Let’s take a breather and talk peak performance. Start HIRTing instead of HIITing – this show will transform your approach to training.

Let’s call this a long Breather show to honor the message that you should take longer breathers during your high intensity training sessions. This show is appropriate for all fitness enthusiasts, because we have widespread training protocols that are fatiguing and destructive at the cellular level. Thanks to Craig Marker at StrongFirst.com for the inspiration and detailed quotable material that formed the foundation of this show.

It’s time to evolve from the dated and misappropriated HIIT training (High Intensity Interval Training) concept to HIRT (High Intensity Repeat Training.) Essentially, you want to focus on shorter sprints that will stimulate maximum fitness benefits before generating too much cellular damage and ammonia toxicity that can compromise your fat reduction goals. You also want to allow for maximum recovery time so that every sprint you perform can be of similar quality and explosiveness as the first sprint.

I talk about a recent breakthrough in my fitness performance and recovery where I do fewer sprints, rest longer between efforts, and have better results. I also tone down my ambitious high intensity workouts that last too long and overstimulate stress hormones in favor of what Dr. Phil Maffetone calls “slow weights.” Here, I do spontaneous efforts of only a single set of a single exercise. For example, I invested in a hexagonal deadlift bar, which sits in my backyard and gets some action several times a day to the tune of 6 reps and I drop the bar and go about my business. I also have StretchCordz hanging from a pullup bar in my recording studio, which I will hit a couple/few times per day for single set efforts. If you add this up over a year’s time, I will obtain fabulous strength benefits but avoid the overstress consequnces of heavy duty workouts as I exist here in the 50+ age group.

The conversation gets a little sciency, as I wanted to attempt to explain the cellular damage that occurs when you try to sprint for longer than 10 seconds. This stuff was detailed beautifully in Craig Marker’s HIIT vs HIRT article. Another insight from Marker is that, “Your feelings don’t matter! That is, your subjective feeling of the effectiveness of a workout is not as important as what science tells us is important to building an impressive base of endurance and changing your body composition.” Marker explains that people love to do exhausting HIIT workouts, end lying in a pool of sweat on the floor and bathe in the cocktail of endorphin hormones that deliver that drug-line painkilling sensation. The problem is we tend to eat more food and become lazier throughout the day as a consequence of our high stress workouts.

Please enjoy this show and don’t learn the hard way like I did that you should not feel sore and tired after hard workouts over and over for years and years. Go harder, go shorter, rest longer, and forget the grueling ethos that many group workouts promote.

TIME STAMPS:

Whatever your fitness level is, you are probably performing your workouts in an overly stressful manner that is compromising your progress.  [00:01:47]

Try to get to the point where you do workouts that will build fitness, delay the aging process, and enhance explosiveness and endurance without that the downside of the high-stress impact of the workouts. [00:05:12]

Maffetone suggests: Slow weights as a routine engagement with a very brief single set of strength training effort. [00:07:44]

Tabata: (work rest protocol) has been distorted and repurposed in its popularity. HIRT (high intensity repeat training) has taken its place. [00:09:38]

The main goal of sprinting is to go for hormone adaptation, the spike of stress hormones in the blood stream. [00:13:26]

Your feelings don’t matter.  Your subjective feeling of the effectiveness of a workout is not important.  [00:16:31]

You want to stop your intense efforts before you experience burning. [00:19:02]

We have know in exercise science that even a single all-out sprint has a profound effect on fitness. It can effect your body composition. [00:19:33]

Ammonia toxicity is what happens when you are involved in too high intensity training. [00:23:15]

Consider taking longer rest periods and shorter sprints. [00:27:05]

Work duration should be between 5 and 15 seconds. [00:31:55]

Luxurious rest intervals are needed. [00:32:09]

LINKS:

Tabata intervals protocol:

Craig Marker HIIT vs HIRT

Phil Maffetone

Brian MacKenzie: Listen to Brad’s Podcast

Joel Jamieson: Podcast on recovery

LISTEN:

Speaker: Brad Kearns

Welcome to the Get Over Yourself Podcast. This is Brad Kearns

[Music Playing 00:00:09]

Welcome to a very important show. We got a lot going on here. I want to try to bring some important and detailed scientific insights about peak performance to a simple and understandable show for the average person. In fact, that’s what Mia Moore said was my greatest skill or contribution with this podcast. I’m not a scientist, I’m not a doctor. I’m not a nutritional researcher, but I eme this game and deeply immersed in this game for a long time, dating back to when I was a professional triathlete trying to get the very most of my body and explore all the latest, greatest training and recovery techniques.

