Aerobic Capacity and Metabolic Health

Now, if we look at kind of physiological prerequisites for hypertrophy outside of the gym, or like I'd say, someone comes to you and says, Luke, I want to make the most of my body. One of the things that you're kind of saying, hey, go pay attention to this. So how much attention are you giving to recovery and what are you using as your modalities? How much are you paying attention to nutrition? What else is playing into it? How much is aerobic capacity important to you? How much is body fat and hormones important to you? Yeah I think that what you just said the aerobic stuff it funny because when we started talking about doing more aerobic conditioning the industry was going one way I was going the other That because of Charles I mean Charles was the reason that I went that way You but i think not to speak bad but i think that was his you know he was very influential and everybody followed i think too like people people misunderstood what he was saying right because they weren't putting in the context he trained high level olympic athletes and all almost all of them were shot put you know this because they were mainly strength stuff weightlifters and that type of thing. And so when you look at now looking at towards bodybuilding and everybody's going, well, we're going to move away from, you don't need aerobics to get lean. You're right. You don't, but it makes the process a hell of a lot easier. Yeah. And it makes muscle growth a lot easier too. And it allows you to eat a lot more food and oxidize food at a better rate. So yeah, it was funny because I started, I started making Poliquin coaches do aerobics because when I left group, I had all these coaches that came to me and this is how I figured out all the metric stuff. I was looking at these guys, eight pack abs, veins in their forearm or veins in their elbows and fingers, right? They look fantastic. Their hair was falling out. Their thyroid was dysfunctional. Their testosterone was low. They had all these issues. They couldn't sleep. They were convinced they couldn't have a carbohydrate without getting fat. They had all these issues, pre-diabetic. It was nuts, but they looked phenomenal. And so I started taking all these metrics and looking into it. I'd have guys with a resting heart rate of 85 to 95. Their HRV would be like 48. Their blood pressure would be 150 to 200 over 100. As I started thinking about this, what's the one thing they're not doing? They're not doing aerobic conditioning. So I started making them do that. The metrics all got better and they all started growing. And that was the first thing they started telling me is my lifts are going up and I've put on like three kilos of size in the last six weeks. I'm getting leaner. And I'm getting leaner. I don't understand it. And I can eat five or 600 more calories. So then it's okay. Let's create a system around this stuff. So I think a lot of people don't, they just jump into this stuff. They just want to put on size. They don't think about the fact that the healthier you are, the better you're going to recover, the more muscle you're going to put on and the more strength you're going to get faster. I tend to use the soundbite of I take an autonomic view of performance, meaning what is the state of the autonomic nervous system and what can I do to intervene and make it ultimately more adaptable, right? And it's a soundbite. It's an overgeneralization, but it's a good perspective for people to start going, well, what is the autonomic nervous system doing? So if I'm in a state of high sympathetic arousal, I'm not building muscles, so I need some parasympathetic interventions. And aerobic fitness ultimately is a very good lever, not maybe the best lever, but certainly a very important lever in parasympathetic stimuli. It's huge. You've got a parasympathetic stimulus. There is something I got from Stuart McGill. There's an analgesic effect from it. How many bodybuilders do you know with low back issues and they're in chronic lower back pain? A lot, but I think that's poor diaphragm function from what I can see. I don't know if Stuart McGill talks about that, but I find that- Is it a chicken or egg thing? Is the diaphragm dysfunctional because you're overly stressed? Is the diaphragm dysfunctional because your psoas and your QLs are jacked up? And they're eating so much food. The stomach's always full and the diaphragm can't expand down to the cavity, right? That's it. So you've got, I mean, there's a lot of different factors. Breathing's a big deal right now too. Everybody's getting the breathing. But it's like, okay, guys, hold on. Let's not do the typical industry thing and go too far that direction. There's other factors to breathing as well. You know, you do the PRI stuff. You can think about that, but you also start thinking about hip stability. Did the diaphragm, did you lose hip stability because of the diaphragm or did you lose the diaphragm because of the hip stability issues? So you kind of have to take a multifactorial approach. But one of the things I got from Stuart McGill was doing more