Hello and welcome to Chasing Excellence, a show about chasing what truly matters.
My name is Patrick Cummings.
Thank you so very much for joining us this week.
We've got something we've never done before.
We've got something a bit special over the last let's call it five to six months.
Ben and I have been having a series of conversations here on the show about how to get into the best shape of our lives.
We've done four full episodes that go from concept to concept to concept.
And I thought, as we were wrapping up this year, it would be a fantastic opportunity to put all of those conversations into one extended episode, one special episode, so that you can go from the beginning all the way to the end without having to do too much clicking around.
So that's what we've got.
We're going to start by examining how just three hours a week can transform your fitness, exploring the fundamental framework for sustainable training.
From there we're going to dive into the concept of intentional intensity, learning why maximal effort is not always the answer.
We'll then see how this plays out in real-world training scenarios, and then followed up by a detailed breakdown of the nine essential components that make up a complete training program.
So whether you're starting your fitness journey or looking to optimize your current training, this guide hopefully will provide you with the knowledge and framework needed to train effectively. and sustainably and i'm very excited uh for you to get all of these conversations in one nice package before we jump into it super duper quick chasing excellence dot email i would love if you've been listening for a while or even if you're just if you're new I would love for you to go over to chasingexcellence.email, sign up for the free newsletter, sign up for all the things we've got coming in the new year.
We've been working hard over the last couple of months, thinking and planning and strategizing about what we could do over there.
And I'm incredibly excited. to jump into the new year with you over there.
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Okay, we're going to jump right into this first episode.
Ben is going to lay out a practical weekly framework for optimal fitness that anyone can follow.
You're going to learn how to structure your training across five days combined strength work, mixed modal conditioning and endurance training in a way that maximizes results while remaining sustainable long-term.
Let's go.
John Greenewald Okay, let's talk about getting ridiculously fit.
Let's talk about getting in the best shape of your life.
I want to start with what does it mean?
What does it mean to be in incredibly good shape?
Like, what does it mean to be incredibly fit?
How do we define that so that we can at least say okay, in this conversation, this is what we're aiming for.
This is where we're trying to get folks to.
Yeah, I think it's the right place to start this conversation is to have a shared understanding of what it when we say get in great shape, what do we mean by get in great shape?
And I think if we were to, even as we're saying that in a conversation, people envision certain things right.
And it's a six pack, or it's people that are running marathons, it's people that are on the beach and look strong, but right.
What does it mean When we say get into the best shape of your life?
What do we actually mean by that?
It's not as simple of a answer as we might think, because you look at like a bodybuilder who's got three and a half percent body fat abs that look like softballs, you know, pasted to their abdomen.
That guy's in great shape, you know, or, you know, you talk to somebody that just ran a marathon.
You're like, whoa, wait a minute.
You held six minute miles for 26 miles.
You're in great shape.
And so we have to have at least a shared understanding of what we mean by that.
You know, I think that for people in our space, this is going to be a very anti-climatic approach to it.
Lift hundreds of pounds.
Just that, like simple.
Do you have the ability to lift hundreds of pounds?
Could you go out and run five miles comfortably?
And could you do a dozen plus pull-ups?
And You know, if you have those things, I don't think we have to worry that much about it.
But do you look the part?
Like, I want you, do you have like, are you lean?
Are muscles showing through?
Like, meaning, do you have a six pack?
Like, I'm not saying the goal is to create and I'm not saying the six-pack means.
What I'm saying is, if you have those other things, I'm pretty confident that you are lean fit, strong and that you're going to look like you're in great shape.
So if you can lift, hundreds of pounds, deadlift And it's a kind of nice way to really simply kind of like layer in your strength.
If we're thinking of your deadlift, your bench and your squat, do you measure that around 100 pounds?
Do you measure that around 200 pounds?
Do you measure those around 300 pounds?
And obviously it's different for males and females, but we'd like for you to be able to do that for hundreds and hundreds of pounds each of those moves.
And same thing for miles.
Like, could you go out and run a mile comfortably?
Could you go out and run two miles comfortably?
Could you go and run four or five or six miles comfortably?
That's where we'd like you to be able to do.
If you're in the best shape of your life, you'd be able to go out and run a 5K any given day without thinking about it.
It wouldn't even be a thing.
Like it's not a challenge.
And maybe running 10K might be a challenge or running a half marathon, but you could comfortably.
You have the endurance to go out and do that thing.
And similarly, when we think about how many pull-ups can you do, do you measure that in one, two and three?
Or are you talking like in the high single digits?
Or are you in the double digits and knocking on the door of 20?
That's an easy way to think about capacity.
And that's similar is like when you think about how excited you are about the way you look.
You know, you're like, man, I really wish I could lose 30 pounds.
I really wish I could lose 10 pounds.
I really wish I could lose those stubborn extra two little pounds.
So I would just like... you know, be that much more confident on the beach?
Or are you like, no, I got this is this is the way I want.
This is the way my body should look.
This is the way I want my body to look.
And I'm very excited to take my shirt off at the beach.
To me, that's a best shape of your life.
And now people go, well, what about the biomarkers?
What about triglycerides and HDL and all those things?
Yes, those are part of that.
But if you took the upper ends of those, if you can back squat, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds, if you can run a six minute mile and you can do 20 pull-ups and you're around 12%, 10% body fat, meaning you have abs,
I'm not worried about your fasting glucose.
Like that's, it's not going to be, you're not gonna be pre-diabetic.
It's assuming that it's not type one, like that's something different.
You know, so those are more downstream.
If you are in great shape, it's the best thing that you can do for biomarkers.
So those kind of get just pulled in by default.
So that's sort of the thing we're saying.
If the conversation is going to do, what is the best way to get into the best shape of your life?
That's what we're steering towards is this really well-rounded capacity.
It's not just the actual shape.
It's not just wide shoulders, narrow waist.
It is the actual.
It is not that, but it's also involved the true fitness, physical capacity, what are you able to do?
And to me it boils down to like your strength, your endurance, and how much relative strength it's a technical term, but your, your body weight um stamina Mm, hmm.
Cool.
I want to get into the nitty gritty and the how to's.
But first, perhaps maybe an interesting context question, which is when we when you know, in this conversation we're talking about getting in the best shape of your life, getting ridiculously fit.
Is this conversation different than if I said cool Ben.
This time around we're going to talk about how to become the fittest person on earth.
Yeah, it's different.
Can you maybe parse those things a little bit?
So again, so that when folks are listening, they hear the direction we're trying to go and not...
Perhaps the direction we may have gone seven years ago if we had this conversation.
So I put this conversation in a box where we're assuming people are normal people, meaning that they're going to go to the gym and they're going to spend 45 minutes to an hour and a half in the gym.
This is not.
I am a professional spending where I go to the gym at 830 in the morning and I leave at six at night, which is the people I trained.
It is not that.
So that is a very different goal.
By the way, there's a lot of third wave adaptations that come with that goal, meaning you're going to compete in these specific tests.
You have to get good at these specific tests, which means there's a lot of skills.
This has nothing to do with skills at all.
There's zero skills.
This is all transferable capacities.
This is not about getting good at the gym.
This is about getting good at physical capacities that will then lend themselves to anything you choose to do outside the gym, Most notably, feeling really good about your everyday life.
Where to begin?
I wanted to make sure we laid that down.
So where do we begin this conversation about getting for us normies, for us muggles, getting in the best shape of our lives?
Where's the best place to begin?
Okay, so if we were to take those kind of four different components, right?
Which is a certain level of strength that is to be like in the best shape of your life.
That's first off what we're saying is you need that.
So I'm not saying to be a guy that's 6'1, 145 pounds, be able to run a 235 marathon, but the biggest part of your leg is your knee right.
That's not what we're saying.
So what we're saying is, again, I just mean to lay that out.
The best shape of your life is you are strong.
You can go and do endurance things and you can move your body and you look really, really fit.
So what we would then do is go, okay, what does this look like on a weekly basis?
You know, it's like time management stuff.
So let's break the training into a week to get into the best shape of your life.
This is also a prerequisite, a common understanding we have to do is go hey, I'm willing to do the work.
Like that's it.
Now we can talk about.
I guess a big part of it is if the work is 30 minutes a day versus 90 minutes a day.
We should have that part of the conversation.
But for starters, we just kind of have to do the outline, right?
Which is kind of like okay, this week, I need to drive my kids to soccer on Monday Wednesday, Friday.
I need to cook meals.
I do laundry twice a week and I need to make my bed every day, brush my teeth every day.
And I go to work Monday through Friday.
On the weekends, I do this.
That's your week.
We have to kind of lay out the week.
So, in terms of what we should be doing to get into the best shape of our lives, is we should be doing three days a week of strength training.
Ideally, those are as spaced out as possible.
So something like a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday is really nice.
So on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we should be doing strength training.
That strength training should be done with compound free weights meaning, compound meaning for strength.
And this isn't again the bodybuilder thing of getting bigger muscles, because that can make you look better.
But we're looking for is not only to look better, but have that functionality truly strong.
Compound means multi-joint, meaning.
Instead of a bicep curl, which is just a elbow flexion, singular joint, we do something like a pull-up, which is not only the elbow flexion but it's also shoulder flexion, so now we're multiple joint.
Right instead of leg extension, you know, knee extension, we do a squat, now it's ankle, knee and hip three joints, And we would choose to do them with free weights, meaning barbells dumbbells, kettlebells free weights, not machines.
That's the place we would start in terms of laying out what the week would look like three days a week of compound free weights for strength.
What's the best way to build strength?
Under 10 reps, ideally closer to like the three to five rep range.
That's where we would start to build the system.
From there, we would choose the movements that would have the greatest demand and greatest efficacy, the greatest effect on our strength, which would be the power lifts, or also known as the slow lifts, which would be your deadlift, your bench press and your squat.
Now we could choose the alternatives too, which is back squat and front squat, sumo and conventional deadlift and bench press and strict press.
So we want to center the week built around those things.
Then what we would want to do is take kind of the opposite end of the spectrum.
That's our strength.
We want to go so that we can go and do that five mile run.
We can just go and jump in and go do it.
The way we do that is, this is going to sound crazy, but you only need to run long once a week.
One time a week, you go for a longer, in air quotes, run.
So once a week our training would involve something like go for a three four five six, maybe upwards to nine or 10 mile run.
And we can talk about the specifics of, do we cycle the strength?
What do we think about tempo lifts?
Should we do linear progressions?
We get into the minutia of it, same thing we do with the longer runs.
But the gist of it is do what's comfortable and just add a tiny, tiny little bit.
Do that until it's comfortable, add a little bit.
Meaning if you could run two miles right now, go and run two miles.
And then continue to run two miles once a week until that's really... not that big of a challenge.
And then go and run three miles and do that till it's not that big of a challenge.
And then run four miles and so on.
You don't need to continually.
If you get up towards that six seven eight, nine miles, you don't need to then continue to go up higher.
You've now built up.
You're now running for an hour to an hour and a half.
You don't need to.
You're not getting any extra benefit out of endurance by going longer than that.
In fact, what you could do is go back down to four or five miles and build back up to allow yourself this kind of waved progression.
Your body will respond.
You won't overtrain, you won't get the stress fractures that all these endurance athletes get.
But that's where you get these two ends of the spectrum now.
You have three days a week of strength training, really focused on the slow lifts pull off the ground deadlift, squat and push.
Then you have a long run.
