HIIT vs. Steady-State Cardio Realities

And yeah, you can absolutely get shredded with weights and with eating. Just like you can get shredded doing a marathon and eating. and you can do it with both and the healthy choices to do with both that's the bottom line and research paper after research paper says this it calls it's confirmed we know that's how it works yes and we know that actually you know the whole hit thing hit is not as good as steady state cardio i'm sorry it that epoch effect they're finding out is not that large no maybe like seven percent it you do it's a shorter session of course and not as much work but the majority of people that do hit aren't doing hit as hard as they should be to actually replicate the studies when you look at the studies done on like windgate bikes yes you go and do it where the weight drops on weight you build up the speed first and then this this weight drops down onto the wheel which obviously increases resistance massively i know uh oh what's his name a really popular guy loves it um he loves the windgate bike and he's also talking about pushing a car so putting the car into um oh what's his name oh forget his name anyway and putting putting the car in and basically you know for 10-15 seconds pushing you know that car as hard as you possibly he says you should be absolutely exhausted when you come off the wing gate bike or pushing the car it is like maximum effort for that 10-15 seconds so much so he said effectively if you're not throwing up um you know at the end of the session he goes you have not put in enough effort that's the that's the high intensity he's talking about yeah and that's again you gotta how do we measure the intensity you know with some people is it heart rate and all that sort of stuff again do we know how we go so we'll do some of the assessments we'll do is like a modified cooper's test so we'll have somebody run for 12 minutes and what i'm looking for is what's your maximum heart rate during that time what's your average heart rate and then we're going to compare that to your resting heart rate so the larger the gap is between your maximum heart rate and your resting heart rate the better the healthier your cardiovascular system is. Okay, cool. But you also have to keep in mind that you want to look at that average heart rate too because if the average heart rate is too high, you're way too far on the aerobic side. If it's too low, you're way too anaerobic and the sweet spot tends to be around 80 to 85%. Yeah, okay. So for an example, in 2017, I said, I'm going to start doing more aerobic conditioning because I just didn't feel right. With weightlifting for 30 years, I don't feel right anymore. I'm not sleeping well. I'm not pooping well. all the normal health stuff, and blood pressure was high, stress was high, resting heart rate was high, my HRV was crap. I started doing a lot more aerobic conditioning, aerobic intervals, and long runs, 5Ks and things like that, and I got to the point when I do a Cooper's test at my age, I'll be 40 next month, and at my age, my maximum heart rate based on the theoretical equation should be around 181. I went and did a Cooper's test, and my maximum is 198, which means I basically now have the cardiovascular system of, you know, 20, 21 or 22 year old, which is fantastic. Um, but my average heart rate was too high. So what that means is I can go out and run forever now, but if I were in sprints, I'm going to gas in between sprints really, really bad and I'm not in my power output. Isn't that good? So now I've switched, I've pulled out a different tool and now I'm doing a lot more hit training, a lot more like 32nd aerodyne, four or five minutes rest, that type of thing to bring that percentage down so that I can balance out the anaerobic anaerobic system and you can teach that techniques to people and also to coaches yeah that's what we teach them that's what absolutely so that's the most the biggest challenge that i always found in the general population is that fear of the unknown the variables not understanding when their body's in the optimal zone and when they've gone too hard or not hard enough and that's when the lack of empathy from some of the coaches and then them that's when everything seems to get pear-shaped another thing when we're talking about cardio what a lot of people have to realise is also look at the person again and your lifestyle so for example sitting's the new smoking a lot of this stuff about cardiovascular health originally the study showed that for every one hour you're sitting you need to walk for five minutes you know so if you sit for an hour get up and walk for five minutes then they worked out you know an eight hour day with lunch and all that sort of stuff if you're an office job you'll be sitting for six hours so therefore they said 30 minutes a day walking but it's supposed to be five minutes every hour that you're sitting you know so they said 30 minutes easier just do 30 minutes a day and that'll compensate for six hours of sitting and that'll help your cardiovascular health which you know it's not really the case but um so it's really important for people to understand some of the people out there saying cardiovascular cardio going for a walk is pointless but they might be on their feet all day like a personal trainer walking around the gym working with customers actively moving all day they are walking five minutes every hour okay a laborer and a carpenter all those sort of people they doing at least five minutes every hour For someone that sits in an office desk if you not doing some walking every day to get their cardiovascular health you going to be contributing significantly to heart disease So there are certain people where they say, you know, screw cardio, but they're doing cardio all day. They're