aerobic activity has an energistic effect and helps eliminate lower back pain. So, I mean, think about all the times you've been on D-ball or anadrol and you do two sets of squats and you have to sit down because your lower back is so pumped up. you can't stand up straight. So, you know, bodybuilders need to start thinking about that type of stuff too. And understanding that aerobics are not the, uh, aerobics are not a negative thing and that walking. Yeah. That's the most aerobic thing you can do, but that's rate limiting. You don't have, you don't have time to walk four hours a day, but you can do an hour cardio a day and get kind of the same effect, um, and also get more adaptations for the aerobic system. But then you also have to know when do I need to pull that out because you don't need to do endless amounts of calorie forever. You just need to do them until you get the adaptation you're looking for. Then you pull that stuff down and you don't really need it unless you're using it as a caloric funnel at this point or unless you see your metrics go haywire. Yeah. And then when you pull it out, your body responds like a sponge, right? I always say like you're kind of wringing out the sponge and you let it go and it's just your body just responds. And you get people putting on 10 and 12 pounds in three weeks you know five six kilos in three three weeks and it all muscle and they mind because your insulin sensitivity is optimized your angioid sensitivity is optimized your recovery is amazing. So that's, again, a point that's important to acknowledge is aerobic fitness is the key, or one of the key predetermining factors of your recovery between workouts, but also between sets. You get a lot of bodybuilders who take five, 10 minutes between sets because they simply can't recover. And just doing a little bit of work, a little bit of aerobic work allows you to increase the density of the workouts without increasing the perceived exertion so therefore you're getting more ultimate work in less time and i think that's just such an ideal circumstance as well as then recovering more uh more rapidly between workouts which again get back in the gym faster why wouldn't we be doing aerobic fitness almost you know three and four times a week i think is it would be a good foundation for most people yeah i think one of the things that i've noticed is um a lot of bodybuilders and and gen pop as well even worse they have a low vo2 max so you know we test people out at you know 35 vo2 max or less and we've noticed if we can get them into the 50s everything changes that tends to be like the magic so if we give them eight eight weeks like two two four week blocks of aerobics and we might be doing some steady state we might also be doing aerobic intervals, Tabatas, reverse Tabatas, things like that. If we can jump that up about 20 points, everything changes. Their work capacity changes. They start fat basically just falls off of them out of nowhere. They can eat more and lose weight. They can have a lot more carbohydrates without worrying about getting fat. They sleep better, their guts better. And as long as we can maintain that, we raise the VO2 max. When that ceiling's up, lactate threshold can now move up as well, which means they can train harder without so much burn. We've had guys that we give them a 12 rep max on the bar, and by set four, their legs are on fire. That's pretty common, but it's not normal. If I can raise your aerobic capacity, now you can actually hit the 12 reps with more weight, which means more growth and more recovery. Is that intervention you use in the beginning with many people? Because I've had a lot of clients who come in, You know, like I really hate the burn and I get such terrible burn. It interferes in my workout. So that's exactly where my brain goes. It's like I need to improve your CO2 tolerance and VO2 max. Yep. Yeah. So that's basically not everybody, but most everybody. People tend to come to us when they're really jacked up. So they've been to six or seven other people and no one's been able to fix it. They come to us like, okay, we're going to do the opposite of what they were doing before. And so we'll do some testing. We'll do a 12 minute cardiac output test. We'll see where their resting heart rate is versus their maximal heart rate. and if that's that gap is too narrow then your vo2 max is going to be pretty shit so we're going to prescribe you know good six to eight weeks of aerobic training then retest it um because there's no point just jumping into a specific physical routine if you can't if you're not healthy enough and generally you're not prepared for it so we'll go through um pretty pretty heavy amount of aerobics initially and it's different right most people put the aerobics at the end because they're chasing calories. Well, from my perspective, I'm chasing adaptation. So if I put it at the first, it's going to make every phase after that even better. And they're not going to have to do a lot of cardio to then, you know, to create a calorie deficit at that point, because they're just burning through so much.