Welcome to the huberman lab, guest Series, where I and an expert, guest discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode marks, the fourth in the six-episode series on fitness exercise and performance. In today's episode is all about optimal Fitness. Programming that is how to design a fitness and exercise program that can achieve the goals that you want for fitness and for sports performance, dr. Andy Galpin. Great to be back in previous episodes. You taught us about the various adaptations that occur at the level of cells.
Elle's at the lower organs indeed at the level of the entire body, the underlying things like improvements in strength and speed, hypertrophy AK, muscle growth and the various forms of endurance and you laid out beautifully, the various protocols, that one can do in order to achieve each and every one of those adaptations.
Today I would love for you to teach us how we can combine different protocols to achieve multiple adaptations in parallel. For instance, how to improve endurance and strength, how to achieve some level of hypertrophy, perhaps directed hypertrophy at specific muscle groups, while also maintaining endurance and perhaps improving speed for instance, and if you would, I'd love you to tell us how we can combine, different protocols, and very those across the week, across the month, across the year.
So that we can make regular progress and perhaps, even you could give us a window into the ways to make the fastest progress possible.
Yeah, I would love to do that. You know, we've invested a lot of time in the previous episodes, hovering background and Concepts and detail about the physiology. So you understood, why you're making the choices you're making. And why other choices are less effective in this discussion. I would actually like to jump maybe more directly to the answer and right, kind of get right into the protocol. So
Maybe a little bit less background. If you're interested in that stuff, I suppose you have to go backwards a little bit and watch some of those previous episodes. But I would love to jump into, just some samples, some case studies, if you will, and kind of walk through different protocols. I know that over the course of my 11 years is a college professor and being in the public space a little bit. Probably the most numerous style of question. I have gotten is exactly that. So I know the rep range for this, right?
I know the style of training for that adaptation but how do I put them together? And I would just like to spend our time today going through those things. And the reason I want to do it is this
Some people listening at home. Surely just love exercise. They're already bought in and they're going to train, no matter what, and they're interested in just actually being more effective. And so the way that you structure and put your plan together will in large part determine getting more progress for Less effort or actually being able to put the same amount of effort in and getting results faster. There's also some folks probably listening who were like, okay, I exercise, I do what I can, I'm bought into the benefits.
You've talked so elaborately over the hundred plus episodes, you've done about the various benefits of exercise, but you don't like apps, you're kind of doing it because you know, it's important, but you're not there. So, for those folks, it's sort of like, okay, how can we actually make this thing more effective? So we can make sure you hit the things you're after absolutely have to get for the short and long-term benefits, right? To make sure that you're looking the way you want to look. You're performing physically the way you want to perform and then you can do that across your lifespan. So
Can we give you all some structure to where again? You don't have to turn into an absolute lover of physical fitness and it doesn't have to take over your life but you can still get more results for your same time. Restrictions, whether that be you have two days a week or five days a week or only certain access to equipment or experience, whatever the case may be, how can we help those folks as well? Put together a protocol that will get them closer to their goals with less restrictions,
fantastic. And I'm hoping that along the way.
Way, you'll also point us to how often to take the fitness assessment for each of the adaptations that you refer to in a previous episode. We will also link to that fitness assessment segment in the show. No captions for this episode because that fitness assessment for different adaptations. I think, is a really powerful way for people to touch in and see, you know, how much long-endurance do they have? How much anaerobic capacity do they have? How much strength do they really have? And then perhaps you'd also be willing to throw in a couple of
Additional ways that we can assess our level of fitness and progress in this Arc of fitness program across the year.
Amazing, I can't wait to do that. I think it is also important before we jump into acknowledge a lot of folks may be thinking themselves, I don't really necessarily need a plan. Why do I have to do that? I don't have a certain goal. I'm going after I'm not running a race anytime soon, I'm not a competitive athlete, I just I go to the gym and work out and that's great. Well, I would like to try to convince you that regardless of where you're at.
Rat, having a plan will achieve those things we just talked about, which is more success in a shorter time frame. There's actually a significant amount of research to support this. Those individuals who go on a specific training plan, compared to those who do not will receive better results, right? Independent of the effectiveness of the program, right? So we've talked in previous episodes about tons of different styles and strategies and reiterate, it really doesn't matter which one you pick.
Fact, you have a plan is always more effective than not having a plan. And so again, even if you're not planning on competing with something, if you want to shorten the amount of time, you're in the gym, get more results from it, I would strongly encourage to put something together. The two largest reasons why people don't get results with their Fitness training protocol is number one adherence. And then number two, some sort of progressive overload. Both of those two things are challenging to accomplish without a plan.
Right? So the reason people don't go to the gym, one of them and one of the reasons why it takes them so long as because they don't walk in with a very specific plan, it's sort of like going to the grocery store and figuring out what you're going to buy versus knowing exactly what you're going to get in your shopping list, grabbing those things and getting out, you'll notice your time in the grocery store is half the length. You're more productive and you didn't waste money on extra things. Okay? So that alone will drive it here. It's because you're not going to think yourself all that 90 minute workout I do is actually really just 60. And so now the next time you go to training and
Man, I don't have 90 minutes. You realize, it's only 60, or 40, or 30, or 20, whatever needs to be so that alone will get you there. The second part of that, which is overload. It's very difficult to understand. And remember, well, the last time I did lat raises, I used, I think five pounds and I think I did like 12. Well, if you don't have some sort of system of tracking, and this can be as simple as a notebook, just writing down what you did before and doing a little bit more. The next time that is going to almost guarantee you success. So having some
Sure. In this structure can be fairly loose. We're going to talk about a bunch of different examples. Is something I strongly encourage everyone to utilize for their exercise.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford, it is also separate from dr. Andy galvan's, teaching and research roles at Cal State, Fullerton. It is however, part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. We'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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a few minutes ago, we were talking about how to of the major reasons people don't get as much either training programs as they would like is because of one, a lack of adherence.
Terrence and to a lack of progressive overload. So the solution to that is constructing a plan that lives within your realistic limitations. So I would like to walk you through my 10 step approach to how I design training programs. Now, before I do that, I think it is fair and important for the audience to understand that this is simply my approach. I've been doing this a long time, I played college football and I wrote my own training programs back then I have, and I'm still working with
Athletes and PGA Tour, the NFL, the NBA Major League Baseball, as well as a ton of general population folks. So, this is a combination of the evidence base that we've been talking about in terms of best practices for strengthening auditioning, as well as just my years of experience. So there are many, many ways one could do this. I'm not even suggesting, this is the best, this is simply how I do it. This is exactly how I handle it. When a new individual comes to me and how I teach my students. So step number one is assessing
Properly and identifying a training goal. Now that's actually sort of funny because we hear that a lot, but a lot of people actually never take that step not to call anybody in the room out.
But what's Happening Here is this morning. Andy. Dr. Galvin and I were training together and he was providing amazing tips on form and set rep Cadence in the sort of thing. And he said, so what's your training goal for the next 12 months? And I paused, and
Turned into a very long pause,
which is an easy, nice way of saying he didn't have an
answer. I didn't have an answer. I of course, I don't just want to maintain what I've developed in terms of strength and hypertrophy and endurance but I don't have a clear goal. So I'm hoping that by the end of today's discussion, I will be on track to a clear set of goals
to today's, I'm not going to bore you all here but really I can't stress enough. How important that step really truly is to getting results.
The analogy we use here is if you left your house and you were attempting to get to the grocery store and you just started driving and if you drove every possible wrote you would eventually get to a grocery store. And so yes, that can't work a better approach is saying here's where I am. There's where I want to go, what is the optimal route there? And that's really what you're doing with gold so it is a boring stuff. It is not interesting to hear. I don't have any real hacks or tricks.
Or you, but it is. Step number one on purpose. We have to know exactly where we're going. You can do this in two ways way. Number one is to just pick something arbitrarily decide. I'm going to run a 5k or I've done that before and I want to improve it by 10 seconds. I want to lose ten pounds. You can just pick one that's great. Another way is to run through that Fitness testing protocol. We described a few episodes before, and if you do that, you can see which of these areas.
That maybe you have the largest lagging in or what is the most severe performance? Anchor is how we refer to it and then choose that as your primary angle. So, either option, some people come into training programs with a very clear goal in mind. They want to add more muscle or whatever. Whatever. Okay great. If you're like, I don't really know, you know, I just kind of workout then run the fist Fitness testing protocol. You'll see what score is the lowest 10 and then you'll maybe make that a priority for the next say, three months.
So the first step is to identify
Fi a specific or set of specific training goals.
A really nice tool for helping you set. A goal is a system called smart right now. There's a little bit of debate on what those acronyms actually stand for, but we'll get close enough, right? So smart is often specific measurable attainable, realistic, And Timely. So, starting off with a specific in general, the more specific, your goal is
The higher likelihood, you will have at succeeding in that.
M being measurable, it means it needs to be something that you can actually put a metric on. So this can be objective or subjective. But generally I like to have at least one objective measure. So remembering objective is something that is not based on feeling. It is not up to. This could be something simple. Like your body weight, it could be how much you can benchpress. What's your one mile time and whatever is most important to you, it actually doesn't have to be a fitness related goal. For example, if you're using Fitness as a way to enhance.
Is your sleep, the main metric. You may be interested in is, you know, my Mount of hours sleep slapped. It could be something like efficiency or whatever is most interested could be work product if it doesn't really matter. So it doesn't have to actually be the fitness goal, but what is the motivation of why you're doing it? So that's specific measurable, attainable or actionable. This is often described is something that is within your capability. So, attainable, a bad example of attainable, is something like my goal.
Is to win more games. That may not be up to you at the team, the other team you're playing. It could influence it, the schedule, Etc. So attainable should be something that is within your control.
Realistic or relevant to. You is something that is again something realistic that you can achieve. You wouldn't want to make a goal that is you want to double your body mass that this is not going to happen. So think about the constraints. How old are you? What's your training experience? How much time? Do you really have to invest in this? And then pick something that is realistic? And then honestly my little twist here is take that in -10% because typically when people put together training programs, their goal tends to be quite lofty and they get
Some small percentage of the way in realize they're never going to get there and back off. We actually sort of reminds me of a classic deception study that we did in my lab one time where we took people and we had them do this maximal front. Raise basically if you held a dumbbell out in front of you for as long as you possibly could and the goal here was actually a deception studies or tricking them and so we said okay we want to just get normative values to see how long people can hold this front raise and I think we use
Thing like 5% of their body weight and so they came in. They did it one time and we time them they didn't get to see the clock they left. And then we said we got to come back in. Repeat it right? We got to do a couple of tries here to get a normal value in cases, off, whatever well, the participants were split up into four groups. So group one actually was told that their time was fifteen percent lower than that. They actually got group. 2 is 5 percent lower group 3 was 5% higher and group for was 15.
Percent higher. So the second time they came in to do it, our graduate student quote-unquote made a mistake and left the timer in front of them. So the first time again they did, they actually they're just holding it. I don't know, have any idea how long they're holding the second time, they had a giant iPad set like just a little bit off-centered or they can clearly see it. So they watch the time go by. And of course, what happened was those folks say who did one minute? The very first time, when I test it they came back in to do the second time and they're holding.
It and we told them, they actually got 45 seconds when in reality they had done a minute. So they're holding it, holding him, and they think they only did 45 seconds by the time they get the like second, 40 41 42, they get past 45. They almost all quit like, 47 48 seconds because they wanted to beat their previous score, but then we're like cool, I beat it and then they quit early. So we're actually not have to failure, but they were just happy enough to beat what they thought they'd done.
Then they quit the other group on the inverse side against a they got a minute we told them they got a minute and 15 seconds. They got to like 45 seconds. 50 seconds and started realizing whole man. I have 30 more seconds to go and they quit way early.
Because the carrot was way too far out they realized, I'm never going to get there. So I'm just going to stop now. Can you guess which group did the best on the
post-test ones that were just within about five percent
of totally. So they wanted to improve and so again, say they got a minute the first time, we told them they got a minute, five or sorry, they got a minute five. The first time, we told them, they only got a minute, they actually exceeded that.
Greatly because they wanted to PR. So making sure that that goal is properly aligned, it needs to be a little bit scary.
A little bit unrealistic. We're going to have to work for this. If it's too easy you'll quit. You won't feel like a challenge. If it's too hard though, you'll quit early as well. So you want to make sure is that reasonable bounds of. Like should I train today? Or like, maybe I'll just go through. If I do that, I'm not going to hit. How can I got to get after it? But not like, oh my God. Like there's just no chance here. So you're going to so you're gonna walk
away early.
That's a fantastic study. I have to say it's very simple, I think it illustrates a number of important psychological principles about goal-setting motivation self-perception but also the dopamine system, you know, the the dopamine system is this Universal reward system, that meaning it doesn't only work for food or only work for fitness, goals are only work for academic goals or relationship goals. It is the universal substrate for all of.
And actually think there's some real gems of information and that study design that you described. So just cue that for maybe a potential collaboration between our Laboratories because I think it's very important but it does queue up another question. That's relevant to Fitness particular, which is what are your thoughts on intermediate goals? So, let's say, my goal is to drop to percentages to percent of body fat from where I am now a year from
Um now roll into the next year from now about two percent lower on body fat, but maintain my lean body mass or maybe even increase it. Yep. How should I assess progress? You know, because the dopamine system loves a goal that it loves anticipation of a goal. But it responds best to, we sort of re-up. If you will, our dopamine, anytime we get a
Know that we are on the right track to that goal and that signal could be okay, I did the workout. I just trust that these workouts are going to give me the result I want. But of course we know that when people get a glimmer of the idea or some objective feedback that they're on the right path that dopamine system, really fires and provides motivation for continuing toward the ultimate goal. And as we've talked about in the strength speed and hypertrophy episode resistance, training itself,
Has this built into it because of the infusion of blood into the muscles. You actually get a little window into what you might get in terms of an adaptation simply by virtue by way of the so-called pump. Whereas endurance type work. Generally doesn't have that you don't see yourself, get better, drop back and then adapting they actually get better, but that's actually what you see, with weight training. So given all of that Contour of the dopamine system, what sorts of intermediate goals, should I set for myself, or should somebody set for themselves? And I realize it will probably depend on the ultimate goal. Yeah.
It would you say check in, on progress, once every week, every month, 3
months. I can't, I don't know if you can tell the look on my face, I love this. Thought this question in this topic, I spend so much time on it on my senior and graduate level program. Design course, I've been fortunate to work with a few athletes, where we've had multiple years, and if you can really take the time to step back and go, it's not about optimizing for the next six weeks. And they
This case, it's not the next fight. It is the championship fight that we need to get to in three years. Or it is the Olympics which were on a quad program, right? You really optimizing for that four-year if you can have that foresight and really think about that. And then work backwards, you can see some pretty tremendous things. The, the sort of saying that is like, we generally tend to overestimate what we can get done in a week and underestimate what can happen in a year that can be extraordinarily powerful.
However you have to have those metrics called out ahead of time because you will lose motivation in that short term because you won't see that result immediately. But if you remember, I'm on a path to four percent or two percent or whatever you need to be there for. I only need to be this far right now. I need to be that far and then that far it's actually quite clear. And so what we would actually do in that scenario not to go like so off track here because I can really go on this stuff is let's say it was the year recommendation. You're going to actually need to go to
To the last part of smart, which is timely. So part of setting, this goal is making sure you understand, the time domain responsible and it's actually quite great here because not to go Inception on us. We're like list within a list and Rob kills us over here. But number one of this program designed thing was assessing your goal. Number two is identifying your Defender. What I mean by that is what is stopping you from hitting that goal.
So you want to lose 2% body fat and the next year, okay great. What's going to stop us? Once we can achieve that and we'll go into more that in a second. Then you just start walking that 2% backwards so you might have to go something like this. Look, every time I start working out really hard. I always get hurt. Interesting. Okay, great. So maybe instead of jumping really hard and do it in a high, intensity interval training program.
Knowing where likely to hurt something or get burnt out or quit or whatever the defender is for you. Maybe we invest something right now, which is maybe improving your flexibility, working on movement, technique, whatever is going to stop you from getting her, or maybe we progressed slower. So we don't get there that will allow us to do the work necessary to hit that goal. 12 months from now, not 2 weeks from now, not 2 months from now, maybe that's not the case. Maybe you're like, no, look, hey, I move. Well, I feel like I'm in like
Like decent shape. I've got enough muscle mass on me. We've talked in previous episodes. Why having insufficient muscle mass is sometimes detrimental for fat loss. So, you checked all that boxes. I don't get her very often. All right, I got equipment around, no problem, I've got the time in my schedule and I have enough muscle great. Well, now, we maybe just split up and say, look, we got 12 months. We got 2%. It's as simple as doing a half a percent per quarter of the year.
And now, all we're looking at is that number, right? I don't have to necessarily get all these things done. I can go quarter half percent, half percent, half percent, half percent. You're going to get there, right? The other sister near the scenario that I laid out a second ago, it may be needs to look like something like this quarter. One is going to be zero percent.
Oh cool. Yeah that's right. You may not lose a pound for the next 3 months.
