Testing and Improving VO2 Max and Heart Rate

yeah so we'll do a vo2 max assessment initially because what we want to make sure is that you have a good aerobic reserve, right? And so the two things I'm looking at is we might run a modified Cooper's test where we do a 12 minute time trial on a rower and aerodyne or whatever. And then we look at your resting heart rate. My metric says, I want to see that you have very high maximal heart rate. How high can I push that? And then how low is my resting heart rate? Because if you have high maximal heart rate and low resting heart rate, you're going to have a very large VO2 max. And the higher your maximal heart rate is, the benefit of that is that you can control your heart rate more efficiently while you're fighting. As your heart rate goes up, you start losing motor skills. And so if you think about what we're doing when we're grappling, for instance, there's a lot of fine and complex motor skill activation going on, and there's a high level of cognitive thinking going on. The higher my heart rate goes, if I don't have good heart rate tolerance then I start making mistakes if I make mistakes I get caught in something right so like for instance for me my maximal heart rate is around 203 right now okay and I've gotten it up to that point by doing a lot of aerobic training up front to get that really high and to get my resting heart rate down close to 50 that being said as the percentage of heart rate goes up I can maintain a much lower percentage of my maximal heart rate than my opponent, which means he's going to make mistakes and I'm not. He's going to gas out first and I'm not. So we look at that with our fighters, first and foremost, as far as the conditioning. And if you think about strength as being the mother of all qualities for speed and power and for performance, aerobic conditioning is the mother of all qualities when it comes to conditioning side. The bigger and broader aerobic base I have, the higher that VO2 max ceiling, the higher I can get my lactate threshold going, which means I can make more energy a lot faster without getting too much of a pump and dropping too much adrenaline and cramping up and things like that when I'm working on something. So you're obviously we can bring that resting heart rate down with aerobic training and, you know, predominantly aerobic training, but our max heart rate, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but mostly that's going to be generally governed by genetics and our age. Well, that's what we're told, right? And what's the typically in research, what will they use? 220 minus your age, right? Or they'll use like the math. Yeah, they'll use a very ambiguous calculation because it's a lot easier to, if you have 400 people in a study, it a lot easier to do 220 minus your age than it is to run 400 stress tests and actually find out where people VO2 maxes are But this is stuff that easy If you have a heart rate strap and you got a smartphone this is really easy You just go as hard as you can for as long as you can, and you see how high your heart rate can get. This is all stuff that's trainable. When I first started getting into the conditioning aspect and realizing that I needed to get that up high fast, 220 minus my age was pretty much spot on but at the time I was only lifting and it was either I was like a sedentary lifter right I was sitting at a desk all day and lifting weights four or five times a week and resting heart rate was about 188 by the end of training training for a 10k run it was sitting at 203 and then I've actually got the ability to measure serum lactate and I can hold a very high heart rate while not really producing shit tons of lactate so i you that's going to show me that i'm managing intracellular um the intracellular components of atp breakdown and energy production so does that mean that you've actually managed through aerobic training you've actually managed to kind of raise your anaerobic threshold a bit because yeah so if i We're told is primarily governed by genetics and there isn't much legwork or much return in trying to increase that. Well, yeah, but we're not a slave to our genetics, are we? Now, there are going to be some people that are on the extremes, right? So if we look at a traditional bell curve, you know, most people are going to sit in the middle of the bell curve somewhere in that like 70%. Then you're going to have freaks like Kenyan runners who win all the marathon races, right? um that there if you look at that and and some of the other guys who are really good at endurance training they tend to have naturally a higher vo2 max they tend to have mechanisms in their bodies that allows them to have a higher vo2 max but that doesn't mean that you're you can't improve that because you can improve that massively um you can improve that massively and you can massively improve your tolerance for hydrogen ions by raising that lactate ceiling but the problem is You can't really raise that lactate threshold very high if you don't raise the VO2 max ceiling as well, because you're always going to be capped out at the VO2 max ceiling. So if you're getting guys coming in, we tend to use a concept to test and then use the calculator on the website. And what I find is most of the jujitsu and MMA guys are actually pretty good. their vo2 max are coming in pretty high but it's always i guess you know improve that improve their aerobic output you know in terms of on the mats you know making them fitter you know rather than just saying okay it's high let's just not concentrate on that yeah i think it's it's going to be a component of how experienced they are um depends on a sedentary person walks in and starts training jujitsu they're typically if they if they don't do the typical white belt stuff if they come in and they listen to the experienced guys where they're saying, conserve your energy, don't freak out, those guys are going to make a tremendous amount of hydrogen very quickly because they have a massive jump, they have a massive dump in adrenaline because, you know, there's, there's nothing that's going to make you more stressed out than somebody sitting on your face and pinning your arms down, right? So, but once you learn how to control that fear of being strangled and that fear of being suffocated and that fear of being held down, you start learning to manage your energy from an output perspective. But then you can also train the mitochondria and you can train the cardiovascular respiratory system to bring that VO2 max back up. So I think it's really a lot of it's going to be dictated by, you know, where you are in that journey. Are you a beginner? Are you kind of in the middle? Are you at the end of it? One thing that I noticed with a lot of the guys because you you know how it is guys guys come in and they train for six months and are doing really well and then life happens and they don't train for like three months so they get in pretty decent shape in six months and when they come back three months later it's like they never fucking trained before they come back and they're completely out of shape again what i found that is if you do the cross training and you you work on your heart and you work on your vascular system and you work on your mitochondria it's a lot easier to get in shape really quickly when you come back to it and it has much less chance of it dropping off