The Missing Zones: Why Easy Cardio Isn’t a Waste of Time
A few years ago, I coached a client who came to us to build strength and keep moving well as she moved into her retirement years. The strength work did exactly that, improving her posture, restoring mobility, and lifting her confidence, yet the habit that kept her looking trim year after year wasn’t the barbell at all, it was her daily, vigorous walking.
Earlier this year I had my own reminder: weeks spent ripping out and rebuilding my backyard meant no gym sessions and very few long runs, only hours of purposeful movement each day; I finished leaner than I had been in a long time and shared the broader lessons in What a Backyard Project (And A Decade Of Spartan Races) Taught Me About Real Strength (www.btgfitness.com/blog/backyard-project-real-strength), and it underlined that the activity that changes you most is not always the one that looks impressive on Instagram.
If you’ve been training hard yet still feel stuck, with flat energy, creeping weight, grumpy joints, and progress that refuses to budge, the fix is rarely more punishment. Most people are missing the steady, easy movement that teaches the body to use fuel, recover well, and feel human again: daily Baseline Activity and longer, gentle Zone 2 work that look simple on paper but quietly change everything.
The Myth That Keeps People Stuck
The most common misconception I hear is simple: if it is not hard, it does not count. No sweat equals no benefit. That story is seductive because effort is easy to see and to measure, and because many of us have been praised for “working hard” our whole lives, but it also happens to be wrong.
The next trap is assuming all cardio is the same. Your body reads intensity like different dialects. A twenty-minute walk after dinner does not do what a ninety-minute Zone 2 ride does, and a short interval session does not do what either of those do. When you skip the easy work, you leave a hole in your fitness, metabolism, and recovery that hard sessions cannot fill, no matter how determined you are.
If your goal is broad-based health, better body composition, and a life you can live fully, you need four ingredients in a sensible mix: Baseline Activity for daily energy flux and appetite regulation, strength training for muscle and joint integrity, higher-intensity intervals for periodic speed, power, and cardiovascular strain, and Zone 2 for aerobic capacity and metabolic efficiency. The exact proportions will vary with your history and schedule, yet all four play a role if you want a resilient, capable body.
NOTE: If you are chasing peak race performance for endurance events, you will also add structured tempo and threshold work at specific times of the year. That is a different layer of planning. Today is about the missing zones most people overlook because they feel too easy and do not deliver the short-term thrill of “I left everything on the floor.”
Breaking Down The Missing Zones
Baseline Activity: The Daily Gear Your Body Is Missing
Think of Baseline Activity as the daily gear that keeps your body in “use fuel, do work” mode rather than “store fuel, sit still” mode.
It is Zone 1, recovery level, conversational pace. The point is not to crush yourself, the point is to accumulate movement, every day, on purpose, so your body spends more hours in a state that rewards energy flux instead of energy storage.
How to know you’re in Baseline:
Talk test: you can hold a full conversation without gasping.
RPE: roughly 2 to 3 out of 10.
Heart rate: about 60 to 65 percent of max (a simple estimate for HRmax is 220 minus age).
Typical example: purposeful, brisk walking on flat ground.
I often hear the counter-argument that “NEAT” (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis – I.E. burning energy through daily, non-exercise activity) will take care of itself if people are mindful. I wish that were true everywhere. In walkable cities with physical jobs, it often is. For most of us in North America, with car commutes and screen-heavy work, it is not. Being “movement-minded” is lovely, it simply does not add up to enough. The clients who make the clearest, most durable progress in body weight and body composition are the ones who schedule daily Baseline Activity and treat it as non-negotiable, the same way they treat brushing their teeth or showing up for work.
What to aim for:
Work up to at least 30 minutes per day, most days of the week
If you want body recomposition to nudge along faster, push toward 45 to 90 minutes most days.
You can break this into smaller blocks if needed, although there is real value in longer, unbroken chunks for the headspace alone.
Speaking of headspace, there is also a mental health dimension to Baseline Activity that we should take seriously. Ryan Holiday wrote a simple reminder about walking in his Daily Stoic newsletter, which captures the lived experience so well that I often share it with clients (you can find the newsletter at dailystoic.com):
“You've got this vexing problem. You've got this decision to make. You've got this conflict that you keep going round and round with your spouse about. You've got this frustration, this anger, this anxiety that won't go away.
What do you do about it?
You go for a walk.
Walks are a kind of magic. They clear your head. They calm your nerves. They pull you away from distractions. Seneca said the mind must be given over to wandering walks, and so too must you.
Get outside. Get moving. Go for a hike. Walk down to the mailbox. Take a few laps around the block. Watch as ideas suddenly pop into your head. Feel the tension in your shoulders ease. Notice how problems that once seemed insurmountable now feel a little less daunting.
A walk won’t solve everything forever…but it will make things a little better, for a little while. And when it wears off?
Take another walk.”
I see that effect daily in myself, my family and my clients. The walk after dinner softens conflict, the lap around the block turns a problem into a plan, and you return with easier shoulders and a less frantic brain. Baseline is not glamorous, yet it remains one of the most accessible tools you have for shifting your metabolism, managing appetite, and setting up every harder session to work better.
