Despite having a full and busy life, you still carve out time for fitness. After all, being in peak physical health allows you to enjoy this life to its fullest.
Making fitness a priority is an important first step in any overall wellness plan. And you want to make sure that every minute you spend sweating it out counts toward your goal, whether that’s fat loss, performance, endurance, strength, or all of the above.
To help you in your fitness pursuits, we turn to board-certified endocrinologist and metabolic cardiometabolic wellness expert Dr. Sean P. Nikravan. At our practice, we’ve established The Longevity Program, which is designed to optimize the health of our patients on every level.
This program emphasizes exercising smart to reach your goals. With that in mind, we are using this month’s blog to explore different types of training — Zone 2 training and high-intensity training — and which approach is best for you.
Let’s start with a brief explanation about zone training, which refers to heart rate zones. The five zones are:
As you might imagine, if you’re interested in optimizing your heart rate zones when you work out, it’s important to know your maximum heart rate. We highly recommend coming to us for testing in a lab setting so you have real world numbers to work with.
During this evaluation, we determine where your heart rate max is; then we can design a plan that works within your unique metabolic ranges. Everyone’s metabolism is different, so there’s no one-size-fits-all training program.
Let’s spend some time addressing Zone 2 training specifically. In this zone, you’re not pushing to the limit, which leads many people to think that there's no benefit to lower intensity exercise.
The reality is that there is much to be gained with Zone 2 training, especially if you want to build a strong foundation of endurance. Low-intensity aerobic exercise also trains your body to be more efficient.
When you engage in aerobic exercise, it increases the number and size of the mitochondria in your cells and increases the blood vessels in your muscles. And this happens with any level of aerobic exercise, even lower intensity.
Now, let’s turn our attention to higher intensity training, including high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which falls under Zones 4 and 5.
There are many benefits of getting your heart rate up with intense intervals of training, including:
HIIT training is not only a great way to boost your power and endurance, but research illustrates that it’s also highly effective for reducing body fat.
This is a question that’s tough to answer here because everyone has different goals and starting points. However, in broad terms, we find that mixing your zones is highly beneficial.
Zone 2 training plays an important role in establishing a solid fitness foundation. Training in Zone 2 also can help prevent burnout.
Mixing in HIIT training with your lower intensity workouts is an excellent practice because short bursts of exercise are highly beneficial and they push your body into a much healthier cardiometabolic direction.
To really maximize the time you spend on your workouts, we strongly urge you to join our Longevity Program so we can ensure that each drop of sweat goes toward maximizing your health and wellness. We can help you learn how to best balance your training and heart rate zones.
To learn more about optimal training, we invite you to schedule a consultation today with Sean P. Nikravan, MD, in Newport Beach, California.
