Zone 2 training: impact on longevity and mitochondrial function, how to dose frequency and duration, and more | Iñigo San-Millán, Ph.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Welcome to a special episode of The Drive. For this week's episode, we want to rebroadcast one of our most popular episodes, which is the second conversation I had with Iñigo San-Millán in March of 2022, which was a deep dive into all things pertaining to zone two exercise. Iñigo is an internationally renowned applied physiologist and assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. His research focuses on exercise related metabolism, metabolic health, diabetes, and cancer. In this conversation, we talk about Iñigo's work with two-time Tour de France champion Tadej Pogačar, looking at the type of training that he does and what we can learn about training and cardiovascular physiology from the world's most elite performers. We talk about lactate and fat oxidation as it relates to cardio respiratory training and how carbohydrates in our food can affect lactate. And we talk about what different lactate levels mean in the context of healthy versus unhealthy people.
We get into very specific detail around zone two exercise, how to measure it, how to know you're in zone two, what to do if you don't want to use a lactate meter, how you can structure your training around it, how to think about duration, timing and frequency. Talk about the importance and the compounding rate of improvement that can happen with zone two training, VO2 max training, high intensity training, and how different exercises of this nature can improve your lifespan and health span. This is a rather tour de force episode when it comes to zone two training. And obviously it's a term that many of you are very familiar with, but it's really great to go back to the source where we started talking about this with Iñigo several years ago and then followed up again in 2022 So without further delay, please enjoy or potentially re-enjoy my conversation with Iñigo San-Millán.
Iñigo, it is so great to be sitting down with you again. Last time, of course, we did this in person, but these days, I've become too lazy to travel around and do podcasts in person, so do it by video. But that said, I really hope you can get out here to Austin so we can train together and do some cool ex-Fizz. And also, I need to get out there to sort of do some of the ex-Fizz stuff we've talked about. But I almost don't know where to begin because there's so much stuff we talked about last time that we want to double click on this time. There's so much that has changed in the interval from when we spoke, gosh, probably two years ago, a little over two years ago. I thought one place we could pick it up, something we didn't really talk about last time, was your work with Tadej Pogačar. Because of course, I don't think anybody knew who he was two and a half years ago. And of course, now he is, I don't know, I mean, I think it's safe to say he has the potential to potentially go down as the greatest Tour de France cyclist of all time, given how young he is, not to put that expectation out there, but to win the tour at such a young age, to not just win the yellow jersey, but the white jersey, polka dot jersey, repeatedly. He looks like something of a different species almost. And I say that not in the way that people typically say those things of cyclists in a way that's suspicious of anything. So for the listeners who are not familiar with the Tour de France, not familiar with your work with the UAE team and your work with Tadej Pogačar, maybe give folks a little bit of an update as to what you've been doing in professional cycling over the past couple of years.