Now we've got this, okay, I can lift in the hundreds of pounds and I can go and run five miles.
The next one is the body weight thing.
In the body weight, we've got to make sure we're doing some body weight work.
So we have these kind of three different things, but they all kind of get over the umbrella of...
What is your, this is a technical term, but like what's your VO2 max?
What's your maximum ability to deliver oxygen to working muscles?
And there's a number of different ways to do that.
Traditionally that has been done with cardio work, meaning on bikes, on the track, on rowers, but it is equally, My contention, is more effective to do it with mixed modal cyclical threshold conditioning.
Now we can break that down a little bit, but the idea is, we're going to do it, not just every day on a rower.
You can't do it every day on a rower.
You're going to be smashed.
You're going to be wrecked.
That's why in these programs, rowers only do VO2 max training once, maybe twice a week.
It's so damn effective, but you can't do it over and over again in the same modality.
If you change up the modality, you can do it more frequently.
It's the number one thing to do.
So you can do it more frequently.
And what we mean by that is one day, do it with thrusters and running.
And the next day, do it with pull-ups and box jumps.
And the next day do it with kettlebell swings and pushups.
And now all of a sudden you've got this, you're using, it's called elegance.
Elegance in the mathematical sense of simplicity, but they also work really well.
It's pretty, it works really well together.
Meaning it's not interfering, right?
There's different movement patterns that are complementing each other from workout to workout.
That allows you to have higher levels of intensity without breaking down.
And VO2max is really what, it's kind of the gold standard.
It's the North Star, but it's not by itself.
It's mixed modal VO2max.
If you were to take a marathon runner and have them do a VO2 max test on a treadmill, which is a normal way to do it, they're going to score much better than a cyclist would if you took a world-class cyclist and had them do VO2 max on a treadmill.
So we want to get this mixed modal capacity, meaning we can do all these things.
That requires certain levels of intentional intensity.
We're not just going to go, go, go everything we can.
In fact, VO2 max training isn't everything we can.
It's VO2 max training is done at essentially like on a rate of perceived exertion.
If one was... essentially where we are right now, recovery.
Two would be those long runs, two to three.
It's those long runs, it's aerobic-based building.
It's also known as zone two training.
When you bump up past that, you get into lactic threshold training.
That's in the fives and four, five, sixes in terms of rate of perceived exertion.
VO2 max training is done kind of that seven or eights.
Then you get into like anaerobic threshold and neuromuscular power and stuff like that.
So this is work.
You are short of breath.
You are working hard.
You have to be very intentional.
But this is where a lot of people in our space miss it.
It's not maximal intensity.
And this makes a lot of sense when you start to think about the way Greg Gossman laid this out.
He said three on, one off, five or six days a week.
Change it up a lot.
And it's about mechanics, consistency and high underline that high intensity, not maximal intensity.
When people get into this thing that we do, we go, okay, we're going to fray it.
It's about doing it as hard as we possibly can.
This is hard.
It's hard work, which is why most people don't do it, but it is not everything you have.
It is not laid out on the floor.
Your eyes roll back in your head, you questioning what the hell you just did.
If we were to take this another approach, there's practice, training, and competition.
You get a lot, we're not talking about the practice, that's skill development.
We're talking about training.
So what is the best way to train to get into the best shape of your life?
It's to train.
Now, if you go above that into compete mode, where I will die for points, there's actually not a lot of organic adaptations or neurological adaptations that take place from that.
In fact, the recovery cycle is not in your favor.
It's going to take more time to recover from that than the benefit you got, meaning you will not receive a super compensation from that endeavor.
So we actually don't, this is, we don't want to go there as much as we might think.
How often do we want to?
Once, twice a month, right?
That's otherwise we just want to train.
You're gonna get the best benefits from training.
You make the most gains, not from playing the sport.
You make the most gains from practice and scrimmaging, that type of thing, the training thing.
So now what we have is we built out going back to the week.
We have three days a week of strength training.
Focus on the power lifts, compound, squat, dead press.
Then we have a long run once a week.
Then what we want to do is, on those strength days not on the long run day, but on the strength days we're also going to complement those with a similar movement pattern in a mixed modal cyclical threshold conditioning.
We're gonna double up on those and keep them a little bit shorter.
Meaning on those days, we're probably gonna do something eight, 10, 12, 15 minutes, right?
In terms of the power curve, the terms of the wattage you can produce over time.
That's really a sweet spot for the adaptations from training.
Even if you're going to try to get better at a super high power, meaning the phosphagen system, that might only last 3 4 5, 10 seconds, something like a 100 meter sprint for the pros.
They don't go out and do one sprint.
Right?
Their training sessions are longer than that.
And they might do sprints and rest, sprint and rest, work on some starts, do some buildups, but they do repeats to where the total amount of work, the total amount of work is probably somewhere in that eight 10, 12 minutes.
That's where we want to live most of those times.
Three days a week.
Then once a week, we'll do that same type of thing, but a little bit longer.
Something in the 20 25, maybe in 30 minutes cyclical mixed modal threshold conditioning, but longer.
And then that other time a week, we're gonna go for a long run.
If you do that, now we have the framework.
So I'm gonna try and lay it out again completely.
Three days a week of strength training, following those days up with mixed modal threshold conditioning somewhere in the eight to 15 minute mark with similar complimentary movement patterns.
Meaning if we did our back squat, we might do the condition piece with front squats.
If we did bench press, we might do the conditioning piece with push-ups or dumbbell bench press.
If we did it with deadlifts, we might do a deadlifts or cleans or something else, kettlebell swings.
Another day a week.
We're going to do a longer mixed modal cyclical threshold conditioning piece in the 15 to 30 minute range.
And then once a week, we're going to go and try to build some endurance with our running.
And now we have the framework for your best shape.
I've got a couple of practical questions.
I think you and I, I think those of us listening and those of us who've been in the CrossFit space for a while, we have a good definition of when we here get in the best shape of your life.
We have a good sense of what that.
I think we have a good sense of what that means or what that looks like.
But I can't help but think a lot of people who aren't in that space or in this space, when they hear that person's really fit or that person's in great shape, they tend to maybe fall into three buckets.
One of those buckets is like, just he's jacked, right?
He's.
He's a bodybuilder, for lack of a better way to put it spends a lot of time doing backs and buys and calf raises, etc.
Another version of that is she's really skinny.
She's really thin.
And that's a proxy for she's in really great shape, right?
Those things are often synonymous.
And then the third one is, she runs marathons on the weekends.
She's in really great shape.
And so, before we get into some of the practical questions I have, I'd love to just get your sense of like Again.
Our worlds are skewed in the way that they are, but do you have a sense that those are still?
When people hear get in the best shape of your life, one of those three pictures is in their head.
Or is it the guy in the CrossFit gym who goes four to five to six times a week?
Has that changed at all in your life? in your mind, in your experience?
So when I'm saying great shape, if we're talking about in terms of body shapes, I'm looking for the running back like the jacked run.
So there's the football player, who's the power lifter, There's the wide receiver.
And when I say wide receiver I'm thinking of like the Randy Moss type, you know, like the long and skinny, because wide receivers now can be like jacked right.
There's an awesome show on Netflix right now called Receiver, and they show their training and the guys are just like so if that's your picture, then it's actually that, but it's honestly, it's like a great shape, or you know what.
It said another way.
It's the Navy seal, right?
It's the.
When I say great shape, what I mean by that is, if there was a zombie apocalypse, who would live the longest?
Yeah.
Who are you hanging out with?
It's a guy that can.
It's a guy that can run to the next checkpoints, run away from danger, run five miles to get to safety right.
But it's also the guy that can.
You know the rebels, like the normal humans, are like coming to raid the town and you have to fight them off.
You're strong enough to fight them off and you have that level of intensity to be able to handle high threshold capacity work.
That's the shape I'm thinking about.
Another one is like a sprinter.
Like think of the Olympics are coming up, watch the 100 meter dash.
That's the body shape.
So if we're thinking of body shape, like she's so skinny or he's so jacked, or it's the guy that goes to the CrossFit gym four or five days a week, it's not any of those.
It's not the guy with the biggest muscles.
It's not the person with the least amount of body fat.
And it's not just the person who goes to the gym.
It's the person in terms of body shape.
It's they have muscles.
They have little body fat, so they are ripped, but they're not huge and they're not skinny.
It's an athlete.
It's an athletic build.
If we were to think about like, you look at somebody, you go, wow, they're in great shape.
That's what we're looking at.
Certainly not the the way fee model that most you know, at least 20 years ago that girls were aspiring to.
I think that's shifting a lot.
I think CrossFit has a lot to do with that.
Thank God.
It's also not the bodybuilder for the guys.
The guy with the pecs that are so big that they look like a injected chicken that can't support its own breast and they fall face first on the ground.
Yep.
Got it.
Okay.
Some practical questions.
I really liked the, what you did with laying it out over the course of a week.
Cause I think you can wrap, I can wrap my head around that.
I can, I can imagine that I can picture that I can plan for that.
I would love to know, in your estimation, how much time would a person need to set aside, right?
Because you had sort of started that with like, you've got you work nine to five, you've got to pick up the kids, you've got all these other things that are either literally on your calendar or at least in your mental calendar of like okay, I know when I, I know I've got to do those things.
And so if you were to say somebody's listening to this says yes, sign me up for getting in the best shape of my life.
What is the range of hours that they would need to be able to dedicate to do at least as a pretty darn close approximation to the framework you just laid out?
We're talking like. four hours a week, seven hours a week, 12 hours a week.
What do I need to be able to say I've got that in order to be able to pursue this?
Well, the framework I just laid out was five days a week.
So the closer you can get to that, the better.
And that's what I would start with.
The goal is to try to get to that one.
So again, three days a week of the weightlifting and the 15 minutes sub 15 minute, then the one day a week of longer mixed modal and the one day of singular.
That's five days a week.
From a daily requirement, we would, that would require 30 minutes a day.
Now, not including warmup and cool down and driving to the gym, but 30 minutes of training.
So that means that, like different, it's hard to prescribe warmups because you talk to some people and they spend, you know, two hours warming up.
Other people spend two minutes.
So, from training time, this is 30 minutes of training time, which means that you would spend on the weightlifting days 15 minutes of weightlifting and 15 minutes or less of the high intensity cardio stuff.
And then the other one is the longer one is 30 minutes and the run takes 30 minutes.
That would be to get in like ridiculous shape, it requires 30 minutes.
30 minutes a day, five times a week.
That's like getting in ridiculous shape.
Now, if you have the availability to spend 60 to 90 minutes I'm not saying every day, but a couple of days be able to spend 60 to 90 Then what we do is we take that base framework and you add in a couple other pieces.
And most notably those couple other pieces.
The first one I would add in is getting good at carrying things.
That's the next thing I would add in is the ability to, I should say, yeah, carry slash move things.
And that means things like you get... You're so much functional.
Maybe we should define that word.
So much functional capacity.
So much strength.
So much... Your body takes an amazing shape.
So this is for people like oh, I don't care, like if I can, you know, you know, carry 100 pounds 400 meters without putting it down.
That means nothing to me.
I don't care about that.
The shape your body takes, meaning like the way your shoulders develop, the way your midline develops, meaning your abs, the way your legs and your calves, like.
There's so much amazing aesthetics that come from that type of fitness that that's the next place i would go to.
It was that i would add in one or two days a week where i would add in a little bit of this grunt work, a little bit this durability work.
