Zone 2 Training Is Useless Without This One Test | MAF Test

[00:00:00] This is the one test that you should do every four to six weeks to know if your zone two is improving or not. No test equals just hoping and waiting. Let’s get into actually how to do the test.

[00:00:18] All right, so today I’ll be doing a. MoFA tone or MAF maximum aerobic fitness test, which will be testing my zone two heart rate. Um, and this is based on MoFA tone zone two, and there’s actually a lot of iterations around this, but I’ll actually be doing the zone two run. I try to test myself every four to six weeks with this.

[00:00:36] I’ll be going over the three mistakes that people make when they try to train their zone two and when they actually try to test it, uh, how to actually. Fix it, I’m gonna be doing it. You’re gonna see me going around and around in circles, and I’ll have a free training plan that you can get in the middle to help you improve your zone two so that you can run farther, faster, easier.

[00:00:54] Uh, zone two helps everything from pretty much, I’d say the mile, even the 800 a bit. Uh, obviously 5K all the way up to Marathon and Ultras. Improving your zone two is huge. I believe in it been 14 years doing zone two training and it has skyrocketed my performance. I’ve been running for about 30 years.

[00:01:12] I’m Daren D Lake, and this is the 1% better runner, and I’ve got this on here. So this is the 1% better runner. I’ll put this down. Uh, and yeah, the whole goal of this is to get everyone 1% better each day, week, month, season, year, just by changing small little variables here and there. Let’s get into it.

[00:01:35] All right, so the first mistake is that people run this zone two based on pace and feel when I believe it needs to be very much so on heart rate. And going back to what zone two heart rate is, it’s usually a percentage of your maximum heart rate. So for most people it’s between 70 and. 80%, some say 60, some say as high as like 82, 83.

[00:02:00] But I’ve found that it is best to do this test and you can figure a lot of things out. You should also do a 5K time trial. You should also plug in your times into the VDOT calculator. Uh, you should also do a one mile time trial. Uh, there’s a lot of things that you should do to figure out. Based on a lot of data points where your zone two is a lactate threshold.

[00:02:19] Field test. If you can’t afford a lab test, um, is a great way knowing your lactate threshold from Garmin or Kros or whatever smart rots you have, and then putting all the data together and being like, okay. Also zone two is when you can talk very well. Uh, you can say a lot of sentences. Obviously I’m in zone zero right now, but I can talk many, many words without taking a breath.

[00:02:38] Whereas zone two, you could take a lot of breath and then you could talk so. That’s what zone two is. And another mistake that people make is that they don’t have a baseline. They don’t know where their zone two starts and how weak it is or how good it is. You might naturally have a good zone two, usually not.

[00:02:52] Uh, I do not naturally have a good zone. Two, I have a lot of fast twitch fibers and slow twitch does not come easy after work at slow twitch, whereas some people might naturally have a lot of fast, uh, slow switch fibers. Um, so when you get the baseline, you actually then can improve on that. And you go, oh, I’m five seconds faster.

[00:03:07] And the last thing is that most runners do zone two and they quit after. Sometimes they either quit too soon after two, three weeks and go nothing’s happened, or even four or five weeks. And then other people, they might do it for months and they never actually checked their zone two properly, so they didn’t actually wear a heart rate monitor, which is here.

[00:03:25] And you know, I always got a heart rate monitor on when I do the zone two test or their arm strap. And you need to actually test it so that you know, you’re like, okay, cool. I was here, now I’m here. Uh, and you need to give it time. So I like to tell people let’s do six to eight weeks of zone two, preferably 10 to 12.

[00:03:40] But six to eight weeks, you’re gonna start seeing improvements about four weeks and then around eight weeks you’ll start seeing a little bit of a jump. And then 10, 12, you really start to see it after 12. I haven’t really found too much benefits. Um, I have done about 14, 15 weeks and you can’t do it all year long to stay healthy.

[00:03:55] But then you wanna actually start doing more speed focus work. So via two max work more threshold work. But you should also be doing a little bit of that stuff while you’re doing zone two, while you’re doing base training. So how to actually improve your zone two. Well, you wanna do this test, but you also need to do training.

[00:04:09] And I have that as a free training guide, a free training plan. You can get it at the link right here as a QR code here, or the link below in a description. Uh, it’s 30 days, I think, maybe, maybe actually six weeks, possibly. I need to look at that again, but it’s a long plan to help you actually get started and then keep you going.