We don't care, that's not the goal of these three months. I know that's the goal this year. That's our major macrocycle goal. We're going to get there. But to get there, most effectively, we need to invest in, you know, working more with your chiropractor or whatever the thing is, right, that will allow us to then go half a percent quarter to when we can really start training but we're going to ramp into it quarter 3. We're going to go another half a percent and now we're halfway there, quarter for we've invested so much. You're ready to go? We're going to go hard. We're gonna get that last 1%.
Last quarter
and we're going to get there
and you won't be hurt.
So that makes it very clear and I can also Envision how the precise structure of these intermediate goals, would vary depending on what sort of adaptation one is pursuing. And I do remember from our previous episodes. That fat loss itself is not an adaptation is a by-product of other adaptations of just want to make sure that you know, that I was paying attention. It's committed to memory.
Absolutely.
Some goals
such as fat loss of very quantifiable and yet they might not be linear, right? It's hard to know, you know, the assumption is if you ingest, you know, X fewer calories than the required per day, than you'll lose, x amount of weight, some percentage from body fat. I think that cues up the idea that we need to build some flexibility into our are thinking about these intermediate goals in order to just, make sure that dopamine system is in Tethered to exact numbers, you know, because
after all a reduction in 2% body fat, for instance is really desire to achieve a different sort of overall body composition. A recomposition, I don't know, by the way, that that's my exact goal. I think one of my goals is to be able to run a mile faster and I'm sort of haunted by this experience of wanting to run cross-country in college and trying to walk on. We weren't to division one school, but the threshold for being considered for the team was, you had to run a sub 10 minute to
Mi was turns out to be very, very fast. That's really hard. I didn't, I did not do that. I didn't even come close, but, and I don't think that I could reasonably do that. Now, we have an honest. I'm not interested in committing to the kind of training required. The sacrifice isn't meaningful enough for me, fairness case, but lowering ones. Mile time to run a mile. Bye. I don't know. 10 percent.
Aunt seems like a reasonable goal across six months, sure, great. So in the case of a goal like that clearly there are specific training programs but this raises the issue of, what if I have other goals as well. And at what point do people having multiple goals start to set up collisions between goals? How do we know whether or not? Something is reasonable, not just on its own but because of the other things that one has structured into their program. So being able to reduce a mile
Time by 10% in six months. Okay, maybe that's doable. Maybe it's not. You can tell me. But also being able to, you know, double the amount that they can do for, you know, single repetition leg extension for that matter. At the same time. That seems the oh, seem like incompatible goals, right? So, a couple of things, number one,
The more specific and precise, you can be with a single goal, the faster you will get there generally. So in theory, if you had one thing you wanted to achieve the best way to go about it is to focus on that. Give it the most priority that doesn't mean you can't do anything else along the way you can but you would want to focus on that the more additional goals you bring in the more distraction you're creating for that primary goal, depending on what those goals are you.
Can actually do them at the same time. Some other combinations are less effective. Think about it like this. We went through those nine adaptations and we went through them in a specific order on purpose, the closer those adaptations are together in that list. The more compatible, they are two training each other the further away, they become more challenging so just to give a few examples. If you wanted to improve your speed and power, you could basically train those simultaneously, they would not interfere with each other at all, in fact, since power
Is speed times force. It would be complementary if you just walk down the line from there to strength. Hey, same thing if you get faster that's going to Aid in strength because force is mass times acceleration. So if you improve acceleration, you're contributing to strength. Same thing with power. So speed power and strength or generally very complimentary, you can absolutely train all three of those those the same time and have no issues getting into hypertrophy now. We've
Got a little bit of Distinction if you're going to train strength and hypertrophy as we talked about in that episode at the base, those are going to be complimentary you add on some muscle. You're going to get stronger. You start training for strength is probably going to help you out on some muscle mass as you get to the end of that Spectrum, the overlap between the two starts to go away such that if you truly wanted to maximize strength above everything else,
If you continue to train for hypertrophy as well, that's going to take too many resources out of your recovery bin and you won't be able to do that. The inverse would also be the same right. If you're trying to maximize strength, you wouldn't be able to put enough volume on to get sufficient hypertrophy. So if you wanted to then combine speed with Hyper tree, you're going farther away from each other which means it's going to be more and more distraction. So the hypertrophy training would cause a ton of fatigue. You wouldn't be able to go at Max Speed.
Your speed or power strength. So you're going to be compromising those results now, speed training, won't compromise your hypertrophy training because it's non fatiguing, right? And so boom. Here, we have a little bit of an interference Effect, one way, but probably not the other. Let's move down the Spectrum. One more time and get into endurance. We won't go through all of these things, but you getting the idea here a little bit of a high intensity intervals. Okay, cool. Now, would that compromise my speed power or strength?
Probably because there's a little bit of residual fatigue, if the volume is low enough, then you'd be fine. All you're worried about there is not necessarily like some sort of cellular mechanism. It's just simple fatigue. It is amount of energy expenditure versus is that compromising my recovery to come back? Would those first three or four of those speed power strength, interfere with your ability to elevate your anaerobic capacity, probably not.
Almost surely. In fact, if you look at any of the literature on endurance training, you will see that speed power and strength.
Almost always, improve endurance. Write endurance training, added on top of strength. Can be detrimental, can have a neutral effect but generally doesn't help one get stronger by adding additional conditioning unless you're so unfit, you can't get through the volume needed in the strength, training, right? One more example here with so we don't drag this out too far.
In the case of something like I want to lose fat.
Well, hey, we don't have to worry about interference. It doesn't really matter if you're fatigued for your hypertrophy session, not a big deal. We're just trying to get some work done. If your hypertrophy session fatigued you from your conditioning? It's cool because you got the work done so we don't have to worry about it so much. So really kind of depends on the actual goal and what you want to pay attention to do is actually what are the chances of overlap? Which means, like what are the the adaptations you get physiologically that crossover from?
One to the other and then what are the ones that are actually going to start interfering? In fact, I have in my in my class, I have this giant matrix chart of interference effect going from adaptations through a whole bunch of systems. Everything from like handling pH to lymphatic drainage to Bone mineral density, Etc. And you can walk through these whole things and say, which one's actually have a positive effect, which ones have a massive positive effect and in which ones actually have a little bit of interference. And perhaps, if you guys are nice enough,
Can throw that into a newsletter or something, some PDF or something. I
think they'll be immensely valuable. I think some of that more extensive information when it's laid out in grid form like that. It's easier to useful. So we should do. Well, now we've said it, so we I didn't say I would do it. I said, perhaps, I think it's a great idea. I think it's a terrific idea. The idea that items closer on to each other, on the list of those nine, different adaptations are going to be easier to achieve in parallel.
Well, then items further apart makes perfect sense. And what I heard was that there's a few caveats that might seem minor but that but they're actually quite important such as anything that is relatively low intensity and doesn't impede recovery can probably be included as a parallel goal. So some speed work in conjunction with some long duration, cardio work notices, even though we're talking about number two, on that list and number nine on that list
and that case the
Duration endurance, even if it's low intensity, may actually interfere in her with the speed, if the volume gets to. I if you're talking about, I went on a 30-minute jock for most people that that it's totally fine. What we're really talking about here, is when the miles start piling up for the time really starts getting there in combination with some of the things, the factors we talked about earlier which is exercise choice. So more eccentric, Landing based exercise, choice is running. For example, there's more like
Klee to interfere than cycling because you're not Landing swimming is low-impact. So, if you're going to do those things, you can hedge your bets a little bit by choosing an exercise choice, that is less impactful again. If we're literally because there's oftentimes confusing here was like, oh don't do 10 minutes on the treadmill before you lift. You're going to cut. I whoa like timeout. Warm up is fine. We're really talking about probably more than 30 plus minutes at higher than 60% are rate like random number. Something like
Depends on the person, Etc. But it has to be a decent chunk. Again, you can actually fix that by then just consuming calories. You can also fix that by making sure everything else in the hidden and visible stressor bucket is improved. So this is like one of our tricks that will get into when we get to the recovery is you don't and certainly need to have to reduce your training. If you just ramped up your recovery.
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Again, most people certainly, they're going to people that lie outside these bins.
I think if you pulled a hundred people or a hundred thousand, or a million people as to what their major goals were in working out. They'd say as you so nicely listed out before aesthetic, changes, functionality and Longevity. But that one in three really kind of sit higher than most people would like to perhaps even admit they want to look good, which usually means they want to lose some fat, gain some muscle in specific places. I realized there are folks out there want to gain a lot of muscle and this muscle
Oh Levi where but I think most people would like to have a little more shape here, a little more muscle there to either balance out their aesthetic or to accentuate certain parts of their physique and they would probably like to shave off some subcutaneous fat. Although there are those exceptionally lean people out there and they exist to I think it would be gain muscle in specific places, lose fat, and do it in a way that also provide some Booth to their health span and Lon.
Have any I would say that that might even be 50% of people out there again, I'm taking the liberty of guesstimating. Another bin, I would venture is interested in getting stronger and putting on more muscle. Certainly there are a number of people that are interested in doing that and that could even be more muscle all over or more muscle with some accentuation to certain areas where they happen to be weaker or less less developed as it were and then the third band be people
That really enjoy cardiovascular work. Oh, I should say the second bin probably care about their longevity, also, but it's not really for most like, yeah, you know, I'm feel great now. And I will live to, you know, I'll live to be whatever, but I only want to do it. If I get that much muscle, right? We know these kinds of folks. I, yeah, I don't run this
whole in my class every year when I asked, like, what you guys all lift of course, like, I make them put their hand up, like, you guys are in my class, you're gonna put your hand up. Let you lift weights, and I asked him, like, why do you train like health?
Long-term health is like on the list and they all like I'm like any of you that selected Health are liars, like you're 20 to 25, you are not exercising for health, you're exercising, because you want to look a certain way or get stronger. Once you get past that undergraduate age, though that the actual desire to live longer and better actually becomes pretty
real. Yeah, I think that there are people who want to feel better. They know that exercise and the results from exercise can make them feel better. Yeah. That s been tends to be more focused on the aesthetic.
Change it seems or being strong. And then the third category think are people, I know a lot of folks like this who really enjoy, what are normally considered endurance type activities. And here, I just want to highlight again. What you? So beautifully Illustrated in previous episodes that you can gain a lot of endurance, even using weights or machines. It just depends on how you use them right now. It's not about that the exercise about how you perform them and Etc and you again beautifully provided all those details as to how to create endurance regardless of equipment.
Anders Etc. But that third category, seem to be people who enjoy running cycling swimming. Hiking. Dancing activities that they can do for long periods of time, that often will involve some sort of skill that is based on improving motor pattern. So maybe not so much stride but certainly for people that are really love tennis yeah people that love a sport like golf, right? If they want to be able to not just walk you you know they want to walk the
Holes they want, they want to have a great golf swing Etc. I'm not a golf player so forgive me. If my nomenclature is off closer, the golfer golfer so they
play golf. You don't play golf
player. I played miniature golf a few times and that's about it. Although Stanford. It does have a beautiful golf course. I'm told I should learn how to play golf. I'll come on
colleague or if you want you come up, I'll play it on say how I get me on the course
from my lap. So category one I think is a significant fraction of people. Yeah. So as we lay out,
These different ways to assess goals and as we approach the structure of a of a program. As you'll tell us, if we could, perhaps touch back to those every once in awhile. I again, I'm taking the liberty of assuming that we will, we will net about 80 to 90% of people out there. Again, those categories being people who want to lose some fat, maybe build some muscle in specific areas on their body and really want to be healthy. They want to feel great and they want to have a long Health spam.
I'll take a and lifespan. I live a long time feeling great, second category. People want to build more muscle and strength, sure. They don't want to damage their health but that's not their main focus. Their main focus is on building muscle and strength and then that third category of people who really want to do more endurance, type work feel great and strong doing it. But not because they can, you know, carry heavy weights while they're doing it. But rather, they can feel vital and they can push harder for longer and maybe even
Slate that to some of the more recreational type activities or sports like tennis and things that are more long-duration, playing soccer, maybe even softball or things of that, surfing. So moving on to those three categories, maybe we could call those bin, a b and c for sake of today's discussion. I think if you're willing to embrace yeah I think that will be informative toward our listeners in a way that simply not assuming what people's different goals are might not be able to accomplish said differently hopefully by doing that people will drive a lot more.
From the description of the program that you're going to give us love it. Now, I am certain that I want to let you return to your list of the five things that people need to consider when establishing a exercise program.
Yeah, great. Let's do that. I also do want to acknowledge point. You brought up cutely exercise, doesn't mean just lifting weights. That's my background. That's what I spend my time on. So I sort of default to examples in that category but it doesn't have to be that you've articulated. Plenty of other ways you can get
Amazing forms of exercise that that I've nothing to do with lifting weights. So for those folks in what was it Ben C or three? I can't
remember it, we go. A is again, muscle lose fat be healthy now and forever, right? Ben B is get stronger, gain muscle, don't damage your health but not really focus on Health, in the immediate term and then Ben C is want to play or do endurance type activities and quote unquote.
It feels strong doing it. So have more Vigor to be able to do that longer and maybe with more attention to skills, Etc. And of course, also want to improve their
health. What you've effectively done is, you've given us three different avatars with three different goals, right? So the next step, for each person or group is going to be to identify their Defenders, but before we get that, we got to close the loop on this smart thing. So in each case, they have either chosen that goal based on their personal preference or perhaps they did.
Our fitness testing protocol and realize they need to gain strength. So whether the reason they chose to be in buckets be or a, or C, was because of our protocol or personal preference, it really doesn't matter. They still want to go through this process of laying out their goals and making sure that again, they are specific, right? So let's go through Ben C which is a great one. So you want to have more energy and you want to feel stronger. When you're doing your kiteboarding, you want to feel stronger. When you finish
Or round of tennis round of golf game of tennis. Okay, great. That's a different strength. Absolutely. See. I hear, I know what you're saying though. Amazing. So that goal needs to be specific to that, right? So it would be hard to make a goal like I want to feel better at the end of my round.
Boy, what that depends on too many other factors. A better goal would be something like this. I want to be able to run this to mile Loop that I do around my neighborhood. And I want to do it and have a lower heart rate at the end or I want to be able to get my heart rate back, my heart rate recovery back faster amazing. That will that will probably aligned with you feeling quote-unquote stronger with right? So I did the same course in either. I can do it at the same.
Speed and it's not nearly as hard or I can go faster, whichever one, it doesn't matter. But that would be an example of a specific goal. The other buckets, you laid out kind of already have specific goals like I want to get stronger. Well that that's going to be the goal. The other one is going to be you know I want to lose some fat, okay. That's kind of the goal is sort of implicit in that it's the other people where you just like, I don't really care about that. I just want to be able to surf the Great Waves and then not feel exhausted afterwards. All right, cool.
Cool. Well then you still should pick a metric that is not that activity, May because it won't be within your control depending on the waves and the temperature and all this stuff that you can use as a proxy to say, if I were to do something that represented me, feeling, probably better when I surf. What would that be? And it's not perfect, but it would be still as specific as you could get, you still want to make sure it's measurable again. In this example, might be something like, you're going to go to the pool and time how long it takes you to swim a ton or meters or something?
Right? It's attainable and then you'll set a goal. That's realistic And Timely. I'm going to improve by 5% in the next two months. Okay, cool. That probably falls in the realm and then you're making the assumption that if you did that, you'll probably feel better. When you go out to do your primary activity, which is a surf, the reality of it is. Every time we work with an actual athlete. That's what we do at least, don't come to us to lift weights. They don't come to us to get stronger, they come to us because they want to play better.
And they want to stay on the field more, what we're trying to convince them of is, if you do this thing in the gym, then that should translate into. You being better at your sport recovering faster, being less injured but it's still just a proxy and so, that's all you're doing with these other nonspecific goals especially when their Performance Based goals and we didn't package it that way. But that's really what you talked about four bins. See there it is, a performance-based goal. I want to be able to perform when I'm in the field and my brain. That's a sport and your brain. It's when you're at yoga class,
It's the same thing. We've said this earlier in our series that if you have a body, you're an athlete.
I want to prepare your body such that it can do exactly what you want it to do. You then get to have the choice of what you ask it to do. You call it a sport, you call it. Your Saturday hike with your family, I don't really care. It's the same thing. You get control of your body performing the way you want it to perform. And that's what this whole thing is about great. So now that we've covered I think, as much as we need to regarding assessing and choosing a goal, I want to get back this idea of identifying your Defender so you really need to think carefully
Carefully about what is stopping you from hitting those goals and so you're forecasting a little bit. You're also going back into your own personal history, right? Do you have a history of knee pain? Do you have a history of working too much? Do you have a history of a lot of travel? Do you have a history of getting sick? A lot? What are these things that are happening? That are going to stop you from hitting your goal?
Um, a couple of examples I've already laid out so we don't need to go too much longer here. But in the case of somebody who is in maybe been a right which is want to lose some fat, maybe gain a little bit of muscle. Okay, what's stopping you from the strength and conditioning side? Is it the fact that you can't train consistent enough? Is it a fact that when you go to train, you don't know what to do. Is it a fact? When you go train, you train your ass off, you're not getting results. Okay, great. All three of these different scenarios.