moving all day. You know, for other people in the office, you've got to get up and move, otherwise you're going to shut down and stop and your heart will die and then you'll die. Well, the thing is with the guys that are going fuck cardio, they don't realize they're like no I don't do cardio I run sprints but because they don't understand the physiology they don't realize that if you do a 30 second run or sprint and you only rest 60 seconds that becomes cardio that becomes aerobic in nature because you have incomplete rest and if you're not doing it with the intensity yeah you get on it this is what I ran we had a program design we have a program design seminar that goes on that's like you know 12 weeks long you come to a seminar you have all this online material to prep you You come to the three-day seminar, then you get to do it twice, and then you test out of it. And we want to make sure that you understand the concepts. And for a lot of these guys, they're like, man, this has been such a big game changer. I realize now, like, I have so many more tools, and I know why they work. So it's making the way I program is now fun. I, like, want to program. And when they came in, I said, listen, I'm going to show you guys what HIIT training is. I'm going to put each of you on the Airdyne for 30 seconds. We're going to videotape you so you actually go balls out, and everyone's going to scream at you. and they were doing this and you know they go about 15 20 seconds all of a sudden you hear the air start to get softer and softer because they can't maintain their energy system and then they find out wow i have not actually been doing hit training when i think i am because i'm just simply not going hard enough because they were fucked they would do it there were guys that were dry heaving for five or six minutes and i go here's the problem great anaerobic power horrible anaerobic endurance and aerobic endurance so we had another girl there that's uh she teaches um she teaches body combat it's our friend we actually she's uh one of our team members for muscle nerds uh marzo farrow from perth and she has a very good aerobic system the problem is she couldn't produce any power but she would she went as hard as she could and she was ready in two minutes to go again while everybody else was almost puking and dry heaving but it showed them like if i'm going to do hit training it has to be done like that or it's not high intensity high intensity interval training you're just interval training so and and this is um and again i i my it was lane norton who I was thinking of before, by the way, that talks a lot about this. And he's got a lot of really good research, I think, backing up this high-intensity type of training style. But the other training style, and I forget what they call it, it's not fart lick. It's another one where it's like 10 seconds on, 10 seconds off, or 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. What's that called again? A lot of people are using that as their high-intensity type training. And they're saying that that is the most effective way to obviously burn fat. but you're saying no because you can't get the intensity level high enough during the the on the training time the cardio time well it depends what mechanism we're using right so the thing is keep in mind for something to be high intense and to keep that up you have to have significant amounts of rest so if i'm going to do a true hit and do a 10 second sprint i'm going to need probably 90 to 120 seconds recovery all right so if i'm going 10 on 10 off guess what you're doing you're fucking doing aerobics. Yeah. It doesn't feel like aerobics the first five minutes, but as you go, that's aerobics. As the intensity drops. Yeah. The resting doesn't recover. That's it, because volume and intensity have an inverse relationship, and if you're doing a high volume with incomplete rest, that becomes aerobic in nature. And would that be confirmed with your testing of heart rate and pulse rate and all that sort of stuff? You'd be able to show them that you think you're doing high intensity, but you're actually doing a steady-state cardio? I could, or I could just pull out a basic physiology and biochemistry textbook and show them what's actually going on. You know, some of these people need to see the numbers. They won't believe you or they won't believe themselves, but they will believe the numbers showing these numbers show that you're in this zone. As you said before, Luke, empirical information, I think, helps to maybe not quash debate because people argue that, you know, the sky is not blue. But having said that, it's funny because last year when I was playing football, you know, my mate plays centre-back. I play on the wing. His needed steady state. He needed to constantly be moving with the occasional sprints and stuff like that, whereas I was sprinting for 10, 12, 15 seconds, and then I'd be resting for a minute or two or stuff like that. So I actually started replicating that on the devil's tricycle, the Airdyne bike, where I would do a 20-second flat out and then rest for a minute and then do it again. Intuitively, I hadn't read anything, but it just seemed to have made sense to me. That's probably better from what I'm gathering that you're saying than doing that 10 seconds on, 10 seconds off. Right. The thing is, everything has to be specific. So you have general physical preparedness and you have specific physical preparedness. So in the general phase, that's when you want to get your aerobic base really good because that's going to help the specific phase do better. So then when you're moving into the specific phase, that's when you're starting to do stuff that's more sport specific. Gotcha. So you look at your position. How many sprints do you have to do in a game?