Think like sets of farmer's carries, sets of sled pushes, sets of carrying things certain distances.
That also has such amazing carry over to both of the ends of the spectrum we're looking for.
That is one of the best training mechanisms to improve your strength.
Because it's kind of what the West Side guys do, some of the strongest human beings on the planet.
They do tons of sled work.
They just go and push sleds a lot. but it also helps a ton for the long endurance stuff.
Because again, it builds up so much durability, so much of this like gait walking, but it's walking under load or under pressure.
And that's basically the most functional thing that human being can do is get from point A to point B.
We're also built to carry things.
Like that's one of the very unique things as us as a species is we can carry things.
There's very few other animals that actually do that in nature.
Like certainly horses do it and camels do it, but there's very few.
Yes, we make them, right.
But there's very few other animals.
Dogs, you know, carry an avalanche and they put, like the whiskey underneath or whatever's, the bourbon.
In Switzerland, they go and rescue people and give them shots.
That next thing would be carrying, getting good at moving things.
So if we were to stretch out a day beyond a half hour, that's the next place I would go is with that.
And if we were to go another place, then I would add in a little bit of lactic threshold work.
So we've already done a lot of VO2 max.
The next thing I would do is the biggest bang for your buck in terms of the cardio piece, which is lactic threshold.
And this is where I think people will miss it, is you hear so much conversation about zone two.
And the justification for zone two is people go look what the most cardiovascularly fit athletes in the world do.
So they take people like marathon runners and people that compete in the Tour de France and they go.
They spend upwards of 80 of their training week, sometimes 90 of their training volume in zone two.
So then they go and they prescribe that to the normal person.
But what they're totally missing is the fact that those athletes are training for three to four hours a day.
If you're training three to four hours a day then yes, the majority of your time should be in zone two.
Correct.
But if you are only training for 30 minutes a day, You will not get the same bang for your buck doing zone two for 30 minutes as you will from doing this other triphasic approach, which is this work on your strength, work one day a week on your zone two and then the majority of your time in this VO2.
They should be flipping the question and going what is the absolute time that those athletes are training in VO2?
And what you might find is those endurance athletes, the best in the world, might be spending 20 minutes, 30 minutes a week in their VO2.
Cool.
Let's mimic that portion of their training, because that's going to give the biggest bang for their buck.
Now, if you have the availability and your goal is world-class cardiovascular fitness, then yes.
What I'm saying is you're not going to win the Tour de France by doing this methodology.
But our contention is for us to get into the best shape, which is you have this athletic build, that is, they're going to live the longest in the zombie apocalypse.
I don't want to be able to just bike away from them.
I want to be able to do the other things.
Last question, possibly, probably.
I don't have 15 hours to work out.
I don't have 15 hours to go to the gym.
I don't have 15 hours to train, however they might define that.
And so that's really interesting to me for what you just laid out and say you need to be able to dedicate let's just round up and say three hours of actual training time.
Again, to your point, it's not driving to the gym, it's not warming up.
But that strikes me as not what most people imagine you would say when they said Ben, tell me how to get in the best shape of my life.
I'm ready to dedicate whatever I need to do.
Like I'm ready to be in the gym 20 hours a week if that's what it takes.
And then you say, I need you to train for three hours a week.
That to me is a paradigm shift.
Oh, I think for me, for our community, is not for the lay person, not for the mass, because the mass here is three times a week of 15 minutes of cardio.
That's what they've been told in order to stay healthy, you need to be active.
What is active?
It is biking, gardening, walking for 15 to 20 minutes, three times a week.
So I think it depends on where you're coming from.
Totally.
But yes, that is our contention is that in two and a half hours, three hours a week, you can get into ridiculously good shape.
Ridiculously good shape.
All right, that was part one.
We're going to jump into part two momentarily.
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Okay, now that we understand the weekly framework for optimal training which we just got through, let's explore why intensity level matters so much and why going all out isn't always the best strategy.
Cyclical threshold conditioning, what does that mean and why is it useful for us to know?
So if we broke down the words, right?
Cyclical means that you can keep going.
It's like a cycle.
The wheel keeps spinning.
It doesn't stop at any point.
Threshold means you're at the breaking point.
It's about to come off the wheels.
You're about to stop. and conditioning, meaning that we're working our bodies.
So I'll talk about just like really simple framework and we'll give some of the science behind this in a second.
So what does this look like?
It's when you choose a movement, a load or intensity, a pace that you could do over and over again without necessarily stopping.
So what that really means is when I say over and over again without stopping, it's for at least 10 seconds and not more than 120 seconds.
Now it sounds really specific and it is.
And the reason for that is there are a number of energetic pathways, ways that your body uses energy, creates energy.
The one that lasts in that timeframe is called the glycolytic pathway.
It's basically using stored sugars in the muscles and the liver to produce energy and motion.
The ones that are short in that are the phosphagen or ATP.
It's really high power.
It's things that you couldn't do for more than 10 seconds.
So if we were to think of that shorter end, we think about loading a movement.
Let's say we were going to do front squats.
If you're gonna choose a weight that's above probably above your 80, you're going to have to stop after 10 seconds.
You're gonna get three reps, maybe Maybe you get a fourth, but you're certainly not getting deep much past 10 seconds-ish, which means that you're usually just burning up ATP.
That is a part of the training, but that's not cyclical threshold conditioning.
That's strength training.
And this is the definition between difference between strength and cyclical.
What we want to be able to do is do that over and over.
So a lighter load.
So this is why most of our loads in our conditioning pieces fall closer to that 30 to 60% range.
We might be able to get to some heavy grindy stuff, but it's going to be very, very grindy.
And honestly, once you get above 70%, the strongest athlete is going to win anyway.
It is a strength test.
So what we want to do is pick movements, pick loads, pick paces that you could hold for at least 10 seconds, but that you could not continue to do for more than 120 seconds.
And this is where we get into like, if we're going to do a workout let's say we do a workout that has front squats, pull-ups and running what we would want to do is choose a front squat, loading and rep scheme that'll allow you to do at least 10 seconds of work without stopping.
Now, you could choose to do this any of these movements in singles, but you would have the capacity, if you wanted to, to be able to do this in greater than 10 seconds.
This gives us the greatest carryover, not only in overall fitness, but it does give us a little bit of benefit in the strength category.
It does give us a little bit of benefit in the endurance category.
But what it really gives us is that high threshold capacity, that VO2 max, that really high-end fitness experience.
And if we do this with mixed modal patterns movements, meaning weightlifting, body weight, and running is the workout I just laid out now we're really getting this broad spectrum of capacities.
We're not saying just do VO2max intervals in this 10 to 120 second pace.
We're saying do this with mixed modal across those three modalities.
If we do that also with intentional levels of intensity and we think about that, there is a certain loading and rep scheme associated with certain movements.
So what we want to do is have the majority of those in what we would call our sweet spot or our threshold.
And people that have been in the CrossFit space will recognize this.
They'll go, oh yeah, that's where those numbers come from.
So if we were to do thrusters, A light thruster is 75 pounds.
A moderate thruster is 95 pounds.
A heavy thruster is 135.
If we were to do power snatches, a light power snatch for conditioning is 75 pounds.
A moderate one is 95 pounds.
And a heavy one's 135.
Same thing.
If we were to do a clean, a jerk, or a front squat, the light is 95.
This is a guy's numbers.
The light is 95.
The moderate is 135 and heavy is 185.
If we're to do deadlifts, the light is 185, the moderate is 225, and the heavy is 275, maybe 315.
So there's these associated reps and associated loads with light, medium, heavy.
Then from there, If it's going to be a light, what you do is you prescribe somewhere between 75 and about 100 reps.
If it's going to be moderate weight, you're programmed somewhere around 50 reps.
If it's going to be heavy, you're programmed somewhere around 30 reps.
And now you start to see how these workouts took shape.
So if we take a workout like Fran, Fran has a moderate weight thruster, 21.59, which is 45 reps.
The 50, it's the middle.
Again, the light is 75.
Let's take a workout like Randy, which is 75 power snatches at 75 pounds of light.
How many reps?
75.
Let's take a workout like Isabel, 135 snatches, but it's only 30 reps because it's heavy.
He starts at Diane, 225 deadlifts, 2159, 45 because it's the moderate.
We start to see is, like the majority of these girls, heroes and all the rest fall in the moderate range.
Now, here's the interesting part is it's not just for loading.
It's also for body weight movements.
And there are certain prescribed rep schemes that fall in the sweet spot.
This is why you don't see workouts with 2159 sit-ups.
It's not enough.
It doesn't get you to your threshold.
Sit-ups, that number is 150.
So three rounds of 50 or 50, 40, 30, 20, 10, Annie, right? or five rounds of 30.
Like that's how you get to the threshold of the cyclical.
Really hard to keep going, but you can keep going.
Similar is like with pull-ups.
Pull-ups, for most workouts, we're gonna have, pull-ups are a moderate movement.
We have somewhere around 50.
Fran, that's on the faster side, but we could go as high as up to 100 reps there.
When you get to 150, now you're tipping over.
That's EVA, and that's really high.
MRF is on the higher side, right?
But it's not crazy for the pull-up number.
And you start to see like, oh, there are these associated numbers for these different ones.
And for most body weight movements, for the moderate ones, it's gonna be somewhere between 50 and 100.
The lighter ones like ab mat sit-ups will be closer to the 150.
The really big beefier ones like 30 inch box jumps will be closer to the 30 or the 50.
And now you start to see how like, oh, intentional levels of intensity.
And then what you do is you pair those movements with elegance, complementary movement patterns that allow you to keep the intensity high.
I mean, if I do a workout that has bench press pushups and dips, the intensity of that workout is going to go down very, very quickly.
Again, intensity is power.
Same thing.
They're synonymous.
How much power can you produce is the intensity of the action.
Power is your force.
The weight times, the distance times, the reps times how long it took you to get there.
How long it took you to complete it.
If I'm gonna do a workout that has 20 bench press, 20 dips and 20 push-ups man, that's gonna take me a long time to finish.
But if I paired that bench press with pull-ups and running wow, now I could keep that because yes, my heart rate's going to stay high.
I'm going to stay in that threshold range.
But because I have these complementary movement patterns with intentional levels of intensity, it's gonna get us a whole lot fitter.
Then what we do is we take that and we pair it across not only intra-workout but intra-days.
From one day, we're gonna pair a lower body push and upper body pull like Fran.
The next day, we're gonna pair a lower body pull and an upper body push like deadlift and pushup.
And now all of a sudden we can keep this really high.
This is where we talked a little bit in the last podcast.
But you can train VO2 max more than once a week, which a lot of people are doing, because you can change the modalities.
You're not using the same muscles.
You can work at this high level of capacity because you're doing it at such elegance and such complimentary movement patterns, with such intentional levels of intensity.
The last place, that is, Are you the time variance and how long we're going, how much volume we're doing?
Intensity is not just how fast you're going, how much weight you're lifting, but the overall workload as well has to be accounted for.
And then you vary the days that way as well.
And then you vary also week to week to make sure you're getting there.
And also we have this better kind of definition of what cyclical threshold conditioning is done at intentional levels of intensity.
Making sure that you also have a day for a back off, a day for a moderate, and probably only one day where you're truly throwing down with intensity, a lot, a lot, a lot of intensity.
That's kind of the appropriate way to get into the best shape of your life for the long haul as well.