Are going to result in different programs because they have different reasons, you're failing and that is really critical instead of just going I want a fat loss program and picking one up off the internet. It may not actually be addressing the point of failure for you. So the sooner you can choose your programs based on why you're failing.
The sooner you'll start getting results.
You have to run a little bit of a critical analysis there and it can be, you know, something scientific and could be a measurement. It also could just be you thinking about you've tried this in the past and why didn't it work? I wasn't that interesting. Okay, tell me more about why it was an interesting. I just I'm not really into machines and that's all I had. Okay. Great or I loved it. I loved the gym I was at and I was getting results but it was so far away.
Okay. Interesting. Why did you stop before? Why didn't it work or if it did work in the past? Amazing, let's go back to something similar but has your life changed at all? Is there anything different about now than when it worked three years ago? Yes, know if not, maybe we run it right back if it is. Okay, we're going to pursue to predict those things and you want to work. Effectively what I'm saying is throughout this entire 10-step process is going to be
You want to make sure that there are the non-negotiables that are in your life that, you know, are going to be ahead of your fitness program and you want to work with those things not against them, right? Because life will win when it comes to your children when it comes to your job, life is going to win, you're going to have to give up something. It's going to take some hard work, but we want to fight the right battles for most people, right? Even for our professional athletes. We get this all the time. This is like, they have nothing else to do but train right? Like, well hold on. Now they're getting
Traded they have agents to deal with. They may not have a contract, they have families too but I think life will get in the way I promise. And so you want to fight the battles that you can win, not ones that you're going to lose. And so that's really what this game is about. So if the battle is, hey, my job is super hectic. Okay, great. We're going to come up with a different strategy. That's more flexible. Maybe, I'm still going to hold you to the fire. I'm not going to be easier on you, but we're just not going to try to set up a situation where you have to do this workout Monday.
Say Friday and Saturday because, you know, your job is on the road and you're the provide, all the income for your family and you, okay. Whatever the thing is, right? That's what we really want to identify. So when I say, identify your Defenders, you need to run a little bit of a critical analysis on this, and a little bit of a tool I'll use for this is a modification of another system is told from Candy Cane which is we called a quadrant system. So you can imagine everything your life goes to one of
Four buckets.
All right. Now bucket one, I'm just going to call business and this has anything to do with your job income. Sort of all those things bucket to is relationships. So again, this could be family or love like anything that we would call relationships social connection purpose,
Binet anything right there? Bucket 3 is your Fitness and bucket for is your recovery. So one of the first steps we take as we walk through this and we say all right you have 10 points total and you get to distribute these 10 points.
Across the four areas. So not ten each, you get 10 total as we walk through, when we say right now, where are you giving your points? And we could do this right now, for you. If you'd like or I could make up a scenario, you want to do it. Sure great. So, Andrew right now in the last month.
If you had 10 points total in those four categories, where would you be Distributing the most points which category and how many points is that
be business with my work
business, work job, sort of all those things and how many out of
10, which doesn't I should say, ever quite feel like work running a laboratory and doing the podcast, doesn't ever really feel like work in the traditional sense, but it's career. It's going to work. Its it involves relationships, but it certainly doesn't
It enhance my fitness except of my vocal cords and and recovery. So so with those notes there, I would say four or four to five you pick
55 Fair. That's the most common number five, business five,
great. Once again I'm typical which makes me happy. You nailed it. One of the few ways in which I've been accused of being normal, I think five for business.
Okay. What's the
Next highest. And what's that score?
I do invest in relationships. I would say, does it have to be around? Can it be a has a whole integer whole integer?
22.
All right or 7 out of 10 here. So would you say it is fair that you spend roughly two-and-a-half percent of your it's not necessarily time. Its energy, time, Focus sort of all these things, two and a half times as much on your business as you do in your relationships,
it varies, depending on what's going on, feels a little skewed in the direction of business. So I might want to adjust to a 4:3 ratio there. Maybe not on the
going to hold 250 K to business relationships and then just for sake of example and because you know this is doesn't seem like it exceedingly precise measure. It can have some slop. Of course,
where would you put Fitness and
Recovery?
I definitely put energy into fitness, so I'm going to give that also a to.
Yep.
Which leaves
one for Recovery.
Great that. What you just laid out is again the most quintessential split? You could have, in fact, you run this game on everyone, they're going to come up with basically the same answer unless they don't work out or whatever her right, okay? So a couple of rules here, recovery must be at minimum half of your Fitness allocation and your case to 21 you're
flying. I think I say has to be, halfway has to be 5 out of 10 points. You know, case as it doesn't leave much for anything else, I would
like it.
To be minimum, 20% of the total which means 2 out of 10. Hmm. Now. And when I say recovery, I don't simply mean muscle. I mean, you need personal time. You need meditation, you need enjoy sleep. You need to go to a concert and get out and see people. And so like whatever the things that that give you energy back, right? Some folks that's personal time. Some folks. That's social time. Whatever. That means to you.
Right? Yeah. I actually get a lot of energy from my work for and so it you know that's why some of these numbers are a little bit.
Always the kind of cloak that the underlying Dynamics.
So here's what we do from this game. We look at that. And we say, if that's our split, Andrew,
5321, the 522, 15 to 21. I'd love to be able to put three in relationships, just because, but then I need 11 out of,
right? So, here's the fun game we play. You're currently at this and you don't get the add to 11. You have to stay at 10:00 there. Your 10:00 is different than my 10 may be, right? But 10 is 10 or just whatever the maximum you can actually do. It's you
So if we went back to our training goal, whatever that goal was for you and we went back to our Defenders we would look at this score now and say is 3 out of 10 Fitness of 3 right. Fitness is issue so it's 5 2, 2 3, 1 is 2 out of 10 sufficient to hit that training goal in that timeframe you described and let's say you said I want to
Hit a new PR in my Mi six months
from now. Yeah, for Simplicity sake. And also because it's largely to I'm going to put myself in what I refer to as been a earlier. Great, right? My by fat percentage is is okay, it's in the rain, it's good that I would like, but I would like to bring down a little bit. I gained a little bit muscle here and there, keep keeper gain some endurance and certainly certainly my immediate and long-term health or extremely important to be
great. So then the question in the May answer me
Yes, that this is the optimal split for you. If it is not then we have to make a choice, we either alter the goal or the timeline.
To make it realistic or we alter our quadrant. And then if we're going to alter our quadrant, the next step is critically important. We need a list of very specific life actions that we're going to take that allows that split the happen. So if you said for example, I want to put three into relationships. Great, what specific life actions are you going to take to pull one from Fitness? You can't pull me from recovery or one from business and industry.
And you don't have to actually answer this. Thank you personal. I know you don't like making these things about you
because right? If that's the other reason to do it and it is a diabolical trick to make it to insist that these be whole integers because I would have done, you know like a 4.5 4 gorgeousness and a 2.5 relationships. But obviously you write the rules on this, not
me. So you would just walk that less, okay? And then let's could be something like I promise to not work after 7 p.m.
Thursday through Sunday or whatever the thing is, right? I promise I'm gonna make sure that I don't start work before 8 a.m. or what but whatever, right, no more trips. Just make those things specific and measurable, not just like, I'm going to work less, that's never gonna go. What is the very specific life action. You're going to take, there's going to be alarm that goes off Tuesday night at 4:00 5:00 p.m. and no matter what we Barbell Shrugged we used to have little shirt. That was like d.
A380 which is like drop everything and train, which amends at 3 p.m. in the afternoon. No matter what's happening? We dropped everything and trained because that was like when you start a business and you're going things just run away from you. Right? And is this sort of like man? It's not my company but those guys are like, we are strengthening company and we're not training. So we had to just make this hard rule, a nuisance like, a little thing that came up and he was easy to say drop everything and train. 3:00, there you
go. I like this drop d e, everything a and and
Like, you could be drop everything and correct, you know, pick your favorite, totally
drunk, everything and read, pick the
relevant read. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, I really miss reading for pleasure, I would put that under recovery and Pratap everything and breathe and breathe and breathe. You are saying, oh, and breathe. I was saying, read. I said that, too. Yeah, because for me reading is actually, is both recovery and relationship because it often times in my relationships, I insist not insisted. I certainly didn't says we've had a format
Of reading the same book in parallel. Oh great. Yeah. Now, surely side by side but the same book in parallel and then discussing It's a Wonderful practice or listening to the same audiobook. Yeah,
it works. Well, you can do drop everything and play. Hmm, you just gonna go do something fun. We're gonna play video games, you're gonna go play with your kid. You're going to do it or play with your dog? Like you some, it doesn't have to actually play but play it to you can signify personal time, right? It doesn't really matter. So yeah. That's a
real like this. Drop everything and blank got a word that you probably shouldn't have.
More than what two or three of those overall,
pretty much like one is the 122, maybe Grace, where you want to go after
that. So the idea is then to redistribute the numbers on this list. But through a very concrete action and I like this, drop everything in blank because it speaks to the non-negotiable
aspect of it has to be. You'd its life will get
pushed right. It's not a fine time to write, correct? It's not in next year. I'm going to correct. I love
it. Yeah. Yeah when you make when you when you put those things
And those things you might as well just don't even put on your lipstick is not going to
happen. Yeah, you're talking to somebody who loves rules because when they are non-negotiable rules, they provide this incredible organizing Force for the brain. Yeah, it's really a neuroscience thing in my mind, totally the and actually, we did an episode on happiness where you find that once people make a decision if they eliminate the possibility of other decisions but literally the hatch is closed. That is it on the boat that the the rates of subjective happiness.
The immediate long-term happiness over time. Go way way up. Yeah and so I'm convinced that the nervous system doesn't like to keep the valves on these dopamine circuits open. I actually think it diminishes from the reward component and there actually some data on this anyway, I don't want to take us off track but the
last part of this, what we do then is we take that quadrant and we take that list and then you're going to print it physically and you're going to put it in two places, this could actually be on your phone. You don't have to print. You can screenshotting be the background, your phone. So every time you click on your phone, you immediately see that quadrant
Like it's a very clear reminder of like what are my priorities today, right? Just a simple little picture. I also like to put it in your place of failure. So for a lot of people that is like on their laptop or right above their workstation, right? Was like the thing that's going to lose and beat your Fitness, is your job typically, right? Or it's on your TV, it's on your Netflix control. No sorry. Netflix, no offense. But you know what I mean? Like, it's whatever. The thing is that, you fail for, I play too many video games. Great there, I work too much. Okay, great. And you
Put it there and you put it. Also the last communities it has to also be in the hands of somebody who can hold you accountable.
Right? Wife training partner, business partner, whatever. So it's like, hey, Andrew, like you promised you were going to do X yourself. Why are you still here? You committed to this, you got to get out of here. Someone who will like be like no, no, it's drop everything and read its 8:00. You're supposed to be reading. You gotta go, you're going to check back in on that, check bank and every week, check back in, it doesn't matter every month and then you can adjust, it's fine. You can always change the system, but that has to now change. You gotta print a new one and now, it's a whole new.
Promise, you've made yourself. So you've got to be able to hold yourself accountable to those things. It's got to be flexible enough to where it's realistic. It can't be. I'm not going to work after 6:00 every day. Maybe it's just three days a week. Maybe it's on Saturdays. I promise to work for the first two hours. So I don't work Saturday night, whatever. Or the inverse? I'm not going to work Saturday. You got it. You can come off a million examples here. So, that's the system. We use to make sure that we have now a properly identified, where we're going,
We found a road map to that and now we know exactly how we're going to stay on track.
I have to take this opportunity to add one more thing to our drop everything list and you gave the example of deer, which is maybe, drop everything and read or drop everything and relax or another example I have to add a deal, which is drop everything. And this is for you. Lex Love
Actually, one of the advantages of having a dog or having children is that the drop everything and love is often enforced by.
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off. Let's move on to the next one, shall be number three. Here is going to be what I call calendar or sort of time frame. So it's going back a little bit and saying, you've decided on this goal and you've to identified the Defenders. Now we need to come up with a realistic time frame for how long it's going to take to accomplish that goal. And when you do that,
You need to look at your life schedule and what I mean by that is, do you have important deadlines coming up? Do you have holiday? You have a trip. Do you have travel to your children? Have something coming up. You need to take all that information and I literally lay out a calendar. And I write all those dates in a physical calendar, first. And the reason I'm suggesting this is you want to work your training backwards around that as we've been discussing. Life will win if you try to plan.
A training program that is five days a week, 90 minutes a day and all the sudden, you look two weeks from now and you realize you've got a grant deadline and then you've got to take two days to go to Austin. It's just foolish, you're going to fail and then you're going to quit and you're going to be like, man, again, my training program failed, so you need to figure out what are the non-negotiables are in that business quadrant and just not be foolish, alright? So let's imagine you're going to plot out, say a 12-week training phase.
You want to, you've decided on this goal and then you look and in you realize in the middle of this 12 week span week 5 is really hectic and chaotic or you realize that this is a quarter in which something important is do. Maybe we want to either adjust the goal or what we really do in this step is going on to actually step number four, which is choose the number of days per week. You can exercise and the length
In terms of amount of time, you can truly afford to train. I would rather you underestimate that then overestimated. So you again, you look at the calendar, you put all these non-negotiables, the deadline. You cannot move in the calendar and then you say, look based on this realistically, I can conservatively train three days a week for 60 minutes total, and that includes the time, I walk into the gym, my warm up my down-regulation breathing, at the end and then me getting back.
Her in the shower, and back is really now, it's maybe 90 minutes by the time you traveled, you transition, you picked back up on work. You showered, you 8, Etc. That time just runs away from you and I'll send it was a two-and-a-half-hour thing, even it was a 45-minute workout. So you really need to figure that thing out if you're a few weeks in and you realize who actually a little more time than I thought, you can always train more. You do another thing you can add up but you don't want to do is set up a program that is requiring you to do certain exercises on one days or certain styles of training on another
And then you constantly miss one of those days. I thought I could do four days a week but one day a week something's getting pulled out. That's just going to keep you off. Schedule is going to make you feel like a failure and you're going to run into problems with your training. So schedule 3 if you are sure you can get three and if there's an extra day we can always do other fun stuff. All right, so that's really step three and four. Figure out your life events over the course of this time. How many days a week can you train then how long in terms of minutes per workout?
Notice we haven't selected a single exercise yet. We haven't worried about how heavy rest intervals. All those modifiable variables, you don't need to pick those later first. Where are we going? Second? How are we going to get there? Which is the quadrant and identifying of Defenders and now the third is, what are the restrictions? I need to place on myself.
In terms of program designed based on how often and how long I can work out. That is going to allow you to go back to some of the previous episodes and go man you gave us all kinds of ideas. How do I know which one to choose? This is your answer. You're going to choose based upon the limitations of time and frequency, so if you've already said we're in, let's imagine we're in bucket, a or bucket, seat, doesn't matter. And you go look the most I can afford with where I'm at with what's going on in my life is
Is weak. We automatically know we're going to have to start training, choosing a training style. That's limited to three days a week. Don't worry about the 45 days of those are off the table. And now we're at we so we've placed restrictions it kind of goes back to that concept of. I think it's one of your podcast Jocko, right? This is like a structure gives us actually some Freedom. So by creating some restrictions here where a little more free to go, I only actually have to choose between A and B rather than sitting down and going man. There's all
20 hours into this exercise podcasting and there's so many options which one to pick what you create a little bit of restriction and now it's easier to go. Oh, my only option is a or b? And there
we go.
So that's number four,
that's three and four at that point, once we're good there. Now what you want to do is go to step number five which is actually select your exercises or your movements and this can be a simple as selecting like a kettlebell swing or running or swimming, it could be your entire exercise mode. What you want to do with exercise selection, here is make sure that you're balancing those exercises across
The whole week not within necessarily every workout. So if you have four days a week, five days a week, you want to look at the exercise selection and say, okay, I need to have somewhat of a reasonable balance between movement patterns, or muscle groups or front and back side to side. However, you thinking of it just across that week, right? So again, it's a war on a three-day program.
And we're in either of the buckets, any of the buckets, really?
And we say, okay, great, maybe it's not ideal, if all I select is cycling every day.
That's not a lot of balance. I don't notice any. There's no upper body work there. There's no torso work. There's no other positions. So maybe I'm going to really focus on cycling. So I will do only cycling, two days a week. But that third day, I need to pick something for the other movement areas, and that's going to make sure you stay in a reasonable balance. If you have an exercise that you like great, if you have exercise you have access to again. Maybe the gym is a giant pain in the ass and so you can say look it's too far away. The closest one is 45 minutes there and back, so maybe
I'm going to restrict myself to only kettlebell and bands and running because I can do those in my house. Awesome, we've actually created some freedom because we give ourselves some restriction and now we just have to figure out. How am I going to give some movement patterns? Somewhat balanced across my three days. So really, when it comes to exercise Choice, it is selecting the patterns that you know how to execute
Giving yourself against someone of a balance between the muscles and the joints and the movement patterns.
