Somewhere in the last few years, Zone 2 became a personality. You know the type. Every second post is a screenshot of a four-hour ride at 62% of FTP, captioned “building the engine.” And honestly? I bought in too. For a whole summer, I rode gently, patiently, virtuously — and got comprehensively dropped in every race I entered come winter.
So when a video landed in my feed arguing that amateurs are copying professional Zone 2 training without the professional training volume to make it work, I sat up. Because that was me. And I suspect it’s a fair few of you too.
Here’s the thing, though — the advice in that video is mostly sound, but the framing is a bit dramatic. Zone 2 isn’t broken. Let’s talk about what’s actually going on, and what a 6–8 hour week should really look like. 🚴♀️
Where the 80/20 rule actually came from
The famous 80/20 split — roughly 80% of your riding easy, 20% hard, with very little in between — came out of studying elite endurance athletes. Rowers, cross-country skiers, professional cyclists. People train 20 to 30 hours a week.
Run the maths on that. Eighty percent of 25 hours is 20 hours of easy riding. That is an enormous amount of aerobic work, and it absolutely will build an engine, even at a gentle intensity. Volume is doing the heavy lifting.
Now run it on your week. Eighty percent of 7 hours is 5 hours and 36 minutes of easy riding — and about 84 minutes of everything else. That is not simply the same training plan scaled down. That’s a fundamentally different stimulus.
A zone on your screen doesn’t cost every rider the same thing. Same number, different life.
What Zone 2 genuinely does for you
Let me be clear before anyone throws their bidon at me: easy riding works. It builds aerobic efficiency; it improves your ability to keep producing power deep into a ride, and — the part everyone skips — it lets you recover well enough to actually do your hard sessions properly.
The problem isn’t that Zone 2 is useless. The problem is the dose. On six hours a week, easy riding alone probably isn’t giving you enough total stimulus to move the needle on race day. It’s a good ingredient. It’s not the whole meal.
And there’s a related trap worth naming: durability. Being able to hold decent watts after two and a half hours matters far more in a road race or a long Zwift event than a very shiny fresh five-minute number. Easy volume is how you build that. You just can’t build it on scraps.
Polarised or pyramidal? What the research actually shows
This is where I want to slow down, because the internet is very confident about something the evidence is quite relaxed about.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in Sports Medicine (indexed on PubMed) compared polarised training against other intensity distributions across 17 studies. Polarised came out slightly ahead for VO₂ peak — but mainly in shorter interventions under 12 weeks and mainly in highly trained athletes. For time-trial performance, time to exhaustion, and power at threshold, there was no meaningful difference at all. Read the study
Then a 2025 network meta-analysis of individual participant data — 13 studies, 348 athletes — found no overall difference between polarised and pyramidal training for either VO₂ max or time-trial performance. The interesting bit is buried in the subgroup analysis: competitive athletes may respond better to polarised training, while recreational athletes may respond better to pyramidal training. Read the study
So no, polarised training doesn’t “fail” for amateurs. But there is no universal winner either — and if you’re a recreational rider on limited hours, a pyramidal shape is a perfectly defensible, arguably better fit. Mostly easy. A useful amount of tempo and threshold. A smaller slice of genuinely hard work.
Which, frankly, is a relief. Because rigid 80/20 often pushes time-limited riders into avoiding tempo and sweet spot entirely — and those are exactly the sessions that give a short week some teeth.
Consolidate your endurance volume
If you take one practical thing from this article, take this one.
One two-hour ride beats two one-hour rides. Not because the hour rides are worthless, but because the physiologically interesting stuff — the fuel depletion, the durability work, the mental practice of still being on the bike when you’d rather not be — happens in the back half of a longer session.
So when you find a spare 45 minutes in the week, don’t sprinkle it evenly across three rides. Bolt it onto your long ride. Two hours becomes two forty-five. That’s where it earns the most.
Match the intervals to what you’re actually racing
“Do intervals” is useless advice on its own. Intervals for what?
- Chasing VO₂ max — something like 4 × 8 minutes hard, with proper recovery in between. Brutal, effective, and not something to do three times a week.