Zone 2: The Engine Builder
If Baseline is your daily gear, Zone 2 is your long, steady drive that builds the engine.
It develops your aerobic base, improves fat oxidation, and makes harder sessions feel easier because your system becomes better at moving and using oxygen. It is the kind of training that pushes your work capacity up in the background, so everything else you enjoy (lifting, hiking, playing a sport) feels more sustainable.
How to know you’re in Zone 2:
Talk test: you can speak in sentences but not long paragraphs.
RPE: about 4 to 5 out of 10.
Heart rate: roughly 65 to 75 percent of max. Think of the classic formulas like “220 minus age” for HRmax, or similar percent-of-max charts as starting points. They are simple and convenient, but they are not personalised and may not reflect your current cardiovascular fitness.
NOTE: In my experience, the most accurate way to place Zone 2 is to set it at about 80 to 85 percent of your tested threshold heart rate. That threshold test is essentially a hard, sustained effort to find the line you can hold for a long time, which is useful but admittedly very unpleasant. If you’re not up for that, that’s totally OK – just use the canned formulas.Typical example: a steady run, ride, row, or hike you could hold for 60 to 90 minutes without blowing up.
For most people, the best default is three Zone 2 sessions per week. Both the research and my coaching experience point to a minimum effective dose of 45 minutes continuous to drive meaningful adaptations, and I see the biggest returns when one session each week stretches to 90 minutes or more, provided you truly keep the intensity easy enough that you are not drifting into Zone 3.
If you want a deeper dive into why this matters even if you do not consider yourself a “runner,” take ten minutes with Running Isn’t Just for Runners — Why Aerobic Capacity Matters for Everyone (www.btgfitness.com/blog/running-is-not-just-for-runners). That article expands on the health and capability benefits of better aerobic capacity and helps the dots connect.
Zone 2 feels simple, which is different from easy. You will need to hold yourself back, you will need to schedule it like a meeting, and you will need to let the minutes accrue without turning it into a race. The patience is the point.
A Word About Heart-Rate Monitors
Heart-rate monitors are useful tools, not judges. If gadgets help you focus, use them. If they create stress, rely on the talk test and RPE.
The goal with both Baseline Activity and Zone 2 is to be consistent and relaxed while you train, not to chase a number and miss the point. And if you are uncertain where to sit, go a little easier than you think you should; you will teach your body to thrive with movement rather than merely survive another workout beat-down.
Fitting It In: A Realistic Week That Actually Works
Modern life is not built around movement. Suburbs, commutes, chairs, and calendars are all working against you, which means the only plan that works is the one that respects your time and still gets the job done.
An alternating rhythm serves most people well:
Four days of Baseline Activity, usually 30 to 60 minutes.
Three days of Zone 2, usually 45 to 90 minutes continuous.
For me, this usually breaks down something like this:
Monday: Zone 2 (road or trail run)
Tuesday: Baseline (walking)
Wednesday: Zone 2 (road run)
Thursday: Baseline (walking)
Friday: Baseline (walking)
Saturday: Zone 2 (long trail run)
Sunday: Baseline (walking or short, easy road run)
If your Zone 2 sessions are longer in a given week, let the Baseline days live closer to 30 minutes. If your Zone 2 sessions are shorter due to time constraints, push Baseline closer to 60 minutes. The goal is not to do everything, every day; the goal is to place the right pieces in the right spots so the whole system improves without feeling like a second job.
For a broader framework on why I care about well-rounded capability more than narrow specialisation, revisit Lift AND Run AND Walk AND Crawl: Building a Truly Capable Body (www.btgfitness.com/blog/lift-run-walk-crawl). Zone 2 and Baseline fit neatly inside that model, alongside strength training and movement skills, and together they cover most of what ordinary humans need to feel and perform well.
Real-World Proof: How Easy Movement Works
Earlier I shared two snapshots, one from a client and one from my own life, to show how the work that does not look like work can reshape your body and your days. Here is a closer look at both stories so you can see how simple choices play out over weeks and months in the real world.
My Client’s Story
This client came to me with sensible goals: feel strong in her body, move comfortably, and stay trim without living on a diet. We started with two small-group sessions per week in the gym. She learned to hinge well and to squat to a depth that felt good on her knees, and she built the strength to push and pull with confidence. That work mattered, and it changed how she carried herself as well as how she approached tough days.
The shift she wanted, and the one she could maintain, did not appear until she added one non-negotiable: vigorous walking, every day.
She chose a consistent time that suited her life, picked routes she enjoyed, and protected that block of time the way you protect any appointment that matters. On days she felt good, she went a little longer; on days she felt rushed, she still went. No elaborate rules, no apps to appease, just a simple practice she could repeat in any season.
Within a month the first change was the one I see most often. Her energy steadied. She woke with fewer aches, the afternoon slump stopped bullying her, and clothes fit better before the scale said much at all. In the gym her numbers improved, not because walking is magic, but because she spent more of the week moving, burned through more total energy, and recovered better between sessions, which allowed the strength signal to rise above the noise.