How do people get this wrong?
What have you seen, either from a coach who's writing programming or an athlete who's just like I'm ready to throw down where?
In everything we talked about in that first episode, that framework, But mostly what we just talked about here was cyclical threshold conditioning, intentional intensity, elegance.
Where does the train go off the tracks most often in your experience?
Well, it goes off the tracks most often in the minutiae, but the greatest differentiation is in the details, right?
That's what makes the difference.
And it's nailing the associated movement, loading, and rep schemes.
If you do a workout... with 100 thrusters at 135 pounds, I know that's super hard.
That's not the point.
We're not trying to make a workout harder.
You're trying to put it in the right cyclical threshold.
The other place that they go wrong with it is they just try to.
Well, it's the same thing is they just try to make workouts harder and harder and they can get so games.
Athletes do this all the time where they make it so hard or heavy that they're actually losing a lot of the threshold conditioning.
They try to beef it up.
I'm going to do these as bar muscle-ups, but now they have to rest 30 seconds between sets.
That's not cyclical threshold conditioning.
That's start, stop, start, stop.
That's interval training.
Again, what we're trying to do is get about five days a week of this cyclical threshold conditioning.
That's really what we're looking for.
Now, if you are truly a games athlete and you have the capacity to rip off 35 bar muscle-ups yeah, you could do a 21-59 with some heavy thrusters and some bar muscle-ups and have it be that.
That is not the case for, forget about the 80-20, that's not the case for the 99% of us.
You, me, and almost every one of our members would get so much fitter if we did regular burpees.
We did regular pull-ups.
We did thrusters at 95 pounds and we weren't trying to do handstand walking and doing two ugly ring muscle-ups and resting for four minutes between sets just to kind of get up there.
Cool and sexy.
Yeah, you can Instagram it.
And yes, you can gain a new skill.
But again, the skill portion of this is not part of the protocol.
Do you have endurance?
Do you have strength?
Do you have high levels of capacity?
Best shape of your life.
Your body doesn't know if you can do a muscle up or not.
Your body does know if your VO2 max is 35 or 55.
How often is it the case because we're talking about threshold, we're talking about intentional intensity, we're talking about sort of the finding the sweet spot how often is it the case that ego is the thing in the way?
Because like okay well, I want to do it at 135 because that's what's on the whiteboard, but I can't do that in a cyclical manner.
I have to do it kind of, I have to do one, I've got to take three big breaths.
I suddenly am doing a different workout than was prescribed.
If more athletes understood which is kind of what I'm getting at if more athletes understood that what the goal here is, the cyclical threshold conditioning, not doing what's on the whiteboard just because it's on the whiteboard, or not just doing 135 because well, I want to be able to say I did that at 135 pounds or 225 or whatever it might be.
Is understanding what we're actually aiming for.
That cyclicality helpful to get people away from the bad decisions that they make before the workout.
Yeah, it's important to understand it.
I think it's more the coach's responsibility than the athlete's.
Are you programming something that your athletes are going to be able to continue to do this movement for greater than 10 seconds?
And again, that is on the precipice of not being... nearly as effective as it could be otherwise.
You have the 10 seconds all the way the range to 120 seconds before you start to bump out of that.
And maybe here's another part is people go, wait a minute, wait a minute.
We do workouts all the time that are longer than 120 seconds.
That doesn't make sense at all.
Well, every time you break, that resets.
So that's what, like, you're doing, we are already doing little mini intervals all the time.
So when you do a workout like Fran, that's so effective.
Now I know there are people that can do Fran in two minutes, but for the normal human being that takes six minutes to do Fran.
The way that they normally do it is they'll do 21 thrusters, which takes about a minute, right?
And they could not, they could not keep doing thrusters for another minute.
No one that did those 21 thrusters in a minute could hold on and do that to 42.
That's an impossibility.
That's why that's such a great movement.
It's such a great threshold spot.
It's at a minute that we fail.
That's awesome.
That's really a sweet spot.
Because then what do we do after we do those 21 thrusters?
We drop the bar.
And Patrick, this is a question for you.
You've just done your 21 thrusters.
What's the next thing that you do?
Well, you take a couple of deep breaths.
That's exactly, you're exactly right.
You rest, you're resting, you're stopped.
Exactly right.
So there you go.
Now it's reset.
And then you jump up and you do your pull-ups.
And for most humans, they'll get about halfway through that.
Maybe they get 10, 12, 15 pull-ups.
So they've done another 20 25, 30 seconds of pull-ups of this movement, and now we're squarely in that glycolytic pathway.
This is awesome.
We just did a minute of work.
This is, you make up the intervals as you go, which is, you just did a minute of thrusters and then you rested for 15 seconds.
You jumped up, did 35 seconds of pull-ups, came down, rested for another 20 seconds before you jumped up and did another 15 seconds to finish out the set.
Then you walked over to the bar, you have 15 to go, That's daunting after what you just did.
So you rest for 25 seconds, pick up the bar and you get eight reps, which takes you 35 seconds.
You drop, and now you get where I'm going.
What we're doing is when we're doing Fran, we're not doing a six-minute workout.
We're doing a whole bunch of chunks in that cyclical threshold, in that glycolytic pathway.
Greater than 10 seconds, but less than 120.
And that's our sweet spot.
If we can live there five days a week, man, we're gonna get some crazy amounts of fitness.
So here's the thing, to answer your question, go back to it, to answer your question.
It's not the athletes.
It's the coaches writing the program, the coaches running the program are not setting their athletes up for success.
And when their athlete comes in and they don't have that capacity to be able to do so.
If you could, if your one rep thruster was a hundred pounds, right.
And you could do two unbroken pull-ups.
Can you do Fran?
Technically, yes.
Yes, you can.
Why?
Now, technically, yes is the right answer.
Because should you do Fran prescribed?
No.
No, why not?
Now you have the answer for that.
Because what's going to happen is you're going to do your 100 thrusters, 100 pounds.
You're going to do a thruster at 95.
And what are you going to do?
You're then going to drop the bar.
You haven't yet worked for the 10 seconds.
You need to be able to get at least three or four reps unbroken.
That's how we get to, like, if you can't do that, and again, that would be crazy.
That'd be heavy, Fran.
Crazy heavy, Fran.
That'd be like Fran being prescribed for us at 155, where my thruster is probably like 185.
Yours is probably about the same.
Could we do FRAN at 155?
We could, but it wouldn't even be a conditioning thing.
It'd be a strength thing.
We're building up strength, endurance, not capacity at that point.
Capacity the way we're defining it.
Can you maybe pull apart a little bit more?
We talked about intentional intensity.
And one of the things that everybody knows about CrossFit, or at least I think they know, it's that this constantly varied at high intensity.
What is the difference between intentional intensity, high intensity, and absurd intensity?
Okay, so first, Greg Glassman, when he coined that, coined it very well.
Very, very well.
Consider very functional movements performed at high intensity.
What everyone did was then they destroyed that and took out the word high and inserted maximal.
Right.
And this program is not supposed to be done at maximal intensity five days a week.
Greg Glassman himself said that is unsustainable.
You are not supposed to do that.
It was a thing that went on the internet for a while ago.
It was like doing CrossFit at maximal intensity five or six days a week is a recipe for disaster.
Whose quote is that it was like post the comments and the people with all these like crossfit haters like that.
It's like actually it was great glass Because it's not supposed to be at maximum intensity.
It's supposed to be at high intensity.
Now, what is high intensity?
High intensity could be anything from, you know, anything essentially from lactic threshold above.
Meaning as long as it's above that kind of like zone two, we're at a relatively high intensity.
That's a high intensity.
You're going to get, it's unsustainable essentially is another way.
You could not continue to do that for an hour's effort.
That's because it's high intensity.
So that's the first part of this is recognizing that it doesn't need to be maximal intensity.
It's high intensity.
I'm trying to elevate the conversation a little bit and go, it's not even high intensity.
It's intentional levels of intensity.
There is appropriate days that you should just kind of like back. off get some movement in do your thing but even more so i want the coaches to prescribe be very intentional with the way that they're laying out the workout to drive a certain adaptation through intentional levels of intensity not just Here's the workout, 21-59 thrusters and pull-ups.
You can thruster 135 as your max.
Should you be doing 95?
You could, but that's not doing it intentionally because you're going to โ it's too heavy.
You won't be able to get that for โ
You know, another way to say this, you can't do it for five reps unbroken, you're strength training.
If you can't do it for five reps unbroken, you're doing strength training.
You're not doing cyclical threshold conditioning.
So in that case, like same thing with like muscle ups.
If you can't get it for five, you're not doing cyclical threshold conditioning.
You're just resting and you're resting probably like at least a one-to-one, if not a two-to-one, if not a three-to-one.
If you're resting greater than a one-to-one, you're a power training athlete.
You're not a conditioning endurance training athlete.
So what's the biggest thing that they're missing?
As good as we are in conditioning our space, we're missing out with a lot of the top level conditioning.
Because we spend, we don't put enough effort into doing it intentionally.
How do you, as somebody who obviously is in charge of quite a bit of programming, how do you look at a week, or maybe, if it's in more than a week like, what are you looking at when you see a week of programming in front of you As you weigh and measure okay, we need to bump this up, or that's too much.
Or we did this on Tuesday, so we can't do that again on Thursday.
What do you see when you look at a week of affiliate programming or just a week of CrossFit programming?
What do you start to pick apart and how do you start to determine good better, this could be better, this is bad, etc.
?
It's actually very formulaic.
It's a lot easier than it might seem once you know the formula.
And the formula is you start off with macro movement patterns.
So meaning like, are we going to be doing upper body pulling or upper body pushing, lower body pulling, lower body pushing or ankle dominant movements, basically double under box jump running.
From there you want to pair those intentionally to create elegant non-complementary, non-interfering movement patterns.
And that should make up the 80% of the programming.
And you have that not only from one day.
Cool.
Those are very complementary movements.
That's going to allow us a very high level of intentional intensity.
Then from there, we would dissect that workout farther.
But as you said, I'll come back to that actual workout.
Then you go to the next day.
You go, does the next day complement the first day?
And if it has, again, lower body pushing and upper body pulling, then the answer is no.
But that still doesn't make it wrong, right?
You'd have to know what the third day is because if you went something like that's close, right?
Maybe you did like a walking lunge and a kettlebell swing, right?
Okay, like, okay.
But then that means that next day should be really far removed from that.
So what we want to do is not only look at the complementary that allows the higher levels of intensity intro workout, but from day to day as well.
So that's the macro movement patterns.
Once you lay out the macros, then you go to the micros.
And the micromove patterns make sense.
So if we're going to do lower body push, okay, are we going to do a wall ball?
Are we going to do an air squat?
Are we going to do a front squat?
Are we going to do a thruster?
Are we going to do a walking lunge?
Like we can choose which of those lower body pushes we choose.
We want to make sure that those are varied. across the week.
Meaning it doesn't make sense to do just a whole bunch of front squats every time we do the lower body push.
We'd want some, we don't want some wall balls.
We want some air squats.
We want some lunges.
We want some front squats and so on.
Then from there, we go to what we talked about before is like, are we hitting the sweet spot?
So if we're going to be doing wall balls, are we doing wall balls in sets of 10?
Like, whoa, that's like five sets of 10 doesn't make sense.
That's only 50 reps.
Wall ball is a light movement.
We should be in the 100 to 150 range.
Or the opposite.
