There Is A Method to the Madness
This is a podcast where I will be discussing all aspects of physical fitness. I am an exercise physiologist and personal trainer and owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs for the last 25 years. My passion is health and fitness and I am excited to share my views, some stories, interviews and much more with you.
There Is A Method to the Madness
Break the Myth of Longer Workouts
Welcome to. There is a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell and I am an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I am the owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs and I've been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to get to the real deal of what really works and, most importantly, why things work. Hence the name. There is a method to the madness.
Speaker 1:Today I'm going to talk about the most important variable of all the fitness variables. What might that be? And what's pretty cool about this one is it kind of crosses the board of cardio and strength. It is still the most important variable. Before I get to that, let me thank Jonathan and Lynn Gildan of the Gildan Group at Realty Pros the award-winning Realty Pros. Look, they're just committed to providing the highest level of customer service in home sales, so why don't you give them a call and figure out what your home is worth? 386-451-2412.
Speaker 1:The number one variable, the most important variable in fitness and improving our fitness, is drum roll please. Intensity. Intensity is number one. Now, of course, we have to show up. Consistency will always trump everything, but once we get there, there's a lot of different variables, as I've talked about before. There is the amount of reps and strength training, the sets, the tempo, the load, the weight, the intensity. In cardio, there is the mode, there's the duration, there is the heart rate, there is the VO2 max, there's all these variables, there's the miles right, the volume, and again it all comes back to intensity. Now we need all these other things, we need a certain amount, we need a certain type, but if we want to get better, it is always going to come back to intensity. So I'm going to spend a lot of this particular topic today. On the cardio respiratory side of things, it comes up a lot and we've said it to a few people lately when we've been discussing different types of training for running and different kind of running events. So hopefully, if you're not a runner or not into the cardio side, shame on you. If you're not into the cardio side, doesn't matter what you pick, but we do have to do some cardio.
Speaker 1:But you know, listen up anyway, because it's really important to understand that there is a method to the madness, like there is science behind all of this. And you know, as far as health and fitness and all the different types of fitness, like flexibility and mobility and strength and cardio, there's really been nothing more studied than cardio. Like we have known for a very long time how to train the cardiovascular system to be more fit, to have more endurance, to perform better. Like we just know, there's been some recent training in the last few years on brain training, like the amount of fatigue the brain thinks, it feels and it kind of has a defense mechanism and slows us down. That's kind of new and it's true, by the way. But we've known overall how to train the cardiovascular system for a very long time.
Speaker 1:Intensity trumps everything and sometimes, you know, people will say to people that have done a lot of 5Ks or that do 5Ks or that want to do a 5K, and also we can take this into the multi-sport arena too. The same thing with triathlons somebody might do a sprint triathlon or they might do many sprint triathlons. They might get into the groove of doing one every few weeks or whatever. And what often gets said around circles is oh, are you going to move up and do like an Ironman one day, like in the multi-sport world, or are you going to eventually do a marathon? You know, like it is the cream of the crop, right, like it's the top of the mountain, it's the peak, and you know, from a bucket list perspective, I mean I maybe don't argue that, like, I've done five marathons and they take a commitment. They're very mentally grueling, they're. I mean, I personally didn't enjoy them. I'm glad I did them as a bucket list kind of a thing, so I could see that, say, man, I did that because you know you really have to commit the time. It's really a huge time commitment factor and an Ironman. The same thing.
Speaker 1:If somebody's training for one of those like if they're elite, elite, you know they're in the eight hour range, if they're still elite, they're in the 10-hour range Then the good is in the 12-hour range. I mean, yeah hours I'm saying so for those that don't know multi-sport, yes hours, 12 hours, and then for a lot of people it's in the 15, the 16-hour range. So that is a bit of a time commitment that you'd have to put in. So sure to kind of say that you can suffer for that long is a bucket list. And again, I'm not knocking these things by any means.
Speaker 1:But what I do want to do is play devil's advocate and say insinuating it takes more fitness is simply not true. Saying that the marathon takes more fitness than the 5k is not true. It's just not true at all. The number one variable in fitness, as I've said, is intensity. So when you run a 5k, if you're running it, you know we got to compare apples to apples here so that means that you're running your 5k in the best time that you can run, so you are pushing your limits to the test right. And in the marathon, same thing, you are doing your absolute best. So we're comparing apples to apples here. So if you are redlining a 5k and, by the way, you can't redline a marathon, it's impossible Redline means that you're upwards in the 95% of your VO2 max or maximum heart rate.
Speaker 1:So when you're running your best 5K, that's where you are. You're in that red zone of 95% to peak, of 95% to peak. You probably will be at your max VO2 somewhere in that 5K. Depending on if you went out super hard, depending on if it's in the middle, depending on if it's at the end. You will be there.
