How to Train According to the Experts

over the course of nearly a hundred episodes of the F my fitness podcast I've had the privilege of interviewing some of the most prestigious researchers in the fields of exercise physiology nutrition Human Performance and these conversations have really brought together some of the greatest minds and knowledge in the field of exercise physiology I'm excited to introduce my special guest today Brady Homer who is a accomplished endurance athlete with an incredibly High B TX um Brady and I set out together uh to work on a pretty ambitious project where we wanted to distill a lot of The Cutting Edge research that was discussed on the F my fitness podcast from these leading experts into a guide that Not only was evidence-based but had actionable insights for people it's called the How to Train according to the expert's guide so I think the result is we have this really great roadmap app that people can follow um looking for how to improve whatever the end goals that they're looking for whether that is optimizing their cardiorespiratory Fitness or their hypertrophy training or perhaps even body recomposition so in this training guide we cover a lot of different aspects of exercise including training protocols to improve cardiorespiratory Fitness training protocols to delay heart aging and improve the cardiovascular structure of the heart heart uh we also have a lot of information in there on how to train to improve metabolism mitochondrial metabolism glucose metabolism and we also get into resistance training protocols whether you're interested in improving strength bone mass bone density um muscle hypertrophy or losing fat at the same time while you're gaining muscle so that would be body recomposition um in addition we have some supplemental information in there on sauna use other protein intake and other supplements like omega3 and creatine so a lot of really great information in this guide you can find that guide and download it for free in howt trinu guide.com so that being said today's episode will serve as a companion to that guide uh Brady and I will discuss a lot of the information you'll find in the free guide and we'll probably give some of our personal takeaways as well yeah Ronda I think putting together this guide um it was incredible I got to listen and relisten to many of the interviews that you had with some of these World leing experts and I personally learned a lot um and had a lot of fun putting it together so we're going to cover a lot of things today and I think what we're going to start with is aerobic exercise training kind of a very popular topic these days with people interested in how to improve their V2 Max and their cardiovascular health you've interviewed experts in this area including Dr Martin gabala kind of an expert in high-intensity interval training exercise physiology and Dr Benjamin LaVine who honestly gave like a master class on just how to improve heart health um I found that episode very interesting so we're going to start today with talking to people about how to improve their cardiovascular health their V2 Max with aerobic exercise training uh one of your also one of your areas of expertise I agree the when Dr Ben LaVine came on the podcast while I was doing you know a lot of background information research on you know his work so reading his Publications and then after after the podcast episode I felt like I learned just a tremendous amount of information that I had no idea about which is really like the cardiovascular structure and what role the heart the structure of the heart plays in cardiovascular health but I do think um before we get started we should probably mention that it's important I think for people to identify what their goals are with respect to training so are you someone that's interested in becoming an elite endurance athlete like like yourself or are you interested in improving your your health metrics so maybe increasing your health span so to speak reducing your cardiovascular disease risk reducing your dementia risk reducing your risk of Cancer all the while you know improving mental health improving muscle mass maintaining independence with the at with age um these are all things that are my personal goals and I do think the guide covers a lot of those bases but again you know some people might be training for different goals yeah certainly I think that you know in the guy there are a lot of protocols that we're going to provide and people can I think they mostly gear towards people improving their longevity their health span and optimizing Health but you know if you're a performance oriented person and are looking to get stronger or compete whether that's in some type of resistance training competition or maybe you're onun a faster 5K or 10K this guide has those types of things too as you know you call me an elite endurance athlete I'm kind of far from Elite but I appreciate that uh sentiment Brady is being a bit modest not only is he Elite from a cardiorespiratory Fitness standpoint if not strictly a competitive standpoint he also has a masters in science a research background and is wicked smart but um you know I have performance goals obviously which are torona fast Marathon that's kind of these days what my primary goal has been and so you know I might train differently from somebody who just wants to get healthier or improve their health span if they're in middle age or older age or you know even younger people who are just kind of getting into exercise so um yeah it's important to define the goals and that will kind of determine how you want to train and even though my goal is to optimize to run a fast Marathon you know given that it's not my full-time job just to run fast and I have other goals like reducing my injury risk and just having a high level of Vitality I also want to you know train for brain health like you Rhonda I think I find the benefits of exercise on my brain one of the kind of most Salient benefits of of exercise um but I also just want to be strong be able to to do things and you know maintain Health later into life so I can keep doing the things that I want to do so I think my the way I approach training is try to optimize for performance but not at the ENT of sacrificing some of my you know other health metrics so I I try to blend a little bit of the two well with the V2 Max of what 75 75 and to 80 is you know I've tested a few times throughout my life and so it's somewhere in that range I mean that's why I I would say you're Elite but I mean maybe an elite level V2 Max but my my running times wouldn't be considered Elite by most standards well speaking of cardiio respiratory Fitness um I think that that would be a good place to start um it is something that we've covered quite a bit on the the podcast and Dr Ben LaVine when I had him on the podcast really He was discussing just an eye-opening study for me um that he was a part of it it was a study that was done over the course of 30 years it was two two separate studies and in known as the Dallas bed rest bed rest study and the study involved first of all Dr lean's Mentor uh jar Mitchell who was studying a group of men um and looking at the effects of being sedentary on their cardiorespiratory Fitness and other cardiovascular health parameters and when I say sedentary I mean fullon sedentary there they were um under they underwent bed rest for 3 weeks so um what that study found was lo and behold when you're actually not moving for 3 weeks not even getting up to go to the bathroom so I mean they were they had catheters this was extreme bed rest they really wanted to look and see what happened to cardiovascular function cardiio RIS pre Fitness after just not moving for 3 weeks of course lone behold cardiorespiratory Fitness declined not so surprising as well as a lot of the other parameters they measured but what was really eye openening to me was you know fast forward 30 years Dr Line is now in Jared Mitchell's lab and they find those same group of men and they wanted to see what 30 years of Aging had done to their cardiorespiratory Fitness which does naturally decline with age and what they found was that their cardiorespiratory Fitness after 30 years of Aging was no worse than their cardiorespiratory Fitness after three weeks of bed rest 30 years ago so essentially three weeks of bed rest is worse for your cardiovascular health for your cardiorespiratory Fitness than 30 years of aging and when you put it like that it's like wow being sedentary is so detrimental on our cardiovascular health um so maybe you can braady just kind of recap highlight talk about what cardiorespiratory Fitness is how you measure it I guess we'll get into some ways to improve it but I mean this is something that you you have a lot of experience in as well I think people will be pretty familiar with the um term cardiorespiratory Fitness it's sometimes used interchangeably with V2 Max or your maximal oxygen consumption it's kind of a very popular biomarker these days with you know like you said um and we'll talk about later correlating with longevity and so on so cardiio respiratory Fitness is sort of the exercise physiologist measure of aerobic fitness it's very popular um as an endurance performance marker or that's traditionally how it was thought of because you know having a high view2 Max is kind of standard among high level endurance athletes but essentially what it is is your body's ability to take in oxygen take in air from the environment distribute it to the rest of the body through your cardiovascular system get that oxygen into mitochondria and skeletal muscle and then utilize that oxygen for energy in the form of ATP so it sort of represents your body's integrative ability to take in distribute and utilize oxygen and again I think we'll talk about this later but I think that's why it's such a potent predictor of longevity it's because it's not maybe just something like grip strength but it really represents you know your body's physical function and your ability to produce ATP it's measured during maximal exercise hence the term maximal oxygen consumption so one of the ways that it's typically measured say if you were in an exercise physiology steady you would get on a treadmill you would run at progressively faster speeds until eventually you just couldn't go anymore so you would exercise until exhaustion all the while having um your gas exchange measured so you're going to be wearing a mask to measure your oxygen intake um and that's able to you know measure the rate of oxygen utilization by your body and at the point of maximal exertion however much oxygen your body is utilizing that's your maximal oxygen your rate of oxygen consumption and um it's not a fun test that's the main way to measure it and probably the gold standard way to measure it would be during a incremental exercise test to exhaustion but it can also be measured or estimated rather using things like the Cooper 12-minute test um which essentially involves you just running kind of as far as you can in 12 minutes and there are online calculators where you can put your time into there to get an estimate you can also get an estimate of your view2 max by if you have a smart watch or something like that a fitness tracker that will also allow you to estimate it and I say estimate because you know without direct measures of gas exchange um you're not really able to definitively say what that is but it uses various things like your age XX weight and your physical fitness metrics to estimate that so those are kind of the three primary ways that that people can measure it um Dr LaVine kind of talked about some of the flaws with estimating it using those uh equations versus you know obviously getting it directly measured into a lab but yeah it's it's a performance marker obviously but it's also a health marker and I think LaVine talked about how important it was not only for improving it but also to try to maintain it throughout lifespan yeah it it's something that I in the past I would say three two to three years I became it kind of came on my radar as an important biome marker for longevity right there's a a variety of biome markers that can be looked at and you know as you mentioned even compared to something like grip strength cardiorespiratory Fitness seems to really shine in terms of being a good indicator of your overall health status um when LaVine was on the podcast Dr lean was talking about you know it takes a certain amount of oxygen like your cardiorespiratory Fitness has to be a certain level just to sit down and have a conversation like we're having right and if you're a sedentary person that really hasn't tried to improve their cardiio respiratory Fitness like at all um as you get older because it it does decline like even maintaining that just level of just having a conversation or maybe walking to the bathroom or walking to your car you're so out of breath it that's when you're really reaching this this level where you have to be concerned about falling off a cliff right when just normal everyday functioning is hard but even above and beyond that there's been just numerous studies that have looked at the correlation of VO2 max so cardiio resir Fitness in all cause mortality one I've talked about and I talked about fan as well was a a published study in Jama medical journal in 2018 where I think it was like participants that were involved in some they were previous veterans and um so they were sort of look that according to their cardiorespiratory Fitness and the people that were in the highest group had a 5-year increased life expectancy compared to people in the lowest cardiorespiratory fitness group which is pretty profound I mean you're talking about 5 years but also even if you looked at the people in the very highest group and you compared them to people in the high normal so they were still like on the high normal end they're doing good like those those people in the highest group had a 20% lower all cause mortality so they were still doing better than the people that had a high normal cardiorespiratory fness but I think also what was really surprising to me in that study was that the people in that low cardiorespiratory fitness group had a mortality risk that was comparable or even worse than people with diseases that we know are clearly bad for your health like type two diabetes um like heart disease hypertension even smokers so in other words um again going back to this Dallas bed rest study as well where being sedentary for 3 weeks was worse on your cardiovascular health than 30 years of Aging it really drives home that point that when you're sedentary and your cardiorespiratory Fitness is falling you it is a disease being sedentary is is a disease and I do think that low cardiorespiratory Fitness should be considered kind of like a disease marker as well a lot more can be said about uh Vox and cardiorespiratory Fitness I I do you kind of mentioned a little bit about thetes being interested in V2 Max and improving their V2 Max um can you talk a little bit about why maybe athletes think about training explicitly for BO2 Max or maybe why they don't yeah I think the answer to that would be they sort of do and they don't I mean I guess it would depend maybe what type of athletes we're talking about so I guess maybe we'll use endurance athletes maybe like such as myself as an example like you mentioned before I have a generally High View to Max and while that's what i' like to think about it is you know having a high view to Max if you want to be an endurance athlete is sort of a prerequisite to kind of get in the door you know you won't find someone in the Olympics or you know even at a sub Elite level who probably doesn't have a view to Max of 65 or above so it's sort of this ticket to get into the gate of oh if you want to be an endurance athlete you need to have a V2 Max of 65 or higher but once you get kind of to those higher levels of elite athletes who all have that V2 Max of above 65 it doesn't do a very good job of predicting who's going to win the race so if we line up at the start line and you say you don't have any idea of of people's previous performance but you just have their V2 Maxes the person with the highest V2 Max isn't always going to win and that's because there are several other performance markers that are associated with doing well in say a race like how long you can run at a high percent of your V2 Max your lactate threshold your exercise economy these are all things that you can improve independent of your V2 Max that can help improve your performance so yes well I want to do V2 max workouts as an endurance athlete and most endurance athletes will do V2 max type workouts every now and then once a week um in the form of high-intensity intervals they can also do workouts that are targeting you know getting better at running economy or um training their lactate threshold so you can get better without improving your view to Max I think that's important not just for athletes to know but just people who are generally interested in health if you're training and you don't see you know your view to Max on your watch isn't necessarily improving well you could still get faster you can still get stronger improve your exercise performance while not improving your V2 Max so it's for that reason I think that athletes sometimes don't just think about explicitly training their V2 Max many Elite athletes might not even know what their V2 Max is because they don't care they just really care about how fast they're running but then of course athletes should be concerned about increasing their view to Max not only for the health reasons that you just mentioned you know it's associated with longevity which is great you want to avoid that decline with age um and maintain it as long as possible but again you know you can see significant improvements when you do improve your view to Max which can be thought of as your ceiling you know if you move your ceiling up everything below that is is going to improve so um short answer to that would be yeah athletes look to improve their view to Max among the highest people the highest view to Maxes it might not be as much of a concern but um people are all still interested you know athletes and non-athletes alike are interested in improving their V2 Max well you you allude a little bit to you know you said high intensity evil training and that's you know one way that you can improve the2 Max and I think we're going to get get into that in a minute talking about Dr Martin Cabala's research but I'm interested so let's say um you know you want to improve your lactate clearance one that you mentioned like how like how what kind of training how how do you train differently than doing like high intensity Ro training how would you improve your lactin clearance more like yeah you can certainly do that by using high intensity interval training I mean you producing a lot of lactate during high-intensity interval training so you're inherently going to help improve your lactate clearance capacity doing what would be called kind of steady state or threshold workouts is kind of one way to do that where you're you're exercising at that point where lactate levels are just above kind of the steady state so you're working on you know where lactate production equals lactate clearers doing those type of what would be called lactate threshold workouts that seems to obviously be a good way to improve your lactate clearance capacity and then there are others who would argue or say you know I think there's decent evidence support that something like zone two training also improves your lactate clearance capacity so you can do all different types of training and we're going to talk about low moderate and high intensity training and why all of those integrating all of those is important but primarily the main way to do that is going to be doing like steady state type and high-intensity uh interval training workouts well so high intensity training workouts like Dr Martin Galo is on the podcast and he's really an expert in high intensity Lal training and you there's there are a lot of people that are interested in the time efficiency of it so high-intensity interval training I guess there's a lot of ways to Define it um Marty likes to talk about it being like when when you're when you're doing it doing the interval that you you're doing vigorous exercise and that could be different for a lot of people depending on your your Fitness level but essentially it's you're you're working harder than you can't really have a conversation when you're doing that interval so you're going really hard most people are about 85 80 to 85% at least maximum heart rate for the interval and then they you know they have these periods of of recovery and then go back to the working SE part the the interval again what was really interesting to me with respect to to improving cardi respiratory Fitness when Marty came on the podcast he was talking about a metaanalysis that had looked at a variety of different studies where people were meeting the requirements for moderate intensity exercise so they were doing about 150 minutes a week of what is called moderate intensity exercise so they're probably doing you know something more like a zone two where they're or maybe even a little bit less than that but you know something like 60 to 80% their their max heart rate and about 40% of those individuals didn't see improvements in their cardiorespiratory Fitness unless some high-intensity interal training or some more vigorous exercise was sort of added to the equation so can you talk a little bit more about like you you mix in you know High inable training into your workouts but like why do you think there's this sort of nonresponder effect or uh probably multiple reasons for it but like what's the rationale for adding in more uh vigorous type of exercise or high intensity Level Training into a workout to improve cardio RIS pre Fitness yeah so I think if you take a group of people who have never trained before kind of unfit people and just give them a lot of lower intensity or you know what people might refer to as zone two training everybody is going to kind of improve because you have it's a new training stimulus you know you've never trained before you add some exercise okay well obviously you're going to get fitter and you mentioned the concept of non-responding ERS which has kind of been around in like exercise physiology for a while and it essentially refers to you give people exercise training program there are some people who don't improve for some reason or another they're V2 Max and I think there's kind of a debate on there where it might just be due to like a measurement error instead of actually a non- response but like you just mentioned when you give those people high-intensity interval training everybody responds there's some kind of recent studies that show that very well you just increase their dose of exercise or their intensity or both and they improve their Fitness so they're just basically not doing enough and so that points to the fact that if you want to get better you need to add in some