Or we do it five sets of 50s, right?
That's 250.
That's over-programmed.
Like that doesn't make sense.
We want wall balls to be around that 150 number.
It's like, it's a light movement, like a sit-up.
We want to be around the 150 number.
Same thing.
Air squats, we want to be around the 200 to 300 number.
Push-ups, we run around that 150 to 200 number.
Pull-ups, we run around the 50 to 100 number.
You guys are like, are we in that area?
And then from there you go like, well, how long are these workouts?
Are they all 10 minutes or some 10, some 20 and some 30?
And then we have that and you pair that then with are we getting appropriate levels of strength and we're getting something long enough in there to work on endurance a little bit?
OK, we're going to continue.
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All right.
With the understanding of intentional intensity versus maximal intensity.
Let's now see how these principles translate into actual training sessions and weekly programming.
Where do you want to pick this conversation back up?
What do you want to focus on now?
Well, I don't know if we fully rounded out the intentional intensity.
So let me pull a little bit in there.
Basically, it was, as the title said, not maximal intensity, but intentional levels of intensity.
The title speaks to it, but maybe to create a little bit more if this is programming 301 instead of 201 or 101.
I can't remember if we talked about lifting to technical failure.
I think we covered that, but there is this other aspect.
And I know we touched upon lactic threshold as a place that could kind of fit into this.
Let's just talk about combining that intentional intensity into the weekly framework.
Sure.
So here's What most people when they start training.
One of the major hindrances, one of the major blockers to results is how hard they work.
It's one of the reasons that people go to a traditional globo gym and stop going after a little while, because they put in what they feel is the effort and they don't see the results.
That's obviously... a function of a lot of things, including what you choose to do and all the rest.
But one of the biggest ones is, as Greg Glassman has said, is intensity, is the independent variable most commonly associated with favorable adaptations.
And what that means in English is that the harder you work, the faster you'll receive results.
When you start to think about that, it's fairly obvious.
If you are trying to do anything, the harder you work, the faster you'll see results, whether that's trying to learn to play guitar or learn a language.
The harder you work, the faster you'll see results.
Here's the big asterisk contention.
Maybe underline bold like we need a little footnote to this thing.
Dot dot dot.
That's about working hard.
And as we said in the last one, it's not about everything you have every single time.
So we spoke a lot about that, but what does that look like in the framework of a week?
So remember that it's mechanics moving really well.
Like if we're learning to play guitar, it's like, where does the guitar go on your lap?
How do you hold the guitar?
Are you strumming with this hand?
Is that with your elbow or with your wrist?
When you play chords, should your thumb be around the top?
It's like, truly the mechanics.
Then it's about consistency. are you practicing guitar five or six days a week?
Right?
You're going to get there a lot faster if you're training five or six days a week than if you are trying to play guitar really hard.
But you play so hard that maybe you get some blisters on your fingers.
That doesn't make any sense.
You train to the point where you have tipped over the edge, to where now you need to take four or five days off to let your blisters heal.
You would have been so much better off if you sat right at or just below that threshold and did this five or six days a week, because it goes mechanics.
Consistency then, and only then intensity.
So what's a framework we could layer on to explain these different levels of intensity?
In the aerobic world, they are into prescribing intensities.
They usually do it through either pacing, but the most common way is heart rate.
And what they'll say is that there is a few different zones of training.
There's also just some different types of training.
So people start to hear these common terms that we're about to talk about.
A very low level of intensity is called zone two training.
And there is a zone one, but...
You know, we're not far out of zone one right now.
Zone one is essentially active recovery.
If we were talking about heart rate, it might be like 100 to 120 beats a minute where you're just kind of moving but you're not really getting physiological adaptations.
You're not getting fitter, faster, stronger.
You're actually speeding up the recovery process of yesterday's training.
If you were to do that every single day, you're not going to get a whole lot fitter, right?
It's a recovery protocol.
Zone two has some benefits to it.
It's at a perceived rate of exertion of about a three or four on a scale of zero to 10.
There's some breathing involved, but it's not heavy breathing.
It's the hardest that you could work while still holding a conversation.
Above that is lactic threshold training.
Lactic threshold training is stuff that would benefit you for.
And, by the way, zone two really good for endurance building, really good for recoverability and endurance.
Lactic threshold is really good at getting you at like hour-long efforts mostly limited by your lactic threshold.
Above that is VO2 max training.
VO2 max is getting attention right now, mostly through Peter Atiyah stuff.
That is essentially what could you hold for 20 minutes.
It's But really, it's race pace effort of that 8 to 12 minutes.
So, like the VO2 max tests, a really common one is just like a 12 minute.
How far can you run in 12 minutes?
Measure the meters.
It's really well correlated to VO2 max.
Zone two, rate of perceived exertion, three or four.
Lactic threshold, rate of perceived exertion, five or six.
VO2 max, seven or an eight.
When we get above that eight, we're now tipping above that 90% of your maximum heart rate.
It's really unsustainable.
So going back full circle, intensity matters.
It only matters after mechanics and consistency.
Here's the big thing in the globo gym.
Intensity is the thing that people need to lean into.
In our place, it's actually the thing that we need to control against.
If you go to a good affiliate, it's affiliate where people program well, work out hard and they work out with good movement.
If you're doing this in your garage, you might need to work on pushing intensity a little bit more.
But that's usually... It's not the thing that I'm seeing.
Like when people come into our gym...
We need to modulate intensity.
We try to control it because people are working out above their physical and psychological tolerances.
They actually like that was so hard man.
I don't know if I want to go back and do that again tomorrow.
Well, even if you're not sore, that's too hard.
So what's the way that we could layer this into a week?
Here's a framework to create a more sustainable intensity level and training with intentional levels of intensity.
One day a week where we are in that nine or a 10.
That's one day a week above VO2 max, above 90% of our heart rate.
From there VO2 max could be a couple of days, maybe like two days a week.
Maybe another day or two is lactic threshold.
That's gonna sound so weird to people in our space.
That's a rate of perceived exertion of five or six.
That means that we're in that heart rate around 80%.
That is not the way we've been taught how to do this.
But for sustainability.
Greg Glassman said it a long time ago, which is if you try and do this program as hard as you can every day, you will not sustain it.
It is unsustainable.
Meanwhile, he said train five or six days a week.
So we need to not go to maximal intensity.
So how can we regulate this?
If you went long and slow once a week, go for a 3, 5, or 10K run, depending on your ability.
3, 5, 10K run. at a zone two pace, 65% of your max heart rate.
There's your zone two, once a week.
From there, twice a week, do your metcons, your conditioning, at a lactic threshold pace.
Rate of perceived exertion of five or six.
That's really chill.
These movements are so powerful, you can get your heart rate jacked up so fast.
That's really chill.
Then another two or three days a week, try VO2.
People in the endurance space are going to go, that's unsustainable.
That's because you're doing your VO2 max stuff with the same thing every time.
You're always doing it with running or you're always doing it with biking.
If you do it one day with push-ups, sit-ups and squats and the next day is rowing and kettlebell swings, it is sustainable.
That's the big difference.
We do it with mixed modal.
So you can keep doing it because your muscles are getting a break, but your aerobic system can keep going.
Your CNS does not get necessarily drained as much from the VO2 max if it's mixed modal as well.
From there, Then one day a week, we go to anaerobic power.
Anaerobic power is that, let's see what we got, nine, 10, everything and go.
This is how we get up to five, six, or even seven days a week of training.
We said again, you can do seven days a week of training.
If we put some of those days in as what in our space, we would call it active recovery.
It's just lactic threshold training, a rate, a perceived exertion of five or six for some of your Metcons.
I just want to put that in as another bullet point underneath, or maybe combining those two conversations we had in part one and part two of how can we bring intentional intensity into the weekly format.
Yep.
I love that.
And that's a great blending of the first two.
So my first question is is something I've heard you say before, but maybe we can nail it on the head which is programming can incentivize, or the kind of programming you're doing or following can incentivize this sort of behavior.
Can you unpack that a little bit more? and give us some examples as to what programming can look like so that it gets us to a place that five, six, seven days a week is not an impossibility because we burned ourselves out on day three or four. this then becomes a question of are we programming for a group of people the masses or individuals okay so if i'm programming for a group of people either small private training or a small group training semi-private or my 9 30 class That's going to look a bit different than if I'm programming for Patrick.
It's going to be very different if I'm programming and putting out programming into the world and I don't know who's using it.
The more specific answer is if I'm programming for you, But the first thing I need to know.
This is actually maybe the better way to start this conversation.
I need to know how often you're training.
Like based off your schedule and your goals and your wants and what you want.
If you tell me, hey, I can commit today to four days a week.
Well, if that's the case, I might not do any zone two, because we don't need the zone two in that case.
But you go like, no, like I'm a, you know, I really think I need to build up my endurance.
I'm a former football player and power lifter.
I get really smoked for anything that's over, you know, four or five minutes, then I'll add that in.
So what we want to start with is the most impactful thing.
What's the most impactful thing we can do?
From there, we'd still want that hard effort a few days a week.
And VO2 Max is hard enough for a few days a week.
So as long as we have that, then from there we would prescribe intensities.
Is the true answer to your question.
If it's for an individual, it then becomes โ is this the way โ I may all use myself as the avatar.
I plan my week to train seven days a week.
There's many weeks that that's not a viable option.
So, for example, this week i'm traveling to europe.
I won't be able to train the the day of travel, so that's gonna be six days a week.
There's next week I'm flying back.
There's another day gone, right?
So there's certain days that it just pops up, but I don't plan a rest day.
I plan for seven days and things pop up.
I do my long, slow distance, my zone two on Sundays Sunday run day where I'll run somewhere between four and usually seven miles.
On Mondays, I don't go hard.
I'm a little beat up from that long run.
I know you're not supposed to get beat up from those, but they do.
It's just time on my feet.
If I'm doing a seven mile run, it still zaps me a little bit, even if I do it slow.
I like to use Monday as what we'll call either, you can call it what you want, take the class.
This is what I do.
I come into class.
I still get my lift in, which is always going to be in our programming at Upper Body Press.
I just ran for an hour.
I can do strict press or bench press.
It's a reason we structure the program that way.
And then I'll do the class, but I won't, this is gonna sound weird, I won't necessarily try hard.
I'll use a little bit lighter weight if it's a lot of weight stuff, or I'll go at about a five or a six on perceived exertion.
Maybe it's a one-minute max push press, one-minute toes-to-bar, one-minute bike.
I'll do that, but I'll use less weight on the push press.
I won't try to squeeze out every possible rep I can.
I'll probably stop with 40 seconds ago, still take a break in between.
I'll jump up and do a handful of toes to bar, but then come down and instead of trying to get 18 or 22 in the minute, I might only get 15.
And the bike, I'll spin, but it's a point where I'm working and I'm sweating. not like dying.
On Tuesday, I'm ready to rock and roll.
Tuesdays a lot of times will be my big go effort.
That would be like a hard one for me.
And then on Wednesdays, I'll usually do something in between.
And then you start to see, like Thursdays depending on how I'm feeling, Friday depending on how I'm feeling, it's all for me.
It's this auto-regulated athlete.
Autonomous meaning athlete has the freedom to be able to pick and choose when they go hard and when they don't.
I can tell you right now, if there's a workout with 315 deadlifts in it, that's not going to be the workout I try to charge into, because I don't want that really hard effort with something, having somebody that's had 10 years removed from a back fusion.