Making sure that you are specifically targeting any muscle group or movement that you want. So making sure you want to improve muscle size and your glutes. You better make sure some of the exercises you're doing at least one day a week, your feel it in your actual glutes, so you can check that box. It doesn't have to be every exercise, it probably shouldn't, it doesn't even have to be every single day.
But make sure it's checked off somewhere on that list.
And the last one is, is there a strategy in which you can progress it? So if you're like, I'm just going to do bodyweight exercises. Okay. Great. Well, how are you going to progress those?
And he's like, body weight. It's really hard to add load. Maybe you can put a weight vest on or something, but then, maybe you don't have that or that's an extra thing or that can only go so far. So, what's my progression strategy going to be well in this case, maybe you just increase the complexity by going from two legs. Like, say a body weight, squat to a single leg squat, or you just increase the repetitions, or you increase time. You can hold it. But my point is, your progression strategy will be based upon the restrictions that you placed based on availability and things like that. The last
thing I was recommend here in terms of exercise progression to make sure that you can continue to do these things. While lowering your risk of injury, both in the short term and long term is to progress your exercise complexity in this this fashion. So make sure number one you can do the exercise properly with the systems. So let's imagine a scenario where we're going to try to squat. So give yourself put your hands on a bench or something.
Like that. Now, can you execute that squat perfectly with assistance? So you're holding on to something. Okay, great. If you can't then don't progress past that, don't go now to a barbell back squat, if you can't do it correctly, when you had assistance. But let's assume most people can do that. Okay, great. Now, you can move on to the next step which is can you do it? Well, without assistance. So this would be bodyweight only
Check cool, we're good there. Okay. Now you can go ahead and move on. Can you do it? Well with an added eccentric load. So in this particular case, if I, if we're learning to squat, we can do it. Well when I hold onto something that's great. Okay. Now I can do it, well, which is my body weight. Now if I put a little bit of weight on whether it's a kettlebell in the front, like a goblet squat or dumbbells to the side or whatever you want to do. Can I lower go all the way down and stay in perfect position?
If you can do that great, you're allowed to go to the next step, which is, can you hold isometrically? So can you go all the way down and then hold that bottom position, what you don't want to do is start adding load or speed or fatigue. If you're going down to the bottom position of the movement and you are out of control.
We really want to avoid this. So I want you to show me, you can go down and you can lower the weight under control. You can hold it in that position under control. If we're clear there. Now, we can add the concentric portion, right? You can now go ahead, you can lower it. You can hold that position of most dangerous. Now, you can move up at whatever speed we want. We are all good there. Once you can show me those things you can add the last two steps which are now speed if you choose to
And the last one, which is fatigue, right? I would really discourage people from doing exercises to fatigue, especially, with a moderate, or high load. Unless you can promise me, you can do these first, six steps. If you can, you can basically go hog-wild with your training and your chances of injury are very low. Again both acute injury as well as long-term injury which is just sort of like my joints ache and all of a sudden my shoulder hurts and you know things like that.
That's really what I'm looking for. And once you're clear there, you can train pretty hard. I
really like this because recently I was showing somebody how to use a. In this case it was a hack squat machine and I noticed that they were a very timid of getting into a deep squat position and they cited a previous knee injury, which is long since healed, right? But even with proper foot placement and everything, you just tell they were getting Ginger about it as they approach that bottom position.
Overtime with pauses at the bottom, they become very comfortable and now actually are going well below, 90 degrees angle between, you know, femur and lower like. So it was clear that it wasn't something range of motion limited or it was just it was a mental thing but a logical one for them. Now after what you just said, I think a better strategy that I could have used would have been to have them get into that position.
Just no weight at all, maybe nothing on the sled and then slowly working up from there, as opposed to doing what we did, in our case, which was to just convince them that they were much stronger than they thought they were in and we eventually got there. But I'm realizing that there was far too much. Mental anguish involved in that process. Yeah,
this whole progression, by the way, this can all happen in one session if you can check the boxes. Like, in that example, you may have been fine to jump there. It may have just been a hey you're fine here, get through it, okay?
This whole progression might take two years. I mean, it's really depends on your background. If you actual have injury history, your comfort your confidence that all these things. So you don't need to worry about rushing. Through that progression. You don't even need to get all the way to the end if you don't want to specially with speed and things like that. But again, it can't happen. It doesn't have to be like well it's a month of this month ago, but no if they feel great and you can go through one to seven and five minutes, then you're good to go. Number 6.
Number six now is just order. So, you know how many days per week are going to work out, you know, how long they're going to take, you've selected all the exercises you need to get done.
You've balanced that across the week. Now, you just need to put them in order and the easy answer. Here is generally do what's most important first in the workout.
There is some minor interference effect of some other things there. But really the reality of it is if you do the priority first, you're probably going to be okay so whether this priority is a muscle group. So in the example you want to make sure your glutes get trained, maybe do it first. If you're trying to maximize your back, squat, you may not want to do a bunch of glute exercises to fatigue first, but that's not the priority. We picked, we picked a different one, which is
Buckets, a b, and c. Okay. Great by doing it. First, you told me the priority was to make sure I do something for my glutes, and then I would also like to get my back squat, a little bit stronger or whatever. Okay. Fine. The same thing could be done for your endurance training, you could do your endurance training before you're lifting. If you understand, that means you might be compromising your lifting quality of the work out a little bit but you might be fine with that. If you say the endurance, work is more important right now, amazing. You don't know the
To that though if you hadn't gone through steps one, through four. And that's why those things are critical. So it makes what we call chaos management, which is things happen. The moment, I don't know what to do. What should I choose? That decision becomes really clear because you can always go back to the beginning of my priority was this, then therefore, that's my choice today. So, it provides a very simple set of instructions. For when the workout gets cut short, when your workout has to be in the hotel. And any number of things that pop up,
In real life. Whether again, you're an athlete or non-athlete either way, life will get in the way at some point. So you need to have rules and a system that says when this happens I go right back to this and that's my choice done. I'm moving on. No decision to make here. It's already been determined a week ago. Five weeks ago, we're often rolling. So the order again, is pretty simple. Just put the one that is most important first. Now I know you like to do legs on Monday.
Great. I actually love that to. I do the same thing generally because to me that's almost always the most important thing if I miss a bicep workout I'm probably fine but I really don't like missing the big movement pattern so I make sure that those happen on a day that tend to be more stable for me. Mondays are generally pretty stable things, get chaotic as the week moves along for me.
Others might be the opposite, right? Others might want to go. Hey I'm actually going to keep Monday as my flexible day or off day because I like to get a lot of my work done. Get that cleared so I can have oh, he sure liked working around you. Some people love to try on Saturdays because it's their most free. Some people hate. It sure. You tell me what is the biggest priority? And when are you the most fresh Monday, Tuesday? It doesn't matter. Depends on your work, schedule. Maybe you work the weekends. I don't know, right? You decide what? Day of the week?
Are you generally the most consistent, the most consistent schedule and the most consistent energy and do the thing that is most important on that day? It doesn't matter. Monday Tuesday day, one day 3, we are sort of talking about this earlier, but you actually don't even have to do a week schedule. Our brains tend to like to go year month week, but a lot of folks will even just run this thing in terms of like a seven or nine Day schedule. In fact, we're a 9 day training schedule.
For one of my major league baseball players and he's eight or so years in his career and he's hitting all time PRS in velocity. He's very, very good. And it was a nine-day training cycle and we ran that for the entire season. So it doesn't have to be a seven days, but but it tends to work for a lot of people because most people have a fairly consistent schedule across the seven days. So, pick the thing that is most important, do it first, and do it on the day of the week. That is most consistent for you in terms of schedule and
energy.
I really like what you're describing. I should just say that one of the reasons I put legs on Monday is because I tend to get enough sleep on the weekends. I generally get enough sleep during the middle of the week, but often times things will come up, I can be pretty sure however, that I've quote unquote caught up on my sleep, on the weekends, this notion of catching up on sleep is a little dicey scientifically, but tend to be pretty rested by Monday morning. And actually, my week begins on Sunday and Sundays are when I get my long form of cardio. So those two are really
And the reason that long form cardio is on Sunday, is that it can take many different forms. It can take a hike with a weighted vest. It can take a form of a jog, it can be done with other people. It can be family time, it can be time with friends and so on and that's pretty hard to do during the middle of the week. We're pretty hard to ensure at least for me. I also find that by book ending the week with some non-negotiable days of training on Sunday Monday. Then if the week gets busy Tuesday Wednesday or even sometimes Thursday with
Travel and things like that. One can sort of catch up toward the weekend. It's not ideal. I mean ideally it spaced out but really this isn't about what I do. This is really just to underscore the principal you described which is I have a very clear sense. Now over three decades or so of training and three decades or so of being involved in academics in science. And work of, when I tend to be most rested, right? When I tend to have some flexibility in my schedule and also, when I'm trying to combine Fitness with some of my
Social engagements, which is actually quite fun. One thing I notice is that the four boxes that you mentioned before, work relationships, Fitness and Recovery, some of them do have some crossover, they all do, you know, I've hiked with family or friends is both relationship and fitness and so on, but I love the principal because anything that can add consistency. As you pointed out, is going to greatly increase the probability of reaching ones goals that sort of an obvious one. But we're in an earlier episode, you
Oh said something that I wrote down and is really still ringing in my mind especially now which is that consistency always beats intensity.
Correct? Yeah. Absolutely. We used to do a thing when I was training, NFL players for the combine many years ago where Saturday's were supposed to be the day they came in and we did the most regeneration. So this is when they get body work done, and we do hot cold contrast and sort of all these things and our attendance was like 14.
Sent nobody showed up for a
massage. Nobody showed up. Wow seems legit, but remember, love a good massage, of
course, but remember you're 18 years old, you're likely to be getting millions of dollars hand to you in the next few weeks or months
and is not referring to me, by the way. Yeah, I'm actually quite a bit older than 18 and I'm not getting handed billions of dollars each week.
Great.
So I would think that but in those folks like they recover Superfast, I've never really had that. And also like Friday night, hmm, kind of enticing and so nothing was there. And the strategy then was what if we instead of having a important hard Training Day on Saturday, we transition and it is only things they want to do. So we basically identified what are the things in training, you love the most. And let's do those Saturdays. And it turns out for those folks? No surprise.
Here it was what we call the gun show so they would come into the gym and we would literally do nothing but biceps and triceps they'd just get a pump and then the deal was though you come in and literally would come in as we would pick three guys. So you you and you you pick your favorite bicep exercise. You pick your favorite one. You pick your favorite one. You three over there. You pick your favorite tricep bicep tricep and we just run a big circle. Is just a like, how many reps? I don't know. I don't care how many sets I don't care. Just like pump away. Like I don't even care, right? We chose small muscle groups, not really getting
Fear with much we're training them for the NFL combine which is like it's not a its legs. Perform is basically, right? So it's like if they smash their biceps and triceps on a Saturday, it's not going to influence what we did on on Monday. So recovery wasn't an issue. Once we finish the gun show though.
Now, you have to go, do your region stuff. So, if you need to Cairo work, you need Physical Therapy, whatever you're going to do. So we would get them in the building with the low-hanging fruit, and then we would actually get them to do their work. You can do the same thing and I honestly do the same thing. I tend to do either. If I'm going to do an upper lower slit, I'm going to do that stuff either Friday night or Saturday, because it's very difficult for me to do a hard long workout Friday night.
Right or even Friday morning for that matter. The same thing Saturday, I wake up and it's now it's like, it's family. Mode is kid things. I want to do stuff. I want man, but I can usually convince myself to be like I just go on there, go, 20 minutes, and get your upper body stuff done. All right, I can, I can walk myself into that mentally. It's harder to walk yourself into your five sets of five dead lift. It's sort of just like, whoa, I ain't got that to me right now. My high intensity intervals. The max of I don't have that right now, so I'll either go for my long steady state stuff which is
Like I'm going to I'm going on the bike, I'm writing down to the beach or coming back nasal only. I can get myself to go for a bike ride like that, whatever. So I picked the thing that I'm likely to do on the days where I'm probably going to be my weakest quote-unquote, not physically, but motivation wise for a long time I try to like it just got stuck in a way where my harder stuff was Friday nights and I'm just like, why am I doing this? I was having like a 50% success rate. Just like we were having like a no percent success rate with
NFL guys, on Saturday. So you have to be a little bit tough. You have to grind, sometimes you have to, you know, get some motivation. Go after it. But you also have to be like, well, this is just stupid planning, right? Like why put yourself in a position where you're just failing over and over and over when I could move it and go look those sessions.
Are going to be things that are easier. They don't require as much Gusto to get up and get them done. I get those things done 90% of the time because the worst case I can be like, all right, we're going to go do a family thing, give me 20 minutes, I'm just gonna run up there and smash upper body and you don't need and I need a 20 minute warm up as like I can just kind of jump into those things if I had to, if I feel great then I could still go do something else or I could do more work to do a longer session but you're sort of immune to any situation. So
So I would book in those as I guess is what I'm saying, what's the day, you're going to have the best day and what's the day? You generally have the worst and and put the programs around those situations.
I love the idea of identifying, the friction points, the high friction and low friction days, friction meaning, anything that impedes you from training, consistently or well. And there are so many factors that ratchet into that sleep other, social engagements work, you know, Friday night. I also find it tough to do any kind of training, I
You cardiovascular training. I do interval type training on Fridays typically, but there's a lot of cumulative fatigue and stress that happens across the week. And usually, for a long time. My gosh were than a decade. Now I've been telling myself that Saturday is the day that I tried to reduce my cortisol as much as possible. From there we go there. And then Sunday, is the day that I enjoy that low cortisol State, and that is actually what opened up into the long, slow run. I like, she like to think of myself as a bit of a mule.
During those in Ron's actually have a shirt that has a sloth on it that I wear to remind myself to go slowly on those runs, not that I ever run that fast, but there's the whole mindset around. It is to be a bit of a mule just kind of moving through it. And the fatigue factor is more one of, you know, at first is a little bit of boredom. But then I've noticed, there's a whole different set of mental escapes that open up under different training types. And this is maybe something get into
Little bit in a future episode or discussion the you when you train really intensely for short periods of time, one way your mind goes into a particular State. When you do long, duration, training, you're thinking and, and indeed, even the way it affects sleep patterns is also very different. I think one of the great futures for neuroscience and exercise science in collaboration is to identify how different patterns of physical movement, relate to different patterns of thinking, and vice versa. Anyway, something maybe to just your mark for a future conversation, but there's clearly a relationship
And ship
their yeah, yeah. Well when we certainly know of a pretty clear relationship between even what we would classify as zone 5 exercise and deep
sleep. So zone 5 again being your breathing a lot through your mouth because you have to in order to bring in enough oxygen to offset the acidity created by the carbon. Exactly. Yeah.
This is the high heart rate. So I mean if you're going to look at it and hit a number looking for something like 30 plus minutes a week,
Being in the top, 10% of your heart rate.
That impacts deep sleep
is going to positively Impact deep sleep. As long as it's done, very far away from deep sleep. So you don't want to do that but night so you went in in terms of time. So if you hit those numbers earlier in the day oftentimes that will enhance the
asleep. Yeah I was looking at some papers recently and the number that kind of emerged from those papers was that unless it's low intensity exercise trying to exercise.
About six hours or more away from your sleep time, would be ideal. Now that said, for those of you that have to hit the gym or go for a run in the evening and then are trying to fall asleep for 26 hours later, I wouldn't want that statement to impede your regular your regular
exercising. Yeah, this is there's an easy trick that just finish it with down-regulation breathing. So it does sort of one of our things that if you because that is a realistic situation, right?
Finish work at five or even six. And then by time of your training or
Or whatever you want to call it. It's a 738. Your home at 9:00 you're eating and then I'm like, you can't eat two hours before bed pretty soon. You run into a number of different Collision points. Yep. It make you wonder whether or not you're doing everything wrong or if it's really worth training at all on. And I would argue, it's better to train the not to train it, provided that you can still get to
sleep 100%. So you have to walk a little bit of a game. We run of this issue at the NBA players, right? You're playing games at 6:00 at night to start Major League. Baseball's is 70 5 7? 10 pitch, right? And also by the way, we're changing times.
Owns every five days, right? UFC fighters and such words usually training twice a day. There is no option train or I mean we are training twice a day always so we have to come up with strategies for that and there's other like non out these scenarios of course words like there is no other option here. Cool. So what we do is a couple of things, number one, that further away, you can make it from sleep, the better. If possible, we do need to train though, around the same time, you're going to be playing.
That has to happen. So the harder and longer we go in the training session, the harder and longer we go and our down-regulation post exercise and that is in my estimation the number one lever. You can pull that can help right now if it really does start crushing sleep, you're going to have to make a critical decision there in general. It's not a good reason to not exercise, but maybe you restricted to only a couple of days.
A week. You go all the way up and intensity and the rest of the day's, maybe 70%, you staying just kind of a working Zone.
Awesome. Maybe it's a longer down-regulation. Maybe there's other strategies you can do, but yeah, you want to be careful of and we've had this situation a number of times where it's sort of just like, sleep complaint sleep, complaint sleep complaints. We run full sleep studies on them in their house. We do the whole thing with absolute rest. We come in, we do the whole thing eye-tracking biomarkers, the whole thing and it's like, oh, you just need to stop doing intervals at 8 p.m.
right then I would add to that.
