To lead others well requires you to lead yourself well. Leading yourself well includes being in good mental and physical shape.

It’s easy to understand that if you’re sick it’s hard to lead well. It’s also easy to see that if you’re unfit, have low energy and poor focus, you won’t lead as well as you might. What’s less obvious is how much better a leader you would be if you were in better shape.

Self leadership is a frequent topic in the leadership development workshops I facilitate. The conversation about leading yourself takes-off quickly … people want to be better leaders and they intuitively understand that the better shape they’re in, physically and mentally, the better they will lead.

There are many things we can do to get ourselves in better physical shape. And we are increasingly proactive with our mental health as we more openly acknowledge its importance. But one form of exercise in particular has a unique relationship with leadership and a powerful effect on how well we lead.

I’m referring to Zone 2 exercise. In other words, exercising with your heart beating at 60%-70% of your maximum heart rate.

The zone system defines five levels of exercise intensity with 1 being easy, like walking, and 5 being about as hard as you can go, with your heart beating at or above 90% of its maximum. The potential of Zone 2 exercise to literally change your life lies in its wide-ranging positive impacts and its do-ability. Apart from making you more energetic, resilient, and focused, the unique relationship Zone 2 exercise has with leadership is how much, or rather little, mental effort it takes and the opportunity that presents.

The Benefits of Zone 2 Exercise

The benefits of Zone 2 exercise are proven. While its powers extend to high-performance sport where Zone 2 is the foundation of elite athlete’s training, much research and many studies and trials have shown its health impacts are powerful, perhaps more powerful, for the rest of us.

Zone 2 exercise reduces fatigue and gives you more energy, increases immunity, improves quality of sleep, and reduces the incidence and impact of disease. It does all this by:

• Improving metabolic fitness and flexibility - Zone 2 exercise builds mitochondria, the tiny cellular ‘engines’ that produce much of our energy. As well as giving you more and more efficient mitochondria, Zone 2 exercise gives you more flexible mitochondria. Metabolic flexibility is your body’s ability to switch from using glucose (carbohydrates and sugars) for energy to using fats stored in your body. The more flexible your metabolism the more readily you burn fats for energy at any time, not only when you are exercising.

• Reducing body fat - Zone 2 is the most efficient level of exercise intensity for burning fat during exercise. In the 60%-70% range, your body is using type 1 (slow twitch) muscle fibres that use fats for energy rather than glucose. You use more glucose than fat as you increase the intensity of exercise because you use more type 2 (fast twitch) muscle fibres which use glucose for energy.

• Improving heart health - Zone 2 exercise makes your heart stronger. Your heart is a muscle and making it stronger helps it like any muscle - this muscle happens to be mission-critical to you and vital to your overall health.

• Lowering blood pressure - high blood pressure damages your arteries, making them less elastic which decreases the flow of blood to your heart and leads to heart disease and damage to your brain, kidneys, and eyes. Aerobic (Zone 2) exercise has been constantly proven to reduce blood pressure.

• Lifting mental health - Moderate intensity exercise like Zone 2 training is shown to have a significant positive impact on feelings of depression and anxiety.

• Increasing healthspan - living longer is one thing but living longer healthily, without debilitating health issues and pain, is another. The many positive impacts of Zone 2 exercise makes it the most powerful controllable influence you can have on your healthspan.

Exercising in your Zone 2 is not hard work. In fact, it’s not meant to be hard, so that your muscles are in the mitochondria-building range of effort that requires you heart to be beating at only 60-70% of its maximum. Many people get a bit carried away thinking harder is better and slip up to Zone 3. The trick is not to get too excited, or bored, and drift above or below your Zone 2.

How Zone 2 Exercise Helps Your Leadership

Zone 2 helps you lead yourself and others better in two ways.

The first is that it gives you a better you. As outlined above, Zone 2 exercise is a potent way to become healthier. The healthier you are - the better slept, more energised, focused, and mentally consistent you are - the better you will lead.

The other way Zone 2 exercise helps you lead more effectively is that it’s an ideal setting for leadership reflection. Leading is not easy. And the ever more complex, changing world we lead in is making leading more challenging. To lead consistently well requires reflection on a stream of situations, opportunities, problems, responses, and decisions. Time to think is vital for leaders.

When you exercise in Zone 2 you are not out of breath or focusing on trying hard. The repetitive nature of jogging or being on a cross-trainer at a gym means you are on mental auto-pilot, not having to think much about your movements.

Thinking about something helps you carry on exercising, distracting you so the minutes slip by. But more importantly for your leadership, exercising in Zone 2 helps you think. Apart from having a healthier body getting more oxygen to your brain, Zone 2 exercise helps you think in two ways.

The first is simple. You’re on your own, not doing anything else besides an automatic physical repetition. You have the time to think.

The second way is that Zone 2 exercise helps us think more broadly and deeply. When we are engaged in a familiar, largely automatic activity like a Zone 2 exercise (admittedly knitting could achieve this too) we are better at lateral thinking and problem-solving. Being slightly preoccupied is a great way to ‘mull over’ something, turning it over in your mind and not rushing to a conclusion.

The science is that the small amount of brain ‘bandwidth’ used to monitor our repetitive physical movements preoccupies our conscious brain enough to allow us to think more expansively with our unconscious mind, recalling and associating - constructively linking - a wider range of thoughts. This sort of reflection suits the complex nature of many leadership challenges where rushed, formulaic answers often fall short.

How to Exercise in Your Zone 2

Exercising in your Zone 2 is not hard. You are not puffing and panting in search of oxygen or pushing yourself to last a bit longer.

To work out your Zone 2 you need to work out what 60%-70% of your maximum heart rate is. There are different formulas to work this out. Or you can use an online calculator (Google “max heart rate calculator”) and if you really want get into this you can get your maximum heart rate measured by some gyms and universities.

But the simplest way is to subtract your age from 220, then multiply that figure by 0.6 to get your 60% of your max heart rate and by 0.7 to get your 70% of max heart rate.

If you’re like me you’ll find yourself interested enough in these numbers to do the math. If you don’t want to get into that there’s a less scientific and really easy way … if you can still talk while exercising but don’t feel inclined to have an extended conversation you’re exercising at a moderate intensity and are probably in your Zone 2.

Do You Want to be a Better Leader?

I imagine you do want to be a better leader so a better question may be ‘how much do you want to be a better leader?’ I’m certain you’re busy, juggling a lot in life, which means to make the time to exercise in Zone 2 you’ve got to want to do it … not think about it and not do it, not see it as a chore, but want to do it.

To want to do it you need a reason good enough to move it up your priorities. Hopefully being healthier and a better leader make the grade for you.

You may already do Zone 2 exercise (nice one!). If you don’t and start to you will literally change your life for the better … and become a better leader.