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Hello and welcome back to Chasing Excellence.
Hello and how have you been? Doing great.
Thanks, Patrick. It is good to see you.
We are going to go back to the gym. Are you ready?
Let's go. We haven't done this for a little bit, but I'm excited to get back to the gym, talk about training.
We did do a whole series of conversations.
Goodness, I'm going to say it was last year, but I feel like it couldn't possibly have been last year, but I think...
I think it might have been last year. With my weird relationship with time.
Yeah, I know, right? This could have been 10 days ago or 10 years ago.
But we're going to talk about training. We're going to talk about fitness.
We're going to talk about... venture into the Comtrain side of the building over there.
But first, I came across an article and I thought it was a good entry point into our conversation today.
This is an article from He's a writer named Derek Thompson.
He's got a sub stack. He's a well-known writer, has written books, and he's a journalist.
And he wrote an article recently about how we are in America, we are in a fitness boom. which I thought was really interesting.
So I'm gonna read a little bit from the article. and use that as a way to get into this conversation about training versus exercising.
And that's really the thing we're going to try to get to. here in this conversation.
But again, first from Derek's article. He points out there's record high participation rates across all demographics as it relates to exercise, and he writes this, in the last two decades, the share of American adults who say they exercise or play sports on any given day has increased by about 20% year over year,
The American Time Use Survey data can jitter up and down, but what's clear is that in the last four years, Americans have been exercising at record high levels.
And he writes this, the share of Americans who say they don't regularly work out or play sports, which the Sports and Fitness Industry Association calls the quote unquote inactivity rate, has fallen by more than one fifth since 2019.
But there's a bit of a quality problem hiding in the numbers, and this is what Derek points out, he writes, As sweaty group exercise classes decline, low impact activities like yoga and Pilates are surging in popularity to replace them. fitness activity saw a larger increase in participation between 2019 and 2024 than Pilates, yoga and barre classes were close behind among the fastest growing activities.
Meanwhile, group cycling, cardio kickboxing, boot camps, and cross-training workouts like CrossFit got walloped by the pandemic and they haven't bounced back.
In general, Americans seem to have traded sweaty group classes for gentler core work.
Before I get into, or before we get into defining training versus exercising.
Any hot takes on just that little bit I read from Derek's article anything i mean obviously hot take is anything like Twenty percent up.
I mean, we're just going to take that like whether we want to. dissect or reframe or anything else.
I read the article as well. I really like his position where he's like, no one's talking about this.
And I think it's really terrific. It's fantastic.
We're seeing the highest exercise levels.
It's up 20% in the last four years, but it's up the highest.
It's basically... ever been, which is awesome.
We're in the midst of a exercise boom, as he said.
No one is talking about it, but Power to the people, it's great.
And yes, we can talk about exercise, versus training and bar classes versus Pilates versus weightlifting and running.
But the while the shape of the pie has changed the slices are being divvied up differently the pie's gotten bigger yep And that's really that's priority number one with a country that is so profoundly sick.
We need more people moving. So that's the first takeaway is excitement and positivity.
Actual good news. Actual, that's not going to get anywhere.
And I was right, I just found it. We put out an episode called Get Ridiculously Fit, The Complete Blueprint.
We put that out of December 6th of last year, and that was actually a culmination of I think four or five conversations that we had.
So that's really the deepest dive we've done on training.
So if you folks. Like this episode, definitely go back and listen to that one because it's going to provide a whole bunch more context. to what we're talking about.
Let's talk about this distinction though between training versus exercising.
And actually you just said a word, moving. that maybe we even want to throw in there.
But here's a first draft of definitions between the two and then kind of correct me and we'll go from there.
Exercising is the random movement for movement's sake. and training is purposeful development with measurement and progression.
Does that sound about right in terms of the decision?
That's pretty damn close, yeah. Okay. Okay, so we can think of this on, we love spectrums.
We love continuums. Continuums. Right. So the lowest level of this continuum is being sedentary.
You're just not, you're sitting on the couch or at the desk, right?
Movement is better than being sedentary.
I think you're going to have a really hard time finding anyone that's going to argue that in terms of what we're looking for for health outcomes.
Movement is getting a walking desk. It's, you know, it's the 10,000 steps.
It's gardening. It's dancing. It's... just getting your body moving.
That is way better than being sedentary.
Better than movement is exercise. Exercise is going for a jog.
It's going to the gym. It's doing spin. It's yoga.
It's Pilates. It's those that's just that's exercising.
That's way better than moving. What's better than exercise is training.
Training is... physical activity for a desired outcome.
It's can you do 20 pull ups? It's can you back squat 300 pounds?
It's can you run a mile in under eight minutes.
It's can you finish a marathon? You have to train. to be able to do those things.
They don't just come from lots of exercise.
You have to train for that desired outcome specifically for that endeavor.
There's a level above that which is well-rounded training.
If you can complete a marathon and also back squat 300 pounds and do 20 pull-ups, That is better than doing any one of those things individually by itself.
Well-rounded training involves strength, conditioning and mobility.
That's what we're actually looking for when we think about this sort of spectrum. of inputs to outputs, the greatest output we're looking for is health, longevity, capacity.
We're looking for pain free, full range of movement.
What we're looking for is actually fitness.
Fitness is the balanced, multidimensional... transferable, I stumbled that word for a while for some reason. transferable, meaning you can take it and do it with other things capacity.
