Movement · 4 minute read

It’s the training term of the year. It comes with heart rate straps, lactate meters and a lot of confident advice about what women should and shouldn’t do. It’s closer to what you’re already doing than the straps suggest, but not every walk gets there.

You’ve heard the phrase by now. On a podcast, from a friend who bought a chest strap, in a reel explaining why your workouts have been wrong all along.

Zone 2. It sounds technical, it seems to require equipment, and it comes with a nagging feeling that everyone else has a plan and you don’t.

The short answer to the question in the title: sometimes. It depends on the walk, and there’s an easy way to tell.

What it actually is

Zone 2 is moderate effort. If you split exercise intensity into five bands from very easy to flat out, it’s the second band: roughly 60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate.

You don’t need the number, because there’s an older and more reliable test.

For most of us, that’s a brisk walk with a hill in it. An easy jog. A steady bike ride. A swim where you’re not racing anyone. Pushing a pram up the street at a pace that makes you slightly warm.

So is your walk zone 2?

It depends on the walk.

• A flat stroll at chat pace, or the dog walk with stops: usually not. That’s zone 1. It’s still worth doing, it just isn’t the thing the podcasts are talking about.
• A purposeful walk where you’re warm within five minutes, breathing noticeably, and would rather not sing: that’s zone 2 for most people, and it’s what the guidelines mean by moderate activity.
• The fitter you are, the harder it is to get there on foot. If a brisk walk feels easy, you’ll need hills, a faster pace or an easy jog to reach it.

So the walk counts if it’s a proper walk. The one where you get slightly out of breath on the hill and don’t stop at every tree. If yours is more of a wander, it’s the pace that needs to change, not the activity.

Why it’s suddenly everywhere

The longevity world got hold of it. Moderate, steady effort is good for the mitochondria, the parts of your cells that make energy. It improves how well your body uses fat for fuel and how efficiently your heart and lungs work. All true, and endurance athletes have trained this way for decades because it’s easy to recover from.

What’s happened lately is that a sensible idea has been turned into a product. Straps, rings, lactate testing, exact heart rate ceilings. None of it is necessary.

The Australian physical activity guidelines have recommended two and a half to five hours of moderate activity a week for years. That’s zone 2. It just didn’t have a name.

The “women should skip it” claim

You may have seen this one. The argument goes that zone 2 was designed for men, that women’s muscles respond differently, and that women should do sprints and intervals instead.

Some of it comes from people who have done real work on women’s physiology, so it’s worth taking seriously. But the claim rests on a small number of studies about specific proteins that move lactate around muscle, and it leaps from there to “don’t bother with moderate cardio.”

The broader evidence doesn’t back the leap. The improvements in fitness and mitochondria that come with training show up at low, moderate and high intensity, and how big they are depends mostly on how fit you are when you start, not on whether you’re a woman.

What’s true in that message

Hard efforts matter, particularly as we move through our forties. So does lifting something heavy. A life of nothing but gentle cardio isn’t the goal. If the advice pushes you toward a couple of harder sessions and some strength work, good.

Where it goes wrong is telling you that the brisk walk doesn’t count. It does. It’s just not the whole picture.

The fat-burning zone, briefly

At moderate effort your body does use a higher proportion of fat for fuel. That’s a fact about fuel mix, not about weight.

Study after study finds people lose far less weight from exercise than the maths predicts, often 20 to 50 percent of what you’d expect, because the body quietly compensates by moving a little less or eating a little more elsewhere. Zone 2 is a good way to get fitter and healthier. If it’s being sold to you as the way to change your shape, that’s marketing.

How to do it without buying anything

1. 1Use the talk testIf you can hold a conversation but not comfortably sing along to the radio, you’re there. No strap required.
2. 2Thirty to forty-five minutes, three or four times a weekThat adds up to the guidelines. It can be split. Two twenty-minute walks count.
3. 3Once a week, go harderSome hills, some intervals, a run where you can only manage a few words.
4. 4Twice a week, liftReformer, weights, a strength class. Easy most of the time, hard some of the time, strong all the time is what the research points to for women in their thirties, forties and fifties.

If you’re starting again after winter

Start where you are, not where you were in March. If the walk that used to be easy feels harder, that’s a few quiet months, not lost fitness, and it comes back faster than it went.

The first couple of weeks, keep it to zone 2 on purpose. It’s the effort you can repeat tomorrow, and repeating it tomorrow is the whole point.

You don’t need the strap. You need the shoes, the hill, a pace that makes you slightly out of breath, and the habit.