Another incentive for being able to train with or without caffeine. Is that it's very clear that even if you can fall asleep after ingesting caffeine within the preceding hours. That caffeine consumed in the gosh even, you know, 12 but really, you know, eight to ten hours, four hours prior to bedtime really disrupts. The architecture of sleep. So if you critically rely on caffeine in order to train whatever your training might be and you know that sleep is important for Recovery. Well then it's pretty obvious where I'm going with this. Yeah. So having that
Leti, is vitally
important. Yeah, you've probably also covered this but you can actually measure that directly. So, by eye tracking patterns, you can actually identify the effects that caffeine has on sleep independent of asleep time, or
not right there. Never positive effects. Correct. That said, I am a proponent of caffeine early in the day, and caffeine does have a lot of thoughts.
Anti neurodegenerative, as long as you're not getting anxiety. It's Pro performance, both mental and physical performance, but of course, if you do not need caffeine, if you're one of these mutants that do not need caffeine in order to go about your daily living with focus and intensity than by all means, don't start taking caffeine.
I'm not the hugest fan, I am scientifically 100% abour. Personally it does, I don't do well on
it. Well, you seem to ride a little bit more. What we would call, you know, sympathetic tone, you know, kind of shifted towards more alert. A'ight.
Tend to be naturally a bit more like my Bulldog Costello was a little bit more on the Mellow sleepy side and caffeine just puts me right at that alert. But calm, place. And I can get away with drinking a I wouldn't say ridiculous, but fair amount of caffeine and remain there, but I do restrict it until the time, right up about 2 p.m. at the latest Israeli when I try and drink caffeine number seven.
Great. So number seven and eight are pretty simple. This is now choose the intensity.
And the volume. So we've discussed those at length in the previous episodes. We probably don't have the time to go back over all those details. So remember the adaptation your training for and pick the appropriate rep range. Total amount of sense as well as the intensity to then get the corresponding adaptation, right? All you have to do is Select those things in terms of progression through week, the rule of thumb we say for intensity is something around 3% per.
A week. Alright, for volume, it will depend on what you're doing a little bit, but any time you cross more than 10% per week, you're going to start running into problems. So I like 5% better. It doesn't need to be as low as three. You can jump up, much more than that five to seven percent is better. So if you are doing say running because because the numbers, make it easy and you're doing 10 miles per week, total, if you were to go up to 11,
Miles the next week.
Great, you're right around 10% but what you wouldn't want to do is say I'm running 10 miles this week and I did maybe for Monday, three Wednesday through Friday. So, for three and three, you got your 10, then you wouldn't want an add-on mile every day. So, Monday, instead of doing for I did five Wednesday instead of doing three. I did for Friday's are doing threaded for you. Would you actually did you went from 10 to 13 which is a much higher percent jump than the 10% prescribed? So the same thing would be true for lifting.
Ting weights. The same thing as actually, 24 calories, and trying to add them Etc. So the body tends to not handle those things as well, jumping more than 10% per
week. So keeping with this idea of increasing Progressive overload being 10%, more over some period of time. Am I correct in assuming that I want to identify one, maybe two, meaningful variables and progressing that or those
variables so Progressive overload can come in the form.
Of any of the modifiable variables. So you could increase the complexity of the movement, you could increase the intensity or the load. You can increase the volume by either more sets. More reps or more total exercises in a day.
What about time under
tension? You could also manipulate how the Temple of each repetition. You could also manipulate how many times per day you train, so, you can manipulate frequency. You can also manipulate rest intervals, so you can progressively load
Any of these things increase intensity?
Run a little bit faster complete the same amount of work slightly faster. Put 5% more on the barbell or the load or the handle or whatever going to do that's the simple way if you want to think about volume in the case of endurance, work is simple mileage time whatever. And the case of lifting, all you have to do is take the amount of repetitions, you're doing percent multiply it by the sets add that all up. So if you're doing 3 sets of 10 that's 30 repetitions if you did,
Three exercises, you just did 90 repetitions but that number down for Monday, put that number down for Wednesday. Put that number down for Friday. Add that total up. So so you did 90 90 90 you would look and say, mind total a number of repetitions this week is 270 if I want to go up 5% then I need to go up another 15 or so total repetitions.
Great. That's all we have to do. That's the increased. You may keep the load exactly the same, keep the exercises, the same chain, nothing else. But you want to add 15 more total Reps for your week. And you may choose to do that by adding one more repetitions per set close enough. So, last week, I did three sets of 10 this week, I'm going to three sets of 11. It can be as simple as that. Again, it can be complex. I walked you through. It can be any of the modifiable variables, but the progression, I just laid out is fairly simple and it's honestly the one I recommend for most.
People just because it will avoid confusion and it will avoid people, taking massive leaps and volume. So the typical strategy I would recommend here is increasing load or intensity or a little bit of a combination.
Slowly for about six or so weeks. And then taking what we generally call Lady load. So back down to, maybe seventy percent. Whatever that number is. You've been doing. So you did three sets of ten, and you work yourself all the way up, to 3 sets of 15 back that down and maybe we'll do two sets of eight for the week and then we'll come back the following week and go back and do the highest we've done. Now, all the sudden we're going to do four sets of 12 or something like that. So,
If you get these little D loads, every depending on what you're doing for 28 weeks or so, you should be in a spot where you can continually progress for a very long time, without either burning out or overloading and overstressing an injury pattern. So the simple way, pick intensity, or volume, and just go up slightly every week for a short span of time, generally around six weeks and then you come back and change your strategy if you
like, because you mentioned sets and repetitions here, just wanted to
Remind folks that in the episode that we did on strength and hypertrophy. And that also included speed, there was a description of a terrific program for strength which is the 3x5 programmer 325 program as it's called, which is to select three to five exercises performed for three to five repetitions three to five times per week with three to five minutes rest, in between those exercises for three to five sets. And if I recall correctly, the protocol for
Generating hypertrophy muscle growth is to perform a minimum of 10 and probably more like 15 to 20 sets per muscle group per week and that can be done in a single session per muscle per week. So one could train for instance, quadriceps one day per week. As long as you're getting that volume of sets per week, or it could be divided up across two or three different sessions for that individual muscle group. Of course, people are going to Target all their major muscle.
Oops. And hopefully some of them minor muscle groups as well. And as I recall, the number of repetitions that can generate hypertrophy is quite broad anywhere from six repetitions all the way up to 30 repetitions, but by the end of the set, it should be to failure or close to failure with good form is
that correct? Yep. And we would say close to failure is probably most appropriate. You can actually reach failure, maybe on a few of the sets may be the end and probably best to choose that with
The exercises that are safer, not that any exercise is particularly unsafe. If you do it appropriately, but you may not want to go to True. Failure on every set for the more complex, larger riskier exercises, so hedge, pretty close to failure, but not all the way.
And I realized I forgot to mention rest intervals between sets, it follows that if a large range of repetitions are
Aimed that a large range of rest, intervals are allowed, meaning the there could be rest intervals, between sets of as low as 30 seconds between sets or as high of 2 or 3 minutes depending on the loads, that one is using. And that, of course, will scale with the number of repetitions
excellent. In fact, that sort of leads me into step number nine of designing your own training program, which is you've decided our goal, we've worked our calendar out, we figured out how many days per week and how long we're going to work out.
Those sessions, we then went and selected our exercises, we balance them across the movement patterns, and the muscle groups we need. So we're not causing excess of stress on the same, exact joint, or muscle. Group, over time, we then ordered our exercises based on priority, all right, because of that, we've identified our goal, we went back and we selected the volume, which is the repetitions per set, the total amount of sets and the load percent that matched, the goal that we wanted to get or the adaptation.
Now, all we have to do is fill in the rest intervals, which reflect back again the goal. So generally higher rest intervals, which means time that you rest between your sets higher somewhere, between two to five minutes, for things like speed, power and strength, perhaps a little bit lower. Although, as you mentioned, it could also say hi for hypertrophy. And then for endurance, you follow the rest interval that reflects the type of endurance training that you'd like to get.
That's walked us through one through nine. We're almost done, we've put together a pretty nice little protocol. It should be well-rounded. It should be effective. We've also talked about how to progress it from week, to week, keeping it within again, four to six weeks, maybe up to eight before, we then take a back off the very last thing we have to do to make sure this training program is customized to you. Your goal and your situation which is then going to enhance your likelihood of adherence and consistency as
Well, as increased the likelihood of Effectiveness is we just have to do a little bit of what we call chaos management. We just take a quick moment to think through this program looks great, but if I had to nitpick it, where are the possible chances of failure and you just want to sort of think about where our where would, I predict things would go wrong and if you anything pops out to, you, try to come up with your solution at the beginning and this could be a number of things.
Things. So maybe you've picked an exercise. You realize, man, I really actually don't like that exercise or maybe look at the schedule. Now that it's laid out in front of you, you look at your work schedule and you're like, maybe that's a bit aggressive. I don't know. Could be any of number of things but it is a useful exercise to just think through everything realistically. I typically just like it's the adage, I teach my graduate students before we hit submit, we're going to sleep, so it's there, it's ready. We're going to take 12 hours going to wake up the next day and
It again and go are we sure we're good here? Yep. Make adjustments. If you need, if not, if you feel confident, then hit send and cross your
fingers. Yeah. We referring to submitting the manuscript. It's interesting. You say that I have a statement that I always make two people in my lab, they hit submit and now I say that you realize you're going to wake up tomorrow morning, there's going to be an email in your inbox that something was formatted incorrectly in. You're going to spend tomorrow reformatting and submitting again. So I've also learned that there.
That every project is actually two
projects find to not die over here interrupt. Yeah it's
done. This enough times you have done this, you know many dozens of times and then there's also another truism of science which is that you know there's the project there's a scientific question and then the paper is yet another project and I actually think this is an analogy that carries over to other other domains of life. I think that anytime we take on something, if we want to write a book or we want to get a degree or you want to fitness program, I think
It's worse thinking about those decisions as actually, to taking on two major things because one is the planning and organization around that thing. And the other is the actual performance of the thing. And so I say that because here, what you just described this ten steps to, to consider and designing a program, I think some people are real list makers and love the Precision and the thoroughness. And I'm one of these people thinking, this is great. I just wanted to check off each one of these things on the list and figure out the ideal.
Program for me, for a given period of time, etcetera. And then other folks might be thinking, well, that's a lot. That's just a lot to do, but what I know with certainty is that
Performing those sorts of, let's just call them what they are. Those tasks of figuring out. What's what, where the Defenders are etcetera. Without question makes everything go so much more smoothly. Once you are into the actual performance, the action of doing the exercise program or the book or the podcast or whatever it is that you happen to do. So, I'm grateful that you brought up both the things that act as conduits for getting good work done. And
This notion of Defenders and and bottlenecks because we don't consider those, I would argue that's a very low probability that anyone will succeed. But when one does consider those even just a few of them, I think the probability of success goes way way up immediately.
That's actually a very good point. That is a lot of work for a lot of people and I know when I'm consuming information, it is helpful to hear structure and systems and design. It's also helpful to hear actual real-life examples. So
So maybe the next thing we can do here is I can just walk you through an entire setup and a program. Considering folks that are in bucket, a b and c and maybe I'll save a little bit of the explanation and will eliminate maybe some background. I'll just walk you through what this could look like. Alright. So I created a program which should run about a year and the idea here is that this could be an evergreen system, so one could
Check off all the boxes that we've talked about. So in general, we want to have three primary goals with exercise. We want to look a certain way, whatever that means to you. We want to be able to perform a certain way, whether that's for life goals, like hiking and energy, or sport goals, or whatever, and then we want to be able to do that across our lifespan. Okay? So a program that gives you all the goals we talked about and I program that covers that Health combine
That we referred to way back in some of our earlier discussions, which as a little bit of a recap is what are the physical fitness parameters that we know are critical to maintaining both lifespan and wellness span and as a bit of a reminder those are things like your grip strength, your leg strength, your total amount of muscle mass, your actual speed and power so that you can catch yourself from a fall, your VO2 max.
And your physical fitness. So, I want to program it as a little bit of all that as similar actually. And we're kind of Crossing barriers between our three buckets. So, I need to be able to control my fat. I need to be able to have enough muscle that muscle needs to have enough function, and I need to be able to maintain range of motion so that I don't lose flexibility and get hurt. And then I need to have a good VO2 max as well as to be able to sustain energy over time. So that was the goal of my progress.
A couple of other things that we haven't chatted about which are very important. You have mentioned. I think on a previous podcast about the importance of seeing light, is this something you've covered at one point or a
joke that I'll be going into the grave and they'll be shoveling. Dirt onto me. And I'll be telling people what I'll tell you again now. It's just to get five to thirty minutes of sunlight viewing as early in the day as possible, ideally from sunlight, that's why it's called sunlight or from Bright Lights of another kind. If you cannot get
Get sunlight and also get that in the evening and then avoid Bright Lights between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. and less. You do shift work in which case, check out our episode on shift
work. Amazing. So we've got a little bit of a juxtaposition where people are like, I need to work out and do all this training, but then I'm also supposed to be outside. Okay? How do I blend those two things into my training program. Cool. So, I checked that box as well. I built that in the last thing here is, we've talked about structured exercise. And just in this episode, we've really opened up and doun on structured exercise hiking.
Sports things like that. Well, one thing that is incredibly clear and my colleague and friend, Tommy would at the University of Washington published, a fantastic paper very recently on the importance of proprioception in maintaining and staving off late onset, dementia and Parkinson's maybe
just remind people of proprioception which is,
yeah, absolutely. So they're structured exercise and that's very important but then there's also things like balance and
Coordination and proprioception meaning you're adjusting to stimuli coming in from the outside world. So this stimuli could be sound, could be light could be smell or in the physical case the body? It is where you are at in space. So I'm feeling like I'm falling to the left. Therefore need to correct and move back to the right. So you don't get this with doing things like a hack. Squat on a machine. You get this typically from being outside. So now you're smelling and seeing things and you're also not Landing with your foot in the exact same position.
On an even platform. We get this from things like sport. Now, I'm on only exercising, but I'm reacting to the outside world. The balls going over here. My opponents going over there. So it's very important in my opinion, to have at least one session per week of exercise in which you are doing something that challenges proprioception, right? So how do I fold all of these best practices into one training program. That's not two hundred hours a week, seven days a week.
What I've laid out to make sense. Cool, let me walk you through it and then maybe we'll come back into each individual category and you can ask questions about them. So the way that I think is best is too
Have a goal and have that goal be around 8 to 10 weeks long. Like we've been talking about. So, what I gave you is, let's start off with quarter. Number one of the year. So perhaps January through March or so, and it doesn't have to be this one, but just as an example, you decide your goal is going to be to put some muscle mass on. So we're going to prioritize adding muscle. Okay, now within that, you're going to be bulking up adding some muscle. But we're also going to be sleeping more. We know, we need extra recovery.
Session and we need to go up and calories. Now, this happens to work nice for a couple of reasons. But in that protocol maybe we're going to do seven days or seven sessions a week of physical activity, doesn't mean seven days but maybe those sessions are something like
I will do one Indoor Sport.
This could be basketball, could be any number of things, right? So I got my sport, ticked off, and it's indoors why I'm January to March. The weather is probably not great for most of the world. So I'm not going to do as much outside activity. I'm going to do weights, maybe three or four times a week and then maybe two days a week. I'll go for a long walk. Okay, again, we'll come back and I'll explain to you why I made all these individual choices at. So you're going to run that for the first quarter. At the end of this quarter, going to take a deload week. Now, this could be fully
Lay off, maybe this is when you schedule a vacation maybe this is backing off, maybe you just keep your walks in and you spend the extra time on your family or work or whatever else we do. So we've bulked up a little bit. We spent 12 weeks adding some mass. Now, we're going to transition into court or two, which is where we start to actually get lean. This is actually a pretty standard bodybuilding template which is you put on some Mass first and then you get lean after that. So now we're going to get lean from April to June.
We're going to bring calories down a little bit. So now we're actually going to play in a high beauclerc, State somewhat the days tend to get longer. So we're going to have more time to spend in the Sun. So we're going to shift a little bit from an indoor sport activity. Like the example I said earlier was basketball to maybe stand-up paddleboarding or some other thing where you're actually getting your sport done, you're reacting using proprioception but now you're getting that son in there as well because you have a greater opportunity to actually do. So in the weather,
Bleah is going to cooperate with you more often than it would in say February you. Then maybe going to pick a fitness or an exercise class. You know, any number of routines where you're with multiple people.
And then two days a week in addition to that you're going to maybe lift some weights. All right. So now we've added some muscle now. We've got lean and all of a sudden we're actually looking pretty good for the summertime.
