A friend sent me over a video of a ‘new’ type of training that advocates most of your time in Z2. I watched that video, which was pretty simple, but then fell down the rabbit hole and listened (partly) to a 3+ hour podcast by the same doctor on the same topic. It was all very interesting, but I just had to get the word mitochondria out of my head this morning, so I searched for some old school training principles to calm myself down. This is the best I came across, espoused by Dr. Marco Pierfederici, an Italian sports specialist who worked with the likes of Bugno, Chiappucci, Bontempi, Visentini and De Vlaeminck.
“Very simply, the training that a competitive cyclist should do is based on riding a bicycle. Once the season is over, there is another thing the cyclist should do — and that is to ride a bicycle. When the cyclist doesn’t know what else to do, he should do a third thing — ride a bicycle. The cyclist must train the muscle group that is responsible for the repetitious motion of pedaling. This is quite easy, because the more you repeat the motion, the more you condition the muscles. Because the other muscle groups hardly work at all, they don’t need training. Therefore, the training of the competitive cyclist should take place almost exclusively on the bike.”
I’m feeling much better now.
The Vicious Cycle 
so what he’s saying is ride a bicycle…I have zero medical knowledge so I’m guessing here.
I do recall reading about MvDP and his training…seems he spends quite a bit of time in zone 2, of course his zone 2 is equivalent to my zone 30. oh well
I think your assessment is correct, although I don’t have any medical training myself.
I think the next ‘deep dive’ might be to try and find how pros train these days, so I’ll start with Matthieu. Thanks!
I am very happy not to have to worry about this sort of thing at all. I am in my own zone all the time.