So not just can you do one thing, but can you do that one thing outside the gym? in something that's maybe closely related, maybe not.
And what we're really trying to do is to fill in all the gaps so you are ready for any challenge, any adversity, any opportunity that presents itself in real life or athletics.
Mm hmm. Cool. I want to get into more of that. around that well-rounded training around strength, conditioning, mobility before we do.
I love your, again, I'm gonna keep using the word hot take, even though you don't give hot takes.
There was one thing in Derek Thompson's article that I thought was really interesting.
And it was he has a graph showing the change between what people are doing when they're exercising, when they're working out, when they're doing fill in the blanks.
And it's really interesting. In 2019, it looked like somewhere shy of 14 million people were doing CrossFit basically, CrossFit-like workouts.
And in 2019, it was about, let's call it, there's not specific numbers, I'm just looking at the graphs, somewhere shy of 10 million people doing Pilates and around the same number doing group cycling.
So those were the three that were tracked.
In 2024, group cycling has dropped a little bit, but what's really interesting is that Pilates is And CrossFit is basically flipped.
So now Pilates looks like just shy of 14 million.
It's called 12 to 13 million people. people say that they're doing Pilates and CrossFit is about 9, 10, somewhere in that range, 9, 10 million people.
Does that surprise you? Because that kind of surprised me that there was that sort of trade-off between 2019 and 2024 in terms of what people were doing. mean you're in the world so like do you yeah did that surprise you or did that kind of track with it's surprising.
I didn't realize the rise of I think we've all seen sort of the fall, you know. people that were doing CrossFit in the heyday. have found other ways.
I don't think they're switching from CrossFit.
I don't think this is the story. I don't think they're switching from CrossFit to Pilates.
I agree with that. Yeah. I think that there's going from CrossFit to they're doing some strength training and they're going for runs and they're doing more of like a hybrid model i think that's a normal progression that a lot of people have found themselves in is stepping away from more of that crazy high intensity to something that's a little bit more manageable.
Derek uses the word gentler, which I think is kind of interesting.
I've never done Pilates before. Again, I don't think it's that, but certainly the masses, and there's growth, right? meaning that more people are entering into this.
So it's not like here's the same pie, How are we divvying up the pie?
The pie has gotten bigger and more people are coming into the Pilates and yoga.
Slice then the other one so I I I was surprised at how big the changes have been. but also not when you sort of like zoom out a little bit and go, If we're introducing new people into this, which we are, we've grown 20%, which is really, you know, 60 million to 80 million.
What's the likelihood? Where do we think that they're going to enter into?
Yep. Right. And it's going to be into a gentler environment.
Mm-hmm. So that part doesn't really surprise me.
Right. And is part of the argument that you're making when we talk about training versus exercising that there's something.
great that people are doing something, right?
Like any movement from sedentary to training, positive.
And I think both you and I both agree on that.
But as part of the argument you're making when we make this distinction between moving, exercising and training, that there's something that we're missing in that exercise phase or that exercise bucket.
And we want to move ourselves towards training or is what I'm hearing you saying.
Like, I don't care what people are doing.
I'm just happy that they're doing something.
Yes. And both. Yes. Yeah. Both. Right. It's absolutely like if we're going to take.
We took 20 people that were not exercising before and now they're exercising.
It's hard to spin that in a way that's not net positive. if it means that 4% have dropped out of the training into the move, like I would take that said, still, it's a net positive like that.
We're going to take that as wins. If this is a gateway, to something, we're also gonna take that.
Like getting someone off the couch to doing 10,000 steps a day, is awesome.
That's fundamentally life-changing. Now, do we want them just to stay at those 10,000 steps? which is just kind of like baseline movement and not do anything else.
No, we want to get them exercising as well. if someone's exercising and they've been exercising for three or four years, we could get more return out of their investment.
They're doing the hard things, right? They're going, they're, They're buying the shoes, they're buying the gym membership, they're going to the club, getting sweaty and showering afterwards.
They're carving out three, four, five hours out of their week to make this thing happen. the thing we want to do is like they could they could if they're psychologically ready for it, they could progress if they're not psychologically ready for it then This is way better than where we were.
As he said in the article, he titled it, we're in the midst of a fitness boom.
So I don't want to you don't want to like push so hard that you actually push them out of the boat.
It's like, just keep them in the boat. Goal number one always is get them to come back tomorrow.
Like because it's just so much better for them to be having this level of activity versus not.
Yep. Maybe it might be worth talking briefly about the sickness, wellness, fitness continuum. as it relates to this idea of exercise versus training in the sense that While most people think exercising is the goal,
The argument, at least implicit in the sickness, wellness, fitness continuum, and something we've talked about before, is...
We want to push ourselves toward the fitness end of that continuum. if for no other reason than as a hedge against let's call it catastrophe or accident or life getting in the way.
So can you talk about that a little bit as to why it would make sense, at least theoretically for somebody who is maybe saying, I'm happily exercising.
I go to yoga three days a week. I do some Pilates.
I make sure I walk 10,000 steps a day. why do I need to do more than that?
Why do I need to consider moving myself into this kind of training phase and then into even the step beyond that, which is kind of like. well-rounded training.
Yeah. So Greg Glassman, the founder of CrossFit, created this framework, this continuum that which is so elegant and powerful in its simplicity.