Speaker 1:So a lot of times people are saying you know, oh, I've never done a VO2 max test. So have you done a 5k all out? Yes, okay, you've done a VO2 max test. Like that is your max VO2. By the way, that stands for volumes of oxygen per minute per kilogram of body weight. It is the gold standard of cardiorespiratory fitness Like. That's how we know how aerobically fit somebody is is by their max VO2.
Speaker 1:Okay, so to run a 5k, you're going to be near the very top of your VO2 max. To run a marathon, you are not. You're going to be 70, 80, maybe 85% max VO2, because you can't sustain it. You can't hold max VO2 for longer than five minutes. And if you are going to max VO2 at some point during your marathon, well, you're going to get totally, totally shut down by your body and you're going to be brought to walking or slow jogging and then maybe picking it back up again. But in other words, you can't run a marathon anywhere close to your max VO2. Now, the people that are best at marathons are very good at simply running at a very high end of their aerobic system, but they're not at their peak VO2. So that alone is the indicator that you're not really improving your fitness per se, not your cardiorespiratory fitness, by training for a marathon. It's actually the opposite. People can lose parts of their fitness by training for a marathon because guess what?
Speaker 1:The way we improve our VO2 max, now a lot of our VO2 max is genetic. I mean it's 15 to 30%. Max is genetic. I mean it's 15 to 30%, depending on. You know that's your range 15 to 30% genetic. So you know our variability is 15 to 30%. So that's all we really can increase it. So VO2 is highly genetic.
Speaker 1:But the way we raise that number is through intensity. So mile after mile after mile, and sometimes we call them garbage miles, and there's a place for them. There's a place for easy training, for sure. But that isn't what raises our VO2 max. What raises our VO2 max is being close to our VO2 max. Close, so, within, say, 90%, for periods of interval training is going to raise our VO2 max. That's it. Nothing else raises it, it's intensity. And you can look back on a lot of Michael Pollack's research at the University of Florida. He has set so many of the great standards that we now know about cardiorespiratory training years and years ago. All right, and so what he found was that when you're just starting out with your fitness, you can raise your VO2 max by training 60 to, say, 70% of it. So when your VO2 max is at its lowest point and you are new to training, you can increase it as you get more fit. It requires more and more intensity to raise that VO2 max anymore.
Speaker 1:So it's funny sometimes people jokingly say when is this going to get easier? And we have to break the news to them and say, well, it's really the other way around the more fit you get, the harder you're going to have to go to improve your fitness. It's really the same thing in strength training. I mean, these two types of training are. You know it's the same thing. It goes hand in hand. You know, basically, when you first start strength training, a couple moderately easy sets of 10 are going to increase your strength and as you get more fit you're really going to have to get close to failure to, or at failure to increase your strength. So it's really the same thing.
Speaker 1:The more fit you get, the harder it becomes to move that needle. And that's why you'll see people like make some pretty substantial gains in the beginning, and then it's like their times, times and again I'm going back to running here or triathlon. Then there are times just kind of like creep along. It's like man, oh man, is the needle ever going to move? And a lot of times you see sort of breakthroughs for other reasons. You know, maybe they lose some weight and that pushes that up a little bit. Or, you know, maybe they get their head right, like maybe they just were lacking confidence and I've talked about that a lot and that has boosted them up. But you don't often see these dramatic shifts.
Speaker 1:But you know you don't quit once you get more fit and it gets harder. You want to make sure that you keep going. It's just you have to realize. You know I'm not going to see 15, 20 seconds come off my 5k every time I race like I used to. As a matter of fact, you're probably going to see maybe a couple seconds and then you'll go to a race where the conditions aren't ideal and you're going to be 20 seconds slower and you're just going to kind of vacillate back and forth. But you know you keep cooking because if you're able to maintain that level through the years, when you get to a certain age you're even more fit because you basically have maintained that pretty fast speed that you've worked up to and it's been 15 years. So like that's how people like that you know people that are frustrated with their peaking need need to look at it really.
Speaker 1:But I don't want to get too far into that. What I want to get you to understand is that it's the intensity that builds fitness, and it's not just VO2max the other aspects of cardiorespiratory training. It's not just VO2max. As a matter of fact, that is a great indicator of fitness, but one of the most important variables we also have to improve is what is called our anaerobic threshold, our ventilation threshold and our onset of blood lactic acid accumulation, otherwise known as OBL-A.