higher intensity interval training obviously you can increase the dose of your moderate intensity training to your volume but adding a greater stimulus you know that seems to be the main benefit of doing high intensity training you can't just do the same thing you can't just do low intensity training all the time you need to not only mix it up for variety but you need to give your body a greater stimulus if you want it to adapt and improve and so Dr Martin gabala was talking a lot during your interview about the importance of doing that doing hit probably at least once a week um elevating your heart rate just to get that additional stimulus to force your body to adapt get stronger for your you know heart to get stronger and for your cardiovascular system to uh to get fitter yeah it's actually Dr LaVine also mentioned something similar where he was saying you know you have to continually stress your cardiovascular system to have the adaptations The Beneficial adaptations and so if you keep doing the same thing without ever adding an additional stresser stimulus then you're only going to stay the same maybe um you're not really going to improve right and so it it does make sense from from that aspect as well since we're talking about vigorous intensity and adding more of a a stressor and a more stronger stimulus maybe you can recap some of what Dr LaVine Dr kabala talked about on the podcast when they were sort of defining the various training zones what these zones are because there is a lot of out there on that which is can be quite confusing to people it can be and some people will like to use zones for training I think it's common in sort of the exercise with you know coaches who are coaching endurance athletes to use this five zone model if people you know are familiar with listening to podcasts on Fitness they'll probably hear people reference five zones there are obviously other zones to use but yeah drvine defined these sort of five Training zones and kind of before I go and Define what these are and how people can use them to guide their training I think it's he kind of defined them using three different metrics and that we're going to use to define each of the zones but lactate levels are one way to do it but we're not really going to discuss that because in reality you know most people are not going to be measuring their lactate levels weekly monthly or even you know certainly not daily um during exercise and so it's kind of a moot point to say you know Zone 2 exercise is this lactate level most people don't really know what that is and so there are other ways to measure intensities and use these zones one way is just raing have perceived exertion or RP um and this is just a subjective measure of how hard you think you're exercising and uh this is typically on a 6 to 20 scale now that might seem kind of weird for people like why is it not 1 to 10 1 to 10 is kind of typical um what people use like uh how hard is this scale but it's called the Borg RP scale and the 6 to 20 is essentially because the um initially the theory behind that scale was that you were just add a zero to whatever your RP was and that would correspond to your heart rate so say average person has a maximum heart rate of around 200 if I give you an RP of 18 that means my heart rate is probably around 180 which is a fairly high intensity whereas maybe my RP right now is a six maybe my heart rate's 60 that's like a resting heart rate so that's kind of the idea behind that scale so people kind of can understand what what what that means and why we're doing 6 to 20 versus 1 to 10 another way is to use the talk test and that's essentially just like are you able to do a full conversation barely get out words or not talk at all that's kind of another way to to kind of gauge zones the next and the final way to describe the zone is to be um based on your percentage of your maximum heart rate and a lot of people have heart rate monitors so they're going to be able to measure their heart rate during exercise so we're going to Define zones using all three of those kind of metrics so if we look at Zone one this is going to be a recovery intensity this is pretty much easy as you can go it's not resting but it's very very light activity so on the RP scale this is going to be anywhere from a six to an8 um it's it's going to be about 50 to 60% of your maximum heart rate and if you going to use the talk test to measure that intensity it would be you could hold a full conversation so what you and I are doing right now Rhonda just talking having a podcast you could basically do that if you were in zone one or recovery intents because you're going on an easy walk or um something like that zone two intensity people will hear about zone two training all the time this is still kind of a low a light to a moderate intensity exercise so um it's going to Cor respond to an RP of about 9 to 12 60 to 70% of your maximal heart rate and then the talk test again you should be able to have a conversation in zone two if someone were listening to you they could probably tell you were exercising but in general you could hold pretty much a a full conversation and so these you know Zone one and zone two there's going to be your light to moderate intensity exercises um in particular you know that zone two train good for kind of building uh your aerobic base then there's zone three this is kind of veering into the territory of high-intensity interval training um it's thought of a lot as your threshold intensity or maybe steady state exercise it's going to correspond to an RP of 13 to 15 about 70 to 80% of your maximal heart rate and then this is where talking gets a little bit difficult so you could speak in broken sentences with still not you're not gasping for air yet but you could speak in broken sentences and that would be a good way to indicate kind of this Zone during uh using the talk test and then zone four this is where you get into up the high intensity training um so it's a 16 to 18 RP it's um you know 80 to 95% of your maximum heart rate and you could probably only speak one word or two at a time maybe if you were trying to gauge that zone based on the talk test and then zone five that's maximal exercise intensity that's your V2 Max it's as hard as you can go so RP 19 or 20 it's 95 plus% of your maximal heart rate and then you shouldn't be able to talk so if you're doing uh you know Tabata intervals or something like that this is zone five you shouldn't be able to talk at all during that exercise intensity so those are the five zones and I think what's cool about having all these different metrics to define the zones is that you know if people don't really want to train using heart rate or maybe they don't even have a heart rate monitor they can use the talk test they can use RP or maybe a combination of all three of these and they're pretty reliable I mean they've all of these have been kind of well evidenced to correspond to the different zones but I think what's nice is that people can use these to train and it doesn't require a lot of technical ability a lot of experience um and so this is I think you know in my mind the best way that people can think about kind of training intensities is using the zones as we Define them here or at least using those as a guide I I really like the talk test way of defining it because I as you were sitting here talking about this I was thinking about my my whole exercise protocol and I'm like okay oh yeah that's actually what I thought was more Zone 2 is really more zone three what I'm doing here with respect to heart rate monitors do you I I know LaVine mentioned there can be a lot of error with using some like a smartwatch and is there more accuracy in using something like a chest strap like a maybe a polar strap versus a smart watch versus like the talk test so let's say you don't have a chest strap should you be using a talk test or can you still use your smart watch is it still what's more accurate yeah I think the accuracy of the smart watches is is obviously there they've been you know validated against EKG and things like that but as LaVine mentioned and as others have kind of drawn caution they tend to get less accurate as the intensity of exercise increases they're not perfect because you know it's getting your heart rate reading from a sensor on your wrist um versus your chest so I would encourage everybody to invest in a heart rate chest you know a chest strap monitor it's less than $100 investment it's going to give you a lot more accurate data some people find them uncomfortable but most of them now are are pretty comfortable and if you really want to train using heart rate I would say invest invest in the chest strap but you know the the watches aren't totally off and they can be used as a good kind of reference as to as to where you are but like I said in my experience and I think the experience of others the harder that you go the higher the intensity goes kind of the less accurate that they get um so if you want to use heart rate great it can be a good indicator but um the talk test is a very good I think way to assess your exercise intensity especially for people who are newer so I think one of the not flaws with RP but one of the caveats is that you need a little bit of experience to really know where you're at like how hard something is I mean if somebody has never actually gone to a maximal intensity then how do you know how do you know what a 20 out of 20 is if you've never really reached the point of volitional exhaustion so if somebody is just beginning to exercise they might be at 70% of their maximal intensity but they might think that they're out of 20 so it takes time to learn kind of what your RP is to be able to assess that accurately so I would say you know if people are more experienced with exercise then you could use something like RP to kind of gauge your intensity but those neard exercise might actually have a lot of good feedback with the talk test I even kind of use that I mean you know it's if you're running with a group of people and you can have a conversation okay well we're probably in zone two if I'm really struggling to like breathe then I might be in zone three four or even five so um I think it's a great way to use the talk test anybody can use it but I think newer people might benefit more from that and I think also what people can think about doing is using a combination of all three you know you can use heart rate you can use RP you can use the talk test maybe see if those you know correlate with one another during exercise um but use all of those to kind of inform your exercise intensity exactly I I usually am not wearing I do have a chest strap I have a Polish chest strap I have used it before but I'm not typically wearing it when I'm doing a workout and so I I think using my my smart my Apple watch along with the talk test CU I often have someone with me when I'm working out is like okay well maybe maybe it's not entirely accurate as I'm getting into my zone three perhaps zone four but I know I can't talk more than a word so it's clearly like it's good to combine them both so I want to there's there's a lot of interest in zone two training I talked about zone two training with Dr Martin gabala a little bit with Dr benline and I want to ask you maybe you can talk a little bit about what are the benefits of zone two training unique are there unique benefits of zone two training metabolically um cardiorespiratory healthwise and as as you were explaining and defining some of these zones I was thinking to myself even what's the real difference between zone two and and what you would call zone three right this this threshold type of training as well right so um I'd love to hear yeah the benefits of Zoom 2 training I think are are kind of vast I mean a lot of people will talk about how some of the main benefits are going to be it's it really serves as a foundation for building your aerobic base you know it is it's good for maybe maybe I should step back a little bit and kind of Define what zone 2 is maybe based on the the exercise physiologist definition of it which would be it's kind of the intensity where you're maximizing your mitochondrial fat oxidation it's a steady state exercise less so than a threshold like intensity so your lactate levels it's t you know measured during lactate is kind of the accurate way to do it so your lactate levels are steady they're not increasing some will actually give like a lactate number being about two Millar I mean I think there may be kind of some debate about that because I think i' as I've heard you talk about multiple times you know people will have different lactate levels and so two Millar might not represent a zone two intensity for everyone um it might differ based on whether you're unfit or you're a fit athlete or something like that so um I think it's important though that you're at a steady your lact levels aren't continually Rising um during Zone 2 training but the key I think and one of the main benefits reported for Zone 2 is that you're improving your fat burning capacity not only during exercise but also your mitochondria's ability to oxidize fat as its energy source because that's the intensity at which the fat oxidation in the mandra is is maximal Zone training you know Elite athletes are doing a lot of it in particular just because their exercise volumes are so high and so I think one of the you know areas of not disagreement but kind of conflict is that people will say you need to do a lot of zone two training you know it needs to make up a majority of your exercise training and a lot of what that those people are referring to whether they're coaches is that you know they leite athletes doing 20 to 30 hours a week well obviously they do a lot of zone two training because they're exercising for 20 to 30 hours per week you know there are certainly benefits to that for building the aerobic base that allows you to do a high level of volume without burnout there's a very low injury risk with zone two train because it's a lighter intensity you're not overly stressing your autonomic nervous system or your cardiovascular system and so it has these benefits of just allowing you need to do a lot of low intensity volume to build um you know what's called the aerobic base and improve your fat burning capacity and those seem to be the main benefits and I think defining it though is important because Zone 2 gets talked about a lot but in reality we just talked about different ways to Define Zone 2 based on the talk test based on RP based on heart rate when most people say that they're Z doing zone two training they really don't know if they're doing Zone 2 training because you're not measuring lactate really without a lactate or you're not measuring your fat oxidation rate in the mitochondria you don't really know if you're in a physiological Zone 2 it correlates with all of those other kind of subjective and objective measures that we talked about like heart rate but to say that you know you're doing Zone 2 training isn't necessarily accurate unless you're you know actually have a accurate measure of lactate but there are certainly several benefits to Zone 2 or uh what I like to just refer to as low to moderate intensity training I think that's more accurate and certainly a more accurate way that that people can refer to that type of training well you mentioned a pretty daunting number here you said 20 to 30 hours of exercise a week which is far beyond what I myself do um I'm more in the six to six and a half hours uh a week and so you know the question is if you are not doing 20 to 30 hours let's say you're doing maybe five or even less than that you're getting like two and a half this is where Dr gabala on the podcast was talking about high-intensity interval training be being really time efficient and having many of the same benefits as even like a zone two type of training with respect to mitochondrial benefits cardiorespiratory benefits uh if not even better if the same volume of exercis is performed in other words if you're doing 30 minutes of zone two and then a 30 minute high-intensity AAL training workout that you're going to have even more improvements in cardiorespiratory Fitness than you would Zone to you can have better improvements in mitochondrial density for example than you would so it it's kind of interesting to look at the benefits of doing something like high intense interval training now you're not going to do 20 hours of hit I mean that's impossible right and like you were saying burnout and things like that are also uh an issue and you have to you know be able to space them out with recovery but there are a lot of benefits to doing High intes interval training time efficiency you get improvements in cardiorespiratory Fitness we talked about that with even people that were doing regular you know low to moderate intensity exercise for 150 minutes a week they needed to really stress their their system a little bit more above and beyond that to get improvements um not everyone but a large percentage of them did and then there's also some brain benefits that are also really I don't want to say uniquely associated with high intenal anal training or vigorous exercise but also the benefits are associated with the lactate that you're producing which does come with increasing exercise intensity right so if people are are Tim limited and they want to combine some zone two training with hit like can you combine them in one session like can you I I was talking about you know with you the other day like sometimes I'll go for I'll do some my jog or I'll do like a zone two workout and then I'll add in some intervals right where I'm like going I'm going pretty hard for a certain amount of time and then I kind of go go back to a slower Pace where I can have a talk test after my heart rate comes down a little bit yeah it's um it's interesting because I think certainly you know there was kind of this debate in like oh do you need to do separate do you need to keep your really easy days easy or can you combine it with Zone zone four or zone five like high-intensity interval training I think it's a unique concept especially for you know as we talk about the time efficiency of it maybe there are people who only have two to three days per week when they can engage in aerobic exercise and they want to do some Monitor and some high intensity training on the same day I mean in reality like when you do a high-intensity interval training session you're kind of doing a little bit of Moder intensity because as I'm sure you structure your protocols Ronda and like I structure my interval training workouts I'm doing you know probably 20 to 30 minutes of warmup or more and a cool down which is at a lighter intensity and then I'm doing the main session which has some high intensity intervals but you know 50% of that session might actually be at a at a low intensity heart rate but yeah I think it's interesting to think about doing if somebody wanted to do a 30 to 45 minute say just a Zone 2 as we'll call it maybe low to moderate intensity run run or a ride or maybe even a slow walk and then finish with some high-intensity intervals I think that's a great strategy that people can use if they want to get some high intensity training and some moderate intensity training in the same session that moderate intensity session beforehand might even serve as like a good warm-up if you're doing 30 45 maybe even like 60 Minutes um to do that and there don't seem to be detriment I guess you're not ruining your Zone 2 session by doing the hit at the end of it because you've already gained the benefits of doing your low to moderate intensity and then you're ending with the lactate elevating the heart rate elevating type of exercise so you're getting the benefits of both and I think people could certainly structure their workout to do that to to optimize kind of both of those benefits and fit it in if they are if they're time limited I do love ending my my run with a uh with a Sprint yeah I do that a lot too if sometimes if I um you know if I don't have a structured interval workout during the week which most weeks I do I will throw in some very hard like Sprints at the end of my run or maybe run like the last couple miles of a run like Tempo or something like that so you definitely feel better so again going back to like the brain benefits I think it just makes you when you end with like your heart rate elevated it feels a lot better you don't feel as stale um but you know there might some physiological benefits there too yeah well going back to the there are our goals you know I did mention brain health and lowering demential risk I often also just a lot of my workouts are geared towards like brain health and not even just thinking about long-term brain health and you know delaying dementia delaying brain atrophy delaying all those you know Brain Age related diseases but also just like mental health like how I feel and feeling good and it it's clear to me like after I do a you know a hit either a hit or also a very long if I do a much longer more steady state sort of run um I also get a lot of really great feelings from that as well structuring structuring the amount of let's say low to moderate intensity or Zone 2 I know we're not measuring lactate directly but let's call it that versus your high-intensity interval training a lot of people out there you'll you'll see on a lot of platforms people say 8020 right 80% of your exercise workout should be like low to moderate 20% should be high intensity Dr gabala talked a little bit about this the distribution the weekly training volume you know how how how someone who is not like yourself you know endurance athlete do they need to follow this 8020 rule or how should that distrib does that distribution change it definitely should I think Dr gabala kind of made that clear in the conversation with you it's interesting because when I and you know I'm interested in this as myself as I you know not only looked at my own training but how to prescribe training and talk about like training for people on the internet but the origins of kind of the 8 or2 are interesting and it was basically just looking at the training logs of a lead athletes and seeing what they do when you broke it down basically by intensity 80% of their sessions tended to be in this lower Zone 2ish intensity and then 20% of the sessions appear to be in the higher intensity training and the important thing I think to note was that it's it's not necessarily based on time but rather sessions per week so say you're doing five Training sessions per week one of those if you're falling to 820 one of those would be high intensity four of those would be moderate intensity um so it's the number of days versus the total amount of time spent which kind of makes it easier I think for people to to think about versus you know sitting down and calculating how much time you spent in each of the heart rate zones which is kind of difficult not many people are going to do that so yeah I think that the 8020 breakdown it works great if you're doing you know maybe eight hours or more kind of aerobic exercise