Hmm. Interesting right quarter 3, July to September, we'll transition and we'll try to get into great cardiovascular shape. So we'll transition more into some high intensity interval type of stuff, more frequently. We're going to maybe stay at maintenance calories. Now we spend a little bit of time hyper and we want hypo and now we're going to go back to maintenance and, and keep along. We're going to continue to choose some outdoor sports, but maybe you change it up, maybe you keep the same one. Maybe maybe now we switch it out in the Gulf or now we pick
A cabal or we play basketball but now we just do it outside any number of things you can do, right? So maybe even we do a couple change it up, you do that twice a week. You're spending more time in the sun. Now you looking outside and you're seeing this great weather and you're not cooped up in a gym but you're getting your physical fitness in. That's also going to be adding in your high intensity or interval, your conditioning because you're doing more stuff like that rather than lifting in a gym and then maybe you're actually going to do some track workouts. Maybe we'll do this on a bike or will do
Hills friends outside any number of things and then we'll do that maybe twice a week and then we'll still lift weights, twice a week in our gym. The last quarter then is going to be October to December, and we're going to transition there and do more pure cardiovascular fitness, okay? Because we're doing that, we're going to be working harder. And remember cardiovascular. Training is generally expelling much more calories than lifting so we're going to actually go up in calories.
Return to that and that works out kind of well because I don't know if you know or not but people tend to eat a little more calories from the months of say November through
December. Yeah. Holidays. And at least in northern hemisphere colder temperature. So
maybe even we play with two workouts a day here. We're trying to get really in shape. We're trying to improve improve our conditioning in our endurance and multiple areas. We're going to actually transition back into an indoor sport. So maybe we're going to do some kickboxing or a Jew.
Jutsu class or something like that. We're going to maybe hit the cardio machine once or twice. Now we're hopping on a StairMaster reverse the climber more may be getting an assault by going something like that. Maybe hits the machines and do are lifting their maybe we spent the rest of the earlier part of the year on barbells and dumbbells will transition to some machines and then we'll still try to get outside and walk twice a week, okay? And week, that gives us our outside activity but it's not necessarily a structured program. So you can we got a
15 minutes where the weather is breaking a little bit, so let's walk get outside and get a walk-in. All right? So that's the overall structure of everything. I would like to actually go back to the beginning now, and kind of walk through each one of these things in detail and explain why I chose certain things. I've kind of given some hints already but I think it'd be helpful to walk back to the beginning and start their
great. I love the overall structure. I have just a couple of questions
The idea of training mostly for hypertrophy January, through March, make sense, followed by a period from April, through June focusing primarily on fat loss. And then from July to September speed and interval type work. And then October to December, you put to emphasize endurance type training. I thought for a moment that when we got to October December,
you are going to emphasize strength and I'm wondering whether or not there's any incentive for training for strength, October December. So that when one arrives at the hypertrophy training, January through March or that much stronger. The idea being then there's more muscle to hold onto as one and tries to lose fat from April through June and then July through September is the speed work or is July through September the speed / power phase of the program.
The
Live through September would be more like your higher heart rate, learning to get all the way up maximum exertion and then
recovering in October to December is long-form endurance,
moderate to long-form, right? So it's closer to that aerobic capacity stuff. It is closer to longer duration, and moving through that Spectrum, you are astute and pointing out that I didn't have pure strength really in there. You certainly could fold it in but quite quite literally,
If you spent three months, bulking up in January to March, that's going to bring some strength along the way. So you should be fine there. But you absolutely could alter any of these variables if you want to emphasize something more than one. So say, you actually felt like, you rented the fitness testing and you identified actually. Your endurance is pretty good, but you're struggling maybe with a little bit of strength and maybe a little bit of lower muscle mass. You could substitute quarter 3 or quarter for and say, one of those quarters will be strength.
And then I'll do all of my conditioning in another quarter. And what you've really done is, the programming still fairly simple. You've just alter the priorities a little bit and therefore, you've altered the adaptation across the year. And why this is really important. This template is meant to be something. You can just run back year after year, after year and you make a subtle change like that. And now over the course of 5 10, 20 years you're going to be in a fantastic spot at the end so you can make easy adjustments along the way as
These pop up as goals pop up, but you're going to be in a position where everything is no. There's nothing that's going to be lagging behind, you'll be in a good spot. Most of your bases are covered to be pretty lean, have a good amount of muscle and to be in great
shape.
Two other questions. One, just a quick question for sake of generating, proprioceptive feedback during the endurance, phase is trail. Running a good, a good option. Absolutely, great. I'm thinking back to the Days running across country. It's October to December your trail running, totally training for endurance, okay.
The ground is not super solid which is even better in this case, right. So you're making more choices and trying to not fall on your
face. Absolutely. And then you mentioned bulking up and I just wanted to
Highlight that there are some folks myself included, while I'd like to add a little bit of muscle here or there, I'm not interested in overeating to the point where I lay down a lot of body fat stores along with that. I think there are a lot of people out there are not necessarily interested in Quantico, bulking up. I also my understanding of the literature and tell me if I'm wrong.
Is that well, there does need to be some sort of caloric Surplus. Hmm. Above what is required to maintain body weight in order to build muscle that many people who try and quote-unquote bulk up. Basically just end up expanding the size of their, their cheeks and face along with their limbs. And you're so, you know, I'm not trying to poke fun at them but the idea of deliberately overeating to the point where a lot of body fat stores come along. I would imagine that would just make the April through June.
Unfazed that much harder crying. I'm not sure it's ever been studied directly but I can't imagine it's all that help. Excuse me all that healthy to bring along a lot of adipose tissue in one's pursuit of
hypertrophy. You're absolutely correct. We have not gotten into the nutritional details there but yeah, thank you. Good clarification, point a couple of things you're not going to be doing this very long.
It's 12 weeks, right? We're not going to be 67
to me. Ha ha number
two, just since we're here to clarify, the literature is ongoing in this area and there's actually a handful of studies that I know are coming soon. But in general, when I say hi perchloric here, I'm referring to an increasing caloric intake above Baseline by something like 10 to 15 percent.
So if you normally eat 2500 calories throughout the day, you might add another 250 to 400. I'm not doubling calories. I don't want you to be stuffing your face hating food, feeling, awful all day. And then, putting on half of your weight is fat and half your weight is as muscle. It is just technically hyper Clark because you're eating more, which is an absolute requirement for most people to add muscle, right? Some folks who have a high percentage of body fat
fat, and a low level of Fitness training can actually get away with just being either isochoric technically, or even a little bit lower and still adding some muscle while there's some some fat. But for most folks that's going to be challenging. So you're going to want to be in a hyper caloric State. Another reason I put it in here is because remember people tend to make these extra calorie choices during this part of the Year anyways. And so, you're sort of playing into life is why I chose that.
Itís like hey you can't restrict calories all the time, it's really, really hard. So maybe if we can put it calorie restriction during the phases of the year, that's a little bit easier and give you the freedom to have a little bit more calories during the phase of the year, when you're probably going to want to do that. Anyways, just make sure you're doing a style of training that's supports that. So you're going to be trying to add muscle. When you know, you're going to be adding more calories, we're going to be trying to really push the pace on our conditioning. When we know we're going to be eating more.
Cal anyways. And so that is actually, in fact exactly why I chose those goals for those times of the year is because we're now playing into life a little bit more. But we, again, certainly do not want to be eating to an excess where it's causing some of the problems you mentioned. We just need to be eating a little bit more. The last Point, here is the next phase, April to June, we know we're going hypochlorite so it's always kind of nice to go. Yep, we're going to go in a little bit of a calorie deficit.
Here. But it's really just these few months and it's okay because I spent the last six months where I wasn't restricting that much and then one actually where I got to see little bit more. And now cool, not hard for me to convince somebody that to go. We're going to bring the calories down right now or in a month and two months and it's just going to be this 12 or 16 weeks or whatever you end up being in there. So those were some of the rationale that I was thinking of what I decided to do that but thank you. That's a very important point in terms of the hypochlorite Gates. It's not the dirty bulk.
Look, it's not the excess of that. A lot of folks will do.
And and just a final point for folks in the southern hemisphere Australians are in South Americans, we actually have large listenership in the southern hemisphere. Of course, adjust accordingly even though the holiday months are still in November December there, of course, holidays all your of gongs before, the many of many of the major holidays are around November December, but it's summer down there. Just adjust
There's nothing holy about trying to achieve certain adaptations at certain times of year. It's more about trying to eliminate bottlenecks Defenders as you mentioned, and it's really about the sequence.
So, if we go back to that first quarter, we're going to try to add some mass for the reasons. I just described, right? It's also tends to be pretty motivating. You're going to start the year off, you're going to want to train and get all excited because of your New Year's resolution and you're going to see results immediately. We've talked about this in some of the previous
Episodes, the nice part about hypertrophy training is you see your muscles growing right now? Where the endurance stuff tends to have a little bit more of a delayed gratification. So I'm going to give you a win early. Okay? Now we're also going to be sleeping more because we know and maybe we'll get into this in a future episode. That sleep is absolutely critical to recovery and critical to Growing muscle mass. So you're going to emphasize sleep more during this part of the Year also, because the sun is very low.
It's harder to sleep for a lot of folks longer when the sun is out for longer, especially if you don't have a perfect blackout Curry. And so you're just like trying to play with the restrictions life gives you an optimized, your scenario. So the sun's probably not out very often and especially depending on where you live. If you're anywhere like where I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, I think it's going to be dark and gray and gloomy most of the day. So it's not hard to convince you to go sleep a little bit more often.
So we'll do that. That's also again why? I chose an indoor sport that activity you're gonna not shoot yourself in the foot being in the gym when it's cold and crap, outside is not that hard to convince yourself to do. So you're going to be lifting your weights, say, four times a week. And then again getting some outside time in the form of a walk so that you can do it, the middle of work. If you have two or catching 20 minutes here, there whatever needs to be the chances of you missing that one.
Walk, our little and you'll still get some outside time. You can, you've talked about the importance of getting sunlight in even if it is overcast. So you can still nail all those boxes and be in a pretty good spot at the end of that quarter, okay? So moving on to quarter to then April to June, a lot of people want to look good during the summer months, you're more likely to be outside. You're more likely to have your shirt off because it's hot because you're either on vacation or going to the beach. So let's play into that a little bit. Let's
Let people look a little bit better. Yeah. If that's what they determined to be looking better during the months when they're more likely to have that. You're also more likely to have things like weddings over the summertime people don't get married often in the winter and so people want to look good for these events. So let's play into what a lot of people already want. And let's help you get leaner. Not a lot of holidays that involve eating during that phase is, so you're not going to feel like you're missing out on a ton of life.
Outside of maybe a few smaller holidays in that phase. The days are getting longer. And so, we're going to choose to get in the sun more often. We can start getting a tan better. We can start getting ready for summer and so this is why we exchanged our Indoor Sport for an outdoor sport, surfing hiking cycling outside. Whatever the thing is you want to do, there's tons of them kiteboarding like I said, skateboarding. There you go. You know, start skating a little bit.
Whatever it needs to be. So we'll do that once a week or so. And then I actually threw in a glass here and there's a couple of reasons one. Now, it's sort of nice to take the pressure of programming off.
It's also nice to if you've been lifting by yourself to get in there and lift to somebody else, it's also nice to now have some social interaction, the gamification the group, the scoring stuff that happens. If Fitness classes is very, very powerful, it tends to be somewhat fleeting. So it won't last for long time for some people, others does. And so if you pepper this thing in and you know, you're going to, you're going to join this activity class even if it's not great and the program.
Sign isn't perfect. It's fine for 10 weeks. In fact, you may really really enjoy it and also again gives you just it gives you something new to think about music is on your out of your house. If you're lifting at your house, you're in a different part of the gym. The schedule is a little tighter so you can't just go work out whenever you want. You got to sort of show up when the class is going and you'll probably find that you just love it. You also get some social interaction right? Which is something that's also very important that we haven't really discussed yet if you're out playing
By yourself or whatnot. So this is just another thing. I'm trying to fold in that still allows you to check off multiple boxes of things that are healthy for you. You've had episodes on the importance of social connection interaction. We talked about that in the quad breakdown of making sure you have relationship time and things like that. So, throwing in a fitness class and just doing honestly, something quite different is pretty fun but then still keeping two days a week where you're doing a traditional strength training thing. So you have some
T control their lastly, you can also, then make sure you're hitting any specific movements or muscle groups that are very important to so you don't get to control that in your Fitness class. But now you can, at least do the gym and make sure you hit that muscle group, that, that you have an interest in it. So now we're feeling pretty good. We're rolling into the summer. We're pretty lean. We're getting out in the sun, a lot.
We're bringing calories down a little bit and we probably or feeling pretty happy. We're also not burnt out. We've done a lot of fun things and we've checked a lot of the boxes off for long-term development. We had a combination of specificity with exercise selection, but we also fold it in just a little bit of variation. So we don't have to worry about overuse injury of doing the same machines, the same lift months, and months, and months after months, and slowly, wearing down something, if our technique isn't perfect.
Okay, so now we're going to go into our quarter 3, which is the summer months, basically, up here at least July to September. We'll transition. It's been a while since we've done some conditioning. All right, so we may have lost a little cardiorespiratory Fitness. We may have not feeling great anymore, maybe energy throughout the day stuff is starting Lake down, so we're going to get in shape. We're going to push our heart rate high, and we're going to bring the the calories back up the summertime Fourth of July other holidays like this. Where
Eating is involved. Maybe you're going to sporting events and things like that.
Our sport choice is often going to be outdoors, but in fact, what you'll notice here is, is, I've ramped the sport Choice up to twice a week. And in fact, I would encourage you to do two different types of exercise. And one of the primary reasons for that is to spend more time outside
A challenge. We often see with people with exercises going, man. It's so nice outside. I can't go sit in the gym for 45 minutes. All right. I don't have that much free time and then he remains over here, telling me I need to get direct sunlight more and like I am I going to fit this in? Well, do your exercise outside? Enjoy it? If you live down here like us, you take Sunshine for granted, but a lot of people I know, it's like it's only nice for two and a half months of the year get outside. So let's push more of our Fitness training to outdoor activities.
I'm these Sports can be intense or not, right? It could be go out there and swim hard. Can the ocean you're going to do open ocean swimming instead of swimming in the pool indoors or whatever the case may be. So we're going to give ourselves more of a priority of being outside, looking. We've looked pretty good or a little tan and we're enjoying all the benefits of training outside and the lack of structure still we have structured but not so specific like the machines and the weights give us
Maybe even now we're doing some crack workouts. So now we can do something like Sprint, the straightaways walk the corners and we don't have to again do our conditioning on the same, StairMaster error machine or whatever. We're on. So we're going to enjoy some stuff like that. We're going to be athletic, we're going to run, we're going to move, we haven't talked about that yet, right. Everything is really been about sort of structured exercise. Well, now we're going to do some Sprint work, we're going to get out and see that, which is a really important human quality. That I think it's important to not lose is actually ability to Sprint, so we'll do.
Do that. And then we'll still make sure we lift twice a week for the same reason as I talked about in the previous phase. So we make sure we have some quality control there. We maintain some of the muscle that we built in the quarter before we don't lose too much strength. There is very good literature to suggest strength maintenance can be done in as little as five cents per week for a very long time, really up to 8, plus weeks, if you do a little bit so you're touching it enough to where you're not going to get really, really weak. But we what you
And want to do is go 12 or 16 weeks where you lifted noise. Maybe you got in great shape, but you're going to feel very weak after that. So, maybe that number come down to one time a week if you really wanted it to, but one to two days, a week where you're lifting, the big exercise is the muscle groups and movements of interest and you're good to go then. Lastly we roll into our final quarter which is October to December.
And we're going to really get in great shape. The sun is starting to come down. We're rolling into the holidays, weathers getting worse. We may have other outdoor activities, we want to do like and my case, you're going on a hunting trip, you have some travel conferences, whatever the case may be. And so we're going to choose an indoor Sport and the Isle of Combat Sports. So, at the example, I gave earlier, it was like Jiu-Jitsu or, you know, maybe you just transition, your basketball, the inside, or your pickleball comes inside or whatever.
Whatever it happens to be and you're still going to have that twice a week then maybe instead of the track workout outside you do that, same workout indoors. Now back on some sort of machine or something like that. Our weights are actually now down to once a week, because we're really pushing the pace on cardiovascular. We're doing it once a week to maintain it to not lose and get too far behind. But we're really want to drink. Bring up our vo2max, we want to bring up our efficiency are cardiac output and everything like that.
And we're still going to now walk twice a week so that we get something outside and I talked about why again it's nice to have that flexibility of not having to train outside because now you gotta warm up and do all those things you just get on, get going to walk in, you still get the Outdoor Experience. So we run that entire thing and then you just start back the next year. Ideally again at the end of every quarter, you take a week off with a that is a true full week off which I'm fully in support of. I mean friends were only talking about for
Off weeks a year. That's absolutely fine, or it could even be a slight deload week if you wanted to be. So we shouldn't run into too many issues of overuse. I have a lot of variety. We get a lot of movement patterns in, because we're mixing in sport with machines and dumbbells, we're mixing and social interaction will mixing in the sun. We're mixing in enjoyment. We're mixing and fat loss strength. Hypertrophy. Some cardiovascular endurance or mixing and calories in high. We're mixing it.