That's not the day for me.
The day for me to drive and lean in really hard is a day with burpees, wall balls, biking, right?
Is a day with pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, squats, etc.
It's a day for that I feel like I can lean into this one really, really hard.
Is that steering away from my weaknesses?
I don't think so.
I think it's creating a sustainable path, because the other ones are too draining on me and psychologically I'm not prepared to go everything I have into those ones.
And if I do, the risk-reward of tipping over the edge.
If I go a little bit too hard, a little bit too heavy, a little too fast on a clean and jerk, that could be bad news bears.
If I go a little bit too far, a little too hard, tip over the edge a little bit on a stationary bike, I'm okay.
I'm going to be okay the next day to come back and do that thing.
So the way we do this is kind of like create the framework but then let the athletes control when it goes.
If I was working with you, Patrick, I would learn you.
I'd be like, hey, so on Mondays, we're going to do this.
On Wednesdays, we're going to go this.
And I would give rate of perceived exertion and let you choose where that is.
Maybe you have a heart rate monitor.
I don't love that, because if you're doing burpees and cleaning jerks, your heart rates can be so much higher than if we're doing Turkish get-ups and sit-ups right.
It's going to be a totally different ballgame.
Yep.
That was a good segue into the question.
I've got kind of a two part question.
So answer whichever one makes sense.
To answer first, which is how do you either yourself, ourselves or as a coach, how do you help others figure out where their rate of perceived exertion is, especially in light of what you just said, which is like I don't really love the idea of the heart rate monitor?
How do you get people to a place where they're going into a workout with that mindset of today's, this kind of day?
Tomorrow's going to be a heavier, harder day.
And the other side of that question is what have you experienced in the gym that keeps people from modulating their intensity in the way that you just described?
At the beginning of this conversation.
You said oftentimes in the gym and the CrossFit space we have to pull people back.
And so, Two questions there.
One, how do you teach somebody how to understand these things, how to feel it?
And then what gets in the way of effectively putting into place the sort of practice that you just laid out, where you do have that sort of modulation?
Okay, so the first one is how do you get people to understand the rate of perceived exertion?
First part of that is you're never going to get it right.
You're never going to nail it.
You're going to be in a neighborhood.
It's like, do I know if I'm at an eight or a 7.6 or a 9.1?
No.
Does it matter?
No.
It's like, you just have to be in the neighborhood.
With our elite athletes, we would give them paces on the rower, right?
So we're going to do, this sounds, this is terrible.
It's what we used to do.
Three by 2K, three 2Ks with a four minute break in between.
What we would want is for that to be at a certain strokes per minute and at a certain pace.
But we don't say that needs to be at a 1.52.
We say it needs to be at a 1.52, keep it between a 1.50 and a 1.54.
I don't want to see 159.
I don't want to see 155.
It's not going to be perfect spot on all the time.
If you start off the workout and you're like, I think this is an eight.
I think this is an eight.
And in round four, you go to an eight and a half or a nine.
It's not like the workout, you messed it up.
It's like, hey, we're not going to give everything to this workout.
We're also not going to take this workout kind of like a little back off.
So that's a first, like just take some pressure off yourself and understand it's not perfect.
Next part is pacing helps a ton.
So things that give you actual feedback is phenomenal.
That's why I love most coaches.
Don't love coaching machines because they're like particularly the bike.
They're like, I just don't know what to do.
I'm just standing there watching them.
I always have... I walk behind... Most coaches also coach from in front of the athlete.
Terrible.
What are you going to... Like, there's a little bit of technique on a bike, but...
You know, I've been a cyclist for 15 years and I have a tiny bit of knowledge on cycling mechanics.
Most CrossFit coaches have zero.
So you coach from behind the bike so you can see the monitor.
What are they holding in round one?
What are they holding in round two?
What are they holding in round three?
Now you understand this athlete.
After four five, six biking workouts, you've seen that, While in the shorter ones they can hold like 1200 calories an hour.
In the longer ones, they're like a 1050.
I don't think I've ever seen them in the 900s and I don't think I've ever seen them in the 1400s.
One workout.
You see them come in and they're going at a 1475.
That allows you the opportunity to have a targeted conversation with them, which is like Either you're burning it down today or you're doing something that's unsustainable.
So you get to learn the athletes and learn where they are.
I coach the 930 class every day.
I have the same 25 athletes.
If you told me, gave me someone's name in my 930 class, I can tell you what pace they bike at.
Within 50 calories an hour, I know what they bike at.
And if they're above or below that, I know that about them.
So, understanding the athlete, based off of pace, And then the biggest one, the most obvious one, is its rate of perceived exertion is what do they look like they're exerting?
Some people are good fakers in both ways.
They're dying, but they're actually like a duck on water, right?
Up top, they're super calm.
Down below, they're like, let's get out of here.
Two water analogies.
We have the duck and we have the drowner.
The drowning effect is if you were to put your head underwater and I said hold your breath for as long as you can.
Almost everybody could hold it for 25 seconds.
If I had you redo that and the next time three or four seconds in, I put my palm on top of your head and pushed you down, what would happen?
You'd freak out.
You'd just freak out.
That's what's happening to some people is they get a little bit uncomfortable, think they're dying and they freak out.
In those cases, we can do things like step tests where you slowly increase the intensity over time.
Where you start off on a bike.
I love the bike because there's an inverse relationship between technique and intensity.
The bike has very little technique, which means somebody 300 pounds overweight can actually work hard on a bike.
There's not a lot of things that we can get that 300 pound athlete to work with intensity levels, because there's too much technique, even running.
Like even running for the person that's above 400 pounds is going to be hard for them to actually work the way they could on that bike.
But in step test you start off at a certain pace.
Let's say it's wattage and you start off at 100 watts.
And you have them bike there to get nice and warm for about five minutes.
And then every minute, depending on every minute after that, you increase it.
It depends on what you perceive them to be able to, where their conk out spot is.
You bring it up 25 to 50 watts. and you see where the failure point is.
This is also the way they do some VO2 max testing and other things.
But that's a really good way to understand people's perceived exertion is you bring them all the way up to the top and then You go, okay, so you conked out at 275 watts, whereas some athletes might conk out at 600 watts, right?
Then from there this getting a little bit nuanced and a little specific, but it's what you can do on a one-on-one setting is how fast do you return, from a heart rate perspective, back down to about 65 of that heart rate that you just got?
If it's really quick, yes, that's a function of how fit they are.
But what you're really looking for is the person that's freaking out, right?
This is not the measurement for the person that's got 600 watts.
This is the person that taps out at 180 watts.
And will you go, okay, you were dying.
And then within 25 seconds, they're like, okay, that was hard.
You're like, they have a lot more left.
Their heart rate was not where, physiologically, they were not freaking out.
Psychologically, they were.
So you can start to understand RPE, rate of perceived exertion, through a number of different ways.
But again, biggest thing is you don't need to nail it.
Get close.
It'll change over time as people get better at tolerating higher levels of intensity.
Got it.
And then the second question is do most people get this wrong or not even know to aim to get it right, simply because they've never gone through any one of those steps or any one of those practices that you just laid out.
It's just, we were talking, we walked into a CrossFit gym.
You just work real hard and you come back again tomorrow if you can.
Yeah, people get it wrong.
And it's the two ends of the spectrum that get it wrong.
The Globo gym, they don't work hard enough.
In most CrossFit gyms, they work too hard.
We're taught in our level one about all the ways to get people to work hard.
Like, you got to get people to work hard.
And...
I just don't think that's the... Yes, but not at the expense of mechanics or consistency.
The goal of the trainer is do everything you can to get them to come back tomorrow.
That's how this thing goes.
It would be crazy to teach someone guitar and just go like oh Nate no, you got to press on the strings harder.
You got to press on the strings.
I want you to really go like someone going, my fingers are getting sore.
It's like.
Okay, but we're going to play Steroid Heaven six more times and you got to play it this fast.
If you make a mistake, we're starting over.
Like you don't need to incentivize intensity because then they leave.
Later on that night, they start to โ fingers start to get like really sensitive.
They wake up the next morning with blisters.
And coach is like, hey, where are you?
And they're like, I can't come in.
I have blisters.
And coach is like pissed off.
It's like, no, the coach drove them to that as opposed to โ
Everything in the beginning, particularly in the beginning, while we're trying to establish the habits.
Remember, the habits are five or six days a week.
And that's not the expectation from day one.
I'm not saying that we start with five or six days a week.
That's not the expectation.
The expectation is work towards five or six days a week.
And if that means that we start with one, it means we start with one.
But if starting with one is really hard, to the point where they don't want to come back the next Monday, then we went too hard.
And then from there, can we get them to two, three, four, and so on.
But the program is we need to do the five or six days a week because the way society is built now is we need to train, not just move.
Just moving, just doing 10,000 steps is not enough.
You sat at a desk for nine hours, and the other part of the day was at the dinner table and in your car.
Like we need to go and actually really combat that.
Walking, good.
Walking, good.
For what we're talking about.
And again, just what we're talking about.
We're talking about the first one.
I'll even pare this down a little bit.
Can we get people?
This is like a good concept of are we fit?
I'm not saying high levels of fitness, but can you run under an eight minute mile?
Can you, if you're a guy, squat 225 pounds for reps? like two plates, 245s.
That's like a body weight and a half for most people, right?
Somewhere around there.
Then from there, could you also do 10 strict pull-ups?
We can get everyone to be able to do that.
If you're 400 pounds, I can get you to do that.
And once we're there, that's awesome.
We can do anything we want in life.
That's such a great place to live.
Now, if we want to pursue that farther, we create a hedge against sickness.
Can we get a six-minute mile?
Can we back squat 315?
Can we do 20 strict pull-ups?
That's not even what we're talking about.
We just want people to be living non-sick lives.
And our standard for that has been so degraded by the norms that we've lost what normal human function is.
You take any hunter-gatherer and they'd be able to do that without training.
Just from the amount of stuff they carry on their backs, the amount of movement they do and how much they climb trees and lift things off the ground, they would be able to do any of those things.
All right, the train is a rolling.
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All right, we've explored how to implement intentional intensity in our training.
Now we're going to zoom out and examine the complete picture the nine essential components that make up a comprehensive training program.
We're going to talk about the three categories of complete fitness strength conditioning, functional range of motion.
Zoom out a little bit.
What do we mean when we say complete fitness?
Why is this the next part of this conversation?
We have the framework of what we believe are the behaviors that are within your control that can help you lead to a healthier, more fulfilled life.
There are 10 factors that influence your health, five of which are outside your control, for the most part essentially more a function of luck and five that are completely with inside your control.
The five that are more function of luck are your age.
If you are 18, you're more likely to be healthy than if you are 98.
That's just the way it goes.
So you're just lucky that you're young.
Your genes?
Were your parents both Olympians, or were your parents both suffering from chronic diseases?
Your exposures to toxins, Or did you grow up in a house with radon?
Did you live next to a nuclear power plant?
Or did you grow up in the Costa Rican jungle?
Your access to high quality medical care.
Did you grow up in the Northeast, surrounded by some of the best hospitals in the world and doctors that are minutes away from you?
Or did you grow up on Antarctica where that's not really an option?
And if you get sick, like good luck.
And the last one is kinetic experiences or accidents.
Did you get into a car accident and now you're brain dead?
Like you don't have your health then.
You can influence those in some factors a little bit.