Speaker 1:Now, what those three things mean and they are all basically the same, but they happen in different systems what they mean is the point when you go from aerobic, where ATP is being regenerated aerobically, to anaerobic, where ATP is being regenerated. Anaerobic, where ATP is being regenerated anaerobically, which is a very small window. It's that point you cross over. It's also the point where you go from burning carbohydrates and fat when you cross into anaerobic threshold and go over it. Now you're anaerobic, you're only burning carbs for fuel. The higher you can raise that threshold and that is very trainable, far more trainable than your VO2 max the higher you can raise that. So, in other words, when somebody starts out training, their anaerobic threshold might be as low as 70%, might be as low as 70%. That means once they're at 70% of their max heart rate or max VO2, they're already huffing and puffing and going anaerobic. Okay, that's kind of like a lower fitness level. As somebody gets more fit, that level goes up and up and up.
Speaker 1:So, for example, lance Armstrong and no, it had nothing to do with the doping or the drugs or any of the silly stuff that he got into. And I'm going to defend him again and say they all did it. But you know, I'm not a, not a drug pusher by any means, but I just, you know, got to keep it fair here. They were all cheating and yes, yes, he cheated. And no, that means is he can go up to 95% and still be aerobic, 95% and still talk to you and, in his case, laugh at you. He was, you know, a little cocky out there. But if his window is so huge like that, well then of course he's going to be more fit, right? Because then he can maybe, if he needed, to turn on that extra 5% and dust you for 60 seconds and then just go back to being aerobic.
Speaker 1:So raising that again requires intensity. We don't raise our threshold by doing easy miles. We don't raise our threshold by keeping our heart rate low in training. We only raise it by being close to or over our anaerobic threshold. Plain and simple. So it's again intensity. Intensity is what requires us to become more fit. It's required if you want to get more fit. So you may think so every workout needs to be balls to the wall. No, the problem is our body and system can only take so much.
Speaker 1:Now, one thing that came out of the last 20 years is the coaches and you know there's a lot of coaches in running and triathlon, just like there's a lot of trainers who don't have a lot of scientific background but they just kind of like follow what other people are doing and do the latest trends. Well, that's not always so bad, because they started picking up on some of the exercise physiology trends when a lot of people started talking about HIIT training H-I-I-T, high intensity interval training being more productive and it was a lot shorter than some of the steady state long endurance training and people were seeing benefits. So they started to kind of get that memo and shift some of the athletes over that. You know that's good, but I think they have to understand it. I mean, the key is that the only way we improve our fitness is through intensity, okay, but we can't do too much so we'll over train.
Speaker 1:So there's this fine balance that you have to find. You know, I always tell people, you know, one day a week do some kind of interval training. Another day do some kind of threshold or tempo training, meaning like not quite as hard as your intervals. Tempo training meaning like not quite as hard as your intervals, but just maybe right at your threshold or a little bit below it, and hold it for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. We would call that a tempo run or something, so that's going to boost it. And then the rest of your time do easier training, just to keep everything moving, just for like what we would call active recovery, just to get used to time on your feet and help. We like to train right, so just to be able to exercise and enjoy and everything.
Speaker 1:So really we need a combination of easy and hard, and everything in between is a little bit counterproductive. We end up burning more calories, but we're not going hard enough to build our fitness and we're not going easy enough to recover. So it's a delicate balance, right, and I could spend all day trying to help you figure out what that should be. It's hard. I mean some people say 90% of your training really easy, 10% hard, but make sure you do that 10%. Some people, like Matt Fitzgerald he's big on the 80-20 plan 80% easy, 20% hard, but make sure you do that 10%. Some people, like Matt Fitzgerald, he's big on the 80-20 plan 80% easy, 20% hard. You know it's somewhere in there. But the key is that we learn that we have to do that hard stuff if we want to improve our fitness, and the same is true with the gym, same is true for strength training. We have to do the hard to get better. We just have to find the balance of volume that works best for us and we are all so different.
Speaker 1:So the next time somebody says, you know, are you moving up to the marathon? Question it and say, well, you know, that's not really true. I mean you can be absolutely the most fit runner in the world and never go beyond a 5K. I mean Steve Prefontaine is a legend and ran that distance. You know he was running it under 13 minutes, which is a freak of nature, right. But you know, and there are other people that are, you know, close to that now, and there's world records that I think have even gone beyond that. So I don't know for sure, I haven't followed it, but I do know that they're in that area there.
Speaker 1:But it's not about going longer makes you more fit, it's about intensity that makes you more fit. So, if you are really happy doing 5Ks and sprint triathlons because it's an area where you can build your fitness and have a hobby, build community, race people and have competition and fun with people and be part of kind of like clubs and organizations but you think you have to move up? You don't. There is no moving up there, really isn't. Don't buy into that. If you want to go longer and even go to the point where you're doing ultras, fine, so be it, knock yourself out. It's just not about more fitness, it's about more preference. What do you like to do? Both can be very fit, of course. Both are great. Just don't think that going longer and slower makes you more fit, because it just does not. Okay, we got to get that intensity in.
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