The numbers mattered less than the identity. She stopped describing herself as someone who “tries to be active” and began to describe herself as someone who moves.
That identity did not require perfect conditions. When visiting family, she walked around the block before breakfast. When work got hectic, she took short laps of the warehouse between tasks and added a brief walk after dinner. She was no longer chasing a streak; she was living a practice, and the difference is everything.
The holiday season provided the test. She kept her walking habit, ate with both celebration and structure, trained when she could, and landed in January with momentum rather than guilt. Baseline Activity did not replace strength work or higher-intensity conditioning; it made both of those work better, and it made her life feel calmer and more predictable.
My Story
I am not immune to my own advice taking a back seat when life fills up, and for the past few years my focus has primarily been on chasing longer and longer endurance goals as a trail runner, so I did what runners often do – I dropped pretty much everything else, and I ran A LOT.
Earlier this year, though, I paused formal training and took on a backyard project that was bigger than it looked on paper. The work was steady and physical: demo, hauling, raking, levelling, building. Some days were long. None of them looked like a “workout”. I did not log anything, and I let the work set the pace. I ate well, slept well, and woke up to do it again.
By the end, my body had changed. Not because I discovered a secret, but because day after day I was on my feet and doing work. The daily volume of low-intensity activity kept the calories honest and nudged my system toward use rather than storage, and when I returned to trail running, the Zone 2 base I had built in prior seasons came back quickly. Longer, easy efforts felt good, and when I turned up the dial for a hard push, my heart rate rose cleanly and settled quickly because the underlying engine was still there.
Baseline Activity during the project did not replace structured Zone 2 like-for-like. It did something just as useful. It kept my metabolism idling warm, it kept me moving in ways that were (mostly) kind to my joints, and it primed me to train again without the slow, sticky start that many people mistake for “age”. If you want to look like someone who moves, it helps to move a lot more than you think, and a lot easier than you think.
What These Stories Actually Show
Both of these examples are primarily about Baseline Activity, one in the context of purposeful movement and the other being a physical daily “job”. In both cases, the daily, repeatable movement changed appetite, energy, recovery, and body composition, and it built a durable identity around “I am someone who moves.”
Zone 2 features here only as a foundation I had previously built, which meant that when the project ended I could return to structured training with no real loss of fitness.
The lesson is straightforward: make daily Baseline Activity non-negotiable and everything else you care about (strength, intervals, and even Zone 2) works better.
The Bigger Picture: Longevity, Resilience, and Identity
Most people come to this conversation because they want to lose a bit of fat or stop feeling out of breath on the stairs. Those are fine reasons, but they are not the only reasons.
Baseline Activity and Zone 2 connect to what I care about most for clients: quality of life over decades.
Longevity and disease risk: a stronger aerobic base is associated with lower cardiovascular risk, steadier blood sugar, and healthier blood pressure, which is the sort of boring-sounding foundation that makes everything else easier.
Recovery capacity: the better you are at moving oxygen and fuel around your body, the faster you recover from strength work, work stress, and life stress, which means you can show up again tomorrow rather than needing a week to feel human.
Stress management: the rhythm of walking or an easy ride acts like moving meditation, clearing mental clutter so you make better choices with food, sleep, and relationships.
Identity: this is the quiet one. Doing something that looks easy, every day, is a powerful identity builder. You start to see yourself as someone who moves, that story feeds better choices, and those choices keep the story true. If you want to explore the identity work from another angle, revisit Better Beats Perfect — Every Damn Time (www.btgfitness.com/blog/better-beats-perfect).
The core message applies here. You do not need more intensity; you need better, more often. Easy cardio is the very definition of better, more often.
The Foundational Work Of A Capable Life
Easy cardio will never win the highlight reel, yet it will build the life you want to live. Think about the morning you hike with your family and do not need a day to recover, or the weekend you cycle to the market and back because it sounds fun, or the season you realise you are sleeping better, thinking clearer, and handling stress like an adult, not because you became tougher, but because your system is less overloaded.
Strength training still matters. It gives you the raw capability to carry groceries, lift your grandchild, and trust your joints. The quiet work of Baseline Activity and Zone 2 is what allows that strength to show up in your real life. Together, they make you resilient, independent, and ready for whatever your days ask of you.
If you are local to Abbotsford, you are welcome to join me and The BTG Crew for our group road or trail runs! It is a friendly way to practise these missing zones in good company. If you are interested, reach out through our Contact Us page at www.btgfitness.com/contact-us.
You do not need perfect conditions. You do not need a new watch. You need a plan you can keep. Start here. Go for a walk after dinner, then do it again tomorrow. Book your first long, easy session this weekend, and if you feel the itch to do more, build slowly and keep it simple. If you want to see how this fits inside a capability-first approach, take a few minutes with Lift AND Run AND Walk AND Crawl: Building a Truly Capable Body (www.btgfitness.com/blog/lift-run-walk-crawl); it will show you where these missing zones live in the bigger picture.
Better beats perfect. In this context, better means the work that does not look like work. Put it in, keep it in, and watch what happens.
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