per week but when you were discussing with Martin gabala he seemed to be pretty convinced as Mi I that you know if once your exercise volume starts decreasing kind of below maybe you know 5 to 6 hours per week are getting a little bit below that you can probably afford to skew that a little more in favor of high-intensity training then so maybe you're doing something like a 7030 or a 6040 I mean you know most people probably shouldn't do more than two high-intensity interval training sessions per week but again it's going to depend on like how long are your high-intensity training sessions I mean you you know you and I were talking when creating this guide and you talk about how you know you might do three high-intensity sessions per week but they're only and I say only but 10 minutes long so sure you're doing hit three times per week but they're very short they're kind of for the brain boost that you get and it doesn't seem to be unsustainable because you've been doing it for long so obviously that's anecdotal but yeah I think if you're doing less if you're doing 1 to four maybe hours per week you should be less concerned with how oh I'm spending 80% of my training time doing zone two you could probably do a little bit more high intensity and in fact you might need to do more high intensity based on things like citations from Dr Ben LaVine on studies where if you want to get the same benefits of doing 8 to 10 hours of moderate intensity you need to do the 1 to four hours need to be a higher intensity to equate basically your your training volume so I think if people are are a little bit time limited and still want to gain the benefits of maybe doing a little bit more moderate intensity training volume you can certainly do a little bit more hits so maybe that looks like again say somebody's doing five Training sessions per week but they're doing you know one to 5 hours total maybe two of those sessions can be high intensity versus B1 I don't see an issue with that again I think everybody should based on your training history and your experience you know you don't want to burn out or risk injury but if your volume is low I think you can afford to fit a little bit more high intensity training in there and a lot of the evidence kind of would suggest that I mean granted most of them are pretty short duration but there are plenty of studies in in exercise science where you take previously unfit people or people who aren't engaging in a lot of exercise and for 8 to 12 weeks you know they're doing maybe two two of the Norwegian 4x4 training sessions per week sometimes even three sessions per week now do I think that's advisable probably not maybe it's not sustainable but it's clear that they can do it that they can do a couple of these training sessions per week without getting injured and they receive massive benefits from that yeah maybe we should um let a good segue into some of the high-intensity interval training protocols that are evidence-based in terms of improving cardor res respiratory Fitness for example and a lot of these Protocols are also also improve other parameters which we're going to get into as well like mitochondrial density um as well as other metabolic benefits but the Norwegian 4x4 so this is one of this is probably one of the it's very it's a very well studied protocol where Dr LaVine talked about it Dr Gala talked about it people are doing four different intervals so they're doing for for four minutes they are exercising typically on a stationary bike perhaps a rowing machine you could you could do it on a treadmill as well but a lot a lot of the the protocols were on on a bike and you're doing for for the four-minute interval you're you're going at an intensity that you can maintain for that entire four minutes that's pretty hard so it's it's pretty pretty much a sustainable hard intensity for 4 minutes it's obviously not going to be maximal but you're going as hard as you can for and as hard as you can sustain for that 4 minutes and then you follow that by a three minute recovery period which is very light right you want your heart rate to come down you want to clear your lactate and then you go back into the four minute interval so that's a 4 by4 you drink it four times that's a very good protocol to improve cardiorespiratory Fitness there's a variety of other protocols out there uh Dr cabala mentioned so there's the one minute on one minute off and you do that 10 times so that the 10 the 10- minute workout well it's actually 20 minutes but 10 minutes of more high-intensity um training where again for that entire minute you're going as hard as you can sustain for that minute right it's not going to be all out but it's as much as as hard as you can go and sustain that for a minute and then you rest and recover for a minute very very low intensity exercise and then there's things like even tatas so Tabata would be a 20 second on 10c off you do that eight times the 20 seconds you're really going as hard as you can because I mean 20 seconds is uh it's not long although it seems long when you're going as hard as you can it actually seems quite long and the recovery intervals seem too short portions seem longer than 20 and recovery is like over before you know it exactly um and there's a variety of other protocols out there as well but we were talking a lot about even just adding adding a little like higher intensity workout at the end of a run do you do the intervals necessarily have to be 85% of your your max heart rate I think I think for most people it probably know doesn't matter you shouldn't focus on heart rate it's just if you're going hard and your heart rate is elevated above the moderate intensity you could probably call that high-intensity interval training and use that to to say that was my one hit session per week I think again I I mean heart rate training I'm not sure how many people actually use it I know in any study that you use an exercise physiology study they'll have measures of heart rate because yeah you have physiologist on the side measuring your heart rate during exercise but I mean I can't tell you the last time I really looked at my heart rate or what percent of my heart rate I was at during exercise I'm typically just basing it off of RP and I'm looking at my heart rate after the fact so I think that you can pick an interval workout if you want to do the 4x4 if you want to do the 10 by one or if you want to do Tabata one looking at your heart rate the entire time is going to be distracting you know focus on the workout so I think going at hard intensity like you said an intensity that you think seems sustainable for four minutes and and doing that I mean once you get more familiar with the exercise you may then be able to know that oh if I'm going at you know however many watts maybe 120 watts and this is kind of my 85% max heart rate you can use that to kind of guide your train but in general I mean again I think most people aren't going to be looking at their heart rate the entire time so we're talking about what your heart rate should be at but it's just just go out of hard intensity and for most people that's going to be enough to get the benefits of of high-intensity interval training which I think is important because like a lot of the time we get caught up in oh what's my heart rate and if you're going hard you know whether you're going hard or not and that can be fine I think for most people to train right and again going back to what we were talking about earlier and what Dr LaVine and the cabala were mentioning about just mixing it up and and giving that little extra stressor so that you get those adaptations right you don't you don't want to keep doing the same thing so sometimes even just doing something a little bit harder in your you know normal sort of low to moderate intensity workout is beneficial right definitely and I think you know with with the training I think there are some people who like to do I want to just do the Norwegian 4x4 every week it's easy I know what to do I'm kind of familiar with it but I think to avoid not only avoid kind of like stagnation or maybe just get getting bored of like the workout but to stress your system in different ways we just mentioned three protocols obviously those aren't the only protocols they're not necessarily the best but just do different length of intervals every week and I think that can be fun you know there something that I try to do in my own training so maybe somebody picks the 4x4 this week you're going to do 4x4 next week you're doing 10 by one the next week you do a Tabata so then you have three different lengths you know you're doing the four minutes which seem particularly good for improving like V2 Max the like 2 to four minute range for intervals you're doing the 10x one again which is you know 1 minute long and then you're doing the 20 seconds which is your super kind of your Sprint interval training as maybe Dr gabala might refer to it so mixing those things up I think can not only be enjoyable but then you're hitting really all these bodies all the bod's like energetic systems which which can be fun as well yeah for sure mixing it up I that's something I do as well although I do have um wonderful coaches that work with me and they're very great at mixing up my routine and it's very nice but if it's just me left of my own device I usually get on my pelaton and I'll do a Tabata and it's the same same almost almost the same exact class that I have been doing for years um but you know sometimes we're just creatures of habit you know and it's it's easy to kind of go back to the thing that you know um so this I think is a good transition point so we we talked a lot about improving cardiorespiratory Fitness and the benefits of that and the different types of training to to help improve cardiio respiratory Fitness based on a lot of what the experts have talked about in the podcast and they their research I want to remind people that they can find all of that information along with a of protocols for improving cardiorespiratory Fitness in our how to train guide according to the experts and you can download that right now at how to trinu guide.com we are going to move on to the next section which is very interesting as well and um is also related to cardiovascular health but it really is an area that is is kind of neglected in a way in I would say in popular media with respective cardiovascular health and that is the youthful structure of the heart and maintaining that youthful structure of the heart which is really important for its function it's important for preventing cardiovascular disease um it's even important for performance being able to have a good aerobic capacity as you as you're getting older so Dr Ben LaVine is really I would consider him one of the world's leading experts in this area and it was just a great privilege having him on the podcast I just learned a tremendous amount of information you know I didn't even really know much about how the structure of the heart changes with age and until I was diving into his research and and had him on the podcast and he was he was talking about how as we age our heart becomes stiffer at around early middle age this is like around I guess it was it's more like 35 to 50 years of age crazy to think about that as being early middle age your heart starts to get stiffer stiffness and that affects cardiac compliance um it affects hypertension and part of that reason that it gets stiffer has to do with glucose regulation and so when we're eating a variety of foods particularly foods that are refined carbohydrates refined sugars and there's a elevation of in our blood glucose levels that can be sustained for longer periods because perhaps there's a refined sugar or something that we're eating a lot and maybe we're not exercising that's the key we're being s if we're sedentary that gluc stays around in your vascular system and it reacts with proteins including collagen which is lining our blood vessels it's lining it's our lining our myocardium our pericardium right this this is you know where our heart is and that collagen when it reacts with glucose in the mailer reaction becomes it it causes the protein the collagen to become stiffer and so that affects the stiffness of our our vascular system of our heart and also our blood vessels as we start to get into late middle age this would be like 50 to 65 in addition to our heart getting stiffer our heart shrinks so it atrophies and um so our heart is getting smaller and it's getting stiffer and these sorts of structural changes are affecting our cardiovascular health and our cardiovascular performance right Dr LaVine has done a whole lot of research lots of different studies trying to identify how much exercise what exercise is doing to the structure of the heart for one and how much exercise is really needed to help really Stave off a lot of those changes those structural changes with age and he had one one of the studies that he had done early on which were were done in Master's athletes they are Physically Active every single day and they're competing at a national level in in many cases so they're they're they're doing a lot of cardiovascular and arobic exercise their hearts structurally um so we're talking about seniors so these are people that are older their hearts looked like healthy 30-year-olds so 30-year-olds that don't have identifiable diseases like cardiovascular disease or type two diabetes or hypertension right and so that's pretty profound when you're talking about you know a 50 6 60y old person's structure at least looking very similar to what a healthy 30-year-old would look but we're not all going to be endurance athletes and Master's athletes throughout our lives so the the next question is well what is the exercise dose that's really needed to get you most of the way there to have your to maintain that youthful cardiovascular structure and that's where some of Dr lavine's follow-up Studies have looked at some of that research maybe you can talk a little bit about that yeah I think some of this might be kind of maybe not surprising to a lot of people but I think it based on you know everything he said it seems like the dose appears to be maybe a little bit more a little bit higher than a lot of people think it might be and one of the things I think too to add of you know when you were talking about the changes that occur kind of across the lifespan one of the I think craziest statistics that of inside was that after the age of 70 it became nearly impossible to reverse the structure of the heart indicating that you know you basically need to do everything that you can before that age to improve the structure of your heart because after that it takes a you know un unsustainable maybe level of exercise to kind of reverse some of those structural changes which I found very informative in related to you know how to train with age so in the study that he was citing uh during your interview yeah he mentioned you know they did a study and a observation study where people self-reported their levels of physical activity kind of throughout their life and they bucketed them into different days of activity so this wasn't necessarily uh studying the dose in hours or minutes per week but they looked at people exercising 1 to two days per week two to three days per week three to four days per week four to five and then five to six or more days per week and this was kind of a lifetime of physical activity so how long do have you exercise how many days do you exercise per week for for how long and then they compared these levels of exercise to people who were sedentary who basically didn't exercise at all and so what they found was that the people who exercised one to two days per week pretty much had hearts with the same structure as sedentary adults so one and two days per week provided zero protection basically against heart aging when you moved up to two to three and then 3 to four days per week those groups had some protection compared to the sedentary adults for their heart structure so structure of their hearts were a little bit better than people who were sedentary the four to five group that's kind of when you experienced a significant level of cardiovascular protection with age and then the 5 to six day per week exercisers had nearly complete protection they were similar to The Master's athletes and so what the conclusion from that study was uh from Dr LaVine was four or five days of exercise appears to be the optimal dose across the lifespan to prevent cardiovascular aging now again this study didn't provide a number on how many hours or minutes per week you should exercise but let's assume these people were exercising for 30 minutes maybe an hour per day when they were doing it that puts you in The Sweet Spot of like maybe 5 to six hours per week of of exercise but that four to five days appears to be important and so maybe you don't even think about how much time the people were spending in that um you know doing exercise but just the frequency of exercise make sure you're doing and when we say exercise here we're referring to aerobic training in addition to resistance training which will obviously dive deep into later but this is just aerobic exercise and again that could be walking that could be something that activity that raises your heart rate Dynamic exercise that raises your heart rate but doing four to five days per week of that seems to be optimal for preserving cardiovascular structure and I think the take away from that was really probably the 150 minutes per week that is cited as what the minimum recommendation it might not be enough if the goal was to kind of maintain cardiovascular structure throughout life and yeah this I I'll tell you um this study was a bit surprising to me because probably for that reason where you know you think the the 150 minutes a week or even just 3 days a week of aerobic exercise oh you think you're doing really good you know and and um I absolutely increased my my frequency of aerobic exercise after hearing about this because I mean I was like oh wow I I need to be doing more I can do more I should do more and now I have every I have why I need to do more right but I do it was a bit surprising it's like okay if you do if four to five days a week of aerobic exercise and you're really you're not quite at the Master's athlete level in terms of your heart structure but you're mostly there and I do think four to five days a week is pretty sustainable for most people it should it should be um yeah it should be and if it's and if it's not you know maybe you need to make it in your structure your life in such a way that it should be you know he had a then Dr line had a great quote where he's says you know exercise needs to be part of your personal hygiene it's like brushing your teeth you wake up you know it's not something that you think oh should I do this it's I'm going to wake up and I'm going to do this because it's part of your personal hygiene and so I think there's a lot of talk sometimes about if we prescribe the recommendations for exercise too high does that deter people from doing it and maybe but I mean the reality is I think he presents compelling data that if you want to get serious about it and you're really serious about not aging cardiovascularly like you need to probably do more exercise and so I think it's kind of a harsh reality but just something for for people to think about and how structured their their training it is a part of both of our per I mean when you wake up in the morning what's the first thing you do do you I mean I'm not first thing but like in terms of work versus exercise oh it's definitely exercise drink coffee and exercise exercise is the first thing I do I mean I brush my teeth and yeah I eat a little bit but but I do before I work in most cases I exercise and um that wasn't always the case for me even even dating back to when I was been have been very interested in my health span and lifespan it was like okay I'm working you know working four days a week or no now it's you know six days it's it is EV it is every morning and and if I if I don't get to if I take off an hour of what would be my work time so be it because that's what's going to happen I'm going to exercise yeah you just you make the you make the time for it and you know that has to be the case a lot I think the Paradox kind of is that most people tend to exercise more when they're younger which is kind of when you need less exercise I think as you get older you probably need to do more exercise and that's I think what the evidence that Dr LaVine presents would would indicate too but I also feel like as people get older they might have a little bit more free time once you get into your 40s and 50s and 60s you're reaching you know your kids are out of the house you know you're maybe still working a job but once you get into retirement age so maybe you know I think the way that maybe people think about exercising is that yeah want to do a lot in early life to kind of build up those reserves in your muscle mass and your aerobic fitness and things like that but you know as you get older think about exercising more as you maybe have more time to dedicate to it because not only you know you need probably that amount in order to kind of maintain some of these changes so it's again I think a harsh a harsh reality maybe well let's talk a little bit about some of of uh Dr lavine's research on um getting into that starting into that late middle age age 50 and this was a a very he calls it one of the most cited or looked viewed at I guess viewed on their on the website in the Journal circulation studies of all time and rightly so I think it's a a pretty astounding study uh it was a 2-year intervention trial where he took 50-year-old him and his colleagues took 50-year-olds that were otherwise healthy but sedentary I would argue That's not healthy if they're sedentary it is as a is a disease but they don't have any other identified diseases like cardiovascular disease or hypertension for example but they had been sary and um he he he put them on a 2-year exercise protocol which maybe you can discuss in a minute that was pretty intense and they looked at at the structure of their heart um before starting this protocol and then two years after this exercise protocol they looked at their hearts again and found that in many aspects like the the cardiac compliance and a variety of different parameters that they looked at the um size of the heart and the stiffness right stretchiness of the heart in in many aspects had reversed in terms of of their Aging in fact it was comparable their hearts were comparable to looking more like 30-year-olds so they had essentially started this program and they they had these 50-year-old looking hearts and with respect to the the size and the compliance and then after this 2-year exercise protocol had reversed 20 years of cardiac aging which is pretty astonishing and inspirational in many respects so the protocol wasn't necessarily easy though it wasn't at all it was I think it wasn't easy it was simple and I think something that everybody can kind of work up to