The big ones really are the ones that we can do on a day-to-day basis, which are what we talk about all the time, chasing what truly matters, the few key fundamental behaviors that determine your performance, vitality, and longevity.
And those are how you train, how you eat, sleep, think, and connect.
The reason we're having this conversation is because the first one we just talked about there is training.
And I believe it's the first domino.
I think it's the most important of all of them.
You know the Peter Attia saying is there is nothing you can do that is so unhealthy, that exercise can do for you that is healthier.
Like basically like, if you're neutral, there's nothing that you can do to swing the pendulum far enough this way, including smoking, that training doesn't push the other way even farther.
It's so vital. matters so much.
It is not what exercise was introduced to us as where there's still a legacy of it.
People only exercised in the past, like get ready for war or sport.
That's what exercise was forever.
Besides that, people just lived active lifestyles.
Then in the...
70s, there started to be this movement towards like running and jogging.
And the 80s, health clubs became a thing.
People started doing bodybuilding type stuff and running and jogging indoors on machines.
It was all for the purpose of vanity.
To look better and be skinny or have muscles.
Well, what we found out, it sounds really recent.
It's the last 20 years or so that this has become a mainstream, accepted medical term practice that you having I'm going to call it training for performance improves your health, your vitality and your longevity.
Now dot, dot dot.
If you train for complete, if your training is complete, you really move the needle.
If you train at all, you move the needle.
If you're just a marathon runner, that is so much better than being a couch potato.
If you're just a power lifter, that's so much better than being a couch potato.
If you do yoga, that's so much better than being a couch potato.
But if you do all three of these things together, that is so much better than just doing one of them.
That's the conversation about complete training.
It's actually the, we named our company off of this.
Comp train, complete training.
So when we are thinking about this, complete training.
We have to define what that is.
We'll talk about each of these categories, but they are the ones I just named.
Do you have strength, conditioning, and functional range of motion?
The strength one, muscles matter.
The bigger muscles you have, they are essentially where your body deposits glucose.
So think of this like sponges for glucose, sugar in the bloodstream.
We know how detrimental hyperinsulinemia is.
This is the precursor to chronic disease.
Chronic disease is the thing that kills 7 out of 10 Americans.
Full stop.
Hyperinsulinemia is the precursor to chronic disease.
Chronic disease is the thing that kills seven out of 10 Americans.
What is chronic disease?
The biggest one is cardiovascular disease.
The second one is cancer.
The third one is neurodegeneration.
The last one is diabetes, type two diabetes.
Type one is not a chronic disease.
What is heart disease?
Heart disease is heart failure, heart attack atherosclerosis stroke cancer, all the different forms of cancer neurodegeneration Parkinson's Alzheimer's, dementia and then type two diabetes.
Those are preventable.
I'm going to say that again.
Those are preventable with taking care of the five factors.
The number one factor most important, training.
And by the way, I'm not saying exercise.
When we say complete training, that's different than exercise.
People say, oh, get your 10,000 steps.
Go do a spin class.
Make sure you're active.
Get in the garden.
With today's sedentary lifestyle in America which, by the way, I went to Europe two weeks ago and gave portions of this talk there and it didn't land at all.
They don't have chronic disease like we do.
They're like, all this stuff you're talking about, that's not landing at all.
So this is an hour thing.
It's one of the few things we haven't exported out to the world yet.
We are, it's getting there and it will be, which it's not fully landed yet.
Yeah.
But this is like we're still at this like Y level.
Well, like how do we strength?
Remember strength, the more muscle strength takes muscles, take care of your muscles.
The muscles you have, they deposit glucose.
If you deposit glucose into muscles, your chances of hyperinsulinemia go down drastically.
Really, really good.
What else does strength do for you?
Well, strength increases your bone mineral density.
If you go do a health 30 assessment, they're going to test that because they know how important it is.
I'm probably going to get the stats a little bit wrong on this, but the spirit of it is more important than the letter.
So the stats are something along the lines of if you fall and break your hip after the age of 65, your all-cause mortality, meaning the chance of being dead in one year, in 12 months, go up 30.
So we got to do some things to prevent that.
First thing we want to do is be able to prevent the fall.
That takes strength.
The next thing we want to be able to do is, if we fall, have the bones strong.
If they don't crack, they're not brittle.
How do we do that?
We were told for a long time it was through impact training, running, jumping.
That does it.
Not nearly as well as training for absolute strength.
I had this conversation with my 930 class last week.
We finished the workout and there's about 25 of them sitting there.
I'm like, I want to emphasize the importance of strength training to you guys.
I would like to get rid of barbells.
I wish that we didn't train with barbells.
If we didn't train with barbells, I know we would add 150 members in the next six weeks.
Barbells are scary.
I also know that barbells are the most efficacious way to work on absolute strength.
And absolute strength is the most important thing for strength as whole muscles and particularly bone mineral density.
As the muscles contract.
I have a pen so people are listening, but as muscles contract, the muscles are in the middle of the pen, ligaments and tendons are on the ends.
As it shortens, it essentially tries to break the pen.
It tries to bend it in half because it's pulling on the ends towards itself.
The bones resist against that tension on the ends.
The resistance of those two ends pulling each other is what creates stronger bones.
How do you create the most mechanical tension?
Through a barbell lift.
What lifts?
The slow lifts.
Dead, squat, and press.
A complete training program must include those three things.
It has to include working towards absolute strength with a barbell in those three things.
So we have strength and now we have our first subcategory of strength.
The second one is, if we were to try to not fall, we have to be kind of quick and explosive and powerful.
Also, there's not a good biomarker for this yet.
Strength is actually a biomarker, like they test it.
They do a force play production or grip strength. to assess how strong you are.
The reason they do those two is because it's where the science is now for the testing.
What we shouldn't do is take the training towards the testing though.
That's a mistake.
What we should do is take the testing towards the actual application to real life.
But the next thing we want to focus on after absolute strength is relative power.
Relative means relative to your own body weight.
So what that means is, can you quickly and explosively move your body from point A to point B?
Short distance, it's like vertical jump, broad jump.
How high can you jump on a box?
That matters a lot.
A complete training program requires you to be able to move explosively.
I wish that wasn't the case because it's probably my weakest thing.
Of all the categories that we're about to talk about, it's probably my worst.
I have like a three-inch vertical jump and it's never been very good.
It's something that I should work on and get better.
The next one after that is muscular endurance.
So we say muscular endurance, it's the ability for muscles to resist fatigue.
This usually happens over very high rep schemes.
So think about surfers paddle boarding, right?
Like that.
It's like your shoulders, nothing's heavy, but your shoulders can get so fatigued.
Think of it as banded curls, 100 rep banded curls.
It's not how strong are you.
A lot of people can lift that once, but you want that muscles to be able to keep going and going and going.
Those three things are what make up the strength category.
We have absolute strength, relative power, relative to your own body weight and muscular endurance.
If we have those three things, we can say that we are doing really well in the strength category.
So not just how much can you lift?
That's a big one.
It's a really big one, right?
But how much can you lift is going to have carry over a little bit to that relative power one.
You know, kind of a neat stat is the average Olympic lifter at the Olympics has a higher vertical jump than the average basketball player at the Olympics.
That's crazy.
So like there's carry over there.
And similar, if you are, there's some carry over to muscular endurance as well.
Versus a couch potato.
Somebody that can bench press 300 pounds is probably going to be able to bench press a barbell, an empty barbell a hundred times a little more effectively than the couch potato would.
But it's really that intersection, that totality of the three that we're really looking for.
And the big take home is complete training requires strength.
You cannot have a complete training program without it.
I wish we could get rid of the barbells, but I can't.
I can't get rid of them because I'm afraid of what the conversations I'm going to be having with my members in a decade.
And the reason this conversation came up with my members is because a newer member and a member's wife in the same week came up to me saying they got diagnosed with osteoporosis.
And I was like, this is why I don't want to have my members coming up and saying that to me.
You need to be training for maximal strength.
We've got strength.
Now we're doing the other end of it, conditioning.
Okay.
So conditioning, we talked about this.
So the first, like why, right?
So people just want to get strong.
I get it.
Bigger muscles, look good on the beach, be able to be harder to kill and more useful in general.
Right.
But where does conditioning fit into this?
And.
Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you.
That's just like, it's a foregone conclusion.
Well, you smoking versus non-smoking improves health outcomes by 41%.
Journal of American Medical Association did a study over a 24-year period with over 120,000 people.
And that was the outcome, 41%.
Not having diabetes improves health outcomes by 20%.
Those are huge numbers.
Huge, huge numbers.
You.
Having a low versus an elite level VO2 max changes your health outcomes not by 20, not by 41, but by 410.
Conditioning matters.
And you go, well, wait a minute.
Okay, like I get it.
Like you take somebody that's horribly out of shape versus like an elite level athlete.
That sort of makes sense.
But you moving just one category, you moving from average to above average.
That means essentially the same equivalent of something in the neighborhood of you going from a seven minute mile to a 630 mile.
That has the same health outcomes.
It is a 41% increase.
The same as not smoking.
How in the world are we not having these conversations?
There's not a person over the age of six in America that doesn't understand that smoking is not good for you.
And if you smoke, you are taking your life in your own hands.
You're not doing it blindly.
You know what you're doing.
You know what you're doing.
How many people know that if you improve your mile time, you're going to improve your health outcomes?
The same as quitting smoking.
That's so powerful.
That's so important.
That needs to be a part of the conversation.
Now, in terms of conditioning, it's not just about VO2max.
That's where the science and the research is, because it's a very easy thing to measure.
I did it last week.
You go to a performance lab, They put essentially a Vento mask on you.
You go on a treadmill.
They start at 0% incline at a set rate based off of basically your perceived 10K pace.
And then every minute they increase the incline and you go until failure.
Of the incline until you can't, or does the speed increase?
No, the speed stays the same.
You just go up and up and up.
Once it gets to the top, it's survival.
How long can you go there?
Got it.
Okay.
Sounds fun.
What's cool is I don't do a whole heck of a lot of running.
I just don't.
I run Sunday run day and I run once or twice in conditioning pieces at the gym.
My VO2 max was not on the chart.
It was so high.
It was a 57 and the chart went up to a 51 or 52 for my age group.
So there's these bars and there's a blue dot above it.
So how is that the case?
Well, training for VO2max doesn't have to be done through VO2max training.
Similar to that is all of the testing is done on a cycle or a treadmill.
That doesn't mean a cycle or a treadmill is necessarily the best way to train for it.
The more muscles you use, the more demand on the VO2.
So if we know what we know, how can we increase the demand on the muscles?
Well, instead of just doing one thing like running, what if you combine that with something else like burpees?
Well, the other thing that you can do is increase it through load.
The more muscles, the more demand.
And we did that in a interval fashion, four on, four off, four rounds.
That's the kind of standard VO2max protocol.
That would be a bigger demand on the oxygen uptake than simply running.
It's a better, more complete fitness training protocol.
But it's not also just about VO2.
It's not just four on, four off.
You can train VO2 other ways.
And again, remember, we don't want to go just to where the research is.
The research will get better and show that this happens in other areas as well.
What we really want to do is make sure our training program encompasses all aspects of conditioning, as I just talked about mixed modal, not just on a treadmill or a bike.
That's insane.
You want to be able to do it with your body weight, be able to do it with traditional cardio things and also do it against resistance and load.
We also want to do it through different time domains.
