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Zone-2 cardio has been having its moment. That comes from a lot of sources, but unfortunately a big one is Peter Attia. I say “unfortunately,” because Attia seems to have a weird, compulsive sense that zone-2 cardio work needs to be, I don’t know, pure in some way, rather than just being enough to promote good metabolic health.

Attia suggests that you do your zone-2 work on a treadmill, stationary bike, or rowing machine, so you can be in control of your effort level at all times. Then you can just get into zone 2 and stay there for 45 minutes.

I think this is crazy, and not just because 45 minutes of steady-state activity on a treadmill or stationary bike would be excruciatingly boring.

I do my zone-2 cardio with a mixture of walking my dog, running, and occasional hikes. Walking the dog isn’t perfect, because the dog keeps stopping to get in her sniffies, and no doubt my heart rate drops out of zone 2. Running isn’t great, because my heart rate probably spends a lot of time in zone 3 or zone 4. A lot of it is zone-2—at least, I can talk while I run, which is one of the tests for zone-2. (I run very slowly.) The hikes are probably perfect zone-2 cardio, but are a big time commitment in a single day.

Attia suggests that you optimize your cardio workouts by getting 3 hours a week of zone-2 cardio, which can optionally be divided into 4 45-minute workouts. And I’m sure that’s fine. But I suspect that getting in a couple of runs a week, along with a good bit of dog walking, is going to check the zone-2 cardio box no problem.

My theory (and I am not an MD, nor even a PhD in exercise physiology, but still) is that this is fine. You don’t need to get 45 minutes of pure zone-2 cardio to be metabolically healthy.

As I see it, the test for whether you’re getting enough zone-2 cardio is whether or not you can engage in a moderate level of exercise for an extended period—a 3-hour hike, let’s say. If you’re metabolically healthy you can go on and on at a moderate pace, because you’re doing it almost entirely aerobically.

Me on the Ham's Bluff Lighthouse trail on St Croix

If you can do that, you’re getting enough zone-2 cardio, regardless of whether your sessions are 45 minutes long, and regardless of whether they add up to 3 hours a week. If you’re not metabolically healthy, even going at a moderate pace is going to push you into anaerobic metabolism, which will quickly become impossible to maintain.

It probably is true that you need to get in 3 hours a week if you’re going to be able to go on long, long hikes. But the idea that they need to be pure zone-2 sessions, rather than mixed sessions at all different levels of intensity, is just crazy.

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About a decade ago, thanks especially to finding the work of Katy Bowman, but also from taking an interest in parkour and similar disciplines, I came to realize that movement was a better model for healthy activity than exercise.

Then came the pandemic.

For a lot of reasons—in particular, the loss of the opportunity for moving with a community—I found that returning to exercise suited me better, especially in the early days of the pandemic. (Follow that link for a pretty good post about where training falls on the movement vs. exercise spectrum.)

Over the past year I realized that it’s been five years now that I’ve prioritized exercise over movement, despite the fact that I still think that movement is the better choice. But when I started thinking that I should start trying to emphasize movement more again, I realized I already have been.

The biggest way that movement has snuck back into my practice is HEMA (aka sword fighting). There is some exercise involved in training for sword fighting, and it is certainly not a complete healthy movement practice all on its own, but it is moving, for a purpose, with a community—things I had been lacking for years.

The next biggest has been walking. In particular, dog walking. It’s not that walking has snuck back into my practice. I have always been a walker, and all that getting a dog changed was that now I walk every single day, instead of merely almost every day. (Even during bad weather, I average at least 12,000 steps per day. When the weather is nice, I top 15,000.) What having a dog changes is that now the walking is not exercise. It’s movement, because I’m doing it for a purpose that has nothing to do with “getting some exercise,” and rather is about making sure my dog is getting what she needs.

I still do some exercise. In particular, I’ve paid up for four workout programs by Mark Wildman: His two club programs two-handed and one-handed, his slamball program, and his “actual action hero” ab program. I skipped getting a kettlebell program (I’ve been doing kettlebells long enough that I feel like I know how to integrate them into a fitness routine, plus my sore elbow seems to be aggravated more by kettlebell moves than by club or slamball moves.)

I’m really pleased with the two-handed club program, which adds to the basic swinging moves a set of lunge moves, a set of squat moves, and a set of ab moves (that work toward a get-up).

Me doing a lunge with a heavy club
Me doing a balance squat with a heavy club

The one-handed club program is also good, but much more technical and specific. It’s purpose, I guess, is to improve your alignment and structure, which is cool (and which I expect will be useful for sword fighting), but it doesn’t look like it’s going to do a lot for overall fitness.

