Rucking along in Zone 2.

To ruck or not to ruck….such is the question.

This morning I started my day by going for a ‘ruck’ around the back lanes here using the same 3 lanes on hills circuit that I use when I just slip out for a training walk. After a few weeks of ‘just walking’ around my regular circuit I felt that I was just getting used to it all again although equally getting less of a cardio training benefit from it so I upped the workload by slinging on my rucking pack with some added load and had a bit of a ruck.

By my previous standards the load that I rucked this morning wasn’t a heavy one nor the terrain as steep as I used to carry big loads of retrieved and scavenged firewood over in the days when I used to drop into a steep sided river valley with an empty pack and hike back out with a full load. I know that my record ruck was just over 80 pounds because once I got it home I stood the pack and it’s load on our bathroom scales and weighed it. One thing I do remember was that I couldn’t easily get the pack into a good position to get both shoulders under the straps until I lifted the whole pack onto a convenient tree stump, balanced it there and finally struggled into the straps. Once I got going I was fine until I hit the hard final slopes and then it was seriously hard and seriously good training.

Today I only rucked an easy load – maybe as little as 30 pounds or 15 Kg but it was enough to push me into the top end of zone 2 cardio training. Iv’e never really been that enthusiastic about cardio workouts compared to free weights training and circuit training but our man Dr Peter Attia says that it is the cornerstone of fitness for old gits like me so that’s why iv’e stepped things up from just going for a long walk to doing shorter hill hikes with load….aka rucking.

As many of you will know from my blog I had a rude shock recently when I saw myself in a video clip, realized how overweight and unfit I was and then went and read Peter Attia’s new book about longevity (Outlive). Without trying to over simplify a complex subject and thus do a great disservice to an important work I get that three of Dr Attia’s main points are that : 1. Overall fitness (defined as cardio fitness) is one of the greatest benefits to living a healthier life in older age 2.The second major benefit comes from strength and balance training and particularly developing and hanging onto muscle strength right now and 3. That diet plays a lesser role as long as it’s not a diet that is essentially making us metabolically sick (the standard American and English diet). Each of those 3 points would take several posts to explain and to be honest you’re far better off if you just buy and read the book or go take a careful watch of his recent interview which I have linked to below.

I’m wary about going all super enthusiastic and saying that exercise is the magic bullet that will cure our problems that come along with ageing and the way we live ; except that the evidence as presented by Dr Attia does all point that way. There are other factors of course, for example there’s much less we can do about bad genes but even then the exercise might be the one modifiable factor that we can work with. As for the rest…..how about a huge statistical reduction in deaths from heart disease, strokes, cancer and metabolic disease – not forgetting neurodegenerative diseases and major pschological problems such as depression and anxiety disorders.

The expression ” single most effective modifiable factor” is the one that gets me up and out there with a loaded backpack in the morning.

So….Zone 2 cardio.

If you’re wondering what or where Zone 2 (cardio) is then it’s what I might have described as being a bit out of breath during a long steady aerobic workout – such as carrying a big load over a decent sized mountain at a steady pace. Working hard enough to be a bit out of breath but not so hard that I would find it impossible to hold a conversation – that’s about the definition of a Zone 2 cardio workout and Dr Attia says that that should be the base of our fitness training and we need to do several sessions of that per week or a total of about 120 minutes.

My usual weekly routine is now to twice daily circuits, three sometimes, of around half an hour to forty minutes and within each circuit I don’t so much have a continuous workout as three hill ‘intervals’ with a flat or descending break in between the harder bits. On a good day I go straight into some sets of press-ups (Push-ups) while I make breakfast which is another important ‘Attia’ moment in that nowadays I always have some protein then and after I train again – that’s one of the few diet takeaways from Dr Attia’s work that I can use right now.

During the average working week I estimate that i’m doing 3 hours or so of this Zone 2 cardio workout although most weeks I will do one longer hike of at least two and a half hours and my current route includes a long hard climb out of the valley. The good news is that even that relatively easy level of workout has the largest relative benefit on my health but it does also seem to be dose specific in that a greater workload equates to a better effect on health. The trick, if there is such a thing is to be consistent and also to recognize the moment that I was able to step up the workload from an unweighted walk to a rucking session : we’re lucky around here in that I can be on my first hill within a hundred yards of leaving the house and then I can link three together in quick succession. I don’t know if i’m gaining or losing out by doing my circuit as essentially a form of interval training but given that it’s the only environment I have it’s the best I can do right now.

At some time in the future it’s possible that I will get less of a training effect as I get fitter and hopefully lighter and that will be the moment to increase the weight rather than trying to push for a quicker pace. One thing that I noticed this morning was a slight ‘burn’ in my thighs that I usually relate to a buildup of lactic acid so maybe in the third week i’m walking at a fast enough pace that i’m slightly switching into anaerobic (glycolytic) metabolism – I don’t know enough to know whether that’s a good or bad effect.

Skinny legs….big belly nicely out of view.