So, I am, wow, having the great privilege of meeting some really interesting forward thinking people in the fitness game and synthesizing all these great insights that they’ve put together. And recently, I got to say, even though I’ve been doing this crazy stuff for 30, 35 years since I was a kid and starting in with the long distance running in high school and still trying to pursue the varied fitness goals that I talk about, bringing in the explosive and the high intensity stuff into my lifelong endurance ambitions – I’ve had some breakthroughs lately in philosophy and in practical application, and I want to share those with you.

This is kind of leveraging a show I did on the Primal Endurance Podcast called “Rethinking; no pain, no gain”. And the theme of the show here is that whatever level fitness enthusiast you are, you are probably performing your workouts in an overly stressful manner that is compromising your progress and delaying your recovery. No matter what age you are … my son is reporting overtraining symptoms from his college basketball endeavors. And here I am in my 50’s, radically shifting my protocol at my high intensity workouts, so that I can recover faster and do less damage.

These insights have been inspired by some really important people – Dr. Phil Maffetone, Joel Jamieson, and Craig Marker to name three that I’m going to cover in detail on this show. Also, Brian Mackenzie. I did an entire show on him, so please go back and listen to that.

Joel Jamieson is the purveyor of this rebound workout philosophy, where you can do workouts that actually speed recovery, enhance the recovery process by doing unique protocols in the gym. And also, promoting the scientific concept of the constrained model of energy expenditure, where you have to focus and put recovery as the central focus of your training rather than the actual workout output. Because, recovery requires energy in and of itself. We’ll have an entire show with him coming up after this recording.

Brian Mackenzie show was kind of him taking off on these new exciting directions of cold and heat therapy and breathing practice as a centerpiece of athletic training rather than a cute little sidelight. So, that was an interesting thing I took out of his show. And of course, Dr. Maffetone. Listeners of the Primal Endurance Podcast can reference several shows with him. He’s the longtime pioneer of aerobic training and balancing health with fitness.

I was talking to Maffetone recently about my high intensity efforts and my desire to put my body under resistance load, so I maintain my bone density and delay the aging process. And I’m like, “You know, man, I get sore a lot. I do with these great workouts, I feel great. And then, I’m sore for days after.” And he said, “You know, that’s a bad deal. That’s [Spanish 00:04:27]. You shouldn’t be getting sore over and over. Of course, once in a while when you go water skiing or do something unusual. The unusualness of the activity, even if you’re in great shape, you’re going to get sore from doing something simple if you haven’t done that exact activity.

But the delayed onset muscle soreness from a stressful strength training session implies that your muscles have been damaged and they’re going to be weaker for a couple of days after that workout. So, if you’re going and doing a couple of high intensity sessions a week and you’re sore for a couple of days after each workout, all of a sudden, your muscles are weaker for a long duration period of the week. So, that’s not a good thing.

So, I’m trying to get to the point where I do workouts that will build my fitness, delay the aging process, enhance my explosiveness, enhance my endurance without that downside of the high stress impact of these workouts that are too tough, too strenuous. What happens after those is you get tired, you feel depleted, and you have a tendency to consume more calories and being lazier throughout the day as a consequence of that overly stressful workout. This is known as “The compensation theory of exercise”, and it can be counterproductive to many people’s main goal, which is to achieve and maintain ideal body composition. To keep the fat off from the intense training, and it simply doesn’t work.