[00:04:26] You’ll also get signed up for my email. Course it’s free to help you stay injury free and not burn out through life so much free stuff. Again, go get that right here or below, and let’s get into how to do the MAF test. So first you need to do 180 minus your age. Everyone knows their age. Everyone has 180.

[00:04:44] Mine should be around like 1 37, but it is not accurate because I’ve done a lot of tests. So 1 37 is a number you can start with. Once you do other tests, you’ll actually see other things. That’s one way of how to do the MAF test Another way. Using Imma. So you need to know your maximum heart rate. Imma stands for Individual Maximum Aerobic Threshold made by Famous by Mike Trees, who I’ve had on a lot of this content here in this episode.

[00:05:09] But you wanna take your maximum heart rate and then just do minus. 40 and that actually landed me closer to one 50. Um, it’s actually 1 57 because my maximum heart rate’s 1 97, which I found out. So I have a really weird zone where my resting heart rate’s a bit higher. It’s around the, the low fifties, and then my maximum is 1 97.

[00:05:30] So everything’s shifted up, whereas a lot of people I know are in low forties. And then the maximum heart rate’s, like 1 70, 180. So this would actually work probably better for them. But through a lot of testing, I found that, yeah, between one 50 and 1 55 is my zone two, proper zone two that I like to train in.

[00:05:47] So now we got our number. It’s super simple. We just go run. We only do a warmup about 10 to 15 minutes, and then we just go run four, five kilometers or three miles. The original mafi tone test says to run for five miles. I found that that is way too long. For a lot of reasons. Um, five miles is eight kilometers for metric people.

[00:06:06] And I was like, you know what? I brought it down. So this is my adaptation. I brought it down to five Ks and I just look at every K. So the goal is to see after I’m done how much slower I get per K from the first one to the last one to the fifth one. And that has been very interesting ’cause you. The gap to be very close.

[00:06:23] That means that you’re super fit. If there’s a huge drop off between number two and number three kilometer, or mile number two and mile number three, then that means that you need to work on your zone two fitness by doing more zone two running. You can also do a little bit of zone two. I’ll talk about kind of a bit more of the fix in a little bit, so make sure.

[00:06:40] You comment any questions or confusions you have. ’cause this is quite weird. You’re doing a test where you’re like, who can whisper the, the loudest? It’s sort of what the type of testing we’re doing. So yeah, hit me up. I get back to you really quick where you can email me, D-A-R-E-N at one, the number one better run.com and I’ll answer whatever questions you have.

[00:07:06] Best I can. All another way to do this is that you wanna run the same course. So this is a flat course that I’m gonna be on here and it’s a pancake flat. I wish the track was open track would be actually the best place. But, uh, if you can find pavement that’s flat, like a line, maybe along a river or a lake where you get good GPS ’cause you also wanna make sure you’re, you’re accurate with your distance.

[00:07:27] Um, and you don’t want too much tree cover. Um, try to do it the same time of day. Low wind, try to eat the same food. So it’s a test. You wanna make sure that all the variables are consistent with each other. And when I go out, yeah, the first kilometer, the first mile. First couple minutes are always gonna be faster because you’re fresh.

[00:07:45] And that’s actually a good like kind of metrics. It’s like where I’m at on that first one. And you can like compare that to other ones, but it always drops off. Now when you hit your, I like to have a zone of about three to five BPMs with the MAF test. And if I hit the high part of that zone. Then I slow down a tiny bit.

[00:08:01] You don’t need to walk, just slow down. You can let it go down gradually over 10 to 20 seconds. If you go above it a couple BPMs for 20 seconds, that’s fine, but get it low again and then speed back up gradually. So it’s a gradual. And then you don’t wanna just stop or you don’t wanna speed up. Uh, you always end up again going out too fast on that first one.

[00:08:18] Alright. If you traps to a avoid. Is that if it’s humid or hot, you got a deal. Try to do it on the coolest part of the day. It’s actually cool right now, but it’s really humid, so the heart rate’s gonna spike. I take that into account and know that I could be five, three or five BPMs lower. I wouldn’t do this on a day where it’s any hotter than 25 Celsius or about 78, 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

[00:08:44] You’re just getting yourself into a mess, um, and the data’s just not gonna be accurate. So that’s a huge, huge, huge thing to note. And again, I’m gonna stress, I know I said this, do this on a consistent course, same time of day, same food, same hydration, so you can test it the right way. And we’ve got the same, we, we want clean data.

