusing on the stomach or the diaphragm? Or like, are we narrowing in on something before we talk about what the intervals look like? Because I know like, you do forget about this one, it's like, yeah, the diaphragm. You know, don't often think about the diaphragm when you're doing your training, you think about your legs.

and your lower back and maybe some numb hand that you get on your handlebar. So like if we're doing zone two training and we're focused on the breathing, what are we focused on specifically?

The scientific term is diaphragmatic breathing. It's also called belly breathing. I think in its most basic form, that's the first step to improving your breathing would be to think about expanding your belly and breathing through the belly. The goal that you want to get to though would be a picture. If you picture your chest and your belly, that whole torso area, as if it was a big can of Coke and someone shook it up and it's expanding in the heat.

That's what you want when you breathe. You want your chest, your belly, your ribs, your back. So behind you, you want it to expand outwards, forwards, upwards at the same time as evenly as possible, which is quite hard to do. if we come back to why is this important? Because a lot of new writers, they work Monday to Friday jobs, sitting at a desk. They just breathe through their chest and they often have shallow breathing. And this is a learned muscle recruitment pattern.

Ben Treble (04:10.136)
that you have. And when you end up doing high intensity intervals, your body's going to revert to its natural muscle recruitment patterns, including when you breathe. And so you're to just breathe pretty hard through your chest and your ribs will limit your breathing capacity a little bit. So let's talk about how do we shift that and improve how much oxygen we're going to breathe in. So you can improve your tidal volume. And then if you improve the strength of those diaphragmatic

muscles through some exercise intervals like this, you're going to improve the pressure when you breathe out, which will improve your partial pressure and it'll improve the diffusion of the oxygenated blood into the capillaries, which is going to improve your call it your VO2 max or your ability to do high intensity intervals.

Okay, good. I'm wondering, there's probably a lot of people out there listening at the moment, myself included, just sitting opposite you that's already started to just breathe a little bit differently. I'm like, yeah, okay. I was chest breathing and now I can feel as I'm breathing and focus more on that sort stomach region, which then sort of continues into the chest. Things are a lot different.

Yeah, you feel karma. do feel calm. Your heart rate's going to drop. Your body immediately gets a parasympathetic response. So it's going to reduce the heart rate, improve your heart rate variability. And you get that, that parasympathetic response across the body, which reduces your stress. That translates if you teach yourself, it's difficult to, to practice that in a high intensity of four minute VO two interval. It's very difficult to practice that. course. That's why one,

I target the zone two or even your recovery rides and I break it up with intervals that are just let's focus on the breathing. See how much you can reduce your heart rate through focused breathing in that five minutes. And when you, it's much easier to do that at low intensity. So you're going to practice that and hopefully the aim is to build the new muscle recruitment pattern. So then when you start doing high intensity work, you should naturally start breathing better when you're doing that high intensity work and it should improve.

Cam Nicholls (06:02.67)
Okay.

Ben Treble (06:20.012)
your, it should lower the RPE. That's where the science is at. So if you're breathing a lot better, it's going to reduce the RPE and improve your ability to sustain those high intensity intervals. So yeah, pretty good one. the other science on this that, you know, I did a little bit of extra research on this cause that's where I was at. and the science behind this was it should also improve your posture and it should help reduce things from tinglingness in the arms.

and to your power output, or if you have back injuries, it's just going to help use every muscle in the body. And it's going to reduce the load on the legs. And the last big benefit that was quite interesting was when you're breathing more efficiently, which is what we just described, you got to think that your, your, your cardio respiratory system is a subset of muscles. Like the intercostal muscles is a big group and they require energy to work. If you can use those muscles more efficiently,

they're going to do the same amount of breathing for less energy. It's going to save that energy for your legs.

Okay, that's good. All right, you've sold me. So what is it if I'm doing a zone two ride? You know, I'm going for an hour on the train or maybe it's two hours as we have here where I live down the coast. That's a common zone two ride or maybe somebody doing three hours on two ride. Like what are they doing? Like how does an interval look like? Give an example and add another layer on that up. You know, I've been into breathing in the past, not so much on the bike but off the bike.

you there's the Wim Hof method and all these things and they talk about you've got to breathe in through your nose because the nose filters the air, warms it and it becomes more efficient when it goes into the bloodstream. So you know are we mouth breathing, are nose breathing? What does it look like?