Bit of calories low. And we're trying to hit as many of these nodes as possible if you also want to cut each one of these a little bit short and repeat your Fitness testing. At the end of every quarter, you could I would probably recommend doing it at least once a year, perhaps doing it. Maybe the third week of December. So so you run that testing that's your last week of training. Then you get to go on your vacation break. You come back to the beginning of the year. You've got new goals, new
It's and you go, if you want to repeat it twice a year do the same sort of thing at the end of June. It's fine. I know I lay these out as quarters, which is generally 12 weeks with one back off week, but if you wanted to make it nine weeks in a testing week and then a back off or 10 weeks, it's fine. It's close enough. So, the last little thing I want to say is, let's assume you're doing the 12 weeks, and you're going to have a back off week, at the end of the 12 weeks, I would actually still then recommend having at least one.
Back off week halfway through. So it would look like this five weeks hard, where you're progressing, you're going up up, up up up every week, you're either increasing volume intensity. Like we talked about a few minutes ago, then week six deload go down to 70 percent volume and intensity. Come back, go hard for five more weeks and now week 12 is your true off week, where you, again, take the whole thing off if you do that.
That you now have four weeks a year or you're totally off. You have four weeks a year where you're really backing down, and you just have five weeks, segments, all year round, where you're just going to push it hard for five weeks. You're going to break your going to reset your going to transition a little bit. Now, as I started this conversation off with there are many ways you can structure your training program throughout the year and hit those primary goals. We talked about of looking, fantastic, feeling amazing and being able
Able to do that your entire life. All I can tell you though is I know this model works.
Because we've done this a lot with our clients, in our rapid Health optimization program and this spans everything from 25 year old folks who are competing in the Boston Marathon to a lot of individuals who have never exercised before, who maybe have done a little bit of exercise. In fact, it's quite literally, all three of the buckets. You laid out. We've had clients in all of those areas, both men and women, young and old. And we've had a tremendous amount of success transforming their lives.
Using a very similar model to what I just laid
out. I find that overall structure to be immensely informative and I'll tell you why in the context of number of examples. But myself, although that's the least important of them, frankly, but examples of family members of mine and friends of mine who undertaken, consistent, exercise, training programs. But that haven't very the program so much. And here again, I go the person who really
Loves to swim. They have a low barrier of Entry to the pool or to the ocean. They love being in the water. I am not one such person. I liked being in the water but I don't motivate to drive to the pool when a bike to the pool or to get into the ocean that often. Once I do it, I enjoy it. But for me, it's running and lifting weights and has been for a very long time. I have a family member or close family member who doesn't really like Quantico exercise, but loves dance. And dancing going out, dancing. Yes, but dance classes. Amazing particular really enjoys it
Loves to be distracted from the fact that she's doing exercise, and just really enjoys it. And it actually is a very good dancer despite the fact that she's related to me and on, and on there many examples, I think of folks that fall into the different bins that we talked about earlier but that also tend to default towards a given structure of training one way and doing that. Throughout the year I can tell you right now that I'm personally going to modify my schedule. According to this four quarters per year
She works because I've mostly been on the quarter system in academics for a very long time. I was at a university had a semester system once but this quarter system is actually the one that we follow academically. So that's one reason why it's a natural fit for me I confess that I typically don't vary up the proportions of endurance to resistance training. I tend to keep those about three and three across the week three resistance training sessions three. Let's call them cardio sessions but each one designed to
to achieve a different adaptation and I've now alter those even further based on your recommendations in this episode and previous episodes. But what I have not done is to really think about d load and to really stick to the structure that I set out to accomplish across the year on the topic of deload. For me the deload has been when I get overwhelmed with work or I've gotten sick, I don't tend to get sick that often but every
Once in a while, get knocked back with a cold or flu once every three or four years. I seem to really get hammered with a fever inducing, something or other, and then I'm bedridden for a couple days and then I'm back at it. And I tend to come back rather slowly, and that tends to be my week off. But I'm beginning to wonder whether or not part of the reason. I hit those streaks of, you know, being overwhelmed, by sickness or by stress, is that I have not done a deload period. So one of the things that I'm going to immediately Implement is
a periodic deload according to the the program that you described. And I'm also going to start matching my specific goals for each quarter with time of year. I don't think I've done that. And it's not because I live in California. And by the way folks, there are temperature, variations, and amount of light across the day variations in California as well. Although they are not as dramatic as they would be under the north pretty modern sensor, right? Of course someone listeners are at the Equator, so they have the opposite issue in any event.
I'm definitely going to do that. I'm going to start incorporating regular deload periods and I am going to be very dedicated, very disciplined about sticking to a program for three months devoted mainly to hypertrophy then a three-month program devoted to Fat Loss. Then a program to add to you know, aerobic output and then one devoted to endurance, although I must say it's very tempting for me to do a very specific strength dedicated,
Ocean. Sure, because I don't tend to be particularly strong. I'm not weak, but I'm not particularly strong. So I might, I might consult with you as to how I could very endurance and strength, in any of that, I love the idea of a macro structure and I love the idea of D loads in anticipation of being able to go further the long run. In terms of results, I'm hoping this next year because we're just on the on the cusp of a new year, will be the first year in which I don't find myself getting some bug.
Virus or whatever happens to be from time to time and having to back off on training for that reason. And that prompts the question and it's something that I want to get into in more detail with you when you describe recovery upcoming episode. But a couple of quick questions, maybe there's some short or shortish answers. You can provide if I'm not feeling well, like a really had a poor night's sleep, maybe just to 24 hours.
Of sleep, for whatever reason, trainer don't train. That's the first question. Second question is, if I'm starting to feel a little bit of a throat tickle and I'm in that phase of denial. Like, I don't get sick, I'm not getting sick and I would, I be better off bundling up some hot liquids. Getting into bed sleeping, a little bit more Etc and protecting myself against that, or would I be better off training and if I've and then the third question is, if I've already succumbed to a bug but
Not a severe bug. I'm not, I don't have elevated body temperature, so no fever. I'm not hacking up at not productive cough or anything like that, but I'm doing just kind of not Wellhead coldish. I did, you know, sort of thing comes to mind and it's not seasonal allergies trainer. Don't train leaving aside the point of whether or not, you know, I'm in a position to, you know, get anyone else sick because obviously, that's a bad idea, okay? So, lack of sleep, I would say 30 to 40% of ones.
Typical sleep the previous night trainer, no train, starting to feel like one might be getting ill and then the third category is coming back from from being sick. Okay thanks and sorry for the extended question, but I want to make sure there was enough detail there because I think these are three common
scenarios, we are going to cover that in the recovery conversation. That's next in detail and I will give you very specific guidelines and we'll have a plenty of time to go into that. The quick answer is it comes,
back to what phase of training you're in now to walk through each scenario, if it is a crummy night of sleep and I am in a phase of training in which we are trying to cause adaptation, I have a lot of space in my schedule and I'm really using this time to make progress because I know coming up soon my schedule will change a, my time to train will go down, I'm still training, I might use a bunch of
Tricks that we have for feeling better instantaneously, we call these little hacks, these are acute hacks. These are not chronic X. I'm going to push the base. If it is really close to a deload week, say it's Wednesday and I start my deload next week or this is not one bad night of sleep. This has been for bad nights of sleep. In the last five days. This has been six kind of crummy nice over the course of the last nine.
And you're starting to see a larger pattern and that's a different answer. So the question we're going to ask ourselves is this acute or is this a tendency or actually a chronic thing if it's a cute and we're close, we're going to train through it. If it's a cute and we this is not a phase of training. While we're trying to really push, then maybe we back off a little bit. If it's the opposite though.
We need to probably make some changes and give ourselves some recovery. This may include anything from a moderate training session. Maybe I'm going to go in the sauna and sit through that and then do some breathing drills and some Mobility stuff. All right, great, maybe I'm going to again, go to the gym and and ride the bike at 50% heart rate. Something restorative like that. Gives you a little bit energy, if it doesn't beat you down.
That's probably where we're learning. If you're feeling sick and you think it's coming. I'm probably going to do option to as well, which is some sort of restorative training. So again, this tends to be moderate, could be weights, could be any of the stuff. Maybe you're going to go out for your swim and we're not going to push past. Probably about 70%. We can absolutely induce immunosuppression with excessive training and so you may want to walk out of that the last case which was I think face.
Is number three, you said there which is sort of like I got a pretty gnarly cold right now I'm going to train most of the time for most people, I'm just going to say to shut it down. Get out of there, right? If you're not going to be able to get productivity done there, you may be better off, either going in sleeping catching up on work doing other stuff. So that the next time you go to train, you don't feel behind and we can give a good solid effort for it. So I know other people who will train right through it. I tend to not to be totally Frank. I if I'm feeling kind of junky, I'm really not going to train.
I may actually probably do some hot, hot water immersion, so bath jacuzzi, things like that. I actually like those better than I like sauna.
If one is ill or you just like them better than Sonic generally both actually. Oh my yeah. First person ever ever met or come on this podcast is say you like bazin jacuzzi more than sauna.
Yeah, absolutely. I may even do some ice. Probably not a tunnel because you got to be careful there. That's a big stressor and if you're already
Over the line. You may be adding a pastor I'm, or I had made. I may go sleep. If I'm very if I'm feeling very, very, very sleepy and sometimes depending on what kind of a bug, you get that can happen. I will just sleep, and I might be the best choice. You have. If that means you kicked the cold half a day earlier than that, then you just won in the aggregate so that those are probably it's a little bit of insight of the algorithm that I'm running with those things.
Those are highly.
Formative answers, thank you. And I look forward to our discussion about recovery so that we can go into even more depth on how to recover
the last thing I do want to say here is kind of going back to our quarter system.
The examples I gave with the bulking up losing fat and getting into better Fitness and cardiovascular fitness at the end. Those were just samples friends. Please don't take that. Literally, if you want to emphasize strength more, put in some more strength if you want to emphasize a different one of our nine adaptations, great do that too. If you're somebody who is has a lot of body fat to lose, then maybe put that for two consecutive sessions or every other you
Can modify them. We've talked about nine very specific training adaptations as well as in fat loss. I only gave you four, which is just meant to be a sample that you can roll in or out, but use those priorities to adjust that system. According to what is important for you. Now five years and then 45 years down the line for whatever that may be. So if you are absolutely free to modify the order, you're absolutely free to modify the primary outcome and then,
These specifics within each quarter based upon what is needed to do to optimize that outcome. I think maybe one more tool we can offer, people is maybe giving the individual week a little bit more structure. So the system I laid out is sort of like month by month and maybe we can lay out, say a three day week workout program and a four-day week program that was still hit some of the same well-rounded adaptations that probably comes.
Covers, maybe not individualized per bucket that we've talked about a b and c, but it's going to cover, 75, 80 percent of what would need to occur in all three buckets and then you can use that last 25% for your individual goal or specialization, so maybe we can jump into that
next great, let's hear it.
The first one I want to give you is just a basic three days. Split that again. Same idea. It's a well-rounded exercise program. I actually wrote this all in an article.
All that is on XP T's website. So perhaps we can link directly that I will just jump, you straight to the answer. You can read more about why and details in that article if you'd like. But this is day one day, two day three. You could do these days where you split them up, actually having say 24 hours in between or you could do these back-to-back, it doesn't necessarily matter.
In this particular case, say day one, you start off and do a little bit of speed and power and then you may finish that with a little bit of hypertrophy. Now, if you want to gain more speed and power, you just do more of it. If you want to maybe just do a little bit to touch it and you really want to gain some muscle, you would do more of an emphasis there. So the template can stay the same and you would just increase the amount of either adaptation this speed and power stuff, or the hypertrophy based on how high it is in your priority list.
Those are combined together because as we talked about earlier, they don't necessarily interfere with each other. You would do the speed and power stuff first, because it wouldn't have a the hypertrophy if you did the hypertrophy first in that workout, it would probably compromise your speed and power and that case you would actually not be getting out of patience. So day one, you do that and that could be a 20-minute workout total or a two-and-a-half-hour up to you, then you would come back. Maybe the next day or two days later. Whatever you'd like to do in your second day.
A of exercise, you would start off with a pure strength protocol and you would finish that with what I'm calling is to higher heart rate. So this could be something like are anaerobic capacity stuff. It could be the aerobic capacity. Something where you're getting up to close to high heart rate? It could be those twenty second bursts, it could be a 90. Second burst five-minute mile repeats. Anything you like you can just sort of plug and play this in your getting to a spot now where you've had a little bit of speed a little bit of strength little bit hypertrophy and you've
The high heart rate. So we've checked off most of the boxes already in two sessions. Our last session then would be more of a steady state long-duration endurance and so a three-day weeks. But like, that is going to be a pretty nice setup for the average
person. So this could be a Monday, Wednesday Friday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, what's happening on the intervening days,
totally off if you want it to be. So I set this up as and the best I can give you and he's three days. Okay, great. If you have more, we could certainly
Prove it. But this was my worst case scenario. I've got other things in my life. The most I could do for exercises, three days a
week and given that it's three days free. How approximately, how long, or each of these workouts going to last
I would do whole body exercises for almost all that. I would do your full body parts. And I think you could certainly finish that in 45 minutes of work, time, little bit of time to warm up some down regulation. At the end, you could be in and out of that gym and certainly under 60 Minutes. The reality is, you could probably be out of there under
50 minutes, the total work time could be 30 35 once you get going.
So that's three days. As you pointed out, probably more work per week is going to be better in terms of maximizing goals of aesthetic, goals and performance, enhancing goals and Longevity goals, right? I mean, the numbers that I've heard that is that we should all try to get somewhere between 150 and probably more like 180 to 200 minutes of zone, two cardio per week.
Minimum, but as I recall, you consider Zone to cardio. So low intensity, that just walking around and is, you know, qualifies as own as really Liz Zone, 1 Zone, 2
cardio. You not to take us too far off track, but I think it's actually useful to differentiate what I consider to be exercise and physical activity.
So physical activity is out for a walk, it is using a walking treadmill and while you're at work it is you know parking farther in the parking lot and taking more steps. These are all important and what's clear you are not going to reach likely Optimal Health by only exercising hard and then sitting around the other 23 and a half hours today. So it's very, very important, whether you want to do that in the form of Zone.
On his own to and hit 30 minutes a day. Various organizations will say, things like that. You need to have 30 minutes a day of moderate low intensity exercise. I don't really care. You can combine it like that. If you want, what you don't want to do, is just physical activity, only, which is almost always going to be like Zone 1.
To maybe Zone 2. You also don't want to go the other end of the Spectrum, which is again. Like I left hard, three days a week, and then what do the rest of the time? Nothing, that's not optimal either. And so, I guess the system, I've walked you through here or the example, rather I walked you through is you would need to maybe supplant that with being Physically Active. If you work as say you're a nurse and you're on your feet, you're moving up and down. You you probably actually covering a decent amount of your physical activity because you might be at fifteen thousand steps.
A day, if you're sitting in front of your computer and you do the same three days split, you would probably need to go out of your way to make sure you're adding a bunch more steps. And so you might need to add several hours of walking to hit that 150 180 minutes a week of physical activity. Because the program I laid out is, you know, if you're doing really 45 minutes, three days a week, maybe 60 Minutes at Best you've hit 180 Germany on 60 Minutes times 380 week. So you might actually need to then throw and maybe some more specific walks so
You could do that in a number of ways. It could be again, actual structured exercise. It could be simply I'm going to do a 10-minute walk three times a day. It could be the exercise snacks that we talked about in a previous episode. So there's lots of ways to engage in more physical activity. But to me, those are different oftentimes in structured
exercise. I think many people will appreciate that you put out there for us, a three-day week protocol because many people simply don't have
more time to exercise their putting emphasis on these other bins in the quadrant and frankly, those other bins are very important as well. So wonderful that people can check off some critical boxes for Aesthetics and performance and Longevity with three days of work or workouts per week. I should say what are some other schedules that people can follow? If they're willing to dedicate a bit more time toward their Fitness?
Sure, if you wanted to do another sample of maybe
A four-day week and again to clarify this is I'm really happy. You said that this is this a four-day week of structured exercise. This would not account your physical activity, moving
around which everybody should be
doing. Absolutely. Maybe this is something like day. One, you're going to do a strength training session and you'll stay in the 5 to 10 or so repetition range. A little bit of strength, of little bit of hypertrophy, you've checked off a couple of boxes.
Probably whole body. So that you get all the body parts covered or closed. We're looking at generally multi-joint exercises could be combination of barbells free, weights, bands machines, anything like that would be sort of day one. You could come back the very next day or you can wait 24 hours, but the second day of your exercise would be, maybe your long duration. And this is actually sort of similar to how you set it up. It's either a little bit of the inverse but what you're kind of saying
is I'm probably going to be a little bit sore from day one and I don't have any free body parts that aren't sore. So instead of trying to do another lift or something, I'm just going to put in some restorative longer durations of same. Exact principles for long duration, we just talked about, could be a swim, could be any number of things, could be your sport, could be your out gonna go ride, the bike and go for a jog in the sun, whatever you would like to do, if you're feeling better, maybe that's a little harder longer.
Or if you're feeling pretty beat up from the day before, maybe that's a little bit shorter and slower, you can modify it then maybe you take the next day off.