It’s a vicious cycle where you become overstressed, you overeat, you under move because you’re too tired from your overly stressful training program. And believe me, I live this for an entire decade when I was training so hard as a professional triathlete that I did little else in my life. And my favorite anecdote was how I drove six tenths of a mile to my mailbox every single day to get the mail just because I’d ridden 53 miles or 84 miles that day, or ran 12 and swam for an hour and a half. So, why should I bother throwing on a light backpack and walking to the mailbox or even so much as peddling my bicycle there after having already ridden 84 miles. But it started to get ridiculous when you add up all the sedentary forces of someone who’s supposed to be an active fit athletes.

So, that’s why we’re emphasizing now the importance of regular everyday movement over just the delivery of a full workout log. In fact, movement in many ways being prioritized. The obligation to just get up and walk around and do brief series of calisthenics in your cube during the day. Go down and do 20 deep squats. Believe me, it’s strenuous. You’re going to start feeling the fatigue before you even finish a one-minute workout. But if you can package those up and add them together throughout the day and throughout a year’s time, if you have the ambition to move more frequently in all forms in daily life, it’s going to have a dramatic improvement on your fitness level.

Fun stuff, and easy to make these fitness gains. And Maffetone goes on to describe what he calls slow weights. And that is the routine engagement with a very brief single set, single exercise strength training effort. So, if you have a weight bench in your backyard and a hexagonal deadlift bar, like I do, what a fantastic investment that is, because it’s much safer than a regular deadlift. So I can do what many strength training experts agree is the single number one most beneficial total body exercise of the deadlift. This thing is sitting in my backyard, so I can go out there and do a single set of six reps.

And you want to pick a sensible weight. Maffetone suggests it’s around 80% of your one repetition max. So, if you had an all-out test to see how much you can lift, take 20% off that, and that’s the weight that you work with. You do six reps and you go on about your busy day. Same thing with a pull up bar or just doing the air squats in your cubicle. If you don’t have the apparatus nearby, which most people don’t, you can find some way to put your body under load for a brief period of time throughout the day, and then add this together.

What happens is you can get a significant increase in strength without that high risk of overtraining that comes with completing a CrossFit session or a regular dose of CrossFit session. Most people do it too frequently as we know, or the same goes for your grueling personal trainer session that you want to get your money’s worth. So, they grind you for an hour and 10 minutes and it turns out to be too difficult and too stressful.

A very interesting example that gets a little bit sciency, but I’m going to try to extract that and make these important points. A lot of it pulled from an article by Craig Marker on strongfirst.com. But let me read some beautiful and memorable quotes about rethinking your mentality, about what it means to a train vigorously and gain these fitness adaptations. Trying to get away from that “no pain, no gain” mentality. That’s why I’m titling this show “Peak performance without the suffering”.

In particular, if you’re in the gym scene, you’re probably familiar with this term HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). And for some reason, this became the Holy Grail, the most incredibly beneficial workout to do. Everyone talks about it in the gym, they name the classes (your HIIT class), and they engage in all manner of interval training, where you do a work effort and then a rest effort, and a work effort.

The concept of Tabata has become extremely popular. And that’s just a work rest protocol, where you have a work effort lasting for 20 seconds and you rest for 10 seconds, and then you repeat for a four-minute total or a 12-minute total workout. Whatever the protocol is.

So, the problem with Tabata is it’s been distorted and repurposed in its popularity away from the intent of the original research and training benefits. And it was only supposed to go for a four-minute workout. But that’s not cool enough to sell at the gyms of the world. So, you’ll see these workouts labeled “HIIT” labeled “Tabata” that go on for an hour with people of varied fitness levels just exhausting themselves and getting away from the original intent. Which was a high-quality explosive effort of 10 seconds, 20 seconds rest, and then repeating that high quality effort.

So, Craig Marker and the folks at StrongFirst have called this out and coined a new acronym to kind of correct the misinterpretations and the poor application of Tabata and high intensity training. And so, what they’re calling their approach is, instead of “HIIT”, “HIRT” – High Intensity Repeat Training. So, when you say high intensity repeat training, you’re talking about delivering a peak performance, explosive high intensity effort, and then engaging in sufficient rest so that you can repeat a similar quality effort.