and use as kind of a framework for how to structure their training so yeah as you mentioned this was a two-year study which again like if anybody's familiar with exercise physiology research like doing a 2-year exercise intervention is pretty incredible to get those participants to adhere to that regimen um I can't remember how many participants were in that study right now but um I think it was you know up somewhere around 200 maybe but they had a pretty pretty decent number of participants um but it involved a two-year commitment and they didn't start them out right away doing everything that they were doing at the end but they scaled up their exercise gradually throughout the two years by year one they were kind of you know reaching their Peak exercise and then they maintain them for the second year and so what this involved was eventually you know doing about 5 to six hours of aerobic exercise or I guess it was total training per week was kind of 5 to six hours and what that involved was one of one Norwegian 4x4 session they actually at one point in the study just before the one year mark were doing two Norwegian 4x4 interal training sessions per week after the year they dropped it down to just one for the maintenance phase so one Norwegian 4x4 interval training session per week they did one session per week that was an hour or longer of their base pace so we could refer to that as lower to monor intensity exercise Zone 2 training but it was like a 1 hour longer base Pace session and that could be just a bu a run a walk a hike something like that and then they did another 30 minute base Pace session for week so another Zone 2 exercise training session per week they also did a very light recovery day after all of their interval training sessions so the day after their Norwegian 4x4 they did a light active recovery day um and then they did two resistance training exercise sessions per week so they were doing four aerobic training sessions two resistance exercise trading sessions for the protocol and again they scaled up to that so this wasn't we're doing 4x4 all at once but they progressively you know added that for the first year by the end of the second year they were maintaining that so they you know for two years did about five to six hours of exercise and like you mentioned they revers their certain aspects of their cardiovascular structure by you know an estimated 20 years which is pretty astounding so yeah not an not an easy protocol but certainly not something like a high level Elite endurance athlete is doing so it's something that everybody I think could do and these were people who were 50 60 years old right it's it's doable and and I I'd be curious to know how many of those people continue to maintain that after the it is over knowing they reversed their their heart aging and some in terms of the structural aging of their heart by almost you know about 20 years I I feel like that would be very motivating for any 50 or 60y old to go wow I should keep this up this is like I want to you know I want I want my heart to stay like a 30-year-old right I mean that yeah for me it would for sure it would be cool to see a follow-up study it would also just be cool to see if they didn't say they didn't maintain that training they just totally stopped how long those benefits kind of lasted I think that would be interesting too and if I know Dr line and them have follow-up studies on some of the exercise training but it would be interesting to see for that one because I'm sure you maintain some of those benefits for a few years but the bed rest training study or just some of the studies on dra training you see like kind of once you stop it's a very steep slope down back to where you were right especially with respect to your cardiio respir Fitness yeah um well a lot of This research so the this this intervention study you know we're talking about the Master's athletes looking at um identifying you know I called it the dose but it's it really is in terms of frequency how many days a week you have to work out to kind of help maintain that youthful cardiac structure has led Dr bline to have what he calls his prescription for life with respect to exercise he does add a little bit of resistance training into that prescription for Life maybe we can talk a little bit about that and then talk about our own sort of our prescription for life like what our Protocols are he prescription for life was honestly one of I think my favorite uh takeaways from that episode because it was something that I felt was reasonable for everybody it's a lot more exercise than probably most people are doing but not something that everyone couldn't work up to at some point and so his prescription for life was very similar to kind of that two-year training study that he cited he cited a sweet spot of four to five days per week of aerobic exercise or 5 to six hours per week of training that seems to be kind of The Sweet Spot performance interval training once per week and you know while in that study they use the Norwegian 4x4 you you could do any type of intervals we just mentioned a few other protocols the 10x1 the Tabata but really it just just do high some type of high-intensity interval training uh once per week after every high-intensity interval training session take a light recovery day LaVine definitely stressed the importance of recovery not only just for from a muscular perspective and your you know your autonomic nervous system but the cardiac and cardiovascular system also needs to to recover you know when you stress it with a high heart rate you do increase some markers of like cardiac damage and those also need time to recover so if you're doing interval workout the next day you know doing 30 or more maybe minutes of very light activity that's also kind of part of his prescription his bit one hour or longer base paay session per week was definitely kind of a foundation of his prescription and then the two or more resistance training session exercises per week which you know this is a very very practical approach and I think most people could you know maybe you should just take this and paste it up on your wall and use that to guide your training every week I think if most people did that they would be certainly in a a good place not only to I think age better but the way I see it I mean I look at lavine's prescription for life and it mirrors a lot of like what I do for my weekly training I mean the way I structure kind of my training I do I have one long run for every single week I do probably two easy Zone 2 exercise sessions I do one high-intensity interval session and then um I try to strength train twice per week so I really follow Line's prescription for life I just kind of scale it up to meet the volume that I'm am seeking for week and so I'm sure you Ronda probably do something similar to that um well you're doing what's your total hours would you I would say on the typical week I'm probably exercising like 14 to 16 hours most of it's endurance so I'll probably do 14 hours of endurance training and then you know getting in like one to two hours of of strength training could probably Veer more towards the the strength training but again you know it's as we talked about ear what I'm trying to optimize for at this point in my life yeah um well I'm so I'm not clocking in as quite as many hours I'm doing more like six six to six and a half hours a week um depending on on the week um so I end up doing more high-intensity training and a little bit more um I would say that zone three is probably a a big a big part of my training so I do um three days a week I'm doing it's sort of a comb it's more like a crossfit type of training where I'm doing a combination of I do strength well two those days I do strength training for about 30 minutes each so it's about an hour of strength training a week and then I do some a little bit of a little bit of hypertrophy training as well and Then followed by like a 15minute high-intensity interval training that includes some aerobic as well so it'll it'll be something like I'll do like the rowing machine or the bike or jumping rope and then I'll add in something like you know lighter weight squat or push-ups or dips or lunges and you know so it's like a combination of and that's um for the remaining like 30 minutes so that that would be like an hour a week of that and then I do another hour of um something kind of similar but includes a little bit more aerobic so it's a combination of things as well where I'm also doing things as like lunges and I'm doing weights and I'm doing hypertrophy training um not as much much strength training but then I'm combining it with a rowing machine I'm doing a salt bike I'm doing a ski the skier or jump rope so so it's a very um efficient way for me to get that strength training my resistance training and also my some high intensity LEL training in there um in addition to that I'll do about an hour a week of I I I do some zone two into zone three runs probably more Zone 3ish where I'm not really talking I mean is very breathy of a talk right and then I'll do some sprinting towards the end and end of that and then one day a week so that's like this is all like that's twice a week I do that and on my LA on my sixth day which is typically a weekend I'll do hiking for like one and a half hours to two hour hike with my family and um we're walking of course and it is hiking so we walk up hills but sometimes we do some Sprints like and and race each other and stuff in the middle of that but it's not like really super intense I do consider it more of a recovery day cu the walk is just very long and it's over an hour so it meets that box with what Dr deine said he should do something once a week that is at least an hour long he doesn't care what it is as long as it's fun and you enjoy it I enjoy the hikes and you know he he said you could even be walking it could be a walk so um that's kind of my my uh typical my week's workout um as well I think what you said about enjoyment was kind of important too and something we sometimes don't talk about you know we're getting very technical about like how people should train but yeah find something he even stressed that that the hourong session you want to it doesn't need to be a bike ride or a run it can be a B it could be I think even said something like a dance you know if you go to a dance class and are dancing for an hour if your heart rate's elevated you know that works maybe you're skiing so just something where you're doing a cardiovascular type exercise for an hour or more because I think the key with his prescription was it needs to be sustainable because that's literally the whole idea is prescription for life you're this is something that you can do whether you're 30 years old or starting at 30 all the way up until you're 70 or 80 so I think that's important too to to have activities that you enjoy doing right for me also accountability is important so I I do work with coaches they have a really great coach that comes and works with me on my strength training and Crossfit type of training and then I go and work out with friends as well and there's again there's that fun group aspect going to a gym maybe that has classes I mean that's another way you something that's going to keep you back going back right so it does have to be sustainable um it has to be something that you enjoy I don't necessarily Joy strength training and we can talk a little bit more about this when we get into that that part I mean there's it's it's very hard um and there's a lot of surprising aspects of it that I've I I didn't quite expect um after I really started engaging in that but it helps to have have a coach um or certainly even just going to a class right where there is a coach it doesn't have to be a personal trainer what whatever whatever it is that you decides best for for you with that said I I would like to uh move on to some of the metabolic effects and and adaptations that occur with aerobic exercise so fundamental to metabolic health is metaconda health and mitochondria for most people who aren't aware of what these are they're little tiny organells that are inside of our cells most of our cells with the exception of red blood cells that are creating energy from the food that we eat carbohydrates um fatty acids they're very important for a variety of metabolic functions and and everything from neurotransmitter synthesis brain function to muscle function to cardiac function our mitochondria the center of everything so you really want to do what you can to preserve and improve mitochondrial Health there's a lot of interest in improving mitochondrial health and what types of training Protocols are best for improving mitochondrial health and when Dr Martin cabala was on the podcast I was asking him about high-intensity interal training and how that compar comped to more of a Zone 2 like continuous exercise type of training in terms of improving mitochondrial health and he basically said that when the volume of exercise is kept the same that mitochondrial density so this is mitochondrial biogenesis which is the creation of a new mitochondria was actually better after high-intensity interval training than more Zone to low to moderate intensity type of training when the volume of excis was the same now again as we mentioned earlier you're most of the time going to be doing a larger volume of exerc size of a Zone 2 type of training versus high-intensity interval training so it becomes a more time efficient way of getting some similar benefits um metabolic benefits and mitochondrial benefits as a Zone 2 type of training would get so um with respect to mitochondrial biogenesis mitochondrial density also a process known as mitophagy so this is the clearing away of damaged mitochondria as we age our mitochondria become Dam DED we don't have a repair system for like we don't have a DNA repair system we have DNA in our mitochondria but we don't have the same types of repair systems as we do in our nuclear genome so mitochondria repair themselves through a variety of mechanisms one of them is mitophagy where a portion of the mitochondria will be recycled or perhaps even the entire mitochondria if the entire mitochondria is damaged um it seems as though the more vigorous the exercise the more intense the exercise the increase the increased prevalence that you have of mitophagy happening so again um that doesn't mean that zone 2 type of training isn't having that happen as well but you probably just have a larger volume of that before you get there so then there's this this whole area of fat burning and you discussed this a little bit earlier and Dr gabala discussed this where what type of exercise is better for fat burning right well mitochondria are at the center of burning fat right so fatty acids are oxidized in the mitochondria so you hear a lot about Zone 2 training and how Zone 2 training is really ideal for optimize optimizing fat burning maybe you can talk a little bit about maybe recap a little bit about what Dr galab is saying with respect to how high intensity interval training affects fat utilization and how that compares to perhaps a low to moderate intensity type of training like zone two training I think there's no question that zone 2 training as we mentioned before during zone two training while you're actually exercising fat oxidation is maximized so you're burning more fat during Z2 training at least as a relative you know percentage of total contribution versus carbohydrates compared to like a higher intensity interval training but when you were talking with Dr Martin gabala and you asked him you know does the substrate that you are utilizing most during exercise kind of predict the adaptation in that and his answer and what the literature would show is that fatty acid oxidation relies on you unom mitochondrial content as well as your levels of this enzyme known as CPT or carnitine palor transferase which is the rate Limited enzyme for getting fatty acids into the mitochondria where they can be oxidized to produce energy so any exercise or you know the exercise that improves CPT enzyme levels and mitochondrial content the most is going to enhance your fat oxidation capacity the most and the evidence is pretty clear based on what I've been reading in certain meta analyses that would show high intensity training compared to moderate or low intensity training it increases mitochondrial content more it increases CP PT enzyme levels and activity more so and it also leads to better fat oxidation capacity so even though you're not burning more fat during high-intensity training your mitochondria are adapting in such a way to allow you to burn more fat or due to exercise training so which is interesting and not to say that you don't need Zone 2 but I think that it goes to show that maybe you know if your goal is to become a better fat burner that high-intensity interval training might actually be you know what volume matched just as good if not a little bit better than moderate intensity training and it all comes back to the mitochondria hit is a potent stimulator of mitochondrial biogenesis and all of these mitochondrial enzymes as his own too but hit might be a little bit better if volume matched again it's always key to kind of note that right it comes down to that adaptation right when you're when you're pushing beyond the capacity of your your your body's ability to bring nutrients and oxygen to the mitochondria to be oxidized for energy and you start going into that you know zone three zone four where you're using glucose and producing lactate as a byproduct they you're at up your body is going oh I need to increase I need to increase my mitochondrial density so that I can start using my mitochondria right it's an adaptation it's a response to that stressor and I think the other thing that people often think about is always like this black and white thinking right there's this bin and that bin as to use l Norton Dr Lane Norton's analogy where people think if you're doing high-intensity inal training you're just you're just burning glucose and and producing lact and that's just not the case in fact the majority of the time even when you're doing a high-intensity Level Training workout you're doing both right you're not just burning I mean unless someone's doing like an allout Windgate which I don't know many people that have done that I certainly haven't ever done one but um you're not really going to be just only burning glucose right there's a gray area so so you're also still using your mitochondria to some degree as well totally yeah I think we yeah sometimes in especially going back to when we were talking about zones people talk about zones as if they're these very knee buckets well I'm zone two now and then oh if I go a little bit harder I like flip across this threshold into zone two and then into zone three but it's more of a a spectrum versus a black and white jumping into these different buckets of zones or what we're using as a fuel source during exercise yeah it's definitely more like a spectrum than a a threshold that you cross and you're using one or the other why do people why why why is there a um you can see it circulating around on on social media and the blogosphere podcasts if you're if you're doing Zone 2 training you're going to be a better fat burner like I'm doing you asked someone why I'm doing Z I'm doing zone two training because I want to be a better quote unquote fat burner what does that even mean is that even true and I've also seen studies where it seems as though doing more high-intensity interval training more vigorous exercise people end up burning more fat after the exercise you know if they're doing that type type of exercise versus low to moderate intensity training I think for yeah for something like weight loss or body composition you know if I think diet is probably the biggest lever you can pull for that and people will say oh exercise is not great for weight loss but you know there is a contribution of of exercise to weight loss and for high intensity training yeah there does seem to be you know you're burning a lot of fat during exercise there's this quote unquote after burn effect that I know Dr Martin gabala talked about where you know maybe several hours after exercise you kind of have this higher caloric burn or this higher fat burn so if you're interest in you know improving body composition you know you kind of want to be you become a better fat burner and burn more fat during exercise to help you improve your body composition I think you know what it means to become a better fat burner is is kind of uh nuanced and maybe not as understood but I think this idea one is of metabolic flexibility and so people may have heard this term before but it essentially refers to the fact that let's say you're in between meals or you're fasting overnight and you wake up in the morning like metabolic flexibility just reflects your ability to you know when glucose is low or glycogen stores are low kind of switch over to using fatty acids or oxidizing fat uh for energy so you can use both fuel sources kind of interchangeably and use them well because you have like the the cellular and metabolic Machinery to do that but what it also means from a kind of performance and athletic perspective is that you're able to use fat as a fuel source at an increasingly higher intensity so most people may be aware that once you start exercising more at a higher and higher intensity you use more carbohydrate or more glucose as an energy source compared to Fat so if you read like a classic exercise physiology textbook there's always this graph where exercise intensity is on the x- axis it goes from zero which is resting to 100 maximal intensity exercise and then on the y- AIS is another 0 to 100% And that's your contribution of glucose and fat to your energy and so at rest you're using you know almost 100% maybe fat and as you increase your exercise intensity fat oxidation goes down carbohydrate oxidation goes up and then kind of in the middle somewhere about 60 70% of your maximum heart rate that's where you know you're getting 50% contribution from carbohydrate 50% from fat and so essentially if you are a better fat burner those are shifted a little bit so the slope of those lines is kind of reduced whereas you know maybe before your max fat oxidation occurred at 60% of your maximal exercise intensity well now if I become fat burner when I'm at 80% of my maximal exercise intensity that's where my maximal fat oxidation occurs so you're using more fat at a higher exercise intensity that is kind of from a performance or an Athletics exercise perspective what it means to become a better fat burner and you can do that by doing fasted exercise you can do it by doing zone two doing high-intensity interval training increasing your mitochondria you know eating a keto diet there's like the famous study where they looked at people habitually eating a ketogenic diet and they're Max bat oxidation was at 85% of their exercise intensity which is kind of high so that's essentially what it means what are the benefits I mean being a quote unquote glucose burner