Practical Cardio Recommendations

our tagline as we told you at the beginning of this is how to be less shit so if somebody wants to like take a basic framework of how to build some aerobic fitness what does that conceptually look like if they want to be less shit from a not dying quality okay so so kind of reader's digest version is first you have to realize how much time do you have because time is time is the one thing you can't buy so how much time do you have how much can you dedicate to it the easiest lowest hanging fruit is just your standard steady state aerobics you put a heart rate strap on and you walk on an incline for 120 to 130 beats and you do it for as long as you can handle. Joel Jamison says a minimum of 30 minutes. I would tend to agree with that. I would say the more you do up front, the faster you get the adaptation, so that's the best. If you're in quarantine and you've got three or four more weeks and you can do 90 minutes of aerobics a day, fucking do it. Just put something on your TV. I know that sounds extreme to people, but the thing is we're doing such low-intensity work that you need a lot of high volume because volume and intensity have an inverse relationship, right? So the higher intense I go, the less stuff I can do. The lower intense, the more I'm going to need to listen to adaptations. So for a lot of people that are stuck at home, if you've got a treadmill, just stick the movie Fear with Mark Wahlberg in and walk and just watch the whole movie and just walk on an incline, right? And you'll usually see massive benefits within three weeks of that. So it's very high return on investment, but it does take a lot of investment capital up front. Now, if you don't have time for that, now we have to look at things. How do I increase work output but also make it aerobic in nature? So let's say 30-second sprints with four-minute rest, okay, the majority of that workout you would be recovering in an aerobic zone despite 30 seconds being glycolytic in nature. so you'd have some global and local glycolytic work for 30 seconds but then you'd have complete rest for four minutes so that the sum total would be mainly aerobic with some anaerobic benefit as well so that those would be easy ways of doing it monitoring your heart rate my my goal for most people is to get their heart rate somewhere in the 50s i think 50 resting heart rate is excellent It shows you have a pretty high VO2 max. What's it sitting at? I hit 48 the other day. Currently, today's 58, but I've also – That's it? I had half a liter of coffee this morning. So to be 58 and a half a liter deep, I'm good. That's pretty good, right? I was sitting at like 50-something yesterday after like 8 milligrams of nicotine and like six espressos. So I was doing pretty good. That's why you also like Broderick. Oh, yeah. 100%. So the thing is like the lower your heart rate is resting heart rate. So I like that kind of in the middle of the day, the lower that is and the higher your maximum heart rate is, the better your VO2 max is. It means you oxidize better. You can test this, run as hard as you can on a treadmill for 12 minutes, monitor it with a heart rate strap. How high can you get that? You want that to be as high as possible. You want your resting heart rate to be low as possible. So if you have somebody who's sitting at like, say right now, my maximum heart rate is 190. my resting heart rate's around 56 57 that gives me a vo2 max somewhere around 50 okay pretty good not that good for me so i'm now doing more cardio work because i like to be closer to 60 i just feel better that way eat a lot more food uh think better too one of the benefits of aerobic training people don't think about is the benefits on the brain so when you do aerobic work it increases blood flow to the brain and it increases uh brain derived nootrophic factor which increases synapse connections and increases brain activity, especially in areas that you don't normally use. So it actually makes you smarter, which is why when people say hashtag fuck cardio, I use that as a fucking IQ test that they're, they're fucking Neanderthal. Yep. So 30 minute sessions, 20 to 30 minutes, somewhere around 120 to 130 beats of heart rates of heart rates. That's good English. How's that for a Neanderthal comment? as many sessions as you possibly can get done. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is like, it doesn't really matter. Right. So like, you know, version of exercise. So long as you are stabilizing, stabilizing, doesn't matter. I mean, you could do, like I was telling, I have a, one of my staff members is living with us right now. She she came up from New South Wales to stay with us for a bit when we got the gym open So now she actually stuck with us So now she has to live with us So we got a pretty badass home gym And I just brought a concept two rower and a spin bike. And so she's doing a lot of aerobic conditioning right now to lose weight and to improve her health markers. And she asked me the same thing, like, do you care what I do? I go, I don't give a shit what you do, as long as your heart rate stays where or want it to stay because I'm working on the heart and vascular system. I'm not working on what's going on with your legs or your arms or anything else. I'm looking at just global conditioning stuff. So if you want to do five minutes on the row or 15 minutes on the spin bike, you want to go run around the block. I don't give a shit. I just, just sustain your heart rate and the range I'm wanting for the time period I'm wanting. And I'm super happy with that. Later we'll talk about more specific localized conditioning, which is going to be, we're going from a level of general training to more specificity, which means that if she decided she wanted to say, I don't know, play AFL on the weekends, then we would start doing specific conditioning for the legs and things. Yeah. For anyone that doesn't have any equipment at all, our home gym is limited to a few resistance bands and I think like a hundred kilos of weight. So like nothing. Yeah. I the other day stood in front of the TV and ran on the spot while I watched a movie. Like that's, you don't need any equipment. You just need like a bit of, I