[00:09:07] That is the goal. So here’s a story of actually what happened with me. When I first did this, I was doing nine 30 minute miles, so that’s like 5 45 minutes per kilometer, super slow. Even though I was able to run half marathon and 1 35, I was doing duathlons. I was quite fit, I thought generally, but my aerobic zone two fitness was so weak.

[00:09:29] This was 14 years ago, and I remember being devastated. I was super tired after this run and I was like, oh my god, 9 45, that’s horrendous. I didn’t know it was that bad, but it felt slow. And then I ended up training this, and I remember week six, week seven. Everything clicked and I remember running, uh, about five 15 at that point, or 5 0 5, and I was like, oh, wow, I’m getting faster.

[00:09:50] Fast forward to week 12, I think I was hitting around, uh, low fives, like 5 0 5 minutes per kilometer, so I was hitting about 8 45 and I was like, okay, I’m getting faster. I’m getting faster. And then about two, three years later, I hit. Uh, mid sevens and I was like, alright, cool, here we go. That’s mid seven minutes per mile.

[00:10:05] That’s about 4 45 minutes per kilometer. And then every year I kept gradually getting faster and faster. And then about the fifth, sixth year I was able to finally touch the, uh, 6 55. I went sub seven minute miles on the first one or two miles of this test and I ended up also, uh, being able to run. Most of a marathon in about zone two.

[00:10:26] I did that actually earlier last year. So gradual improvements. And basically most of my zone two runs are in the four 15 ish range for 20 minutes per kilometer, or about six 50 to seven minutes per mile range. But that took a lot of zone two training and I’ve started incorporating a VO two maximum based training, also incorporate sprint strides, uh, strength training, plyometrics, what else, uh, threshold runs.

[00:10:50] Started doing more of those sub-threshold runs where I. Pull up my zone two, uh, zone two and zone one. Push up the, the MAF, the maximum aerobic threshold, but you can pull it up a tiny bit also with doing the fastest stuff. Just little sprinkles of that. And another trap to avoid is stopping. Do not stop in the middle.

[00:11:07] It’s continuous. Even if you have to walk, ’cause you’re so unfit, don’t stop. We wanna make sure we see at least three miles worth of data, five kilometers. That is very, very huge. As you can see, I’ve already taken my shirt off ’cause. So hot and that thing was just a wet rag. And another thing is for your treadmill people.

[00:11:27] So let’s say you do treadmill for most of your runs or winter, that’s fine. It’s gotta be the same treadmill, same time of day, same watch, same metrics. And you can’t really not use the treadmill after day. You can’t go in the field ’cause the data doesn’t match up. So if you do treadmill first, stay with it.

[00:11:45] You might have to do two different tests, a field test, and then a treadmill test. That’s not fun. So pick one. So I found that when I test this every four to six weeks, I can also find out if I’m over training overreaching, doing too much, getting sick, all these different things. When I stop getting fit, all these different things, it usually flattens out around like 10 weeks and then I start doing others.

[00:12:08] Race specific training, and that’s where it’s supposed to be. But if it goes lower, something’s happening. Um, you won’t just keep improving on this week, on week, month on month, it does flatten. Now you need to do other training, other stimuluses to just keep yourself fit. You won’t go from eight minutes per mile down to five minutes per mile.

[00:12:25] Doing this in a year, that takes many, many years. Or for metric people, uh, six minutes per kilometer down to three minutes per kilometer. Like, it doesn’t just happen like. You know, it’s not linear. Our bodies aren’t linear and this type of fitness, aerobic fitness isn’t. You also may be limited genetically, so if you have a huge gap between miles one and three, or kilometers one and five, that means you’re unfit.

[00:12:45] That means you got a lot of work to do. That’s actually a good thing. That’s cool. If it’s actually really tight, that means that you are, again, quite fit and you actually don’t have too much room, but you can still maintain it and do other work. Alright, so if you haven’t already, make sure you get that training plan.

[00:12:57] It’s free to improve zone two. It’s right up here at the QR code or below. And again, you’ll sign up for that email course, which again is free, and you’ll be injury proof and you’ll not burn out. And you’ll just live a better running life. 1% better at a time. And if you wanna learn more about base training, ’cause zone two is a lot of base training, go get that at the episode below if you’re on YouTube or in the description or show notes if you’re listening or watching anywhere else.

[00:13:20] Happy Runnings, happy Zone, true training. Peace.