Testing Cardiovascular Fitness (Cooper's Test)

Luke, do you use the blood markers as your kind of gauge of progress? or do you have like a certain benchmark for someone to be able to do like a, like a joke, for example, that you say you should be able to do 45 minutes while staying in the, in the zone of one 30 to one 50. I mean, I think, I think it's pretty fair to say you should be, you should be able to do 30 to 45 minutes at a steady pace, like not, you know, elite level runner pace, but you should be able to do that at a swift walk or a slow jog and maintain your under one 50 beats per minute. I think that's pretty fair. Um, If you want to test, like, I don't really use blood markers for this, but if you look at, like, we use a modified Cooper's test. So that's what we will do. So we'll have somebody do a 12-minute time trial on whatever equipment they want, but it has to be something that gets their heart rate as high as possible. So, like, we'll use, we'll tell people to use things that's already familiar. So I've got guys that are swimmers. They swim. I have guys that love the concept, too, so they row. If they like to run I like them to run What you don want them to do is you don want them to do this test on a piece of equipment they unfamiliar with and don have the right motor patterns for it So you go as hard as you can for 12 minutes And the first test you log distance because you going to compare that with the one you'll do in say three months or every quarter or so. You want to look at your maximum heart rate because the higher your maximum heart rate is, the younger your cardiovascular system is. And so you look at that and then you look at the difference between that and your waking heart rate. So for me at 40, my projected beats per minute is supposed to be, if you look at 220 minus my age, I'm supposed to be sitting at about 180, but my maximum heart rate is actually about 198. And the way you figure that out is by doing the modified Cooper's test and go as hard as you can. And then you use something like the Polar Beats app for the iPhone or the Android and use a Polar H10 monitor. And that app will tell you what your maximum heart rate is. So then you get those two numbers, maximum heart rate with a waking heart rate. The gap in between those is very important. You want that gap to be as broad as possible. So just again, because I've got my numbers on top of my head, 198 for maximum heart rate. Then I look at resting heart rate about 54 beats per minute. That's really good. That means really good, really high functioning cardiovascular system. Then I want to look at the average heart rate right so there's a sweet spot in programming and i think in general population where you want about your average heart rate you wanted about 83 or 84 percent of your maximum heart rate which that app will also tell you if you're above that then you're more aerobic if you're under that you're more anaerobic and depending on what outcome you want that can be good or bad. Like for me doing all the aerobic work, I got up to like in the 93, 94%, which means you can go for a long time, but you can't produce any power anymore. You have no power endurance. But then if you look at most trainees that only do interval training and plyometrics and heavy lifting and high threshold stuff, they'll be really low and they can produce power, but they can't produce power over and over and over, right? So they typically end up gassing out in the game. If you look at that 83, 84, 85% range for most of your athletes that have to produce force over and over and for most of your general population, that's a really good area to be in. Interesting stuff, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Adam, what are we taking you out for a jog then today? Fuck that. Let's go. You've got to film it though. We were in LA last month and I convinced Adam to come on a hike with me up the Ronin Canyon, right? and I think within about two minutes he was pouring sweat popping and popping it was going to be, I don't know if I can do this How hot was it? It was pretty hot, we were topless and he wrapped his t-shirt around his head to make sure he didn't get sunburned You know you were talking earlier about losing the hair, well sadly I'm going through I have to take precautions.