What do the terms Zone 2 and VO2 max have in common? According to the celebrity personal trainer Harley Pasternak, they are irrelevant to the majority of people, the health-conscious among us included.
If your goal is to be healthy physically and mentally, you are far better off focusing on a simple metric, such as daily step count, than a set of hyper-specific terms peddled by health influencers, Pasternak told Business Insider.
“We’ve overcomplicated our approach to health and physical activity,” Pastnerak, who has worked with the likes of Rihanna and has a Master’s degree in exercise science from the University of Toronto, said. “I want to wake up pain-free. I want to be physically healthy. I want to live a long time. I want to be able to play with my kids. I don’t know why my VO2 max is relevant for that.”
Zone 2 refers to exercise done at around 60 to 70% of your maximum heart rate, and VO2 max is a measure of how much oxygen the body can use during intense exercise. These metrics indicate a person’s endurance, and evidence suggests that improving them could help you live longer. With the rise of longevity and health optimization culture, buzzy terms like these have entered the mainstream.
But Pasternak said that they are generally only relevant to elite athletes, performers, or those recovering from a heart attack or heart surgery, Pasternak said.
Likewise, if you’re using a wearable health tracker such as an Oura ring or WHOOP strap in the hopes of “optimizing” a workout, Pasternak suggested asking yourself what you want to achieve and how the data will help.
“I think people are enamored with data without even being able to understand what that data means, and then what they’re going to do with that data,” he said. For regular people, getting fitter over time through regular exercise is likely all the VO2 max training necessary.
Pasternak thinks that the daily step count is “a great metric” for everyone because it quantifies how much you move over the course of a day. From there, you can decide how to increase it incrementally. “I think that’s a metric that makes sense to people that they can do something with,” he said.
His take echos that of Dr. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s, the author of “The Age of Diagnosis,” which explores the pros and cons of health data. She told the Intelligence Squared podcast in April that she tracks her step count, but said healthy people shouldn’t buy into other metrics.
It’s also well established that doing 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity a week is associated with a lower risk of many chronic illnesses, including cardiovascular disease and several cancers.
“Let’s not worry about what your zone is. Let’s just do more physical activity in a day,” Pasternak said.
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