or a carb burner you know when you use carbohydrate you kind of produce reactive oxygen species and maybe you know that may be helpful for limiting those kind of byproducts for performance you know it can help you not have to fuel as much during exercise you know if your body can use fat you don't necessarily have to keep replenishing and keep your blood glucose High using Exogen it's kind of like drinks or gels or something like that that's kind of from an Athletics or performance perspective so I think those are some of the main benefits and you know not everybody's goal is to become a better fat burner but there seem to be benefits both for Health and Longevity to to doing so metabolic fle flexibility I mean there's definitely longevity benefits for that and and to get that metabolic flexibility it sounds like you know you don't necessarily have to be just a zone two trainer like you can do high intensity training again you're increasing your mitochondrial density there's a lot different ways to get there uh in terms of aerobic exercise it doesn't have to necessarily just be zone two which is where some of the like you hear some people and they think they I think there's a misconception where it's like oh I have to be in the zone two where I'm only burning fatty acids and not shifting into that more intense Zone where I'm I'm burning glucose as well in order for me to become a fat burner and I I don't know that that's necessarily the case no I don't think so and you know like we just said because if you get better more and healthier and you know more efficient mitochondria you're going to become a better fat burner and there are multiple ways to improve the health of your mitochondria right just Z to exercise right well shifting gear and talking a little bit about glucose regulation I mean this is also a very important area for cardiovascular health I mentioned that glucose disregulation if you're constantly having elevations in blood glucose levels that can lead to the stiffening of your myocardium of your pericardium right these these have collagen in them and they react with glucose and that leads to a lower cardiac compliance essentially your heart is less stretchy you want to have you want to maintain and improve your your glucose regulation throughout your life it's very important this is where my conversation with Dr Martin cabala was really I I think shed some light into the benefits of high-intensity interval training on glucose regulation now there's no doubt that aerobic exercise improves glucose regulation like full stop like you're going to have improved glucose regulation if you are engaging in aerobic exercise but if you're again comparing the volume of exercise being the same and comparing sort of a continuous lower to moderate intensity exercise with high intensity interval training or a more vigorous type of exercise there's you're going to have more improvements in glucose regulation with the higher intensity exercise and that somewhat has to do with the utilization of glucose which produces lactate as a byproduct it's not necessarily a byproduct we know it's not a byproduct anymore it's an active metabolite that is not only an energy source for mitochondria it's also a signaling molecule so in other words it's a way for your muscles to communicate with your muscles and P proteins in your muscles it's also a way for your muscles to communicate with other organs like the brain and the heart and the liver and your kidneys and so that lactate actually is a signaling molecule to the muscle cells the glucose Transporters in the muscle then come up they're it's called translocation they come up to the cell surface of the muscle and they're open and primed and ready to take in lot of glucose and lactate is really key in that process so if you're producing lactate by having a more intense workout you're going to have more GL for Transporters that are translocating up to the muscle cell surface where they're ready to take in the glucose so high intensity AAL training is definitely a good way to improve glucose regulation but the lactate isn't the only reason for that right yeah so you know lactate obviously pretty important in that mechanism that you just referenced but muscle contraction and in itself is just so interesting in that it also causes the glue forward Transporters to translocate to the cell membrane where they can suck up more glucose into the muscle and so what high-intensity interval training does that makes it more potent for doing that is it engages a larger amount of muscle mass like you mentioned it increases our utilization of glucose in the skeletal muscle so it kind of increases the sensitivity of the muscle to take up glucose because you're utilizing it larger amount of muscle mass larger amount of glucose trans Transporters and more glucose picking up into the cell so essentially you know that's another reason I think why high-intensity training and resistance training too like we'll talk about later but are great for glucose regulation maybe much more so particularly compared to to Zone 2 training you're talking about engaging the the the muscles um there was a study that was published oh gosh not a few months ago I mean it wasn't it was less than a year ago that i' compare doing 10 body weight squats to 30 minutes so the 10 body weight squats over the span of an eight hour work day basically so you're doing it every 45 minutes so every 45 minutes you do 10 body weight squats over eight hours and that was compared to a 30 minute continuous walk and the body weight squats were more potent at improving glucose clearance than the continuous walk again probably because lactate is being produced and you're engaging like you're talking about the muscles are being engaged more robustly than perhaps a walk would do but also Dr Gala talked about walking and continuous walking versus interval walking as well yeah and I think that the study that he was citing shows that just intensity matters but also kind of just interval kind of the interval pattern could be interesting for like uh regulating glucose so yeah he mentioned the study where they basically just did two groups of walking where one walked at a continuous intensity of 65% and the other group alternated intensities sub 75% and 60% so not even high intensity interval training they just did interval walking is what he called it and they experienced much better improvements and it was 24-hour 24-hour glucose regulation and cardiometabolic risk factors I think in things like waist circumference their BMI as well as like their hb1c all those things improved better with interval walking compared to just uh moderate intensity walking even when they didn't do really high intensity so there seems to be maybe something uni about you know the study that you mentioned breaking up the activity throughout the day and then doing oscillating intervals even if it's just walking for um glucose regulation so something to think about uh for people if glucose regulation is one of their goals right I I like to do that again like I mentioned with my hikes you know we'll stop and we'll do some interval Sprints and um of course like throughout the day it's nice we'll talk a little bit about exercise snacks but that's another way to kind of break up the the sedentary part of your day um I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about I'll just talk briefly about brain health training for brain health we cover a little bit in this in this guide as well and um Dr gabal and I talked a little bit about this as well in fact he just sent me a a systematic analysis yesterday a new study that came out on high-intensity interval training and and how it improves brain Drive neurotropic Factor so brain Drive neurotropic factor is a growth factor it's a neurotrophic factor it's produced um in the body in the muscle but also in the brain in the brain it plays a very important role for it helps the growth of new neurons in certain parts of the brain like the substantia Negra for example the hippocampus and it helped with the connections between neurons so that your synapses and your connections and your long-term potentiation things that are forming long-term memory or more solidified it plays a role in neuroplasticity the ability of your brain to sort of adapt to the changing environment and a variety of other things that's doing in your brain that's that's huge beneficial for brain Aging for cognition so you really want to increase brain derived neurotropic factor in the brain there's been a variety of exercise protocols high-intensity exercise protocols Vis vigorous exercise it seems as though the more vigorous the intensity of the exercise the more robust the brain derived neurotrophic Factor effect and um again this comes down to lactate as well as other mechanisms lactate one mechanism because lactate has been shown to cross over to the bloodb brain barrier and in the brain activate brain Drive neurotropic Factor so it's it's one of the ways your muscle communicates with the brain and tells the brain you because you're stress in your muscles um you're also stressing your your your brain at the same time and so it's a way it's a response an adaptation uh the way your body is is adapting and going okay I need to make sure I can handle this stress let's make more brain derive neurotropic Factor so that I can handle that stress even the 10-minute you know high-intensity interval training workout has been shown to improve cognition I often like to do a 10-minute Tata before I do something that I need to be sharp or focused on like like a podcast for example because it's a 10-minute workout I mean you have 10 minutes and you can do it and I often feel really good after that so um we do we do cover some of that in the training guide as well I think I think that the bottom line with with protocols to improve brain dve brain Drive neurotypic factor is intensity and also volume so you know even if you're doing if you're doing a 20 minute work out and you want to be at least like 80% your max heart rate for those 20 minutes more like a Zone 3ish kind of workout right um that's been shown to robustly increase brain Drive neurotropic Factor if you double that to 40 minutes then you get an even more robust increase I think I think a lot of people will probably just know that to be true anecdotally I certainly know that if I do a longer low to moderate intensity exercise like 60 to 90 minutes I feel good afterwards you know my mind feels clear but it's nothing like when I do a high-intensity interval set where you sometimes feel like your brain is just like on fire so I think a lot of people have the same experience where just low kind of steady state exercise yeah it feels good but it really doesn't provide I think the cognitive Improvement benefits acutely that um high-intensity training does and I know that's something you talk about a ton and just how you structure your own hit protocols to really correspond with your either cognitive work that you're doing because you really do you just feel clear you feel sharp after you feel energized so I really do think there's like nothing like hit to to improve brain health and obviously long-term brain health through exercise training but just to use it acutely as well just as like this kind of stimulant almost right I deliberately structure those short 10-minute hit workouts around times like this like I have a podcast I'm going to do or a presentation I'm going to give and I'm in a hotel and it's like I got to do my 10-minute high intensity workout I often go to the gym and and get on the the bike and do do something that kind of is a good I think this is a good segue into these sort of exercise snacks now some people would consider a 10minute it work out even on the longer end of an exercise snack so exercise snacks are they can be structured or unstructured and I talked about this with Dr Martin gabala a lot he's been involved in a lot of studies involving the unstructured type of exercise snacks but the structure type of exercise snack is something where you're getting your heart rate really high at least 80% of your max heart rate right you're getting more into that that vigorous intensity Zone and it could be anywhere from 1 minute to 9 minutes perhaps 10 minutes where you're you're doing intervals right if you're doing a 10 minutes it's not like the entire 10 minutes you're in that but you're you're doing intervals but if you're doing a one minute or two minute or three minute workout then you can you can you can be in a pretty high high 85% your max heart rate zone right so some examples would be something like body weight squats or you do high knees or burpees or jumping jacks for some people lunges right something where you're you're engaging multiple muscle groups and you're also just getting your heart rate up as well so those would be the structured types of exercise snacks there's also the unstructured type where people just throughout their their daily activities that they're doing will engage in an exercise snack so these are called vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity or Vila and this is typically someone who let's say their office is on the third or fourth floor of a building and they Sprint as you know they Sprint up the stairs they go fast up the stairs maybe not technically Sprint because coach would be like no way and you're right but no way but but they're going faster they're not just walking they're they're they're going fast their heart rate's getting up and they do that multiple times a day or they walk and instead of just walking they're really briskly walking they're they're going really fast right and there's other examples of this sort of unstructured type of you know house cleaning sometimes right people are like going around and vacuuming and they're kind of flast like you know I've I've seen that being the case as well so there's a lot of types of unstructured exercise that can be done and there's a variety of benefits that are associated with this sort of these exercise snacks and if you with Dr gabala um when he came on the podcast he was talking a lot about these Vila studies where researchers give people that are in engaging in this type of unstructured exercise um an accelerometer so this is measuring their their heart rate and they're they're able to see their heart rate and also like I guess the distance as well but it's it's also measuring their heart rate and they're seeing how high their heart heart rate goes and then they've looked at a variety of outcomes all cause mortality cardiovascular related mortality cancer related mortality and um what these Publications which Dr gabala has been a part of have shown is that people that are engaging in this type of Vila exercise this unstructured exercise for one to two minutes three times a day so you're getting up to the 9 Minute a day range they have a 50% reduction in all cause mortality cardiovascular related mortality and a 40% reduction in cancer related mortality um and these are even these are benefits that are even found in people that identify as non-exercisers so in other words they don't consider themselves they don't go to the gym they're not doing tennis or dance class or whatever they they they consider themselves like not doing physical activity so um I think that that that data really kind of drives home that even these small sort of bursts of physical activity can be beneficial for health then there's also a lot of psychological benefits that Dr cabala talked about as well with the exercise snacks it obviously I think that psychologically um you know knowing that you have to just exercise for one to two minutes at a time it feels easier and so one of their I think goals with these exercise snacks and doing these actual studies was one of the barriers to exercise for some people is oh I have to exercise for 30 to 40 minutes at a time I don't really want to to do that now people should probably learn to do that but you know for people who may not comply with that it feel psychologically easier than long workout and they don't really require any special equipment if you're doing them throughout the day when you're working at a job you don't even have to change your clothes and so it just removes that psychological barrier that I have to get dressed and go to the gym and exercise for 30 minutes at a time with exercise snacks you're doing it for 1 to five minutes and then it's over and you just do it a few times per day so psychologically they feel easier these consistent small efforts also appear to enhance adherence and so when they conduct these studies they find that adherence is pretty high as compared to maybe some of the exercise training studies where people don't necessarily do all the exercise that they're prescribed especially if it's supposed to be at home and it's you know it doesn't require them coming into the lab so those are kind of two of the psychological benefits and I think those can be leveraged by again maybe non- exercisers but also people who exercise um but there are a lot of physiological benefits to the exer snacks as well I mean there are multiple Studies by Dr gabal and colag showing people improve their V2 Max just by doing these exercise snacks uh four to five times per day for a few times per week they can improve cardi metabolic health so they can improve their blood pressure reduce their fasting blood glucose improve their hba1c so measures the body composition glucose regulation all of these can improve with exercise snacks which is profound I think one thing to note I think is that these people were previously untrained so I don't think you can take somebody who's exercising at a level of maybe what you and I are doing Ronda and do exercise snacks and you're going to see these huge health benefits um especially like V2 Max but I certainly think that they can be additive so if you are exercising and you add these exercise snacks you can receive additional health benefits but you might not see a you know 50% Improvement in your V2 Max by doing exercise snacks but Studies have shown that and so um I think they can be very potent in doing that as well and showing that it doesn't require a large time investment just to see um a fitness Improvement and then I think one of the other benefits is that they uh break up sedentary time throughout the day so we know that being sedentary sitting for say 30 to 60 Minutes or longer or maybe 3 hours at a time is not good for cardi metabolic Health um so breaking up your sedentary time as much as possible is good and so physically psychologically just for the cognitive benefits too using these exercise snacks intermittently throughout the day can improve physical health by reducing SED intine and keep you more focused by reducing your kind of the cognitive maybe slump that you get after you sit for three hours or so at a time it also helps with the the like midday slumpin like where you're feeling kind of sleepy and I cannot drink caffeine afternoon like I for me it affects me I'll be I'll be up too late in the evening so I will get up and do some body weight squats um usually it's body weight squads sometimes I'll do some push-ups or something but something that just gets my heart right up and blood flowing and what do you know I feel better right I'm ready I'm more focused ready to get back to work as well um and the other thing that's really good with the exercise snacks is to to time them around meals and there's also been some some evidence on this published looking at mostly people with metabolic dysfunction like type two diabetes um metabolic syndrome and how even doing something timed around a meal and it has doesn't have to be long it can be a short again you're doing you're doing some body weight squats or burpees or jumping jacks what ever it improves glucose regulation right and so it's something that you can I I typically will do it if I'm going out to dinner um certainly when I'm on vacation and I don't eat the way I usually eat on my my my usual discipline type of diet where I was like okay we're in Italy and we're having gelato guess what I'm like next to the gelato station and I'm doing body weight it's like so I mean it's something that can be used as a tool for um like like you mentioned improving cardiometabolic health and also timing it around times when maybe you're cheating a little bit more as well sure and also you know can be used to kind of if you feel like you don't have enough time with your main training sessions during the week to kind of meet that minimum recommended levels of physical activity I think the exercise snacks again can be additive so they can be used to kind of bring your total exercise volume during the week up to meet those activity levels or sneak in maybe extra exercise if you don't find you have the time or you miss a training session or maybe there's a day where you just don't have the time to dedicate to an actual training session I'm going to do exercise snacks today and that could be a suitable alternative very good point yeah and also that psychologically feels good right like I'm I'm I'm checking that box right they do yeah I do exercise snacks during the day even though I'm training a lot just again mostly like for the psychological benefits it's all do like some kettle bell swings some push-ups some pull-ups you know they might help me build a little bit of strength but um definitely get that cognitive boost all right so I think that wraps up our section on aerobic exercise training we really covered a lot of ground here this is all covered in our how to train according to the expert's guide along with a variety of protocols more detailed information again you can find that at howt trinu guide.com we're going to move on to resistance training this is another um area very important for longevity and also an area that I've actually focused a lot more on in the last year I you know it really happened after I started having experts in this this field of muscle protein synthesis muscle muscular Health professors like Dr Stuart Phillips Dr Brad shenfeld um even experts like Dr Ling Norton as well having them on the podcast and and just hearing about all the important aspects of maintaining strength maintaining Mass with age uh really was eyee opening for me and so I I became I dedicated a lot more more effort and time into resistance training over the last year really some of the statistics that Dr Stewart had called out on the podcast were kind of scary you know first of all he was he mentioned that your Peak muscle mass occurs between the age of 20 and 30 for me was quite while ago I mean you're you're reaching that point but that's that's your Peak and then after that Peak about you start to decline on average about 8% per day decade so this age related decline in muscle mass is often referred to as sarcopenia and there's a lot of elements that can contribute to that which I will not get into but um so 8% per decade and then as you reach the age of 70 that goes up to 15% per decade and then strength actually declines even quicker than muscle mass so um strength declines annually for men about 3 to 