Why Nobody Can Ever Agree on the Right Way to Train

Coaches and health influencers can't see eye-to-eye. And that's ok.

When a new exercise study hits social media, I can basically predict what happens next.

The post does well. And then the coaches and exercise scientists appear in the replies to critique the conclusions, nitpick the wording, or argue that the study is being “oversold.”

It happened recently with a study Dr. Rhonda Patrick and I discussed on her podcast—one that tried to quantify the “health equivalence” of different intensities of physical activity. If you saw reactions to that episode (or to the study itself), you probably noticed the same dynamic of people debating what the data should (and shouldn’t) be used for. And plenty of incorrect—and some valid—interpretations.

The tl;dr version is that the study we covered used epidemiological data to estimate that, for every minute of vigorous activity someone engages in, they’d need about 4-10 minutes or more of moderate, and even more light, activity to get the same health benefits (reducing mortality or CVD risk, for example).

Our takeaway was simple: We’re undervaluing vigorous physical activity.

Our takeaway wasn’t “Everyone should be doing more high-intensity interval training,” but unfortunately those were the (mis)interpretations. Though reception of our podcast was, in general, positive.

That’s not the part I want to talk about, because I don’t think this is a “people are argumentative on the internet” problem. I think it’s a much more interesting problem.

Coaches, exercise scientists, and health influencers will probably never fully see eye to eye. Honestly…I think that’s okay. But we should admit why it keeps happening. Once you see the pattern, a lot of these arguments stop feeling like heated disagreements and start feeling like a simple mismatch. Most of the time, we’re arguing about two different things.

The crux of the issue is that people use the word “training” like it means the same thing to everyone.

It doesn’t.

When a coach talks about training, they usually mean training for performance. A marathon. A 5K. A HYROX event. A CrossFit competition. A 500-pound deadlift. Something specific. Something measurable. Something where the outcome has a very clear definition.

When a health influencer talks about training, the goal is usually not a race time or a PR—it’s health, longevity, risk reduction, metabolic fitness, feeling good, and doing it in a way that doesn’t require one to reorganize their entire life around exercise.

Sure, these two perspectives overlap. Performance training often improves health. Health-focused training often improves performance. Exercise is exercise.

But the constraints, time budgets, and success metrics are different. If you don’t state which problem you’re solving, you end up with people passionately disagreeing while they’re essentially talking past each other.

That’s what I saw in the conversation around the study Rhonda and I covered. Some people were treating the study like it was giving prescriptions for how to train like an athlete. Some even misapplied the activity intensities to different exercise zones (this sparked an intense debate between notable coach Steve Magness and Nassim Taleb (who writes about economics, among other things unrelated to exercise).

Other people were treating it like what it actually is… a way to translate different patterns of movement into something the average person can understand and apply.

Same data. Different question.

If you want to watch this problem in its purest form, you just have to mention zone 2.

On one side, you have coaches—especially endurance coaches—saying some version of: “Most training should be easy. Build the aerobic base. Don’t turn everything into a sufferfest. The 80/20 concept works.”

And they’re not wrong. If you’re training 10, 15, 20+ hours a week and you want to perform, you can’t go hard all the time. Your body won’t tolerate it. You’ll get injured or burned out, or you’ll just plateau.

But on the other side, you have the reality of most humans who are not training 15 hours per week. They’re training, if we’re being honest, two to four hours a week—sometimes less. And they’re not deciding between polarized training and threshold blocks. They’re deciding whether they can convince themselves to exercise at all after a long day.

So when the internet turns around and tells that person, “Do mostly zone 2,” what are we actually saying?

We’re saying: “Devote a lot of time to low-intensity volume.”

For an athlete, I agree that’s a sensible plan. For the average person with limited time and motivation, it can be a plan that’s impractical. Not because zone 2 is bad, but because zone 2’s superpower is accumulation. It shines when you can stack hours. If you can’t stack hours, you don’t have the luxury of being inefficient.

And this is exactly why the “zone 2 vs HIIT” argument gets so heated. People are debating two completely different use cases but trying to use the same vocabulary and pretend like the studies on athletes apply to studies in the general population, and vice-versa.

When you look at exercise studies that get shared online—especially studies on interval training improving VO₂ max—you’ll notice that most of them are designed to be time-efficient.

That’s the point!

A lot of research in this space is trying to answer a very practical question: if someone has limited time, what’s the smallest dose of exercise that produces meaningful improvements?

And higher intensity training is a very strong stimulus per unit time. That’s just how adaptation works. If you don’t have much time, you need a stimulus that’s large enough to matter.

This is where coaches often jump in and say, things like “Sure, but that won’t prepare you for a marathon.”

Correct. It won’t. But it also wasn’t trying to.

A study showing that brief interval training improves VO₂ max doesn’t magically become a marathon training plan just because it’s about aerobic fitness. And this is where I think we confuse people. We take research designed for one goal and start applying it to a totally different goal, and then we act surprised when different groups object for different reasons.

I think it’s easy—especially if you’re deep in the endurance world—to forget what “normal” looks like.

Normal is not 80/20, it’s “I try to work out when I can.”

So when we debate intensity distribution like we’re building a Tour de France rider, we’re often missing the actual problem most people have. They don’t need a perfect training theory, just something that’s realistic, repeatable, and effective with the time and motivation they actually have.

I think we have an exercise communication problem. We keep arguing because we keep failing to clarify the context.

This is also why I liked the framing Kristi Storoschuk used in our “Much Ado About Zone 2” discussion. It helped separate the emotion from the actual question.

If you’re time-sensitive and primarily training for general health, then yes—higher intensity training is often the efficient way to move the needle. Not because easy training is useless, but because you’re trying to squeeze meaningful adaptation out of limited time.

Meanwhile, if you’re training for performance and you have the time to build a foundation, steady zone 2 work becomes more and more valuable. It improves durability. It supports higher overall training volume. It makes you better at the thing you’re training for.

I think coaches should sometimes stay in their lane, and health influencers should stay in theirs. I mean this not to gate keep, but as a reminder that expertise is contextual. I’m not trying to start a turf war. Especially because I (somewhat) place myself in the middle of this spectrum as neither a true endurance coach nor a “fitness influencer.”

A coach can be absolutely correct about what builds a great endurance athlete while being less helpful for someone whose main barrier is simply getting started. A health communicator can be absolutely correct about time-efficient fitness strategies while being wildly incomplete when someone’s goal is performance in a specific sport. And exercise scientists can be absolutely correct about what a study shows while still missing how people will interpret it in the real world.

The goal is to stop pretending we’re all answering the same question (or trying to solve it, for that matter).

Where I Land

If you’re training for general health and you don’t have a ton of time, I’m not going to pretend the ideal plan is the same as an elite athlete’s plan. It’s not. Higher intensity training can be an incredibly time-efficient lever for improving aerobic fitness, metabolic health, and cardiorespiratory capacity.

At the same time, I’m also not going to pretend zone 2 is overrated or irrelevant. It’s foundational, recoverable, and sustainable. For people who can actually accumulate more volume, it becomes a really powerful tool.

What I am going to push back on is the idea that there’s one universal “best” method—and that anyone who prioritizes a different method must be confused or wrong.

Usually, they’re just talking about a different goal.