It's about the work capacity you're able to do, not just how good are you at this six to 14 minute VO2 max test.
But can you do this with zone two, like long?
Do you have endurance?
Can you go for hours if we asked you to?
Can you do this training both, this is the next category, with lactic threshold and VO2 max.
Those are kind of brothers and sisters in the same family.
They're both at moderate to high intensity, but you kind of like tweak things a little bit to get different outcomes.
And the third one is can you do it with?
Anaerobic capacity means really hard, really high unsustainable, and you're really uncomfortable afterwards.
So what does that actually look like?
Zone two, as we said, is long, and on a rate of perceived exertion, it's like a two to a four.
So zones is different than rate of perceived exertion.
Zones has to do with your heart rate.
It's zone two.
And at RPE, rate of perceived exertion, on a scale of one to 10, one would be walking briskly.
That's recovery.
That's not what we're talking about.
It's basically how hard can you work before you can't hold a conversation anymore.
That's zone two.
Once, maybe twice a week is enough to do that.
We talked about that in the first one that we talked about.
So a little of this is recapping the first one, or actually sorry, the second one, because this was intentional intensities.
LT and VO2.
Again, this is something that we want to do probably again, two or three times a week.
And maybe once a week we hit the anaerobic capacity thing.
They'll work really hard stuff.
Most CrossFitters are doing anaerobic capacity every time they do it.
So they're just burning themselves up.
We want to build without burning out.
This is the intentional levels of intensity.
So CrossFit's amazing.
It's the best training for fitness protocol.
That's probably revolutionized fitness, but it can be misused.
It's so powerful that it can not be beneficial if not done correctly.
And also we want complete training, right?
Complete.
What is complete?
Zone two all the way up through anaerobic.
Not just anaerobic capacity, anaerobic capacity, anaerobic capacity, anaerobic capacity.
We want the totality of it.
If there's one thing to shoot for right now, the research would say VO2.
But like, again, this is just where the research is.
It's kind of like saying, what's the number one biomarker?
And someone saying like body fat.
Okay.
But like there's just yeah it's, but we're not going to optimize body fat and not take consideration of everything else.
It's like, what are we doing to get to the body fat?
And what comes along with that?
It's not just the body fat percentage by itself, because you could take Ozempic to get to a certain body fat.
That's not going to help everything else.
Taking Ozempic doesn't solve for the mitochondria and the dysfunction that's in there.
It doesn't solve for the gut microbiome dysregulation.
It doesn't solve for all the other things that are... freaking messed up in the body.
You're not even solving for the body composition.
You're solving for weight loss.
Body composition is actually getting worse in many cases, meaning that you're burning up muscle faster than you're burning up fat.
So A little diatribe, a little side tangent in there thrown in just to get my shot at big pharma.
Okay, so that's conditioning.
Long and slow, lactic, or VO2 max, and anaerobic.
We want to make sure that our program is allowing us to hit all three of those.
The third and the last is functional range of motion.
So the why behind that is life requires it.
You don't go to the nursing home because you're sick.
You go to the hospital if you're sick.
You go to the nursing home when you lose the ability to live your life on your own.
Meaning if you fall down, you can't get yourself back up.
The ability to get yourself back up usually has more to do with functional range of motion than anything else.
Meaning that you cannot...
It's possible to get yourself up off the ground without passing through a below parallel squat, but you look like a freak.
It's basically like this weird walk on your hands, like wall walk back up.
The normal way every human being would get up is they would get up off the ground passing through a full squat.
You need that to live your life.
Even the ability to put on a shirt and take off a shirt, to grab something off the top shelf, to get up and off the toilet requires range of motion.
So it matters.
Kelly Starrett has a very cool sit to stand test, which is correlated to longevity.
Sit down Indian style.
I don't know if you can say that.
Native American style, crisscross applesauce, whatever it is.
Yep, save for that last one.
And can you stand up without using your hands and without losing your balance?
Yep.
If that's the case, congratulations.
You probably have some pretty damn good lower body mobility.
There's equally as powerful ones for the upper body.
I think the best one is just lie down on the ground with your back.
The best is like in the corner where the wall meets the floor.
Your back on the floor and your legs up the wall.
Are you visualizing that?
Yep.
Okay, that just basically makes it impossible for you to steal from your lower back.
It's like stealing range of motion.
From there, make fist, put your thumbs together, And then how with straight elbows, how close can you get your fist to the ground?
If you can't pass your head, you don't pass.
If you're somewhere between your head and the floor, that's passing.
If you're on the floor, you get an A, that type of thing.
And those really are the two biggest primary range of motion that we need.
Can you squat, ass to grass, ass to ankles, full range of motion?
And can you get access to the full range of motion above your shoulder?
There's other ones, right?
Dorsiflexion, internal external hip rotation, internal external shoulder, trunk and neck mobility.
But those are the real ones that we actually need to own.
How do we do that?
Three buckets.
We do it through flexibility, mobility, and stability.
What the heck are those?
Flexibility is the one we're most comfortable with, common with.
It's the most understood.
It's a length that a muscle can stretch.
And how do you improve it?
Through static stretching, meaning holding a stretch for upwards of one two, maybe even three minutes.
There are some really good yogas that do that, right?
If it's long stretching.
Mobility is essentially your ability to own that through, it's active.
So it's not just, can you get to that end range of position? but can you get there and own it?
Can you not just squat to the bottom, but can you squat to the bottom and have good mechanics and muscles turned on?
It's a much more active versus a passive.
Flexibility is a lot of times like if it's gravity or somebody else stretching you.
This is you getting yourself into these active end ranges of motion and controlling them.
That's mobility.
And then stability is can you do that through motion and under load?
So kind of walking through that would be flexibility.
Would be something like the couch stretch right.
Where you are stretching out your hip flexor.
The mobility would be something more like a walking lunge twist, right?
And then the stability would be more like a Bulgarian split squat.
We're actually bringing it through range of motion with load, owning it and everything else.
A complete training program requires all three of those things.
What is the best one that kind of assesses it all?
If I kind of said, like there's the one in the strength, it's probably that.
How strong are you with a barbell through those three lifts?
In terms of the conditioning, it's probably that VO2 max.
In terms of this one, it's probably like what does your overhead squat look like?
Ass to ankles, that overhead position controlling through the midline stability, stability with a lot of proprioception and coordination to be able to get yourself actively down into that active end range of motion.
When you combine those nine different components, when you combine absolute strength, relative power, muscular endurance, you have strength.
When you combine zone two, VO2 and lactic, and anaerobic capacity, you have conditioning.
When you combine flexibility and mobility and stability, you have flexibility.
When you have those three things together, you have a complete training program.
There are a lot of ways people are trying to get fit out there.
But I think what they really want is complete fitness.
And this is where I kind of fell into this trap.
I wanted to be the fittest guy I knew.
And this was in 2002, 2003.
So I was like the fittest thing that I know that I can do is triathlons, because it's three different sports in one.
And this was my three.
But little did I know, I was actually doing one of those nine.
Right?
I was just doing endurance because I was doing Ironman.
That's the hardest.
So, Ken, how good are you at going 10 plus hours?
Like, you know, if you're doing eight hours, you win world championships.
If you're doing nine hours, you qualify for worlds.
I was at 10.
You have to finish under 17, 17 hours of the cap.
That's at midnight.
So I was like, I'm just going to try and qualify for worlds.
That's the hardest.
That's the fittest thing you can do.
I didn't know what I was looking for until it like smacked me in the face.
And that's when CrossFit came along.
I was like, Oh, this is a much better approach.
Wow.
This is 10 components of fitness.
Well, I think that we can simplify that a little bit.
And also it's not just high intensity, high intensity.
It's also not just cycling barbells to cycle barbells.
It's not just walking on your hands and flipping around and doing somersaults on rings.
Those things are super cool and I dedicated a big part of my adult life to those.
But in terms of a complete, what is the essential?
What I'm saying is, if you did not have one of these things, there'd be a missing component to your fitness.
They are all the nine essential components to what you have.
Because when you combine a couple of them, When you combine absolute strength, how much?
What's the maximal external load that you can lift with relative power?
You get power.
You get power cleans.
You get that one.
That's a crossover between those two.
And yet when you combine zone two with anaerobic capacity, you get metabolic flexibility.
The adaptability, a flip between burning carbs and fat.
Like there's so much little carryover between all of these different categories.
Now you don't necessarily need to train those ones, because the training the two will give you that capacity.
This is the complete aspect to it.
And again, it's what our company is.
It's complete training.
So it's obviously I feel very passionately about it.
And I just wish that you know when people go and they try to, They're trying to get fit, but people are doing it by trying to run marathons and they think they're doing it.
And they're not, right?
They're working really hard.
This goes back to like the conversation we had maybe a month ago or so, where we did like the teardrop conversation.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
They're trying really hard.
They're making sacrifices in the gym or in they're making sacrifices in the kitchen.
They're training and eating.
Yet they are not getting what they could be getting out of a training program.
Because if, without one of these things, you're not going to have the health, the vitality and longevity.
Said another way, you need performance across these three categories.
And if you have that, then you reap the benefits.
Remember, being strong is better than the couch potato.
Being a marathon runner is better than a couch potato.
Being a dedicated yogi is better than a couch potato.
But dedicating yourself to complete fitness is equally as better as dedicating yourself to any one of those endeavors.
I think maybe just the one thing, or the one question or the one thing to tag on is just something we've talked about before, which is the purpose of training, the purpose of health, the purpose of all the things you just laid out is not in and of themselves the goal but, as you're alluding to, it's the metabolic flexibility, it's the ability to get up off the ground if you fall down.
All of those other things.
So posed as a question is, I think is part of where we've gone wrong over the years has been we've made the training, the point of the training, and not zooming out like you've just done and saying we don't train for this, we train for what this allows for, what this creates in terms of what we are capable of doing, what we are able to continue to do throughout the lifespan.
We should not be training to get better at the gym.
We should be getting training so we can earn the freedom to live the life as we choose.
It's a freedom to choose.
So when you go outside the gym, you can do what you want to do.
If you want to spend the extra time getting good at the gym, that's not wrong.
You can do that.
If you want to learn how to walk on your hands, you can do that.
I spent...
15 years teaching people how to do that.
It's cool, it's awesome, but it's also not essential.
This is the complete essential program.
So yes, where we have gone wrong is, where we didn't go wrong is, Training, training, not exercise.
Exercise is movement.
Movement for the sake of movement.
Training is exercise with a specific goal in mind.
You can train for a marathon.
You can train for a powerlifting competition.
You can train to try to do the splits when you train for this holistic approach.
That's what's gonna move the needle for you the most.
And said what we said in an earlier episode, how do you go about doing this?
There are those three circles.
There is strength, cardio, and functional range of motion.
Which of those is the smallest circle for you right now?
Focus on that.
Focus on that until it is no longer the smallest.
Once you have no longer have a limitation, then you train it concurrently.
You try to bring all of them up together.
So if you are, you kind of like picture like the profiles of these people, right?
If you're really strong but you have no wind, you have no flexibility, you're a power lifter, right?
If you have tons of conditioning, particularly zone two, but you have none of the other two, you're a marathon runner.
You have tons of flexibility, but no strength, no cardio, you're a yogi.
What if you combine some of those?
If you have tons of conditioning and you have tons of strength, you're a hybrid athlete, right?
If you have strength and functional range of motion, you're one of those primal guys, right?
You're like, what do they call those?