4% per year and then for women it's about 2.5 to 3% your strength decreases per year on average now if you're engaging in resistance training strength training then you're skewing that right in a positive way you're not going to be declining as much and that's that's kind of the goal one of the goals of resistance training but it's also very important for maintaining functional Independence so your muscle mass your muscle strength um these are very important for as you're aging to have functional Independence to make sure you're lowering your risk of a fracture um a fall that that's also very important as well as when you're doing the resistance training a lot of the exercises that are engaging you know multiple muscle groups are also improving bone density as well right and that's another aspect that's um very beneficial with respect to resistance training but there's also another part of this equation that's muscle power muscle power yeah we recently covered this on one of our newsletters but researchers have kind of proposed this new term um called Power penia as like a nod to sarcopenia so power penia being the age related loss of muscle power and so muscle power as opposed to muscle strength or muscle mass is you know your ability to generate Force quickly so standing up out of a chair or you know lifting something heavy with a high velocity that's those are all kind of examples of muscle power and why that's important is because you know like strength obviously but it's important for predicting your functional Independence and essential for activities of daily living essentially uh you know especially as you get older and so one of the ways to measure it is using just like a simple sit to stand test on a chair but like how quickly can you do that so how quickly can you sit down and rise from a chair we even you know in the study that we covered that's how they assessed muscle power and showed that it was correlated with actually longevity which was pretty interesting so what's unique about muscle power is that it seems to decline earlier start declining earli and then it declines more rapidly than muscle mass or muscle strength so obviously you know how much muscle you have and your strength all of these things are kind of interrelated but muscle power seems to be a more a more sensitive indicator and maybe a more robust indicator of functional outcomes with age and so muscle power is just as important you can obviously train for it as we'll talk about how to train for hypertrophy and strength similar you know with resistance training you need to resistance train um to improve muscle power but yeah this is another idea that hasn't been as necessarily well cited as the declines in muscle mass and strength but it might actually decline um to a greater degree than either yeah it's not something that's talked about as much either right so yeah we're going to cover a lot of aspects of resistance training including training for strength and hypertrophy body composition as well but I want to start with with um when I had Dr Lane Norton on the podcast he had some really good general principles that people can follow for resistance training most people can follow these general principles and I thought they were really they were just really it was really good information that was just I think accessible and applicable for a lot of people I did too and it's because they were you know very non-technical kind of just advice on how to think about training in general we're applying this to resistance training but can it be applied to you know any types of training so he mentioned the first one was consistency the most effective training regimen is the one that you're going to follow if you have a coach who prescribes a training regimen to you that is too hard or that leads to injury or that you don't enjoy you know you're not going to be consistent and executing it and you need consistency in order to see long-term progress so his first one was consistency that's obviously important Progressive overload is the second one this is kind of a fundamental aspect of all exercise training and what Progressive overload just means is increasing your dose your load your volume your intensity however you want to Define it of exercise over time so with resistance training week after week month after month year after year you want to continually stress your muscle by lifting a heavier weight in order to cause that muscle to grow either stronger or bigger or both however you want to do that so Progressive overload a key aspect of thinking about resistance training um the third one is going to be recovery sometimes a cliche but you actually get stronger when you aren't exercising not when you are so you need to do the training but you also need to allow your body to recover and so Lane stress the importance of recovery um that includes you know both just decreasing your training or doing light intensity training or no training at all doing some light active recovery versus just laying on the couch all day that's not necessarily the ideal for way to recover and then you know focusing on sleep focusing on eating uh focusing on your protein intake but obviously just eating enough to sustain your training and to rebuild the muscle so it can get stronger and then the final one was mindset and execution focus on on execution rather than being perfect I mean you know we in this world of health and fitness dare I say biohacking but like to focus on the very specifics of things like I got to get the sets perfectly right or the weight perfectly right and obviously those can be important but what the main thing is is executing it week after week doing the training and not focusing on you are at the perfect heart rate or the perfect lactate level or lifting you know this perfect amount of weight down to the 0.1 kilogram just execute week after after week um and that will lead to consistent gains so yeah again I think all of the principles that lane provided when you know you were um talking to them during your interview were great and everybody should just keep those you know in the back of their minds when they're thinking about training in addition to you know structuring their training uh which we will talk about how to do very soon yeah it's for me you know I like I mentioned I've really engaged on this journey in the last year of really be be being committed to my resistance training and um all of the principles that that lane discussed I I am following so the consistency for me uh really involved having a coach and a group of friends that I work out with as well we do resistance training together and both of those for me help tremendously with consistency now other people might be different some people I mean I think generally speaking accountability does help with consist consistency so having a coach or a class you go to or some friends that you work out with routinely like you have this this day per week you guys are doing this workout together really helps with the with consistency um Progressive the progressive overload so working with a coach this is obvious probably why I'm I'm able to but I learned right how import it how important it was where it's like I don't just ride out the bat go and like I'm doing a b back squat with 80 pounds I'm working my way up there and in many cases you can consider that like a warm-up but you know I start with just body weight squats and then I just do the bar and then we progressively load the weight right and so that's also a really important aspect as well as recovery and we're going to talk a little about about recovery even between sets and also recovery days um what's interesting is now I've been doing so much of the strength training resistance training that my recovery days are my zone 2 runs which I never would have thought of as recovery days back when I was only just doing running uh or running in my pelaton but um but it's kind of funny how sometimes you you call that a recovery but it really you know you're you're engaging in in exercise you're just letting you're not it's not so hard on your muscles right I Al also find that doing doing runs seems to help with the soreness big time it definitely does you know increasing that blood flow so I think it's you know you basically you're doing a form of like active recovery and that's why I think if you do a strength training and you you know or a hard run even and lay around on the couch all the day the next day you just feel sore you feel stiff you don't feel good so yeah I think your zone two training sessions are kind of having a dual benefit there they're increasing your Fitness but then they're also providing some goodd recovery for from your resistance uh from your resistance training session right um and then mindset another one that's a that's a big one and for me um sometimes I just do it like especially when I'm doing strength training when I if I know what how heavy I got you know like what was my what was my one rep max so the maximum amount of weight that I could lift for just one rep what did I get to last time or what was my reps in reserve like what was I what was I at for that I don't think about those things um I'm just I'm just doing it and it really helps to not be a perfectionist because that can get that can really get in your mind and kind of stress you out I think the stress and that's another thing when I am under a lot of stress I I kind of just do something a little bit lighter you know not not quite as intense I think it can be counterproductive to train if you're overly psychological psychologically stressed I mean I when you were talking with Lane I think you talked about you know there are several studies showing like psychological stress it increases your injury risk um your training session is going not going to be compromised I mean I know exercise you know for myself and many other people can be stress relieving but if there's something majorly stressful and it's going to either compromise your training or increase your injury risk then you should probably just maybe take a recovery day or take an easy day if you had something um more more intense planned so yeah mindset is definitely important uh in structuring your training I think it's it becomes more important when you're lifting heavy like for strength training so let's talk about strength training we're training for talking about training for strength and even um bone density bone mass as well because there's a lot of overlap there and um Dr Brad shenfeld came on the podcast and and really did a was so knowledgeable in this area and talked quite a bit about strength training and how to like the best types of exercises for strength training and I think one of the take-homes here was the multi-joint exercises these are the the compound type of exercises they're engaging multiple muscle groups and Joints simultaneously really are the best type of exercise for improving strength and um ultimately they're more time efficient as well so these are exercises like squats or deadlifts or lunges of any type of variation presses overhead presses all the variety of types of presses that you can do these are the multi-joint compound types of exercises they're essentially improving function it's functional training um it's also again um going to improve bone bone density more because you're putting more force and um you're putting more of the force and stressing your your your bones more with those types of exercises and that causes the adaptation of bone remodeling so you're going to have improvements in bone mineral density and and bone mass as well so a lot of the overlap between those multi-joint exercises when it when it comes to um strength itself so I guess I should contrast that to the single joint exercises which are more like bicep curls tricep kickbacks what are some other ones you know um some single joint exercises I think yeah bicep curls tricep extensions leg extensions all those all those things anything just yeah doing a sing lingle joint kind of explains itself well when you're so so strength training in general um is mostly is mostly where you're lifting heavier and doing the lower volume right so I think Dr shenfeld mentioned um you want to when you're when you're doing strength TR you're going to get up to about an 85% or more of your one rep max which again is the maximal amount of weight you can lift for one rep and um that's the strength training and so oftentimes you're going to do fewer reps than you would if you were not strength training and you're going to you're going to require a longer recovery so Dr shonfeld mentioned between two to five minutes depending on the weight that you're lifting depending on how you feel so I know for me personally with my strength training know yesterday I I was doing um strength training with back I did back squats and I got up I got up to 85% of my one reped Mac so that's where I ended at that weight um sometimes I go to an actual where I just do one rep but I was doing 85% of my one rep max and I did five reps and I would rest about 3 minutes between that typically I rest between 2 to 3 minutes between between my sets and every person sort of different and if you're lifting heavier you're going to require more rest and it's really important and I've learned this where my cardiorespiratory system feels ready to go pretty quickly after I finish my set and I have to like wait and go wait minute like if I if I start to engage again I'm not going to get the five in because I'm going to my muscles haven't had enough time to recover yeah Dr sh and F I think that was one of the main thing he's things he stressed with strength training was there might be that temptation to um you know rest maybe one to two minutes or like really cut the rest interval just to get to get to the next set because it does you know it does make the exercise quote unquote harder because you know you're reducing your rest period and like you said if you're in a decent you know you have a decent level of aerobic fitness I think that your your heart rate will come down quickly after performing that exercise so maybe even you know psychologically cardiovascularly you might feel like oh I'm ready to do the next set but your body literally needs time to replenish the fossil creatine stores in order to produce you know the ATP to do that next set your nervous system needs time to rest and so that's why you know Dr shold recommended rest up to anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes again based on how much weight you're lifting you know if you're doing failure on each set you might need to do longer if you're doing one to three reps in reserve you might need to take a little bit shorter rest but two to two to 3 minutes is probably the minimum anywhere up to five and he really emphasized just don't rush the rest period especially when training for strength because your goal on each of those sets is to lift the maximum amount of weight that you can you don't want to it's not just about fatiguing the muscle it's you know you have to be ready to you know if you lift 95% of your one rep max on you know this set you want to be able to do that the next set need adequate recovery to be able to do that particularly if your goal is to improve strength or even muscle power as well could be um similar right you mentioned the central nervous system and that rusting being important to for that your central nervous system to recover um and I'll say that for me it's been one of the most surprising aspects of strength training in particular is how stressful it is on my central nervous system uh lift heavy is scary to me and I don't know I mean I'm I'm sure as I become stronger it won't be as scary because I'm more experienced now I've been doing strength training now for I would say it's 11 months so I started last February um so almost a year and of course I've been making my progressively getting to where I am now but um it's hard mentally on me and I find I find that it's it's physically hard too for sure but I find that I mean just that moment before I'm about to lift like do a clean or you know squat down or deadlift whatever it is I'm anxious you know and it's very stressful for me um in fact one of the very surprising benefits to strength training for me was the effect on my ability to handle stress throughout the day because I do exercise you know it's it's pretty much what I do before I I IAT e and you know take care of my family and stuff but then I exercise I'm doing my strength training before I work and I I have found that doing the hardest thing for me mentally in the day first day in the morning makes everything else a lot easier and I was very surprising for me um because you know I do a lot of stuff that's hard and um but boy but getting that barbell and and doing that clean or you know lifting that that really heavy weight um it's it's very hard so it's it's it's it's important again to let your central nervous system rest as well and that is also going back to what we were talking about with um Lane not be you if you're very if you're under a very stressed State it's probably not the time to to try to do your your personal PR on your lifting weights so he me he even mentioned that he says you know if he's has something planned for the day where he's trying to go like really maximal like either lift a failure or set like a PE off are in the squad or deadlift or something and he's like stressed and he won't do it because yeah you have to be not only he going to raise your injury risk but you know you're probably not going to be able to perform that activity because your nervous system just isn't in the state that's primed to do that I know laye has like posted videos and help post videos on social media where he's preparing for a lift and you see how psychologically amped up that he gets before doing that and like that's what you got to do because part of it yeah you need to be strong to lift away but it's like your nervous system is contributing a lot to lifting the weight during training and trying to set like a PR attempt so it's one of the aspects I think of training that kind of goes um it's less talked about but it's certainly important I think I need to get some more loud amping music on when I'm strength training because I don't have any on while I'm doing my strength training and I'm wondering if that'll help me a little bit with being a little more mentally prepared for it it might or maybe some of those um the smelling salts that the lifters use um so talking about failure that's another that's another area that both Dr shenfeld and Dr Lane Norton have discussed on the podcast in terms of do you have to go to failure to improve your muscle strength or even mass is you know for a lot a lot of I would say a long time a lot of people thought that going to failure was really the ultimate necessary thing to really get those gains and strength and in fact it seems as though at least according to a lot of the published research that have come out Dr shanfeld talked about that it's actually not necessarily it's not necessary and also may even could potentially be um problematic in some cases particularly if you're doing like a multi- joint type of exercise because you can increase your injury risk and also as you mentioned like if you're going to failure then you kind of like if you're going to do you can't really do another next set without like you're you're going to affect your performance right so what were some other things that that Dr Norton and Dr shonfeld mentioned with respect to failure it appears yeah train to failure doesn't appear to be necessary to optimize strength or hypertrophy it appears at least you know pretty equal to training with um you know a couple reps in reserve and we'll talk about what that means in a second but so yeah train to failure doesn't appear to be necessary I think if you're going to train to failure um Dr shonfeld seemed to recommend doing um machine based exercises versus on free weights because the injury risk and the risk of you know an accident happening is lower if you're on a machine you know you can't you can't drop a weight on yourself early if you're using a machine so going to failure on machine based exercises seems to be fine um and on maybe those single joint exercises too so if you're doing something like a bicep curl okay you can do a failure on that but maybe not going to failure on a back barbell back squatter or something like that um those were kind of his recommendations there so but in regards to then if you're not training to failure what should you do to kind of optimize strength um both Lane and Dr shell um use this concept of reps in reserve and so essentially what a reps in reserve means is you're lifting to the point of how many repetitions are you away from complete failure so if you are three reps in reserve that means I do one you know another repetition of exercise and oh if I did three more of these I would fail but I'm going to stop I'm going to stop with three repetitions in reserve and training with one to three reps and Reserve appears to be just as good as train to failure if your goal is to maximize strength or muscle hypertrophy so people can kind of use that to guide your training if you're doing one to three reps in reserve that is a good kind of range um to stop in terms of if you don't want to train to failure um one of the cool great recommendations I think from Lane Norton was that everybody trained a failure at least once and you know maybe every training block trained a failure at least once Because unless you train to failure similar to like what we talked about with V2 max if you never go to failure you don't really know what failure feels like so train a failure once and then you can prescribe your training based on the Reps and Reserve because you sort of know what it feels like when your body really has it doesn't have another repetition left in it so he recommend a training failure at least once um but then you know you don't need to train to failure every time you train because one yes it compromises your recovery for your next session increases your injury risk all of those things and obviously people are free to train to failure but it doesn't appear to be um optimal or necessary to uh improve your strength or hypertrophy what about um so when PE when you're engaging in a lot of compound lifts in particular deadlifts squats you your heart rate gets very elevated I mean you're you're you're pushing like high-intensity training workouts for sure and um there are some people that only strength train only do resistance training and they think because their heart is getting really elevated they're they're filling that cardiovascular aerobic exercise bin because their heart rate's getting elevated but Dr line came on the podcast and said that not that really wasn't the case definitely not the case so strength training cannot be your form of cardio I think is the too long didn't read version of that um so yes while it is true that your heart rate will increase when you do strength training if you continue to do strength training and compared to aerobic exercise