It is the sickness, wellness, fitness continuum.
If you think of it as sort of that bell-shaped curve on the far left side, you have sickness.
In the middle, you have wellness. In the far right side, you have fitness.
As you said, fitness is a hedge against sickness. the farther you are on that continuum to the right, the more it's going to take to really kind of throw your life out of whack.
We saw this during COVID. people that had high levels of fitness that got COVID, got sick for a few days or a few weeks.
People that were already sick that got it got rocked and a lot of people have died.
But they were usually the people that were already experiencing one or more issues.
They were diabetic. They were obese. They were other health issues going on.
The contention here is that these are all measures of the same thing. and sick, well, and fit can be mapped on the normal biomarkers that you get when you go to the doctor in terms of, your resting heart rate, your fasting glucose, your triglycerides, your blood pressure, your body fat percentage, all of these things can be mapped and take any sort of like blood panel, you can map them.
If you are in the norm, you're well. If you are below you're sick and if you're above your fit.
Example, if your resting heart rate is 65, you're well, like nothing to really talk about.
If it is 95 or 100, you have some issues.
There's some things going on. Similarly, if it's 40 or below, you're fit.
Like your heart is so strong It only needs to beat once every two seconds to do its job.
That's a really strong heart. Same thing with body fat.
If you're 35% body fat, you're sick. You can have other issues going on in your life.
If you're 20%, probably not a lot to talk about.
If you're 12%, like... You're fit. You're going to have, there's a lot that has to happen before you become obese.
Yes. So it's like this is a hedge against fitness.
The cool part about this is you can map performance metrics on this. if you don't have the physical capacity to complete a mile in 15 minutes, you're going to have other issues in your life.
By the way, like a brisk walk is a 20 minute.
It just means you can't like briskly, like you can't fast walk. a mile.
There's going to be some major issues. If you need a mile in 10 minutes, not a lot to talk about.
If you need a mile in six minutes, you're probably going to have some benefits that other people are not going to have in terms of longevity, health span, not just lifespan, but what your life's going to look like when you're 80 because you're going to have the aerobic power to be able to do things that other people wouldn't a.k.a.
Walk up flights of stairs, carry groceries, travel independently. so we can do is we can map all of these things on this sick well fit continuum So what that then means is we need a wide breadth of fitness because it's not any one indicator that dictates fitness.
And my contention is fitness is balanced You just mentioned strength, conditioning, and mobility across three different big kind of concentric circles.
How big is your strength circle? How big is your conditioning circle, aerobic conditioning?
And how big is your mobility? If you have real limitations in any one of those, you're gonna have real limitations in your life.
You're going to be edging closer towards that sick department.
It's balanced across them. It's multidimensional.
And as I said earlier, it's transferable.
It's not just about what happens in the gym.
It's we need to be able to get you out. So I'm not interested in like... can you do a pirouette on your handstand?
Like that's just a, a gym trick. Can you double under crossovers?
Like that's a gym trick. So what I'm looking for is. can what you perform on in those three major areas transferred to life.
Like that's what the big thing is. hike mountains, swim, run, lift, jump, throw, anything that would be required on the job site or in life.
What we can, if we do that, what we end up being able to do is sort of... mapping what makes up each of these circles.
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Excellent. If you took that strength component, that strength circle, three concentric circles, conditioning, and mobility.
There's a lot that can go into strength.
But the idea is if you really work on three, there will be blends between them that kind of cover it.
Meaning you don't need to work on every single... There's, just to put some words to it, there's relative strength.
There's speed strength. There's strength speed.
There's... muscular endurance. There's absolute strength.
There's a lot of things that go into strength.
The take home is if you work on three, those three being explosive power, Think. really quick, upwards of less than a second to a second, maybe two.
Think about like broad jump, vertical jump, max height box jump. power clean, medicine ball throw.
Those are like very explosive, very fast.
If you have capacity there, and capacity in absolute strength.
Absolute strength is the ability to move maximal external loads.
So it is things like your one, two, or three, even four rep, maybe up towards five. five rep maxes of the major movement patterns through full ranges of motion.
This is things like squat, deadlift, and press.
Can you squat pattern? Hip hinge and pull pattern and press.
Squat dead and bench press. What is your capacity to do those?
The transferability of those to other areas is enormous.
And then the last one there is muscular endurance. which is not just the ability to do a rep two or three, but to be able to do them over and over again.
The high end of that spectrum is things in the like the 20 and 30, sorry, the low end of that spectrum is in the 20 or 30s.
And the high end is in the hundreds. potentially even the thousands.
So the, The low end might be something like in training environment when you're doing drop sets or accessory work, We're doing like three sets of 15 to 20 reps.
But the higher might be like sets of 30 to 50 to 100, much like even the west side guys do. the strongest athletes that roam the earth, and they'll do accessory work with 100-band pull-aparts. but it could open the hundreds and hundreds, like 200 pushups for time.
We're going to the thousands of like kayaking. you don't sort of fatigue, you don't stop and slow down in kayaking because you're not explosive, not because you're not strong and not because you've lost the cardiovascular component, but because your shoulders just start to burn and give out.
That's muscular endurance. So inside of that bucket, not only are we talking about the bucket, but we're also talking about this in terms of time domains. explosive power lasts under a second maybe a second or two really not much more than that We have absolute strength, which lasts a couple seconds to three, maybe up to 10 to 15 seconds.