The ab program is interesting. Mark Wildman wrote it for his friends who are stunt people, who needed a program that could be done in a very small space (basically a yoga mat on the floor of a trailer, which is what stunt people live in on-set), that focused not on making your abs look good (although it definitely will) but rather on building the muscle, strength, and control to do the sorts of moves that stunt people need to do. It’s designed to be done in just a few minutes every day at the end of your usual workout. It has 50 moves, and it gives you a different combination of them every day for up to a year (assuming you can work up to doing continuous ab work for 14 minutes a day, five days a week.

Me doing a crab cross-touch

So, I do continue to exercise, because it seems useful, and it suits me, but I’m going to resume trying to prioritize movement going forward.

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I lived in Los Angeles briefly in 1986. While I lived there, my dad sent me this book:

It talked about landscaping to minimize fire, flood, and mudslide risk, but my key takeaway was, “Only a moron would live in Southern California,” and I moved away before the end of the year.

It was a government publication, so the PDF is available: https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr067/psw_gtr067.pdf

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A couple of days ago Jackie braised some wild-caught venison, and today there was just a bit left that she included in some fried rice that she served as a side dish along with the wild-caught sockeye salmon that I cooked (cumin and zaatar as seasonings).

No pics, but trust me: A lovely and very wild main meal of the day.

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Playboy magazine and Helen Gurley Brown. That’s what last week’s New York Times opinion piece, Barstool Conservatism, Revisited (on the weird agglomeration of libertarians, crypto- and tech- bros, and incels who ended up voting with social conservatives) made me think of.

My thoughts draw on a book I read about Hugh Hefner, Playboy, and Helen Gurley Brown. The basic thesis, as I recall it, was that Hefner wanted a society where young men could enjoy an extended youth. The best way to make that work, he thought, was for women to be able to support themselves—so that they’d be willing to sleep with men, rather than feeling that they had to hold out for a man who would marry them.

To that end, Playboy magazine was very active at promoting equal rights for women—so they could earn money, own property, etc. Because only when they were able to support themselves without needing to get married, would they be willing to sleep around. And women willing to sleep around, were what the Playboy demographic wanted.

That social experiment played out pretty much just the way Hefner wanted through most of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Women could earn enough to afford an apartment, food, clothing, and the other necessities, which meant that they didn’t have to get married just to survive.

However (and this was key, even though I don’t think Hefner really thought about it much) men earned more than women.

The result was perfect for men. They had enough money to buy fancy cars, fancy stereos, fancy watches, expensive liquor—all the sorts of products that advertised in Playboy—with enough left over that they could afford to take women out on nice dates and buy them little gifts. The women earned enough less that, although they could get by, they couldn’t have really nice things, except when men bought them.

Things began to change the 1990s, when women’s incomes grew to the point that they could afford nice things. That produced two changes. First, women that could afford not merely a tiny apartment, but their own house, weren’t so reliant on men to make them comfortable. Second, with so many women taking top jobs, there were fewer top jobs for men. That meant that more and more men found it tough to earn an income that let them improve a woman’s standard of living.

This situation is what has the incels so unhappy. For decades, even after women weren’t legally subservient to men, men generally had enough money that they had something very tangible to offer a woman. Now that’s only true for the top few percent of male wage earners.

Of course, any man with either ambition or good sense could work around this situation. Becoming one of the 1% is hard, but simply having enough ambition to get into, let’s say, the top 50%, means that you have enough of a surplus to be able to raise the standard of living of a woman. And good sense is all it takes to do a bit of an analysis and realize that following the strategies of the pick-up bros isn’t going to lead to what you want nearly as well as coming up with things to offer to women besides cash. (Different things for different women, but: getting fit, wearing nice clothes, learning about the arts or science or history—whatever any particular woman is interested in, paying attention to them when they talk, being supportive of their efforts, are all things that might work.)

But incels as a group don’t seem to want to make even that modicum of an effort. They’d rather blame women.

The other groups I mentioned are broadly similar. Even the rich, successful tech bros are often dysfunctional to the point that they have trouble attracting women. Libertarians are often attracted to the movement specifically because what they yearn for is a world where people have minimal legal protections from the wealthy (and for no good reason, they imagine that they’ll be wealthy enough to take advantage of that). Crypto bros are the same, except they have a specific (rather than vague) notion of where their money is going to come from, even if it’s a fantasy.

So I understand that article. I think that is why all those disparate groups came together, even when their actual interests are pretty disparate.

The big question is, will these groups hang together going forward? Or will the fact that they have nothing much in common except a fantasy of enjoying being on top, lead to infighting and failure?

I’m hoping for failure, but it’s still too soon to say.

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If I were a bio-terrorist, I think my next project would be to engineer a fish flu, hoping to enormously build on the damage to the human food supply caused by bird flu. (I am a fiction writer, and neither a bio-terrorist nor a genetic engineer, so no worries. Plus, I rather like fish. Even as I type, Jackie is making salmon burgers.)