Ben Treble (08:06.038)
Yeah. I do like breathing in through the nose and out the mouth. for me, main benefit, no, that's very difficult. So yeah, preface high intensity stuff. You're to be mouth breathing. Good luck trying that with nose breathing. Maybe if you're a pocket show,

VR2 max

Ben Treble (08:24.642)
But when you breathe through the nose, it limits the amount of oxygen or the volume that you can breathe in, like how fast you can feel those lungs. And so naturally what it does is it forces you to breathe in over a longer period. when you have shallow breathing, it's often short. You might be breathing in and out in one, two second increments. So the practical side of this is I would put in a one hour zone two ride, probably three, five minute intervals, three to four. And

it's at the same intensity. So you just try and maintain the same power. But the focus of it is you would start in the most basic form, try and breathe through the belly, which is going to help you breathe out everywhere and start with trying to breathe in for three, hold it and then breathe out for three. Yeah. Well, you don't have to hold it for three, probably for two, but you just want to hold it for at least a period. Yeah. Don't just breathe in and straight back out. in, hold it for a bit. Cause it's going to help strengthen the muscles and then

for three seconds.

Cam Nicholls (09:23.352)
through the mouth, through the nose when you're the...

You breathe in through the nose. To me, it doesn't matter that much, but if you breathe in through the nose, it's going to force you to do it longer. And you want to progress. So if you can do it for five seconds in and out, that's great. I think that's the target is to get to a five second in and out. Some people like to do this with the pedal strokes. So you might say, as you're breathing in, try and get through five revolutions. That's another way to count through it. And then as you're breathing out, try and get through five revolutions.

Okay, cool. And you're doing this for...

I would just try this for five minutes because it's actually, it's a very, it should be a very focused effort. And I think it's actually a little bit mentally draining when you start doing this. And so that's why I just do five minutes.

Oh, and I think you can also lose focus very quickly at a zone 2 level, know what I mean? Because you're sort of plodding along and quite often I get caught in my own thoughts and you you drift off so five minutes sounds like a good period.

Ben Treble (10:14.318)
Yeah. And then I would just build it up. And this is a, you know, we just had a good chat about winter training. Great time in winter training to train this. might even do a full block, say like a four week period where you start in the first week, trying to get through two of your zone two rides. You've got three, five minute intervals of breathing. And by the end of the four weeks, you want to get to a point where, you know, you're doing 20 minute intervals and then you testing that out, uh, when you do some high intensity stuff, potentially.

Okay, and do you, you know, with the RCA members at UCoach who are doing this, do they progress that breathing into other zones as well? So like I'm thinking, obviously you wouldn't go straight to, you know, top end zone, but like you get them to do tempo efforts or any sweet spot efforts or is this something that you think is a good idea? Because obviously at a zone two level, it's easier to probably be

doing this may become more challenging as you go up the zones.

Yeah, I would definitely progress it into tempo efforts.

Okay, and a tempo effort if you're out there listening, zone three, so power wise we're talking what's at about 75 to 85 percent of FTP around there.

Ben Treble (11:25.752)
Yep, around there. It's going to be the job.

Okay, and have you had any feedback from some of your athletes that have been doing this? What have they said about the workout specifically and any things that they've noticed on the bike?

highly where it came from was a conversation with an athlete I had around their zone two workouts and they were concerned about cardiac drift or they felt like their high rate was just increasing too much towards the end of a zone two ride. I think there were other factors at play like heat strain throughout an indoor workout was a one factor. And I was trying to think of how do we help this athlete because we're not going to change the work that they're doing.

the zone two work they're doing is going to help improve the cardiac drift and the progressive increase in volume will help reduce cardiac drift. But that takes time. And so I thought, let's try get that heart rate down a bit more with some breathing exercises. So a lot of secondary benefits, but at the end of the day, we did it even for two weeks. And when we did our weekly catch up in the second week, we looked at the heart rate response and we looked at the RPE and the comments.

And the comments simply were I could feel the difference. I could feel that I managed to get my heart rate five to 10 beats lower than it was at the start of the five minute breathing interval. And then by the third week, we managed to get the heart rate to be around 10 beats lower in average for the whole workout. Wow. And in the space of one week, you're not going to see a massive, you know, shift in say just pure cardiac drift stuff, but

Ben Treble (13:08.136)
I would say a big portion of that was just through breathing.

Interesting.

So, yeah, pretty significant drop in RPE. And I think this helps everything from recovery to a whole lot of subset of things.

Yeah, and it's such an easy one to do, but such an easy one to forget about as well. I'm going to go try this myself. know, particularly I think on the indoor trainer as well, I struggle with those own two rides. They're very boring. So this is going to be a good one for me to test out.

Yeah, I think it's a great one. often talk about low hanging fruit and often when you target something in your cycling training, it means that you're not doing something else, but adding breathing exercises into a zone to work out. To me, there is no downside. There's only a possible upside. So what have you got to lose by trying it?

Cam Nicholls (14:00.288)
Very good point. Such a good point. We're gonna leave on that point. Thanks again for joining us, Ben. And look, if you're looking to implement these things and work with the coach, get support with these types of things, make sure you check out the RCA's website, www.roadcyclingacademy.com and there you can hire a coach. Even, can you hire Ben at the moment or are you at capacity?

I'll always make room for some people.

All right, thank you, Tom, and we'll catch you in the next podcast.