And then we have that muscular endurance, which could be anywhere from that 30 seconds up to several minutes. of work.
If you have that capacity well rounded across those, and by the way, the strongest guys in the world probably aren't going to be the best kayakers So because you have one doesn't mean you have the other.
And kayakers might not be the most explosive athletes either.
It is, while they can be closely related, if you have a Good explosive power.
You probably are also strong, right? That certainly matches up. but it doesn't necessarily mean capacity in the other.
An excellent example of this is one of my good friends, Marcus.
We do bench press. He will out bench press me on a max bench press.
He'll do 275 and I'll do 245. Then we drop to 135 and I'll do 35 reps and he'll do 19.
They are different. So that's that strength component.
Then we move on to the aerobic conditioning.
And in this area, I shouldn't say it's not just aerobic, it's conditioning across anything.
The idea here is it's also made up of three.
It's not just three. There's a multiple of them and there's lots of gray in between. crossover and you're never just in one of these areas.
They kind of are like more like seasons than like gears in a car.
Right. What we're trying to build here is your VO2max, which lasts on the really high end of capacity in sort of that... four, five, six minute on the low end of that capacity in the 12, 13, 14 minute. with sort of peaking the most, like the best kind of test of this is sort of that 10, 11, 12 minute, 9 to 12 minute range.
Really high level. capacity of VO2 max.
Maximum ability for muscles to use oxygen.
And by the way, it's really important to understand this.
If you were to go get this tested, they would most likely do this on a... on a treadmill or a stationary bike.
That doesn't mean that those are the best developers of VO2max. the more muscles you use in the body, and the more demand those muscles are put under, the higher potential VO2 max demand.
Meaning if you were to introduce some external loads, do thrusters, do pull-ups, do burpees.
It's just very hard to test that when you have a... a mask on with a tube going down, so they choose to do this in the most controlled environment, which is you're not moving anywhere, treadmill or bike.
But don't get that confused with the only way to train these things is bike or run. it's actually equally, if not more beneficial to use more muscles under load, which is these other aspects of training.
Remember, we want to be multidimensional.
Moving kind of down the spectrum, which by the way, we're doing this in time and intensity.
Explosive power is the shortest time and the most intensity.
Highest amount of power output, wattage, whatever you might want to call that.
Next down is absolute strength. We've extended the time but lowered the power a little bit.
From there, it's muscular endurance. Again, lower the time but lower the power output.
Then from there, it's VO2 max. Extended the time, lowered the power output.
Then the next place from there is lactic threshold.
20, 40 minutes of work, upwards of 60 on the high end, 50 minutes on the low end. kind of that sweet-sot being that 20, 30, 40 minute range. of lactic threshold.
Basically, how much work can you do before lactic starts to spill over It's your maximal sustainable pace, essentially, before it starts to spill over.
It actually can be used as a byproduct. It can be an energy source.
It's not this kind of like, waste product that people thought it was.
But the idea is where is that threshold?
Then if we move down that a little bit further, it's endurance, cardiovascular endurance.
And this is something that could last forever.
60 minutes, hours on top of it. And that is basically like, how long can you go?
So we start to kind of like think about those two components together. they start to create this graphical representation of this sort of On the y-axis you have output, how much work you're doing and on the x-axis you have time.
And what you'll see is a slope down into the right.
What we're trying to do, and this is something that Greg Glassman did such a great job of, is what we're trying to do is raise the entirety of that curve up.
It's not about just improving one aspect.
It's not just get stronger. Because especially the closer you get to your human potential, the less return you have on that effort and investment.
The better thing to do is to find out the areas that you have the greatest potential for gains.
Meaning, you're a powerlifter. You can squat dead and bench hundreds and hundreds of pounds. but you can't run a mile under 14 minutes.
You trying to increase The Your Squat Dead and Bench by two, three, four, five percent could take years of effort.
You putting in a couple months of work into your cardiovascular conditioning could return a 5, 10, 20, 30% return on that area of the curve.
So in this instance, when we're thinking about in terms of health, The play is, what is my weakest link?
Bring that up. because if you're an eight or a nine in some categories, the amount of work it takes, the law of diminishing returns, to get a return on that is not as beneficial as putting in the same or even less amount of work into something that you're not quite as good at.
Now if we took that curve, what underpins all of that, what kind of sits inside of the work capacity, Thank you. is mobility.
Because what we need to be able to do is express all this through full ranges of motion.
It is not just like shake weight. It's not how much power can you produce through this tiny little range of motion.
It's not just wall sit, wall squat, stationary.
We need to get out into life and express this through full ranges of motion. dynamically, meaning not just passive hold a stretch, but actually do this dynamically through movement, and under load.
And that works us through three components inside of the mobility bucket, which is flexibility and ranges of motion. motor control dynamically through full ranges, like not just hold a...
But can you get up and down and bring your arms up over your head and back down while you're moving across the earth? and stability.
Now we have full range of motion dynamically under load.
If you have that capacity, then what our contention is you are setting yourselves up for well, this is well rounded training.
This is the pinnacle of that hierarchy of people. sedentary movement.
Getting back to your, we can pin this on the sick well-fit continuum. as we can with sleep and nutrition and mindset.
But again, the sick is sedentary. In between sick and well is movement.
