Are These Training Trends all Hype?

It’s fairly easy to get training information now. You can follow Olympians on Strava and fitness influencers on Tiktok. You can listen to podcasts on the latest trends or argue about the best workouts in forums.  

But just because it’s easy to access doesn’t mean it’s easy to know which information is good. 

“Most of the trends you see are at the highest level of performance,” said Steve Magness, an expert on athletic performance and author of the new book Win the Inside Game. At the highest level, world class athletes are trying to eke out the last bit of extra performance, so they’re often tinkering with details. Those workouts and methods then spread. 

When those things trickle down to the average or even elite amateur athletes, though, it doesn’t always make sense — because the average athlete hasn’t yet maxed out the amount of improvement they can get from the basics, said Magness. “You’ve got to acknowledge you’re a regular person.” 

In fact, sometimes taking those elite level trends too far can lead a regular athlete to instead skip out on or miss the big key parts of training. 

While details have changed some over the years, the basic principles of endurance training, said Magness, have stayed pretty consistent:  

• You need a good amount of easy work to build a base — while you can define this in different ways, the simplest is whether or not you can maintain a conversation 
• Then you need some moderately hard work (tempo efforts or repeats) 
• And eventually you need to top it off with some quite hard or fast efforts 

 It also all needs to be progressive, building and allowing you to adapt; “We don’t jump from A to Z,” said Magness. 

“We can argue over details,” he said, whether 200s or 400s are best on the track, “but the big components are all still there.” 

There are, of course, some things to learn from the latest trends in training — but you probably don’t need to implement all of them immediately. Here are a few of the ones Magness hears questions about from his athletes lately: 

The definition of zone 2 training depends on who you ask. Generally speaking, zone 2 training is aerobic or steady-state cardiovascular training, according to the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM). Some experts will say zone 2 is 80 percent of your maximum heart rate, or for cyclists, 80 percent of your maximum power output. Others will say it's 60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate or power output. 

But zone 2 typically refers to workloads done below the first ventilatory or lactate threshold. Work done at this intensity is sustainable for long periods of time, and represents what most athletes would consider base building. 

Zone 2 training is focused on staining nearly all of your training at a strong Zone 2 effort — not super easy, but not a tempo level yet either. 

This is absolutely a decent concept, said Magness, and many athletes would benefit from a steady Zone 2 effort for much of their training as they build a solid base and cause physiological adaptations.  

When it comes down to it, zone 2 training is just sustained, easy effort. It's a great tool in your overall fitness toolbox and has a bunch of proven benefits. But stressing too much about what ‌exact‌ level of effort zone 2 is — or whether your heart rate is in precisely the right range — is not needed, Magness said.  

Coaches find everyday athletes tend to push too hard on their easy days and not hard enough on their hard days, increasing their risk of injuries and overtraining. Plus, recreational athletes who only spend time training in zone 2 start missing out on some of the other necessary pieces: sprints or threshold efforts or strides.