training for one you don't get the same Improvement so if you do you know if you look at all the benefits of aerobic exercise training that include like improvements in endothelial function cardiovascular structure like we talked about blood pressure you don't get those same benefits from resistance exercise training so that is kind of one reason why you should do both why endurance rers should strength training why strength training people should do a lot of endurance exercise training and even LaVine said you know he consults with NFL players football players and he recommends that everybody do some aerobic exercise training and the reason for that though is interesting and it's kind of rooted in you know the mechanisms of why heart rate increases during endurance exercise versus aerobic exercise so during aerobic exercise your heart rate increases because there is an elevated metabolic demand in the muscle and therefore your you know your cardiac output needs to increase to deliver more blood flow to the muscles and that means your heart rate and your stroke volume both increase during strength training though the drive for the increase in heart rate is mainly from the autonomic nervous system so it's a central driven by Central command so if you think about you know if you just are here and Dr LaVine used the example where you're just clenching your fist as hard as possible or like grasping something maybe well your heart rate is going to increase but that's just due to a drive from your central nervous system um so versus a metabolic demand increasing in the muscle or like the drive for increased blood flow during aerobic exercise so your hyid increases for different reasons during strength training compared to aerobic exercise and you don't get the cardiac ad adaptations from strength training that you do from aerobic exercise so they're not the same they're not comparable yes heart rate increases during strength training but it is not a form of quote unquote cardio or endurance aerobic exercise it's it's it was fascinating to me to hear um Dr Line's explanation of that and for that basically why your heart rate elevates so much when you're doing a strength training and especially given my anecdote right where I was just talking about how surprised I was was how much my central nervous system was involved in strength training um I wonder if there's some connection there as well I just had you know I had no idea that it was like There's so it's it's a it's mentally taxing on on my brain strength training is it's very much um uses a lot of my my my central nervous system is very active I guess is the the way to put it um but let's shift gears and talk a little bit about hypertrophy training right so this is there's a lot of overlap with strength training here and Dr shonfeld on the podcast was talking about know hypertrophy training so these are this is the typ type of training that people are interested in with the goal of increasing their muscle size their muscle mass right hypertrophy muscle hypertrophy and um essentially the the the biggest difference that he was mentioning is is the weight right so you're not you're not lifting as heavy and you're increasing the volume right so you're lifting lighter and you're increasing the volume so typically I mentioned with strength training people are are are getting up to about 85% of their one rep max with hypertrophy training it's more like 60 to 80% of your one rep max and so you're doing more reps rather than doing like you know up to five Reps for what you be doing with strength training you're doing like six to 10 or 12 reps and um so this is this is a I would say like one of the biggest like general principles that Dr shanfeld talked about on the podcast with respect to training for muscle Hy hypertrophy resting is also a little bit lower like you don't have it's not it's shorter you don't have to rest quite as long because it's not you're not lifting as heavy so you're resting for one to maybe two minutes between your sets versus 2 to five minutes so that's also um seems like a big difference and then when it comes to like exercise selection uh Dr shonfeld mentioned I mean it really depends on what you're interested in right so you're always it seems best to do these multi-joint exercises right so you're doing deadlifts you're doing squats you're doing presses rows because not only are you g getting gains in muscle hypertrophy strength you're also getting functional you know you're improving your functional your function your muscular function and power a lot of power is in things like squats or um lunges or things that are causing you to use mus muscular power although you can get some of that with bicep curls as well but people are some some guys are interested in their bigger biceps and so doing focusing on bicep curls viously would be something that they'd be interested in for myself I do a lot of compound exercises with you know some bicep curls and tricep kickbacks and stuff as well but the majority of my training is definitely compound exercises yeah I think with regard to order and exercise selection I mean you would think somebody like Dr Brad shenold would be very hyperfocused on you need to pick the perfect order and the perfect exercise to optimize hypertrophy and you know him being an experienced lifter and bodybuilder physique competitor himself but he really seemed unconcerned with it and you know when he was really talking about it it goes I think this goes back to focusing on execution rather than Perfection he just says the muscles that you want to get bigger train those first and then train the muscles that you aren't as concerned about growing afterwards and same thing with exercise selection there are lots of exercises that could Target the muscles that you might want to grow bigger so whether you choose a squad or a deadlift or a leg extension you know it might not matter just make sure to if you want your legs to grow then do leg EX sizes and make sure you're getting the quality sets and Reps and time under tension for those muscle groups and really don't just get focused on the kind of nuances maybe obviously there are people who are interested in that but when thinking about what exercises to do what order to do them in seem pretty straightforward just focus on what you want to get larger um do those exercises first and um then kind of everything then comes after yeah it's pretty straightforward I like that you know like it's it's not it's not a very complicated concept to understand there are lots of different types of sizes and people can choose the ones that they enjoy the most and that are going to obviously you know help them grow but also reduce their injury risk using machines versus free weights um he didn't seem to be concerned with that either and even cited some meta analyses showing you know can you is uh hypertrophy better with machines or free weights seem to be equal so I think that goes to show that you can do there are multiple paths to hypertrophy and you can choose uh whether you prefer to do freat or machines doesn't seem to matter much I think the one question I wish I'd asked him back then um when I wasn't engaged in so much of of resistance training was yes hypertrophy but you know functional Independence right like like reducing fall risk being able to get in and out of a chair I wonder how much of that you're going to get with machines versus doing Olympic lifting or like a squat um deadlifts things like that with a barbell um and I don't know I think I maybe talked a little bit about this with Lane and I don't I think I he he said you might get a little bit more bang for your buck with with using like a barbell or doing doing um you know a squat with a barbell versus like a is it a hack squat but at the end of the day if you are increasing your muscle strength in your muscle mass you're definitely going to be reducing your your fall risk as well so yeah exactly I think it makes a little bit of sense if you really are focused on the quote unquote functional training to do you know maybe more stuff with free weights that moving natural move mov ments but like you said if you're getting stronger if it's on even if it's on a machine then you're getting stronger and that's going to help you within functional Independence and activities yeah you need to do what you like what you're going to be consistent with I mean that's like Paramount right the most important thing um training for body composition so Dr shenfeld Dr Lang Norton um both both of them talked quite a bit about training for body composition on a podcast and so a lot of people are interested in losing fat and simultaneously gaining muscle so body recomposition and Dr shenfeld talked about and this is a common thing with weight loss in general so when people are on a weight loss diet which most of the time involves caloric restriction to some degree they end up losing some muscle mass right it's not just fat that's being lost and he cited a study that even up to 30% of the weight that's lost can come from muscle or lean body mass so I think that's important to consider um because if you're not engaging in some for form of resistance training then you are at a higher risk for losing muscle even though you may may be losing fat and so um I think there's a variety of take-homes here um that were talked about on the podcast in terms of like the best what sort of template to follow with respect to body recomposition so obviously engaging in resistance training number one right yeah engaging in resistance training yeah if you're if you're losing weight um and you don't resistance train you're going to lose lean body mass so engaging in resistance train ideally three times per week you know if your goal is body recomposition which means you know you either want to maintain your lean mass or increase it probably um you need to engage in resistance training three times for we probably lift pretty heavy probably with a focus on more hypertrophy Based training versus strength strength based training so that was obviously their one recommendation and it was above all else it's like resistance training so second of all though is if you do want to lose a little bit of fat you'll probably will have to eat in a caloric deficit and you don't want it to be too drastic though because I think similar to not engaging and resistance training if you drastically cut calories too much while you're trying for you know to attain body recomposition you risk uh losing more lean mass so you want kind of a more conservative weight loss approach maybe a 1 to 2 lounds a week and to do that Dr shenfeld recommended eating 10 to 20% below your maintenance calories um that was kind of his recommendation there maybe you're increasing your exercise more so your deficit might be a little a little bit less but it might not cause you to actually you need to eat less because you're exercising more so the 10 to 20% kind of reduction in calories and then protein intake was a super large focus of all of their recommendations they emphasized eating you know anywhere from 2.2 G per kilogram of body weight per day which would be 1 G per pound or even more you know if your goal is to gain muscle and that is key because eating protein a higher protein diet tends to have a few benefits so not only the lean mass maintenance benefits that come with protein but it also has a thermogenic effect so protein you know when you eat a higher protein diet it kind of causes your body to increase its caloric burn for Digestive purposes um which may lead to a slightly greater caloric deficit um and then satiety as well Lane talked a lot of bit about this eating higher protein diet may help with satiety to help you kind of eat less throughout the day again some people don't have the goal of weight loss so that might not be a concern but if you are if you're aiming for body recomposition and are aiming for that slight caloric deficit all of those things tend to um help improve that so those were kind of some of their core recommendations for body recomposition and I think the key takeaway was that it is possible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time it's going to depend on your Baseline body composition you know if you're already 10% body fat and and uh you know it might be a little bit harder to do body recom but um if you have some weight to lose or NE resistance training those can certainly be accomplished it doesn't require doing one you know losing a lot of weight and then building up a lot of muscle um you could do both at the same time I think the other thing that lane had mentioned is that you know most people don't even really know how many calories they're eating in a day yeah which is so true you know so you you kind of have to be able to track that at least for a couple of days and get an average to know how much to cut out right and then again if you if you want to like if you're going to increase the amount of protein you know making sure it's not really fatty protein either right like this is where something like a protein um powder comes in it's very handy because you can increase that protein without a lot of calories right as well right sleep too was one of the things Lane also mentioned he cited a study showing that if you don't get enough sleep it actually will hamper your gains in lean mass loss and it can make a kind of body fat loss a little bit more stubborn so harder so if you're not sleeping enough while you're training you're not going to gain as much Lee Mass as you could and you're not going to lose as much fat as you could so focusing on that recovery aspect that aspect of sleep Stress Management all of those things um would be important as well and not just for body recomposition but you know that's was one of the key principles yeah sleep is important for brain health your immune system I mean just cardiovascular health everything hopefully people are aware of that by now if they're not I think think uh another aspect that a lot of people are interested and and and certainly um myself is time efficient protocols for resistance training and this is certainly like we were talking about time efficient protocols for aerobic exercise and high-intensity interval training be being at you know at the top of the list there Dr shenfeld has actually published a couple of studies on time efficiency and how to be efficient with your resistance training workout he talked about it on the podcast I really liked a a few of the principles that he had covered going back again to multi-joint exercises they are the most time efficient you are going to be training multiple muscle groups at once so squats deadlifts lunges rows presses those are really uh great types of exercises to do if you are pressed for time and then he also talked about using super sets and drop sets and so this is something I also o use in my workouts super sets are typically when you are engaging backto back different exercises that are working different muscle groups without any rest and so you're doing back toback on so for example you're doing bicep curls and then you you know after your bicep curls you go straight into tricep kickbacks then you go into lateral raises or frontal raises then you go back then you you know hammer curls and then you go back to the some sort of tricep K and you're doing them like back to back right like so those are the sets and you really get fatigued and it is a very time efficient way you can get a really good workout in 10 minutes doing 10 minutes non-stop just switching switching from you know muscle group to muscle group doing these sort of super sets as well and then drop sets is another type of training that involves basically I do I do a lot of drop sets on the on the tail end of my strength training so it involves like reducing the load and then performing another set you increase the volume you you reduce the load and increase the volume and then you perform another set back to back so let's say you're you did a squat workout strength training squat workout you you then drop the weight way down you're you're at like 60% of your one rep max and then you do 10 of those rest for a minute and then 10 again um so that would be an example of drop sets and that's also a very um and there's a lot of different ways you can do drop sets I just talked about the way I do it Dr sha and Feld talked about a variety of other ways to do it we also cover that in the guide as well um but I do think that's another really time efficient way to to involve engage in resistance training um and then you can com combine you know a lot of different types of training right so you can do your strength training and then do some hypertrophy training within that within that same exercise session uh you can avoid a lot of warming up in fact the warmup rather than like stretching for like doing all these like stretches where you're like I don't know is this really that important maybe you can stretch for like 3 minutes 4 minutes or whatever or less and then you're your your warming up is actually just like progressively loading right so you're you're like I said you do body weight squats or you would do your squat with the barbell and then you get to your weight right like like the much more productive way to warm up because you're actually warming up your muscles yeah just just do the exercise that you're going to perform but either unweighted or you know with a very lightweight if you're going to do a bench press your warmup can just be just doing the bar for 15 20 20 reps or whatever um and yeah in fact that ex stretching as compared to Dynamic stretching actually appears to have no performance benefit if anything is detrimental so standing there and doing you know your little arm exercises that's actually hurting your performance so just like unweight the bar and do some reps if you're mimicking the exercise you're going to do it's a dynamic warmup that appears to be much better for sure was there any other time efficient protocols that were important that yeah I think uh Dr shenfeld did cite a study on these sort of micro resistance training workouts where people performed 15 minutes of resistance training 6 to eight times per week versus say doing the same resistance training same volume same exercises three to four times a week for say you know 30 to 40 minutes they achieve the same level of strength and hypertrophy I can't remember what was exactly measured in that study but so you kind of do these micro workouts so maybe you have you have a small window to exercise every single day of the week not much time but you could just do 15 minutes of resistance exercise okay well delegate out your different kind of exercises maybe do just bench press one day and leg extension one day and you know every day do something um it seems you maybe that's not the most efficient but some people if that fits into your schedule it seems to produce kind of a similar level of of strength and gains um to three or four like longer duration sessions so that could be another time efficient way and you could also do cardio or cardio and strength training or high-intensity interval training on the same day so you know again you might be even more warmed up if you do a 60-minute Zone 2 session and then go to the gym and get your strength training in or do your Norwegian 4X for and do some strength training afterwards I think depending on your goal might determine the order of those so if you really are focused on aerobic training and then strength training a second so someone like me I'm going to do my long run and then I'm going to do strength training versus the other way around because that strength training is going to get in the way of the quality of my run if I do it beforehand um whereas somebody who's strength focused might want to do strength training and then end with cardio because their goal is strength not the endurance exercise session so I think that should probably determin your order but doing those on the same day could be time efficient as for the whole like interference effect people sometimes get worried about like oh is uh doing aerobic exercise on the strength training gig and to compromise my gains due to the molecular interference of the different signals that govern like endurance adaptations and strength that whole thing has been kind of dismissed there's not any really such thing it only occurs if you're obviously compromising the quality of your sessions by doing them both on the same day but um yeah and combining cardio and strength this can definitely be um compatible in a way that be time efficient with your exercise I think if anything Dr shenfeld talked about there might even be a benefit you're combining because the increased blood flow to muscle you're getting more nutrients there you're getting more oxygen um so it actually improves recovery time it decreases decreases the amount of time you need to recover so you might even get some benefits there as well so the micro sets is it's funny that I forgot that one because my husband does so he does a lot of that uh type of resistance training workout he does a lot of micro sets throughout the week and it really does depend on someone's schedule and what what suits them best um as well but it's nice to have all these options and I think this kind of is a good segue into like the minimum amount of time required in quotes to basically get some strength and hypertrophy benefits and I think Dr shonfield talked a little bit about this as well yeah two times per week 30 minutes at a time um seems to be compatible with maintaining or even building strength he cited multiple studies and even recently they have published a couple showing that just engaging in resistance training two times per week 30 minutes that seems to be probably the bare minimum if you want to maintain or increase your muscle strength and then obviously you can work out from there based on kind of what your goals are but um I think three times per week is probably optimal and then you know really if you're someone wanting to build a lot of strength or your performance oriented athlete doing four to five days per week but um yeah I think it's great to hear you know especially for someone like me who doesn't do a ton of strength training and needs to do more that you can really do a lot in two sessions per week but obviously that means during those two sessions if you're just going to do them don't be on your phone a ton of the time you probably want to do super sets you probably want to do some drop sets to kind of make the most of that but two two times per week 30 minutes at a time seems to be enough so if people are really concerned with that time efficiency um you can accomplish a lot in that and then you also mentioned the the micro doing as can so it doesn't necessarily have to be two 30 minute sessions you can do that the more sessions of like 10 or 15 minutes sessions that are you're doing multiple times as long as the total time is the same yes exactly so again um all of this is in our how to train guide you can find all these protocols and information um download that copy how trinu guide.com we're going