At least get out of the house. Right. Go for a walk.
Well, is exercise. Like go to the gym three days a week.
It's what everyone told us forever. Like three days a week of 20 minutes of moderate exercise, like that.
Get well exercise, go take some classes. between well and fit is training. and the really highest levels of fitness, because again, it's the area under the curve, is well-rounded training.
It's not just run a marathon in two hours.
It's not just back squat 800 pounds. The bigger area under the curve is the 400-pound back squatter. that can do the three and a half hour marathon. with capacity to achieve control, under load, full ranges of motion.
That's what we're actually looking for. Okay, so that's why I think you use the term well-rounded training. strength, conditioning, and mobility.
So I want to bring Back, one of the conversations we had, I think it was actually the first conversation we had last year when we started the series on nerding out about training and programming.
We did an episode, I think we called it three and a half hours to the best shape of your life.
And so that was where you gave us basically the blueprint of here's what a week of training should consist of. in pursuit of this fitness, in pursuit of this complete fitness.
And so I bring that up to ask kind of a two part question.
One, which is everything you just laid out.
Does it still fit within that original framework that we laid out, that three and a half hour training per week to get to fitness?
And then if so, talk to us a little bit about like frequency.
Cause you just gave us, I think nine different components of these three big buckets. again, of strength, conditioning, mobility.
So how do we fit all of that in to three and a half hours, assuming we do.
Yeah. Actually, it was two and a half hours.
So it's 30 minutes a day, four or five days a week.
So you can do all of this in two and a half hours a week.
Now, you can't do it without being really intentional.
It's again, if you kind of just go default mode and you just go take a class or you just go for a jog, We have to be very intentional.
We have to work hard to be able to do this.
But you could do this in 30 minutes a day, five times a week.
And the really simple framework would be 5-3-1.
The five being five days a week. Yep. So... go and do 30 minutes a day, five days a week.
That's the five. The thing you're going to do every day is something that gets you out of breath. and puts you through a full range of motion and sometimes with load.
That's kind of the big thing. Right. Doesn't need to be every day.
And but every day we should be all of those five days we should be working on getting some level of outer breath working that lactic endurance VO2 max or lactic threshold.
Five, three, one. The three is three days a week of strength training.
And all that means is we have our three primary movement patterns, squat, hinge, and press.
We need one day dedicated to one of those.
And we just need to lift something heavy.
So I would love a world where we kind of just get away from barbells in general.
I think it would introduce so many more people to what we're doing.
But it's the greatest tool that's ever been invented for strength training.
So I don't want to get away from it because we're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It is important to train with a barbell and to be able to squat deadlift and press with a bar because it's it's the Working at those upper percentages of absolute strength is really, really important.
So three days a week of strength. One day a week, go long.
That's it. That's one day a week. We're going to do some zone two stuff.
And he said that into like 30 minutes of kind of like easy stuff.
Train five days a week, three days a week, make strength one day, go long.
Now, there's some little nuance stuff in here, which you said as well as like, well, you take those nine.
How do we blend those nine into it? So working through those.
In the strength bucket, we had explosive power, absolute strength, and muscular endurance.
Explosive power, think of it in terms like plyometrics.
To actually get the benefit of plyometric training, we really actually only need to do it once a week.
Now, it could be two or three. I don't think you need to do it more than three times, especially depending on what you're doing.
But they could be like low amplitude plyometrics, like skipping or like, plate hops, you can do those five days a week.
But for more like the traditional true plyos like broad jump, high box jump, hurdle hops, bounding, or other types of plyometric med ball throws. once a week is sufficient.
So one, two or three days a week for explosive power.
So let's call that once a week and let's put that on Friday.
I'm going to bring that the whole week. So we had that first one.
The highest power, most explosive, shortest and fastest.
We'll do that first thing in our training sessions on Friday after a good warmup.
Okay. The absolute strength, again, remember that is squat, dead, and press.
We're going to put those in on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
So Monday, we will bench press. Wednesday, we will deadlift.
And Friday, we will squat. and we will be working at loads above 70%.
If they're sometimes going up as high as 80, 85, 90, cool.
If we're doing higher rep ranges in the four, five, sixes, sevens at 75%, I'm okay with that as well.
But I would like to get some higher things because that's where the more absolute strength gains happen.
So now we have Monday, Wednesday, Friday, strength training, bench training. dead and squat.
And we also are combining that squat on Friday.
We're putting before that. our explosive power, rotational med ball throws.
We'll call them to start. Okay. Throwing a medicine ball against a cement wall, right?
Or throw it as high as you can or slam it in the ground, whatever you want to do.
Okay, moving across then from there, the last one in the strength bucket is muscular endurance.
Muscular endurance can be trained upwards of five times a week.
And again, this could be your accessory work.
Meaning that we're going to do some back offsets, some like if we're going to do the heavy bench press.
On Monday, we follow that up with three sets of 15 incline dumbbell press. and or we followed up with a piece in our conditioning piece where we're going to do upwards of 100 to 150 push-ups broken up with some rowing in between.
So now we have our muscular endurance of working really high rep range with the same movement patterns.
We can intermix that into every day if we wanted to in terms of the muscular endurance.
We want to get at least three days of it because we want to get those three movement patterns to be hit. but we could do it even more frequently than that.
But let's just say we keep it the same, really simple.