One simple example would be to go for a sprint like I like to do at the football field. So, I’ll go for a sprint that takes 13 seconds, something like that. Let’s say I time myself and then my goal is to repeat that same quality of effort next time. So, if it takes me 13 seconds to get from end zone to end zone, I’m going to rest appropriately enough so that I feel totally focused, motivated and explosive to go on the next interval, so that I can repeat another 13-second performance. And as I might have described on other shows, my entire sprint workout consists of only four times 100 meters at full peak performance effort with sufficient rest in between.

So, the great transition that I have made in recent times with my standard sprint workout is first, I’ve cut it down from six times 100 meters back to four where I started years ago. But I thought as I’m getting fitter and fitter, I can add a few more reps and that’ll be a better, more productive workout. Right? Not necessarily. Because when we’re talking about sprinting, the main goal here is we’re going for hormone adaptation. The spike of stress hormones in the bloodstream, the hormetic stressor that’s going to deliver a net positive benefit, make me more resilient for future sprint workouts and other forms of physical and also life stress.

So, it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. So, taking the quality back down to only four repeats, and then the second big revision adaptation I’ve made, is to take my time and rest for a much longer period than I used to. Remember, I have this endurance base. I’m more of an endurance guy than an explosive guy. So, I could easily wind it up and do another sprint after only 15, 20, 30 seconds rest. And then I’d do six of those, and guess what? That would turn out to be a pretty hard session.

In fact, sometimes I would do a couple 200 meter sprints and then four times 100 meter, and that would package my workout. But there was very little rest happening throughout the workout. So, the net effect of that, yes, it was an awesome workout, but it was a high stress workout that required significant amount of recovery time afterwards due to the stress impact of the workout.

In contrast, if I’m going in and conducting high intensity repeat training, a HIRT workout, I will have so much more rest that the individual quality of the sprints will improve. So, I will become a better sprinter because my second, third and fourth efforts are much more quality because I’m fully rested.

Secondly, because of all the rest in between the efforts, the overall stress effect of the workout is vastly lower than when I’m going back and turning on the motor again and again, with only brief rest periods. So, when I leave the track, I feel great. I feel snappy and explosive and springy rather than exhausted. And then the following day and the two days later, I don’t have as much muscle soreness. I don’t have as much delayed fatigue, and I can actually conduct more sprint workouts if I want to. I don’t put that many more into the schedule, but I’m just not trashing my body as much as I was before.

Same with someone who’s doing a routine boot camp class that lasts for an hour and they’re asking for these interval efforts, or you’re going into a spinning class and you’re doing Tabata, but you’re doing it for 12 minutes or 20 minutes instead of four minutes. Guess what happens after four minutes? Is your output, your quality of your effort starts to decline. So, it’s a high intensity interval training session, but your interval start to suck instead of maintaining that repeat of high quality. A big difference in recovery, a big difference in fitness improvement and removing that huge problem of overly stressful high intensity workouts.

Oh, here’s an interesting quote from Craig on his article at strongfirst.com. When he’s talking about that buzz that you get when you really, really push yourself, and that’s what the fitness community is selling. That’s what we’re addicted to. That adrenaline or that endorphin buzz from these overly stressful workouts. So, here’s Craig talking about that.

Guess what? Your feelings don’t matter. That is, your subjective feeling of the effectiveness of a workout is not important as what science tells us is important to building an impressive base of endurance and changing your body composition. A common training method of HIIT, is the one that leaves people on the floor in a pool of sweat, feeling as if they’ve accomplished a great workout. I am proposing a smarter way of training, which should have a greater effect on your endurance and long-term body composition effects. This is high intensity repeat training. And guess what? It may not feel as good, but your feelings don’t matter.”

Why is it a [Spanish 00:17:35], to be laying on the floor in a pool of sweat? Because the prolonged recovery time, the prolonged or the overstimulation of stress hormones, it’s going to suppress immune function and it’s going to be difficult to sustain over a long period of time. That’s why we have so much attrition in the fitness community. Who wants to go lay on the floor in a pool of sweat 100 times? 12 times? Yes. You get the endorphin buzz, you get some instant results. People say, “Hey, you look great. What have you been doing? Going to the gym?” And you say, “Yeah, I’ve been going to the gym.”

