We received this question a few weeks ago from one of our Bars & Bells members, after switching up our heavy lifting program for a couple of weeks of more intense metabolic work.
Here’s their inquiry:
“Outlive talked about strength training, steady state cardio, and high-intensity cardio. It’s a little overwhelming to think about what that would look like, and how to fit it all in. This week’s program has been awesome and has reminded me that I need to do more fast-paced cardio. (And walking)”
The book “Outlive” by Dr. Peter Attia was about longevity, the “four horsemen” (heart disease, cancer, neurogenerative disease, and type 2 diabetes), and provided insight and advice on how to live a longer, healthier life.
In the book, Dr. Attia covers aspects of our lifestyle that we are in control of that can provide us with the greatest outcome towards the longevity goal. These factors include diet, exercise, sleep, stress management and overall well-being.
Many of our members have read this book, listened to Dr. Attia speak on podcasts, and find the exercise component overwhelming because he discusses strength training, steady state conditioning, and high intensity conditioning.
What does that look like for you?
How would you fit that into your schedule?
The cop out answer is it depends.
It depends on the amount of time you have in your daily and weekly schedule to exercise.
It depends on your budget and the amount you could invest in your health with a gym membership, personal training, virtual memberships to tools like Peloton or Tonal.
It depends on your current health state, level of fitness, and where you want to go.
These three questions are an important starting point:
1. How would you rate your overall health and fitness now
2. Where do you want to be?
3. What’s your time frame?
“Cardio” is also known as metabolic conditioning and energy system development. Essentially, it’s when you get your heart rate higher during exercise.
There are a lot of options and it can be challenging for a fitness professional to understand all the options, their benefits, and how to program these options into training programs.
Take a moment and consider if it’s complicated for the fit-pro, how difficult is it to understand for the general adult population?
Let’s start with metabolism. Without getting too deep into the rabbit hole, metabolism is everything we’re made of to function. We take food to break it down to use as energy for us. Life = metabolism. Metabolism is the key to everything.
Catabolic metabolism is taking the food we eat and breaking down the foods into smaller components.
Anabolic metabolism is using those broken-down smaller components into what we need to survive.
Exercise improves everything in this metabolic process.
For activity and how to program this, there are many options.
Before strength training, whether it’s two or six times a week, it is important to be consistent with your mobility work, which can make up a majority of your warm up. Generally speaking, the older you are, the more you want to spend on your mobility and warm up.
If we start with strength training as our foundation for an exercise routine, we want to be engaged in that at least two times per week. Most of our members at ELEVATE train between 2-4 sessions per week.
The focus on strength training should be aimed at improving and strengthening movement patterns that include multiple joints working together. Practice squatting, hip hinging, pressing, pushing, pulling, lunging and do these movements in multiple planes (forward, backward, left, right, and diagonally).
The key to achieving results strength training as little as twice a week is working with intent and effort. These can’t be easy or light sessions if you want results. You’ll need to push yourself.
We also have members training 5-6 times a week. This is not necessary, but if this is your scheduled routine, make sure you’re waving the intensity of your training sessions with light, medium and heavy days, and not repeating the same intensity two days or more in a row.
Let’s break the conditioning component into three separate categories (which we simplified):
1. aerobic / steady state / Zone 2 / cardiac output
2. anaerobic / high intensity intervals
3. glycolytic
First, it is important to know you need to build your aerobic base first before doing the anaerobic and glycolytic work.
The well programmed anaerobic / high intensity interval session will have a work to rest ratio that ranges from 1:5 to 1:6 (and greater) depending on the activity. The duration of work performed is between 5-10 seconds. Programming this work into your weekly training is optimal around 2-3 times per week but not programmed two sessions in a row.
Benefits of anaerobic work is strengthening the heart (left ventricle hypertrophy) as well as being able to maintain power output over a longer period of time.
Two examples would be performing 10 second sprints on the fan bike with 50 seconds of rest for 8-12 rounds, or kettlebell 1-arm snatches x5 reps alternating arms every 45-60 seconds for 10-20 rounds.
The glycolytic session is the one you typically feel the worst doing and is not for the faint of heart (pun intended). It’s intense, your heart rate is jacked, the amount you’re working is even to or greater than the amount you rest. You feel the muscular burn and metabolite build up. Consider this type of effort the event. A 5K run, the kettlebell 5-minute snatch test, or a fan bike challenge fit this category. You could do something hard like this once, maybe twice, per month.
The benefits of glycolytic work include fat-loss, higher energy output and an ability to develop the nervous system. Glycolytic work comes with the downside of fatigue. If you spend too much time doing glycolytic work, you could be robbing from your aerobic base.
Training aerobic development can be done 2-3 times per week. Recommendations include 30-90 minute sessions but most people don’t have time for that. Brisk walking, hiking, cycling, swimming, running, paddle sports, rucking, etc. are all excellent activities that can get your heart rate up between 120-150 beats per minute (60-70% intensity for most people) for an extended period of time.
The reasons we train the aerobic system include improved heart health, lower resting heart rate, improved blood oxygen supply, stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (rest & digest) and improving work capacity and recovery. Everyone can benefit from aerobic training and this is the foundational component of your cardio work.
Recommendation – wear a heart rate monitor device when doing your aerobic work so you can adjust your pace and intensity accordingly.
At ELEVATE, our sessions typically break out to a 8-10 minute warm up, 20-30 minutes of strength work, and 5-15 minutes of metabolic conditioning.
Whether we’re coaching our small groups or our small group personal training members, the programs are designed to deliver most of the protocols above. From that schedule, our members have the freedom to schedule when they can fit in any other work to build a more robust, resilient body that is capable of doing everything they want outside of the gym.
If you have questions or want to learn, please reach out and we’ll help you move closer towards your goals.