So following the bench press, we're going to do a whole bunch of one arm, dumbbell, shoulder to overhead push press.
And we're gonna do that in a conditioning piece with rowing.
On Wednesday, we did deadlifts. We're going to follow that up with two things.
We're going to follow up with a quick little set of three by 15 RDLs. followed by another conditioning piece with some hang dumbbell, with some dumbbell snatches. or kettlebell swings.
And we'll use that in the higher rep ranges as well.
Friday, we're going to back off the wait total because we've already done the... explosive power med balls.
We've done squats. We're going to add in just a bunch of air squats. into that one to be able to get some air squats in.
And we'll do that in a conditioning piece as well.
We'll throw that in with some... burpees or some bike or some jump rope, right?
Something else to get the heart rate going.
So now that leaves us with these other conditioning pieces.
We still have the VO2 max, lactic threshold, and endurance.
Let's start with the endurance. We're going to throw that in on Sunday.
It's going to be our long, slow run. By the way, I'm building out seven days and people can pick and choose where they want to go with this.
So that's our Sunday run day. You're going to run for 30 minutes.
If you want to go longer, I said we keep it in 30 minutes.
So we'll just do 30, but if you want to run 45 or an hour, we can do that and slow zone too.
Yep. Lactic threshold, let's do that on, that could be done once a week.
That's all we need. If you want to do it twice a week, that also works.
It could be three times a week, one to three times a week.
Again, we're going to be doing this in a lot of variants.
So it's not like we're doing last day threshold runs every single time.
And because of that, we can get out of this kind of world that the runners live in of like, whoa, whoa, that's going to so quickly overtrain you.
But let's put in our lactic threshold work on Thursday.
And we do that with. some running and we do have some bike intervals or running.
Just keep it really simple. And then we still have our VO2max.
We can slide that in on Tuesday. But really, if you could make up any one of those things we did on Monday, Wednesday, Friday as well.
We can keep those kind of more pure and we can put that in on...
Tuesday and we could do that as some, as I said, we could do this not just with Lowe, but we could do this with some lightweight, some kettlebell swings and some burpees and some box jumps.
And we can work on our VO2 max through that.
Or we could just do some like, you know, Norwegian four by four.
Get on treadmill, run for four minutes, rest for four minutes, repeat four times.
Okay, never heard that, got it. Okay, so.
Then we, every single day, When we're doing those movements, we'll make sure we're working them through full ranges of motion.
Thank you. Yes. We're working these through full ranges of motion, meaning that we are going all the way down in our squats and send them all the way up. and as much capacity as we can through the full range motion of our joints.
We're doing some of them and we're doing this dynamically.
We're moving. There's the motor control. and we're loading some of them so we get the stability.
We could also work in some really specific flexibility work or dynamic flexibility work into our warmup as well.
All of that stuff can be done in 30 minutes a day.
So to break that down, let's just take day one, which was our bench press. and work out with the one-arm dumbbell shoulder overheads.
We're going to do a little warm-up. Five, ten...
15 minutes. We're going to jump in and we're going to do a three by five bench press.
We'll do a couple of warmups sets to get there. but we're probably 12, 13, 14, 15 minutes into it.
When we're done with the bench press, we're going to grab a dumbbell and we're going to do 10 shoulder to overhead on each side, followed by 10 toes to bar.
And we're going to do that for five rounds.
Mm hmm. 30 minutes and we're done. That workout will take you six minutes.
And that's day one. And then day two, we do the same and we just kind of work it in.
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Can you talk a little bit about the distinction that you're making and I know that you've worked hard to make over the last few years between what is considered CrossFit and what you just laid out?
Because it feels like if to the uninitiated or to somebody just on the outside, it does sound like CrossFit, but I know that you've I don't want to say you've gone away from that, but I think you're evolving it in a way that's very intentional.
So can you maybe just bubble up like what that intention is?
Yeah, so we're not purposely trying to differentiate.
I believe that what they've done is phenomenal.
They've revolutionized fitness. It's amazing.
And they've massively... I mean, I've shared... two frameworks that Grossman's already created.
He's massively influenced the way I think about training and fitness.
I believe that functional movements... and high intensity need to be at the cornerstone of any well-rounded training program.
CrossFit defines itself. This is CrossFit's definition of CrossFit.
Constantly varied, functional movements performed at high intensity.
We do that as well to an extent. Constant variance, we actually like repetition and structure.
So the way we do this is we lay out the week every single Monday is muscle building Mondays.
So we bench press almost every single Monday.
And then we do a low intensity. This is the opposite, like a lower intensity conditioning piece that targets similar muscles.
Mostly all like the framework of the week.
Muscle building Mondays. target Tuesdays, a specific aerobic target, VO2 max or lactic threshold.
A lot of times done with intervals. Well-rounded Wednesday. a combination of strength and conditioning probably looks a lot like a CrossFit thing. right?
In terms of like mixing cardio with body weight, with weightlifting threshold Thursdays, specifically bringing the intensity down to work on lactic threshold.
We call it Forever Athlete Fridays where we have plyometrics.
Not usually seen in the CrossFit programming people go no box jumps the way the box jumps are done in in Normal CrossFit workouts are a conditioning thing, not an explosive thing. a thing, strength training and a short mech on.
Then we do sweat test Saturdays and then we do Sunday run day.