But guess what’s happening (this is back to Craig’s article) when you get that attention for weight loss? The professor named Yakovlev, who’s saying, “The perversion of the muscular activities, chemical nature taking place during overtraining causes a resulting disruption of aerobic metabolism and a drop in metabolic efficiency that leads to significant weight loss in advanced overtraining.”

“Oh, you look great. You’ve been going to the gym?” “Yeah, yeah. I go to the burn class every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning at 6:00 AM.” And guess what? Burning in the workout, that lauded state of lactate accumulation in the bloodstream faster than you can remove it, is a bad deal. According to Craig Marker, he says, this mentality is sick, man. You want to stop your intense efforts before you experience burning. Burning is bad at a cellular level. All kinds of crazy shit is going on inside you that ain’t good.

Let me do a quick kind of breakdown and layman’s explanation if I can from the details this article on strongfirst.com and also some other articles. So, we have known for a long time in exercise science that even a single 32nd all-out sprint increases something called the AMP to ATP ratio 21 times normal. And also, generates significant AMPK That’s Activated Protein Kinase increases when you do just one sprint. So, it has a profound effect on your fitness by sprinting once in a while.

That’s why Primal Blueprint’s centerpiece is sprint once in a while. If you do a sprint workout once every seven to 10 days, it can profoundly affect your body composition, even though the workout only lasts for 10 minutes of hard work or six minutes of hard work. I’m counting the drills and the aggressive warm ups as well as the four times 100 meter sprint, because I am doing some pretty strenuous drills before I blast those sprints. But anyway, a very short high intensity workout can have a profound impact on your metabolic function and your ability to reduce excess body fat.

So, when you have these 21-fold increases in AMP to ATP ratio and AMPK activation, this is a sign of impending or upcoming mitochondrial growth. So, the desired effect of a high intensity workout is to stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis. That is the development of new mitochondria. These are the energy producing power plants located inside of almost all of your cells. So, if you envision your body as an energy generating organism, you are adding solar panels to your solar field there. So, you’re making more energy and also, you’re making it more cleanly when you have good mitochondrial function.

So, trying to stay with the big picture theme here, I don’t want you to get lost in the science. But we’ve known for a long time that these 32nd sprints deliver huge benefits. But here’s the current thinking, the nitty gritty details. Now, the scientists are convinced that the main benefits are derived during the first 10 to 20 seconds of high intensity exercise. After only 10 seconds, an ATP deficit starts to accumulate, so you can’t produce explosive energy as desired.

This is a simple insight where when you’re doing an explosive effort that last 10 seconds or less, you’re actually burning not sugar, not glucose yet, but pure ATP in the muscle cell. So, you don’t have to have this more involved chemical activation to get yourself from the starting line to the finish line of a seven-second sprint.

Okay. So, that’s cool. But then, when you can’t produce energy as desired and you’re still trying to sprint beyond 10 seconds, the “emergency systems” kicks into gear. That’s myokinase comes to the rescue and start disassembling ADP to make ATP and AMP. Again, backing up, what’s happening is you’re asking a huge demand for your body and you’re getting into this emergency energy production to get yourself from 10 seconds to let’s say 20 seconds. Some of this is quoting Craig’s article.

So, if the emergency continues too long, another reaction called deamination occurs causing cellular destruction. You know this is happening when you start to feel the burn. So, when that lactic acid burn comes about, you are engaged in cellular destruction. Disassembling and deaminating, the two things I just described is [Spanish 00:23:14]. Okay? Also a byproduct of these chemical reactions when you’re asking yourself for maximum effort performance for longer than 10 seconds is the generation of ammonia -the byproduct, which is very toxic to your cells and your nervous system.