That's open your third day of exercise is. Now, instead of being that 5 to 10 repetition range for your lift, you do something like 11 to 30 reps range. Also, this could be exchanged for something more like body weight, more muscular endurance, type of stuff. So, this is a great day, maybe, as yoga, maybe it is a gymnastics thing you're working on or any of the many other styles of training that are not in quote, unquote, lifting weights.
But they're not just walking and Hiking. So could be a Pilates or equivalent, anything like this, where you're going to get some muscular burn in there but it's probably not any additional, wait outside a body weight or if it is, it's fairly minimal 510, sort of 15 pounds something like that would be nice. Could also be done in a circuit. So we could hit our high heart rate, and liquid hits the muscular endurance in their group activity class might be nice here, even maybe something like a spin class.
Or a dance class, all these things can be great and then maybe you even finish that with 10 minutes of some light weights to hit the body part. You say didn't get. So, maybe you did the dance class and then you finish, and you do 10 minutes of upper-body sets of 30 to make sure you get a nice pump there because your legs, probably got some work during the dance class but your upper body didn't see you. Balances system out a little bit. So all body parts. Got a little bit of muscular endurance, your heart rate got really high came back down and you
Sort of checked both of those boxes. Now it's important to remember the hypertrophy episode doing sets of say 15 plus repetitions per set is as effective as doing sets of five to ten or twelve for hypertrophy gaining muscle. It's not effective though, for strength gains so you wouldn't want to do this. Only because you really be doing nothing to improve your muscle strength and you want to make sure that that
Is ticked at least a little bit.
Then again, you can take the day off after this, or you could roll right into your fourth exercise day which would be your last exercise session of the week and you would do something more of like a medium intensity. So this is a little bit higher intensity than our second day and this could be something like, you know, Shadow Boxing or hitting a heavy bag. It could be a little bit of higher intensity intervals but not all the way up. So maybe this is you're going to do a one-minute on.
One minute off on the bike, but you're only going to go to like 85 90 %, heart rate, and then, instead of going off during that one minute, you drop it down to 50%. So we would actually look like 30 minutes of straight work, but you would have a little bit of rolling intensity, as opposed to staying really nice and record restorative. It's going to be some work there and you would finish it with something like 5 to 6 minutes, total of Max heart rate stuff, which lines up perfectly with that number you,
He created in our endurance, episode of hitting six minutes total per week of maximum heart rate or closed. So you could wrap that all up kind of in one session. You could do those in the inverse order, thorough warm up a few minutes. Whether you want to do 30 second bursts or a minute bursts or straight five minutes. This is a protocol. I like to use a ton on the assault bike is simply a good warm-up, 10 minutes, solid warm up,
Recover. And then I'm going to go five minutes and cover as much distance, as I can in five minutes brutal, it is rude. And it's amazing. And you like you get a lot done in 5 minutes. 10 minutes on the back of that is a very gradual. Bring back to Earth there. I actually in that case, I don't need to do down-regulation breathing because of tense of spent, 10 minutes actually coming way back down and the last two minutes or so of that is very deliberate five-second. Inhale, through the nose five-second, exhale,
That the nose one, I'm barely just moving and you end up being in a pretty good spot. So that again, TimeWise could easily be done in 30 minutes and you'd be rounded off there. So the nice part about this four-day week, split, as well as the three-day week split is. It does give you a little bit of flexibility. And so what I mean, is maybe Monday. Your plan is to do the day one left and then any number of things popped up in life, just shipped it back to Tuesday.
Rather than saying like Monday is leg day and then all the sudden something happened, you missed like they, it's just you're doing these things in order and you would like to get all four done and a seven day span. But if it doesn't happen, fine, the next day you get the workout, you just go right back into the next workout and it doesn't matter what day they land on exactly for the three day routine. That works very nice because the Assumption there is you really only have time for three workouts a week and so that's sort of
It is, there's probably some chaos happening in the schedule a little bit and you don't, you don't really have the ability to lock in 3 days per week. If that's not the case you can go. But we're trying to listen to the pain points that people have with exercise and see if we can give them some solutions for those.
Several things about this program were attractive to me. One of them, you just mentioned, which is that by not rigidly attaching individual workouts. There's two specific days of the week. One in theory could say, okay was, I didn't get that much sleep last night. I don't feel, I know that a lot of people say, what is feel, but I don't feel recovered or like, I'm going to get that much out of the workout tomorrow, so I'm or today. So I'm just going to push it Forward today and the, the ability to
I'd workouts forward or back by a day think is incredibly valuable. If for the consistency sake. I also really like this idea of some of the long duration work coming a day after hitting the strength and bit of hypertrophy work. So this would be the day to one thing that I've experienced over. And over, is that if I'm very sore and a given muscle group, especially my legs doing some low intensity cardio, whether or not it's a jog or on the bike typically for me.
A jog or even even skipping rope and then walking skipping rope, walking does seem to dissipate the soreness. I'm sure there's a mechanism for there, has to be some mechanism, everything frankly, but I like that Arrangement and then I also liked this idea of making sure that there's a workout for muscular endurance because I feel like unless I've been stuck without a good gym or I've decided to specifically trained bodyweight exercise, which I did a few years ago, I got really excited.
I'd about some of Pavel. Such zulan's. Sure work, great stuff is amazing. The Naked Warrior, which doesn't involve training naked, although, I suppose you could, if you want, it was really about no weights and involved. Building up to pistol squats and one-armed, push-ups and things of that sort even doing pull-ups on doors. And I discovered that some door frames are much stronger than others. Aha, you know, tells I just accidentally caused some damage there. But in any case muscular endurance, I think, is a really interesting one.
One that I plan to incorporate into my schedule but that is I think is one that often overlooked unless people really have an aversion to weights and and two
machines, you're right, it shouldn't be because it's pretty low hanging fruit. You don't need a lot of equipment for it. Typically it doesn't hurt that bad. You don't often get that sore out of it and you're going to feel a nice, wonderful pump afterwards. So it's great Moda. And as we discussed many times now, it is quite effective at
hypertrophy. Yeah. I also
Don't know if they fit specifically with more muscular endurance, but if you look at the physiques for example, on rock, climbers. I mean, they have to me, of course, they have him. Usually the experienced. Climbers have pretty remarkable body composition so they tend to be lean and live and flexible. All those things that many people aspire to the other thing is their development, always looks exceedingly, balanced. You don't really tend to see. Climbers are like overdeveloped in the Torso and underdeveloped in the
arms or overdeveloped in the arms, despite all the climbing and underdeveloped in relatively in the other Lim limbo, that's true for women and men. It's not a sport that I participate in, but it seems like what they're doing is essentially muscular endurance basically. Yep. Yeah. So there's, there's really something there to be valued. So that's a four-day week schedule with off days or rest days, inserted as needed and then, just and continuing for those that are
Bit more committed to their Fitness and want to do a five or six days a week program. Would you recommend just collapsing some of the off days paying more attention to recovery and and cycling through more
quickly? Yeah, absolutely. You could combine that and just run that either one of those programs. So, you could run that three-day week program back-to-back. Do they get that done? Six
days. So day one speed, power, hypertrophy day to strength work with elevated, heart rate in aerobic capacity and day, three endurance. And then, just and then
Just cycle
through again. You take day for off of the Wheaton and then you go back again. So we'd be having a six days of exercise. One day off and you'll be getting every one of those adaptations in multiple times a week. That is almost exactly how I would set up a six to eight
week program, great. I love the elegance and the Simplicity of that and the thoroughness of it because it checks off so many if not all of the made nine major adaptations to exercise that we've been talking about these episodes and I suppose the one thing that I want to
Highlight and impose this. Also as a question is that early in our discussions in a previous episode, you mentioned that so much of what people think of and apply. As it relates to resistance training is borrowed, from bodybuilding, and hypertrophy training specifically which typically involves getting close to failure. Failure sometimes even involving rest, pause where you hit failure. Then set the weight down for a few seconds and repeat these high intensity techniques. You know accentuating the - so called eccentric.
Etc in hearing about these Protocols of three day a week or 4 days a week. Six days a week. It's very clear to me that if one is not careful to Omit that kind of thinking and suddenly is taking their strength working speed work to failure or is pushing too hard on muscular endurance to the point where you're just grinding out that very last push up on every set that the amount of soreness and the amount of recovery that results from these workouts.
Might start to cause progress issues. So one thing that's in the back of my mind is as you've described these programs is that even though some of them are very brief or involve a minimum of time commitment,
In particular three day week but also the four-day week schedule that there is a discipline involved in, making sure that you stick to the workout that you're supposed to do that day and not go ham as they say and just throw in a couple extra sets of bicep curls and tricep pushes because you want to do, then you thought you could, maybe you could get away with that but you have to come back pretty quickly and do some serious meaning devoted speed and power work and or strength work. And if you haven't been disciplined about
Not doing certain forms of exercise. I could see how the whole thing could kind of Crash quickly in one could think. Oh this is just too much work or it's not for me. Yep, so this, I suppose is now where the question comes which is what are some of the key points that people need to keep in mind when they Embrace a program, how rigidly do they need to stay attached to? You know, it today's endurance day I'm just doing endurance, today's strength day, I'm just doing strength work. I'm not going to take things to Absolute.
Earlier Beyond
failure, I am absolutely happy with anyone, modifying, any of the sample programs. However, they would like to my only recommendation for the question, you just posed would be set your program and then if you're going to make a change fine, but that is a change to your program. In other words, don't just make decisions every single day and make changes if your
Doing that, you might as well not have a program and as we described earlier, there is clear evidence that having a program is better than not regardless of the effectiveness of the program and so my general comment to that is okay, fine a day or two, you made some modifications, no problem. We're in a situation now where it's like you're basically changing the work out every day as you go. Then we just need to read or write a new program. We need to reassess where we're at because we need to have some structure. Look, the reality of it is
I change the programming. I'm going to do the day of often because of any numbers, a choice. I just don't feel like it I weigh overestimated. Today we talked a little bit in a previous episode about Auto regulation which is a style of appeared ization. Program design, which you're adjusting based on how you're actually feeling that day but with some specific structures. So you're going to take some measurements that day and adjust. So Auto regulation is a very, very effective tool. You just need to make sure that auto is dialed in other words.
Is it because your body actually needed something different? Or is it? Because you're now just getting a little bit lazy. Now, you're just not feeling like it today. So there's a little bit of an impossible line to draw. Their both scenarios are real gray area. A lot is real in the moment and so you just need to be a little bit aware of having some reality check listening to your body. But then also being like, hey, no, I'm talking to you, I'm telling you, this is the plan, we're going to do this and staying within it is going to
Challenging.
To progressively overload.
And therefore, you get a higher likelihood of success in your training program, if you're just making decisions and changing the program right before you work out, you're probably not. You're probably going for most people, you're probably going to choose less or off more so than you choose more. Now having said that there are more than a few clients that have come through our programs, where they choose more Alloys, they add a set, they add an exercise they add
Another workout and that can be okay. But we're going to track various markers on them. And if we see these things, consistently going down, we're going to identify whether they are, which phase of this overtraining thing. We'll talk about next, they're actually in some faces. I'm okay. Some of them. I'm not if we're seeing certain things happen physiologically, we're going to make a conversation. We're also then going to really think carefully about
why are you making this choice?
Do you feel like the training isn't enough? Okay, great. Well let's modify it then. Are you not making progress or are there some other reasons why you're doing this? Obviously, I'm not a psychologist or therapist, but there are clearly situations in which folks dose themselves with far, too much exercise for reasons that are not because it's productive to their training or goals. And if such case, we would probably bring in somebody that specializes in those areas to clear that out, and just make sure it's like, we're not doing this for
anxiety issues or energy things. Like if it's, I just don't think the program's enough. Okay, great. Let's go back. Let's look at our metrics, let's evaluate our tests and go there. But if there's other reasons and we may bring in somebody to have that conversation,
they usually when I've seen people deviate from programs because they tend to revert to something that they've done for a long time, it just feels really comfortable to them and it worked. Yep. And it was giving them decent results. So they're skeptical to try something else or there is a phenotype of
Of haphazard and sometimes, especially if you get really caffeinate before workout and just want to throw something. And then there's a third category and this is one that I've had to contend with a lot in my life which is that I really enjoy training with other people when I have the opportunity. Yeah. And a certain day rolls around where you're supposed to do something and not do other things. And people say, hey do you want to go for a long ocean swim where you want to train and you end up doing some, you know, Candy Cane, this one's for you some ridiculous you know 20 wall, ball CrossFit type workout and I'm not acclimated for that.
Of thing. And then it does tend to throw things off, not because no pun intended. Kenny because there's no, there's nothing wrong with a 20 sets of wall balls. If you're if that's part of your conditioning. Yeah, but if it's not appropriate for where you are in your schedule, it really can disrupt what you're trying to do. Yeah. Even as a non competitive athlete, like myself years been since I've competed in any Athletic program, but the as a non competitive athlete, I think there's a beauty to Anna
Really strong incentive to being disciplined about the program, that one follows as a mentor. And Professor that I worked with years ago, used to say come into his office. All these ideas and things I want to do and he'd say let's constrain this walk and then you know the question you always want to arrive at in a discussion with your students as you know is what's the experiment exactly and then you go and you do that specific experiment. I think I've you will work out the same way that there are multiple with adaptations goals and things that people.
We are trying to achieve really knowing why you're there each time and really sticking to that. Even if it means not training with other people. Or I always say, well, you can train with me, but I'm not going to train with me, right? So that's one way to do it, but really sticking to a schedule is really what allows the progress to emerge but that doesn't necessarily mean being antisocial. You can invite people along. But in this case, I'm telling people to be the host, not the guests.
I have a little bit of a rule here, maybe I maybe I should answer your question this way. I actually,
I like doing things totally different. Occasionally, so I'll do when I'm traveling, I tend to do hotel workouts. What I mean by that is I will go down to the workout room and I will do a set of 10 to 15 reps of every single machine in the exact order in, which they are laid out. Whoa, just for the sake of fun like just for the sake of
like the tarot card version of well totally whatever comes up. I'm going to make sense of it
and you just move. Yeah and those are typically things have like I just want to move a little bit for jet lag and
And other sort of purposes right? That's often like I wasn't going to get to work out today. So now I'm going to do something to feel great.
I don't travel that much though. So it's not really throwing my things off. I also I don't get a lot of free time and so if I am traveling and I'm seeing someone I haven't seen in many years or for the first time, I mean, we got to train together this week the first time, I'm not going to burn that opportunity. My rule is this though. I'm not going to do something that's going to cost me more than three days.
So I'm absolutely happy to get out there and maybe tomorrow morning or tonight. We we go do some fun. That's off my schedule. I'm Tom and I mean 100% I'm just going to down regulate a little bit. I'm not going to maybe do as much as you were as hard as you or whatever. I'll do more than I should, but if it cost me tomorrow, it was worth the exchange. I don't have a world record. I'm setting any time soon. I don't have, I got many years. I'm happy to give up a couple of days of exercise to be little.
Sore that I need to be for the exchange of a lifetime memory. And this stuff is so important to me. This stuff lands is like true lifetime memories or I can look back many of my fond memories from my life. Are our training sessions with friends. Whatever it is like, doing Jiu-Jitsu with somebody who's a world champion. We just like totally whatever the thing is right here. Like that was really, really cool. Absolutely worth missing, two days. If it's going to be more than three days old were like, I'm going to be so wrecked. I can't work out for five or six days, then I'm probably like, all right, that's
That's kind of nonsense unless it's just like an opportunity where I'm like, I absolutely can't pass up. Yeah, so that's kind of how I think about it.
That doesn't happen too often with me though. Maybe once a month. And so I'm like, okay I finally lost a day reality of it is, it's probably more like once a quarter, but that happened. So I don't really care. So you do want to balance, joy and life. You don't want to be so rigid about your training program that it ruins and Rob's experience physical activity should be
Fun your Fitness and your training should be something that makes your life better, not some tasks, you have to get done. So that 75 years from now, you've hit some Metric of who knows what
just alone in your room with your training logs. Yeah. No you want the red eyes in all seriousness? I think you point to the richness of life and you know you can draw these boxes. Like work relationships to Fitness recovery but the boundaries between those boxes are blurry because I'm right and I should say
I love training with you. I greatly enjoyed training with you this morning not just because I was receiving so many useful tips. In fact, thank you. As first time I pr did a number of things today. Thanks to your input in the moment and that's it, replaceable kind of gift. But mostly, it's the gift of getting to train with a colleague and friend. So I want to underscore highlight and put an exclamation mark behind. What? You just said. Thank you. Once again and again for giving us so much interesting. Clear.
Actionable. And at times somewhat counterintuitive information,
In order to build out an exceptional training program to meet any of and in some cases, all of the nine, major adaptations that exercise can create toward aesthetic performance-related and he'll spend lifespan. Okay. Longevity goals, this is really a treasure Trove of information there and I look forward to our next discussion about how to best recover from exercise both within the exercise bout and between exercise bow
out and in the more macroscopic structure of a week, a month a year. I can't
wait. I can't wait either. I love that topic and I've got a lot to cover. So it'll be fun
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