So every week is the same. So just to kind of back it up a little bit.
Constantly varied, functional movements executed at high intensity.
We don't believe in constant variance. We like structure.
We believe that the repetitiveness and the build and the progressions We work on the entire year already programmed out through certain progressions.
So we're kind of saying, we're beginning with the end in mind and going, we want to get there.
To get there, we're going to do this. across the 52 weeks.
So we don't have the constant variance, we have structure. in terms of the functional movements, love them.
Majority of our program is that, but we also do things that aren't functional.
CrossFit in their level one says we've replaced the bicep curl with the pull-up.
We do bicep curls. So we actually like isolation movements as well.
So we are not just... functional. We haven't said, nope, we're going to ostracize anything that would be decidedly isolation movements, single joints.
So we will do those things. We do a lot of them in our accessory work.
So, constant variance, functional movements, yes and, right?
And then high intensity. Love it. We also do things that we purposely do not do at high intensity.
As we just said, like... Zone 2. Zone 2 is as low as you can work before you're in recovery mode.
So zone one is recovery. Zone two is the slowest speed you can go. with not actually working on recovery, you're actually creating some little deficit.
So we work that in every single week, go along once a week. at a lower intensity.
Then we also do lactic threshold work as well, which is lower intensity.
Yeah, we've taken the things that they've built, which have been amazing.
And then we've kind of put our little takes on this thing as well.
Dig it. Okay, so I want to wrap this conversation up with a question about goals, by which I mean goals for the individual they're listening.
A lot of times when people are choosing whatever they're choosing, whether it's Pilates or yoga or CrossFit or everybody's sort of choosing based on what they say their stated goal is, right? whatever that might be.
And I'm not going to assume I understand what people who are doing Pilates, like what their goals, whatever it is, assume validity.
But one of the things that I think is an interesting distinction here, when you start to say, okay, well-rounded training versus just training.
The goal would then be or the assumption is that there are people out there whose goal it is to be to be well rounded in their training.
Can you make the case, well, one, do you get the sense that that is in fact what people are saying.
My goal is to be well-rounded in my training versus being I want to be really good at the single domain that I've decided I like. whatever that might be, is well-rounded, Fitness, a new goal that you're trying to make the case that we should all want and have?
Or do you get the sense that that is a goal for people and now here's a prescription for how we get there?
I don't think it's a goal for most people because most people aren't aware that the benefits is – raising up the entirety of the curve and how important this is for the sick well-fit continuum.
I think that we're still kind of chasing this like, as long as I get to the gym three, four, five days a week, That's the best thing I can do.
And you can intermix whatever you want into that.
I go to bar class. I go to yoga. I go to Pilates and they're all interchangeable.
The contention is that they are all better They are not doing them.
Yep. But they are not interchangeable. As we...
If you were to go, Patrick, let's say for the next three months, you were to go out and for 20 minutes, you were going to do one of two different things. four days a week for 20 minutes a day for the next three months, you are going to walk for 20 minutes or you are going to run at a challenging but not detrimental pace.
At the end of three months, which of those two tracks will make you fitter?
The latter. Correct. So there is a hierarchy to this.
Yes. Right? If, same thing, if you're going to take a broomstick and put that broomstick from the ground to your waist 50 times a day, three times a week, or you're going to do that with 135 pound barbell, which is going to get you fitter.
We know that, right? Now we also know that based off of capacity, That if you were to try to run a two-hour marathon. right incredible like that would be a one person the world's ever done it right let's call it like Sub three hour marathon.
A goal that could be done with a sufficient amount of training. if you were to do that, or you were going to try to be able to do 20 pull-ups back squat 360 pounds and be able to run a six and a half minute mile,
Based off of the science of the area under the curve and the fitness of because the fitness is the area under the curve.
And if we're trying to move from sick well to fit, then what we need to be able to do is do well-rounded.
It's a greater level of capacity. than going and try to chase one singular thing.
This is not... the normal take. There is no differentiation here.
So people are going to go to spin class.
They're just going to keep doing spin class.
Good. Like, yes, that's better than if it's going to get you there more than than doing nothing, then that is the right move.
So the take is not to say that they're wrong because they're not.
But just like they're in business, you can work really hard and not get a lot of results. it's the same thing in the fitness world.
You can work really, really hard, commit a lot to it and not reap all of the benefits that you would otherwise if you had just targeted that on the most meaningful and impactful areas of your business and or your health.
Yep. Last thing I want to ask you about, which I think is related to this in terms of related to this idea of maybe redefining what our goals are so that our pursuit of those goals moves this more in line with this idea of well-rounded fitness and something I actually stole off the CompTrain website.
It's this idea or this concept of quote unquote growing your spheres.
So I just want to ask you about this, but this is what it said with a balance across all three tenants.
So all three tenants being strength, conditioning, mobility. you are better prepared for any adventure, adversity, challenge, or competition.
Grow the size of your spheres through complete training and increase your all sport. ability.
So is that really the goal that we should be having?
Is the goal of really two part question is, is that the right goal is to have to grow the spheres of strength, conditioning, mobility, And if so, are there any ways to assess where we are currently so that we know if we're making the right progress in the right direction.
I would say for most of us, the answer is yes, that should be our goals, but not for everybody.
Mm hmm. If you are a Kipchoge and you're trying to break the world record for the marathon.