One guy named Geoff Neupert suggests that ammonia toxicity could be one of the factors that compromises fat reduction when someone is engaged in high intensity interval training, ambitious efforts to drop a few pounds before their summer cruise or their bridesmaid gig. And so, they go to spinning class three mornings a week and the instructor’s screaming at them to sprint for every stop sign, every finish line on the imaginary route. You’re actually suffering from ammonia toxicity, especially if you’re not super fit to begin with.

So, the most fittest and genetically gifted and hardest working, longest lasting athletes among us, have less distraction, less breakdown, less negative consequences because their cells are so strong. They already have a robust mitochondrial system to generate energy. But for average folks that are just trying to do right, it’s very, very easy to exceed a healthy heart rate for too long a period of time in your average boot camp class, average spinning class. And what’s happening there – and going back to Craig’s article, “What’s happening is you’re breaking down the A-frames of your cells. Rebuilding them is a costly and time consuming process.”

While this is taking place, while you are rebuilding your cells and doing away from that damage that occurred during those high intensity sessions, where again, to review, you had the disassembling of ADP to make ATP and AMP. You also had the deamination, the cellular destruction as characterized by lactic acid. And finally, you’re breaking down the actual structure and the A-frame structure of your cells. While this is going on, guess what? You feel tired and run down. Your ATP is short of a full stack.

Gosh, this is why I kind of felt like crap 24 to 36 hours after my ambitious sprint workouts for many, many years. I thought it was just because the workout was so difficult and I was at an advanced age over the NCAA Division One college pool of talented sprinters. So, I’m like, “Alright, whatever. That’s the consequences I have to pay for trying to sprint and stay healthy.” But really it was the composition of the sprint workout, being too stressful, doing too many reps with not enough rest and digging into these breakdown processes, disassembling, deamination, and also the ammonia byproduct generation. So, you can do away with this stuff. You can escape from this trouble by sprinting for a shorter duration, and still getting all those wonderful hormonal benefits of generating maximum explosive force.

So again, not sprinting, not turning that motor on to full blast once in a while, you’re going to accelerate the aging process, use it or lose it. And so many fitness enthusiasts do a lot of chronic exercise, but not enough truly high-end explosive peak performance.

So, this has been of great interest to me for now, it’s 12 years that I’ve been sprinting ambitiously, knowing that that prolonged endurance training, that steady state stuff was not the whole picture and that I could benefit greatly from these explosive efforts, but I’ve always struggled to recover. So, I want to save you the trouble of what I’ve learned the hard way over the past 12 years and consider taking longer rest periods, shorter sprints.

So, the magic number, the magic window is sprinting between 10 and 20 seconds. And almost done with the science here waiting out before we fall apart. This is where Craig Marker says, “You’re giving your finest effort to sustain your output while your heavyweight energy pathway is fading, but before the acid levels become high enough to ruin everything.” So, timing is everything. Tone it down. And I’m also going to say that if you’re doing high impact sprinting such as running as opposed to peddling on a bicycle, you can work with shorter time durations just because of the increased degree of difficulty that running presents versus let’s say, swimming or bicycle riding.

We have so much support for this type of philosophy. This is not just new crazy stuff. Charlie Francis, one of the greatest sprint coaches of all time. Unfortunately his name was tarnished a bit because he was Ben Johnson’s coach and a central figure in the doping scandal that emerged at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. But a renowned coach of Olympic, world record holding sprinters, a great sprinter in his own right back in the day.

He was known to maximize rest intervals so that each sprint could be better or at least, the same as the sprint before. He wanted athletes to repeat their performance, not watch it degrade in front of their eyes. That is the sign of a destructive workout rather than an optimal one. He had his sprinter sometimes resting for 10 minutes in between these short sprints. Whether it was 60-meter bursts or whatever they were doing on a particular workout day.

So, try it out. I’m going to give you a nice, clean summary of everything. The key components to high intensity repeat training. Thank you Craig Marker at strongfirst.com. If you’re into this stuff, of course, go look at the website and get into the more details of the science that I skimmed over. But I wanted to present this show to the general listening audience, because so many of us are screwing this up and going into the gym well-intentioned and getting slammed.