- Long events or gran fondos — build controlled tempo blocks into your longer rides instead. Twenty to thirty minutes at a steady tempo, two-thirds of the way through a two-hour ride, teaches your body something a fresh interval session never will.
- Zwift racing — the demands are punchy and repeated. Race-specific efforts, over-unders, and, yes, actual races count as quality sessions. A hard race is training.
Two quality sessions a week. That’s the number I keep coming back to for a 6–8-hour rider. Not one, because that’s not enough intensity to progress. Not four, because you’ll be flat by week three and blaming your FTP test.
Your zones need to be real, not vibes
Perceived effort is a lovely skill to develop, but on its own, it lies to you. Constantly. On a good day, your “easy” is tempo. On a tired Tuesday, your tempo feels like threshold, and you back off from a session you could have completed.
Use power if you have it. Use heart rate if you don’t. Test properly, update your numbers every six to eight weeks, and then actually ride to them — which is the hard part, because riding easy when you feel good requires a genuinely irritating amount of discipline.
The classic Zwift trap isn’t riding too easily. It’s every single “easy” ride creeping into Zone 3 because there’s a group up the road and you’re only human. That’s how you end up permanently tired and permanently average — accumulating fatigue with no purpose attached to it.
🩷 Want your training week on paper instead of in your head?
Half the battle with a 6–8-hour week is simply seeing it laid out — which rides are hard, which are genuinely easy, and where the long one lives. The TED shop has printable trackers, training tools and indoor cycling resources built for exactly this kind of real-life, fitted-around-everything training.
The fuelling problem is hiding behind “Zone 2 doesn’t work”
Here’s an uncomfortable one. Many riders who conclude that their training isn’t working are actually just under-fuelled.
You ride at 6am on a black coffee. You do a two-hour session on one gel because you don’t want to “waste” the calories. Then you wonder why your legs feel hollow, your recovery is slow, and your hard sessions keep falling apart. That’s not a training-distribution problem. That’s an energy problem.
This one is well supported, by the way. A large meta-analysis of 136 studies found that taking carbohydrates during endurance exercise significantly improved performance, with a larger effect the longer the event — and a larger effect in less-trained riders than in highly trained ones. Read the study
So, fuel the long ride. Fuel the hard sessions. You don’t need to eat like a Grand Tour rider on a 45-minute recovery spin, but stop treating carbohydrates as a moral failing on the sessions that actually matter. 🍌
What I’d actually do with 6–8 hours
This is the shape I’d give a Zwift racer or a rider with a busy diary and a stubborn streak. Adjust it to your recovery, your race calendar and your actual life — not to a plan you saw on the internet.
- 2 hard or race-specific sessions — one VO₂ max or race, one tempo/sweet spot. Spread them out.
- 1 longer easy endurance ride — two hours or more if you can find it. This is the one you protect.
- 2–3 genuinely easy or recovery rides — and I mean genuinely. Boring. Conversational. No sneaky sprints for the green jersey.
- Tempo added selectively — inside the long ride when it suits the goal, not as a default drift on every ride.
That’s a pyramid, not a rigid 80/20 split. Mostly easy at the base, a decent band of tempo and threshold in the middle, a small sharp point of very hard work at the top. It fits a short week better; it’s more forgiving when life eats a session, and the evidence gives it every bit as much backing as the polarised model for riders like us.
The bottom line
Don’t abandon Zone 2. It’s still doing real work — aerobic development, durability, and the recovery that makes your hard days possible.
But if you’ve been riding easy for months and racing badly, be honest about which of these is actually true for you: not enough total stimulus, a poor balance of sessions, zones that were set eight months and one fitness change ago, under-fuelling, or simply not enough recovery to absorb any of it.
Nine times out of ten, it’s one of those. Not the zone itself.
You don’t need a professional’s training plan. You need a plan that survives contact with your actual week.
A note on the research: the three studies referenced here were checked on PubMed. This is general training information, not individual coaching or medical advice — if you have a health condition or you’re returning from injury or illness, please chat to your doctor or a qualified coach before making big changes to your training.
What does your week actually look like — and where does it fall apart first? I’d love to hear. Drop me a line at liz@theendurancediaries.co.za or find me getting dropped somewhere on Zwift. 🩷
🩷The Endurance Diaries🩷