Right. I'm not going to try to get you to do a triple bodyweight back squat.
Mm-hmm. You can work on some levels of strength, but It's not about growing all three of them.
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He's a great marathoner, by the way, if you don't know. that anyone's ever lived.
Right. Yep. Yep. So the idea is, yes, for the people that are in this, to be athletic forever.
The idea behind being athletic forever is to find balance across the three spheres and then grow all three of them concurrently.
If you have one that is drastically diminished, we should put a little bit more emphasis into that one.
The cool part is if you do a concurrent training program, that one will come up the fastest just by law of dimension returns.
You're not going to get as much out of the other ones.
You're gonna get a lot more out of that one.
Yep. So that's the first one is yes for most, that should be the goal, because that's the thing that's going to cause the greatest amount of capacity in any opportunity, adventure, challenge that life presents us.
Yep. Today, tomorrow and forever. So that's that is the idea.
Unless you're paid to do a certain physical activity and it's okay to have some wheelhouses.
Got it. The second part of that question was which part... Do you have any quick... maybe ways for somebody, for us, to be able to assess where we are today Again, so that we know like, okay, this is my goal now.
I'm going to do all these things that Ben just said.
How do I know if I'm getting better at how do I know if my strength is increasing, my conditioning is getting better, mobility is improving?
Yeah, it's a good question. And a quick so.
I think most people intuitively know the answer to this already.
Particularly if you've done any sort of I just think people know the answer. stiff and you don't have good range of motion, but you can back squat 300 pounds and run a seven minute mile.
Guess which one's your weakest? Right. Right.
It's just like it kind of goes similarly if you're like a a yogi marathoner.
We have great mobility and you have incredible cardiovascular capacity.
But like the thought of getting underneath a 200 pound barbell like scares the hell out of you.
Like, guess which one, right? And then...
Maybe you're an Olympic lifter and you're really strong and really mobile.
But if someone was like, I'm going to do a 5K this weekend, would you like to jump in?
And you're like... No way. That's not even a possibility.
Then guess which one, but it's kind of those things.
It's like, you know, you could give kind of different performance metrics across the three domains for all different sort of levels But what you kind of find is like, you could say like, in terms of pick your favorite lift, deadlift, squat, or bench.
Can you lift 100, 200 or 300 pounds of those things?
If you're 400 pounds, it's a really big strength.
But level one, two, three, four, just by hundreds of pounds.
Level 1 is 100 pounds for any of those. Level 2 is 200 pounds for any of those.
And Level 3 is 300 pounds. Level 4? You're off the charts.
Don't worry about it. Similar to that, it's kind of like that's the strength one.
It's kind of like the mile time, right? Like, are you – by like two-minute kind of things.
Are you in the – like that 10, 11 range, that's we got some work to do.
Are you in that 8, 9 range? Okay, that's probably like level...
Two or three. Or are you in that kind of like six-ish range?
If you're below that, don't worry about it.
You're doing great if you're in the fives.
And then for flexibility, this is probably one that's a little bit more challenging because the numbers don't match up.
I can't just be like, What's your sit and reach?
Is it three inches or is it negative three?
But I actually think that a good one is which become popular and Kelly Starrett wrote about it in Built to Move. is the sit to stand.
Test. It doesn't involve the stability as much because it's not loaded.
But it certainly involves motor control, balance, range of motion. flexibility which is from a standing position can you get to a seated position and then return back up.
Anytime that you put a hand, knee or elbow on the ground, you lose a point.
Additionally, anytime you lose balance, you lose a point.
So level kind of the top of this would be, can you do that?
Standing, sitting, getting back down without touching anything on the ground and without losing your balance in under three seconds.
No one really talks about that part, but that's kind of super high level.
We've done this with people in the gym and there's plenty of people that can do it.
The middle level is can you just do it without putting a hand down?
And then the lower level is, do you need to kind of put a hand down, a knee down, right?
Like if you have to put more than... If more than two happen, that's kind of a weakness.
So then you go. Where am I on those? Well, I can lift hundreds and hundreds of pounds.
I can do that sit to stand test, no problem, but I have an 11 minute mile.
Okay, that's the one to work on. Yep. I really like what you said with the, hey, you want to come run, do a 5K with me?
And like your gut is like, no. I'm running through a list of things that, hey, you want to come climb the mountain with me?
No. You want to come to the yoga class with me?
Like whatever it is that like your instinctual, kind of self-protective voice says when somebody's like, hey, do this thing with me.
The thing that you most quickly say no to.
Right. is at least circling around one of the three tenets that you're like, OK, that's probably where you're weakest.
And flip side as well, the thing that you're most quickly say, yeah, I'll definitely go do that with you, is probably the strength.
That's probably the easiest... We should ask you that question.
Probably the easiest way to do it. It's like...
Want to go to a powerlifting competition?
That's right. Yeah. You're like, no way.
Want to run a 5K? If you're like, no way.
Want to do a yoga class? Yeah. Yeah. So that's a good that's a really that's a really nice way to kind of quickly self-assess where you are.
This has been great. Again, go back and check out if you want even more of this kind of programming deep dive.
We did do that episode. Came out last December.
It was Get Ridiculously Fit. The complete blueprint is kind of stacking on top of some of the things we talked about there.
So do go. Check that out. And as always, thank you, Ben.
Thank you very much for tuning into the show.
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