Oh my gosh, I usually do my sprint workouts on Saturday morning, and one time instead, I went over to the gym and joined the boot camp class of my girlfriend, Mia Moore. And we just got worked, man. I mean, my form started cracking at the end. I was looking at the clock and we went hard for like 50/53 minutes. And I just felt like for most people in the class, I mean, I consider myself a pretty fit person. I figured somewhere around the 25-minute mark would have been perfect or 20-minute mark and more rest in between the things. Then the next song comes on, you’re asked to do something crazy again. I felt like it was a little bit too much.

I know we have these days of long prolonged inactivity, so when we get to the gym, we want to bust loose, we want to feel like we did a workout. But please listen to the leading scientist in the world, Joel Jamieson, talking about recovery as the centerpiece of your training. Where he’s working with world champion MMA fighters and other athletes, and the guys at StrongFirst saying, “Hey man, tone it down a little bit. Turn your work efforts down and you will benefit. You will get less tired, less broken down.”

Okay, so, HIRT, you must be able to repeat the high intensity performance. If it can’t be repeated, the training session should end. The intensity is the key. So, if you’re doing this high intensity repeat training, you want to be doing pretty well on those explosive efforts. Don’t worry about your feelings or your guilt for not working out for longer. Even a smart guy here, who’s talking about this stuff, I had to come to grips with the fact that I was turning my workout down from six times 100 to four times 100, almost an embarrassingly minimal workout.

I mean, we used to go out there as triathletes and do six times 800 meters hard on the track, past anaerobic threshold pace, and then get on our bikes and pedal another 30 or 40 miles after that workout – routine, daily schedule; Tuesdays at Pepperdine in Malibu, man. That was a brutality to the body and plunging us into that chronic training pattern, the stress hormone disruption, all the breakdown that occurs in the interest of trying to be a competent for peak performance competition.

If I had to do it all over again, rewind the clock, I would have just cut everything back by 10, 15 or 20% and reap the benefits on the race course. Believe it or not, hard to believe, but it’s true. So, if you can’t repeat, get out of there. Make sure you’re doing good, high-quality stuff.

Here’s the big one. Work duration should be between five and 15 seconds. Keeping the work time short allows for maximum effort and quicker repeat performance.

Next, luxurious rest intervals are needed. Have you ever heard a bad ass trainer use the word luxurious in describing a workout? Okay, it’s time to wake up. We got to give ourselves some luxuries out there on the running track or in the gym when we’re pounding. So, for 10 seconds of work, there should be about 45 seconds of rest. Yes, I will concur that after about 45 seconds, I’m pretty much ready to go again and going for two or three minutes of rest. Then you start to kind of lose your pump. You lose your mojo. So, the mental aspect is important here too. Where you want to feel fired up and ready to throw down on the next interval.

And no, I don’t want to spend all morning at the running track taking 10-minute breaks between my sprints, but you just have to get to that mode where you truly are ready to go and you’re not being pressured by the clock, by the Tabata clock ticking and someone yelling at you to go again when you’re still catching your breath. In fact, that is a good sign when your respiration returns to near normal.

So, if you’re doing this in sort of a strength training protocol, where you’re doing maximum kettlebell efforts for 10 seconds, Craig says training every minute on the minute fashion works well here. So, you’re going to do 10 seconds of hard work and then rest till you see the top of the clock again.

Cool, huh? Don’t forget to pick exercises with less risk of injury. Again, I’m quoting. And the ability to maintain maximum power. Sprinting form’s difficult for many people, and the power in a sprint, an actual running sprint can be maximized only for the first few seconds. And then it’s all about decelerating. Did you know that? Like when you’re watching the Olympic 100 meters, and they say, “Here comes Usain Bolt, he’s coming from behind. He’s catching the leader, he’s passing,” and he wins. What’s actually happening, is he’s decelerating less than the other athletes. No one (repeat), no one is accelerating after the halfway point of 100 meter sprint.

