Progressive Overload in Cardiovascular Training

Oh, man. So here's the thing. This goes back to what you said about being on level 10 on a cross trainer. At some point, steps aren't that effective. They're effective at first, especially if you're really out of shape. So if you're really out of shape, you get people, they walk and their heart rate's at 115, 120. But over the course of a few months, their heart rate's now like 90 while they're walking. So there's a clear loss, there's a clear diminishing return going on here. So this is at the point where I'm like, okay, so steps worked at first, but now we have to do a little bit more. Are we going to walk longer? Are you going to spend half your day fucking walking, trying to get 25,000 steps? Or can we just do some basic cardio to fill in some of those steps? So in a lot of cases, I'll give people, say, a step count. We'll say it's 12,000. I'll say, okay, let's see what you're getting on average. If you want to walk a little bit more, that's fine. But you get people that are sitting at a desk for eight hours a day and they may have to take the tube in to work and then take the tube back home They might be on they might be on the train for a fucking three hours a day If they look like say say you training somebody in London they could be living way out West or way out East And it takes them 90 minutes to get into work and 90 minutes to get home. It's like, where are you going to fit all these fucking steps in? They basically have 13 hours where they have to sit, you know? So, and they, you got, you got to sleep, you still got to wait train. So it makes sense from an economy perspective of, hey, we get the steps you can get and then fill in the rest with some type of cardiovascular activity. And then I'll usually try to find something they like to do. If you don't want to go to the gym and just get on a cross trainer or get on a treadmill, that's fine. I mean, maybe you stream a dance thing at home and learn how to Latin dance or some shit in your underwear in your living room or pull out the rollerblades or find something you like to do that allows you to get it in. And then you can usually equate the steps. If you go, well, you know, how many steps there's move spring, I think it's move spring.org. And there's a couple other calculators out like that, where you can put in like a steps to like, how many steps is rollerblading for an hour worth of rollerblading for 10 minutes. And you can go, okay, well, I need 4000 more steps that might be say, 25 minutes of rollerblading. I like rollerblading, I'm going to go out and do that instead. But the key is you have to have some type of progressive overload system because you're going to get used to whatever you're doing. You're going to get more fit, which means that exercise doesn't weigh as much as it did anymore. And the only way to make it weigh more is you have to do more of it, which is not really practical from a time management perspective, or you got to go harder. And with steps, you can only walk so fast before you have to, you have to start running. So it's like, all right, well, you were good at steps. I'm not a good runner, so I'm not going to run. So I'm going to go find something else. Oh, well, the cross trainer is really good. I'll get on a cross trainer, put it on level 10. Okay, and my heart rate's back where it needs to be. And when the heart rate drops down, now, okay, we've got to make a decision of increasing the level or increasing the RPMs. But it's just like people need to look at cardio the same way they look at weight training. And I often say this when I'm teaching, there's always at every gym I've ever been to, and I've been to gyms facilities all over the world. You go to any commercial gym, There's always three bros who have been training together for like at least 10 years. And they train like two or three hours a night because they're busy yapping to each other because they don't want to go home to their wife and kids or something. So you'll watch them. And year one, they're all benching, say, 100 kilos for a set of five. Year 10, they're still benching 100 kilos for a set of five. What happened? They never added more weight to the bar. They never did any more reps. That cardio is the same thing. And people will always joke. look at the people in January they get on the cardio machines you see them a year later they haven't lost weight yeah well that's their diet and they haven't changed because they have they've done three percent elevation at six kilometers an hour and they've never done anything more it's like there's you're so used to that you have to create a bigger stimulus that weighs more yeah I think one thing that like is so fast about fascinating about the body and I guess it's like you know body's always trying to fight your fight your efforts when it does come to training is like your body's ability to adapt you know whether that is you know the steps whether that's you doing cardio where it's you kind of lifting the huge huge loads and training your body's always like how can we find a way to make this not as stressful for next time because preserve energy preserve energy how can we preserve energy and make this way more economical and then you have to go, oh yeah, I see that and I'll, I'll raise you one and you just go harder. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's, it's truly fascinating that the human body is a, is an amazing thing. Um, I want to wait real quick, real quick. There, there was something else I was going to say there. Um, ah, man, I think I lost it. Um, I, fuck, I lost it. Nevermind. It was good too. Um, all right. So I guess I want to kind of just go through. what would be some general training principles that the average trainee should really be paying attention to? That could be across, you know, cardio, could be across the more movement stuff, training, whatever it may be. What would be some kind of principles that you'd be using, especially when writing up somebody's training program?