don't know, no shame and a bit of creativity. She has no shame. The same for me, man. Like last night I ran a 25-minute session and I actually just was referencing heart rate for where I was sitting in ranges. And it was just back and forth between a push and a pull of some description, varied exercises. It really wasn't there for hypertrophy. It was just making work. Yeah. And the one thing I would say that I've found, especially in my quite unique population of primary bodybuilders, is that if you set a mode specific to them that they can't actually get their heart rate up to because they do have localized fatigue from a lactate point of view, like say sitting on a bike, then it is important that you do shift that exercise out and you don't have to do cardio. So like I'm going to actually have one of my guys soon just essentially run like a full body weight circuit with like over the shoulder med balls. Yeah. Because he cannot handle doing bike work and getting his heart rate to where it needs to go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because when you're talking about like that kind of local versus global conditioning, like in a lot of cases, they haven't done enough of the conditioning work to build the enzymes locally to manage the bioenergetics. So even though their heart's handling it, not their heart is maybe like really far ahead of their musculature, where it's like now I have to go a lot harder to get my heart rate up. But I haven't built the mechanics in the musculature of the legs to facilitate that. Now my legs are on fire. I'm building up too much lactate. Okay, that's the goal was to keep that down because mitochondria don't like that very much. And when you're doing that, what you're showing is that you cannot buffer hydrogen ions anymore. You're losing that ability. So there's a lot of reasons why that could be. It could be low NAD, so it could be a low amount of B3 or activated B3. It could be the fact that you just don't have a lot of mitochondria. So acetyl-CoA will tend to build the mitochondria, which shuts down pyruvate from getting in the mitochondria. If pyruvate can't get in the mitochondria, it has to go somewhere else, so you can reduce that with hydrogen. There's a lot of things going on in all different directions. And so in a lot of cases, you might have to say, well, you know, while this exercise was great for you the first three weeks, now your heart has gotten so badass that your legs can't handle it, so we've got to find something else for you to do. right because from a bodybuilding perspective you could have him go harder on the bike but then that that may fatigue his legs for a squat session so you know you'd hit you'd hit a place where it's a law diminishing returns and actually counterproductive to what they're wanting to do with what training really matters to say a bodybuilder which is getting fucking bigger yeah yeah a quick little story and then we'll get onto the something worth sharing about if you look to explain this in actual in actual action uh at the end when i my soccer career my last season i was fortunate enough to be at uni and i did a vo2 max on the treadmill now i was a soccer player it's a running man's game yeah that vo2 max that i achieved on there with a lactate threshold my vo2 max was 67 and my lactate threshold was like what it like into the sort of low to mid range 80 percenters like super specific to my sport a week later i did the same vo2 max but on a bike and i only managed to get a vo2 max of 55 because my legs just absolutely fried from that build-up of hydrogenizing talking about and now gas my lungs are fine i'm like but i couldn't keep up the repetition necessary to complete the test so i otherwise was like what fucking 20 percent reduced capacity from a VO2 testing point of view because of the specificity of fatigue Yeah, I mean, you're looking at when you're running, you've got some deceleration happening. You've got a little bit more blood flow. The minute you get on the bike, you've got a bit of occlusion going on. It's high-intensity continuous training. So you never really get a relief from that continuous contraction. so and that that that it goes to showcase um specificity and everything that we do like because you're good at one modality you might not be good at something else so when we teach testing we teach a lot of testing in our courses you have to use the test that somebody's already pretty good at if i and you and then that has to be the test you always test against so if i do a cooper's test on someone and we're going to modify it because maybe they don't they're not a good runner maybe they're good at the rower okay i'm going to modify we're going to use the rower as the standard but then the rower always has to be what we use every time we test it because if they get up and run there's no deceleration component and it's like a centric deceleration in a rower there's no um there's no isokinetic activity to running like you have on a rower with the air display so there's a lot of different things that you have to keep like an apple to an apple and an orange to one orange. Yeah, absolutely. I did a stress test for as part of a study in when I was living in Austin at University of Texas. This is back when I was just doing strongman and power lifting. And so they same thing I didn't run at the time, they put me on a treadmill, I think I achieved somewhere around a 54 to 56 vo two max being a strength athlete. And they were surprised or like, you don't run. I'm like, I don't run, man. I do heavy weighted carries. And I do all this you know alice stones and i do all this other shit and they're like wow that's pretty amazing for vo2 max for somebody who doesn't actually run um but uh but you know what it wasn't the i wasn't gassed my legs couldn't handle it anymore like because i just didn't the incline got to a point my legs just went fuck off my heart and my lungs were still fine so you know but that's why that's why you got to be careful when you look at research because you never know how they've, you know, what they're researching may not actually be applicable to some of the stuff we're doing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.