to move on to the last section that is covered in our guide and this really sort of supplemental to the exercise protocols we're going to cover a lot of supplemental protocols like deliberate heat exposure um for example using a sauna some nutrition protein intake and then also some supplements like omega-3 fatty acids and creatine um so starting with deliberate heat exposure drawing from um some of the leading experts in the this area of sonor research um Dr Yari linan being one of the world's experts on how the sauna is affecting cardiovascular health I've had him on the podcast many years ago and he has published just numerous studies on how this sauna affects cardiorespiratory Fitness how it's affecting blood pressure cardiac compliance arterial compliance just a lot of different cardiovascular health parameters and his research has shown in a couple different ways so there's been observational data showing people that exercise and use the sauna have a lower all cause mortality than people that exercise and don't use the sauna but he's also done some Interventional studies where he's taken two groups of people and put them on an exercise protocol aerobic exercise on a stationary bike and then only half of that group then went into a sauna after the exercise and he measured cardiio respiratory Fitness and found that people that use the sauna in addition to aerobic exercise improve their card cardiorespiratory Fitness even more than people that uh only did the exercise and there were other cardiometabolic parameters that were also improved cholesterol was improved blood pressure was improved more as well so it seems as though adding the sauna in addition to an exercise routine is another way to improve some cardi metabolic end points and also cardiorespiratory Fitness there's also some endurance benefits as well um something that i' I've talked about before on the podcast fact you Brady use the sauna in your exercise uh protocol I do and you know a lot of that has to do with some of the research that you've talked about and that um Dr linin has published so I informed kind of my strategy based on this not only you know the studies show that you can improve your V2 Max you know additionally by using the sauna but it also improves your exercise performance not only in the heat you know which kind of makes sense you're using the sauna you're becoming more heat acclimated but it also improves your performance just in normal weather or like not hot weather I guess as you would call it so I integrate that in my training not only just do I like the sauna for the cardiovascular benefits and the Brain benefits you know after reading these studies kind of hearing you talk about it I think you know it makes sense to use it so about three times per week two to three times per week I'll try to get into the sauna immediately or within 5 to 10 minutes of finishing one of my runs so I'll you know do my run from the gym I don't have a sauna at home but I have one at the gym that I use and I'll finish my run I'll get right into the sauna for another 20 to 30 minutes that seems to be the protocols used in many of the studies they do typically a 20 minute sauna bath afterwards so I'll get right in there try try to keep it so that my heart rate is like staying a little bit elevated from the end of the run into the sauna so I think of it as a way to sort of extend that cardio session a little bit um that endurance training session because when you're in the sauna you know my the heart rate might not be as high as it was when I was running 30 40 50 beats per minute but it'll be 110 maybe at the at the end of the sauna so um I use that as a strategy again one CU it feels good and I just like it but two to gain maybe some additional benefits uh to that endurance exercise training session I did the same um I I I get in the sauna um after both aerobic exercise training as well as doing my strength training resistance training exercise you know and a lot of the the data that Dr uh Lin has published has been observational data looking at people that are routinely using the sauna and the effects of that on cardiovas ular related mortality all cause mortality and it seems as though like the minimum effective dose to get some benefits is really two times a week of son use if you get up to four times a week then you're really getting maximal benefits of four to seven times a week people are getting reductions up to 50% in their cardiovascular related mortality 40% related to reductions in their all cause mortality and this sauna doesn't have to be so hot I mean this isn't like the 200 something degree temperatures that you some often hear people site that they're using um in fact I think that the a little bit too hot I mean these people are using 100 on average 175° fhe often there is a little bit of a humidity you know 30 up to 30% humidity as well but they're in there for about 20 minutes and so um I find it it is nice to get in get into the sauna after a workout and extend that sort of aerobic exercise mimicking capacity a little bit further another area that using deliberate heat exposure could be beneficial is combining it with resistance training or even using it during perhaps an injury when you're not able to work out and I would say a lot of this evidence is preliminary and more needs to be done but going off the preliminary evidence and just knowing that there's benefits for cardiovascular health as well why wouldn't you um there has been at least some preliminary evidence in one small study that people that gotten this on after the resistant train protocol increased signaling molecules that are involved andol signaling molecules that involved in muscle hypertrophy there's also been another trial in humans that underwent I mean it was experiments that are done where they're they mobilize a muscle for a period of time and they look at atrophy after that right disuse atrophy is is what it's it's called and it seems as the um heat exposure at least at the local level in this in this regard for this study people that had the heat exposure were about almost 40% less likely to to lose their they lost 40% less of of their muscle mass um which is quite a bit so a lot of potential reasons there heat chock proteins have been shown to be activated a lot of disuse um atrophy studies done in in animal models with heat exposure and then you're getting a variety of endocrine effects as well growth hormone is elevated when you're getting the sauna and that can have aspects for Recovery as well so there's a lot of reasons to to combine deliberate heat exposure with also resistance training workout and I would say that is not the case for deliberate cold exposure yeah and in fact I think a lot of the evidence would suggest the opposite lately where getting in cold immediately after resistance exercise in particular seems to blunt some of the hypertropic benef benefits um there's a lot of press about those studies now where it's like avoid the cold after your resistance training workout so yeah it makes sense to really embrace the heat not only for recovery but for the anabolic potential um the endurance exercise benefits I think you know the the anabolic potential is interesting because you know I don't know if again if there are any studies out there showing greater hypertrophy after using heat but like you said with the heat shock protein all the mechanisms kind of make sense and so um there was recently like a review paper that just came out that we'll need to probably read and maybe write about on that because I think it's heat is becoming kind of embraced and yeah again the cold maybe not something to do around your resistance exercise sessions right and and Dr Luke Van Lon who was a a guest on the podcast as well had done some he has done some research on that in fact showed that doing doing deliberate cold exposure like a cold bath um immediately after resistance training workout does blunt hypertrophy I mean so that's yeah muscle muscle protein synthesis all goes down if you get in the cold ride afterwards so something to avoid probably um kind of going back struggling back to the disused atrophy you know that's something that's obviously very relevant for people in if they're injured or perhaps they're traveling somewhere and they don't have the same they're not they're working their muscles out the same that they usually do and so there's a there's a there's a case to to be made you know where it's like okay well I'm not going to be engaging my muscles as much and you're kind of like you don't use it you lose it right um and this is where a supplement that I'm I'm I'm quite fond of for a variety of reasons um omega-3 fatty acids seem to be beneficial so Dr Chris mcglory came on the podcast and talked about some of his research using high dose omega-3 so was about five grams a day which is um a little bit higher than what is prescribed for some people for different cardi metabolic reasons was able to prevent or cut disuse atrophy almost by 50% in in this case it was in in women so omega-3 fatty acids might be another um sort of tool for Recovery right um use use during perhaps illness injury I think they should be used every day there's a lot of benefits cardio cardiovascular benefits as well anti-inflammatory benefits it's again going down to the recovery and omega-3 fatty acids being beneficial for inflammation forh for some someone like yourself it might might be even more useful right where you're really running you're running what 20 20 hours a week almost there's a lot of stress uh on your muscles and a lot of inflam inflammatory cyto kindes and molecules that are generated during uh that kind of training and the heart too I think it was maybe something that you had posted but I think there was a study showing omega-3 fatty acids could prevent some of the um cardiac injury biomarkers after endurance running or after downhill running so yeah I look at some of those studies and I mean I do take omega-3 myself I think I take uh two grams per day so maybe I need to up my dose to three to five grams per day based on some of this uh research here but yeah like cardiac stuff too you know I think um makes sense to take that for Recovery purposes for sure yeah I think it was a three grams a day and it decreased the tropinin levels that that are which is a marker of you know cardiac stress um Okay so we we're we're also going to kind of transition to some of the nutritional aspects of this guide starting with protein which is probably I guess the most important um when it comes to uh muscle mass muscle hypertrophy um any anything and all things muscle Dr Stuart Phillips was on the podcast Dr Brad shonfeld talked quite a bit about protein intake Dr Luke vanloon Dr Lang Norton quite a few experts have been on talking about the importance of protein intake how the RDA for protein which is 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight um does not appear to be enough for maintaining muscle mass particularly if you are engaging in resistance training in fact St Phillips was a author on a a study that was a metaanalysis of multiple randomized control trials that found that people that on average were taking in about 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram body weight and were engaged in a in a you know resistance training protocol if they up that to about 1.6 gam per kilogram body they had a 27% increase in muscle mass and a 10% increase in muscle strength compared to people that were resistance training but only doing the 1.2 grams per kilogram body weight so of protein intake so I think that's a pretty easy lever we can pull in terms of increasing our muscle mass and strength with not as much effort right it takes a lot of effort to lift weights but to increase your protein intake isn't quite as much effort yeah but I think something too note there too is that while they all while you know steu Phillips and Brad shenfeld and you know basically all the experts who we put evidence for into this guide they recommended these protein intakes quoted that it was very important but all of them really emphasize that nothing kind of compares to the resistance training so yeah protein intake is important but if you're not resistance training you're kind of really missing out on that aspect so I think protein intake can be seen as kind of necessary but not sufficient for muscle growth you know you can't just eat more protein and get bigger you know you got to do the training but so but it is uh certainly important and I think total daily protein intake was one of the things that stood out as that is the most important factor when it comes to if people have questions about how much or when do I eat it or how much or how do I distribute it total daily protein intake that seems to be the most important thing so just making sure you're getting enough during the day but two things that you know we're also talked about were regarding protein dist distribution so and that refers to you know timing and distribution I guess is how we could phrase it so when to eat your protein particularly maybe with regards to exercise and then how to distribute it throughout the day regarding timing there's this concept known as the anabolic window and this was kind of an earlier idea where it was once thought that you know after you ended your resistance training session you need to consume protein immediately afterwards otherwise you would sacrifice your gain so if you didn't eat protein within 30 minutes after finishing resistance training then you were leaving gains on the table you weren't going to grow as strong you weren't going to grow as big Dr BR shenell I really liked what he said about that he refers to it more as an anabolic barn door so it's just a lot larger than you know the 30 minutes that was kind of once thought you know you you don't need to eat immediately after you train now that's not to say that you can't I mean in fact I think if you have the opportunity you you should it makes sense to eat as quickly after your exercise session as possible because you're your most muscles are more um sensitive to amino acids at that point so yes eat a meal have some protein immediately after resistance training if you can if you have to wait 2 to three hours it's probably you're still going to be okay in fact there was just a recent study that came out that showed delaying protein intake versus immediately after they both lead to similar gains and hypertrophy and strength so you know if as long as you're getting enough throughout the day you don't need to be that concerned with the timing it right around exercise so that seemed to be one of the takeaways and people you know may not need to be as stressed about that when they're thinking about their protein timing and then protein distribution was another thing that Luke vanloon discussed a lot in terms of what is optimal so is it optimal you know if you want to eat two meals per day with two very large doses of protein is that worse or better than consuming three to four evenly spaced meals throughout the day um based on you know muscle protein synthesis data that Luke vanloon um cited it seems to be optimal to eat 3 to four protein containing meal containing you know 25 to 30 gram or more throughout the day evenly spaced um that's for optimizing muscle protein synthesis does it appear to be better for muscle gain maybe not but it in theory kind of would produce greater gains due to the greater muscle protein synthesis response but um he also said that you know if you're just a two meal per day person or even a one meal per day person you know if you want to eat 100 grams of protein at once that could be digested absorbed used for muscle protein synthesis they published a kind of popular study recently showing that but it certainly doesn't seem to be ideal so if regarding protein distribution evenly distributed protein during the day appears to be optimal secondary obviously to to getting enough protein throughout the day yeah it this this all this information and more I recently covered in an episode on the science of protein um for those of you that haven't checked it out make sure you check it out if you're interested in protein and the effects of protein on Aging muscle mass strength all all things considered definitely check that out I I kind of want to move lastly to the the last sort of aspect in our in the training guide and that has to do with creatine supplementation and Dr Stuart Phillips and also Dr L Norton both mentioned creatine as one of their top tier supplements that they take uh lots and lots of evidence on safety and efficacy um I take it you take it maybe you can talk a little bit about you know just summarize Brey for people what are some of the benefits of creatine supplementation how people should start dose you know some of the best practices I think cine I feel like it's probably like one of the most popular supplements these days and everybody is taking it or if they're not they probably should be due to the the evidence that's coming out so yeah creatine um it you know it's something that we get from the diet but that you can supplement with it to get more regarding you know how much you should take I think that currently the recommendations and you know based on what um Dr Stu Phillips and Le Norton and others said taking 5 to 10 gram per day appears to be the optimal dose if you're a bit larger you could maybe you know take 10 to 15 but even five grams per day after a while will probably saturate your muscle creatine stores especially if you're consuming a lot of meat which does contain creatine too so you're getting some from your diet and supplementing so in regards to how to dose uh there was once a thought that you had to do this loading dose when you started supplementing so you take 20 gram per day for a week and then you go down to a maintenance dose of$ 10 grams per day indefinitely um that the loading dose isn't necessarily recommended anymore um it's pretty much just start taking 5 to 10 grams per day tomorrow and never stop it um so the loading dust doesn't appear to be optimal unless for some reason you need to get your muscle creatine stores up you know in the next few days then you need to take a loading dose but for most people that doesn't appear to be important so it's pretty easy supplement to take it doesn't matter what time of day you take it because it doesn't have the acute benefits so just find the time during the day when it works and makes sense to take it Take 5 to 10 gram and just continue to take it it seems to have benefits for muscle performance and building strength obviously that's kind of what where the main benefits are probably most evidenced and it was thought of as being like this bodybuilding strength supplement which it obviously is so it allows you to train harder which then allows you to build more strength and muscle mass but I think there's a lot of evidence coming out that it might be good for older adults to take for muscle strength as well for endurance athletes it probably makes sense for them to take it um and then there's a lot of stuff coming out about creatine in the brain for you know during sleep deprivation um so just a lot of evidence that it's good to take there appear to be very few side effects it's very safe and all of the myths I think Stu was talking about some of the myths uh regarding hair loss or Kidney Health and L even said mentioned some of those and none of those really appear to be valid um creatine is well studied and so um it's something that most people can can benefit from and it's again pretty pretty simple to take it's just bite creatine monohydrate Take 5 to 10 grams per day and um just continue to take it after about a month or so that's kind of when the benefits might start to appear because that's when your muscle stores are are saturated I take about five grams a day yeah as do I I take I take five grams per day I've been experimenting with taking 10 grams per day on the weekend for no reason I I run longer on those days so I just I'm like oh maybe for Recovery purposes just take 10 gram it's just something I'm trying but yeah usually I'm 5 grams per day I thought about experimenting with 10 gamly just is there I mean it's hard to sometimes notice differences subtle differences like that especially when you're taking so many other things and doing so many other things right but um I've I've also thought about kind of increasing the dose just to see like oh can I lift a little bit heavier is it is it going to affect affect myh strength as well yeah it might be worth uh it might be worth trying out I think one more thing about creatine um to Noti is that like I think people are concerned steu Phillips mentioned he doesn't take it all the time and that if he goes on vacation he might just like not take it because it's not important it does appear that after you stop taking it your stores will still stay saturated for about like one to two weeks so like if you go on vacation or and forget your Crea team then just like eat more steak maybe on vacation and supplement when you come back yeah that's good to know yeah I've definitely uh not taken it on uh vacations before especially because my my container is like this big of it TSA also might think it's like they might get a little bit skeptical due to how it looks I know and know I often wonder that sometimes when I'm quing like powders and stuff I'm like oh is this going to get my bag flat um that is to say all of this wonderful information very useful practical information protocols everything can be found in the How to Train according to the expert's guide um you can pause now download that at how to trinu guide.com wonderful uh training guide that uh Brady Brady was a big part and working on thank you so much Brady for uh sitting down first of all working on the guide and for sitting down with me to discuss it um I do want to uh plug your your book you have VO2 max Essentials you also have a substack page you can tell people about and you're very active on Twitter X um I follow you there you post a lot of really great stuff on exercise uh physiology so maybe you can tell people where to to follow you up on on those um platforms yeah thanks Ronda um so view to Max Essentials is just the book um that I self-published you can get it on Amazon and substack I write kind of like a Weekly Newsletter based on you know studies in health exercise nutrition kind of whatever I find interesting that week it's uh physiologically speaking I kind of put somewhat of a difficult name but people should be able to find that and then on X I am just uh bore Homer h o m e r so people can find me on there it's where I'm most active and uh posting a lot about you know topics similar to what we talked about today awesome all right well thank you so much Brady yeah thanks R this is great thanks so much for listening to today's episode nearly 80% of you watching right now are not subscribed in my YouTube videos I emphasize excellence and as a result I don't release episodes all that often so please subscribe and click the Bell to get notified when we release a new episode I'll see you next time