Yes, it takes them 20 meters to stand up all the way and get into full speed. Another, some meters for momentum might be mistaken. But I believe the maximum miles per hour is clocked at around 60 or 70 meters on the 100-meter sprint. And so, that final 30 meters, oh my gosh, it’s just who can slow down the less. Pretty Interesting, huh? So yeah, it’s maintenance or stopping of deceleration, which is important after the first few seconds when you start to generate the maximum explosive power.

StrongFirst recommends things like sled pushes or peddling an exercise bike are much safer choices for the sedentary or the novice athlete. I will also say sprinting up hill is great because of the low impact, and you don’t have to be moving quickly to say that you’re “sprinting”. Is just getting your maximum heart rate and maximum explosive output out of your muscles. Okay?

Okay, you’re still with me? You still with me? I know, it’s going to make you an outcast because most of the programming out there is not respecting this at all. They’re just blasting you with HIIT workouts that will serve to tire you out, make you crave more food, especially quick energy, carbohydrates, and be lazier both consciously and subconsciously throughout the rest of the day. [Spanish 00:35:38].

So, kind of try to do your own thing or gracefully bow out halfway through a class or do whatever you need to do. Do the first seven seconds of the programmed interval, and then start spinning the easier gear, whatever it takes to honor this and try it out, so that you don’t have those repercussions. Thank you so much for listening.

Hi, it’s Brad to talk about Ancestral Supplements. Question for you, how is it going with the critically important health objective of consuming some of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet? Namely bone marrow, collagen and nose to tail organ meats like liver, heart, kidney, and more? Yeah, how is it going? Pretty poorly? How did I guess?

I have to admit the same. I’m sorry, folks. I’ve known for a long time since Dr. Cate Shanahan in her wonderful book “Deep Nutrition”, emphasized that this is a sorely missing element of the modern diet, but a huge part of the ancestral diet that made humans the healthy creatures that they are today.

Now, we have a fantastic and convenient solution from Ancestral Supplements, because they make New Zealand-sourced bone marrow and nose to tail organ meats, liver, heart, kidney, pancreas, spleen, and more, delivered in simple convenient gelatin capsules. Oh my gosh, I love this product and I love what this company is all about. Go on their website, ancestralsupplements.com. Read one of the most impactful and inspiring mission statements you’ll ever see from a company.

Listen to how they describe their product. “Traditional peoples, native Americans and early ancestral healers believe that eating the organs from a healthy animal would strengthen and support the health of the corresponding organ in the individual. The traditional way of treating a person with a weak heart was to feed the person the heart of a healthy animal.”

Sound hokey to you? I’m sorry, but this is extremely well-supported with scientific evidence confirming that these are the foods that are DNA-evolved with, and are sorely missing from the modern food supply. That’s why Ancestral Supplement says that they’re putting back in what the modern world has left out to return people back to strength, health and happiness. And hey, if you’re a clean-living person that kind of doesn’t like the idea of popping a bunch of synthetic vitamins in the name of health, going over to GNC and buying 12 bottles, this is an entirely different story.

This is real food packaged conveniently so that you don’t have to worry about your liver making skills or how to best cook a kidney. Just swallow the pills, man. I throw them in my smoothie every morning. So, I’m taking about four or five capsules of the various Ancestral Supplement products. I’m throwing down the beef organs, the beef liver, the bone marrow. There are so many other ones on their absolutely fabulous and educational website. Thanks for trying it. Ancestralsupplements.com, you will love it.

Hi, it’s Brad to talk about ancestral supplements. Question for you. How’s it going with the critically important health objective of consuming some of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet, namely bone marrow, Collagen and nose to tail organ meats like liver, heart, kidney, and more. Yeah. How’s it going? Pretty poorly. How did I guess I have to admit the same. I’m sorry, folks. I’ve known for a long time since Dr Cate Shanahan and her wonderful book, deep nutrition emphasize that this is a sorely missing element of the modern diet, but a huge part of the ancestral diet that made humans the healthy creatures that they are today and now we have a fantastic and convenient solution from ancestral supplements because they make New Zealand sourced bone marrow and nose to tail organ meats, liver, heart, kidney, pancreas, spleen, and more delivered in simple convenient gelatin capsules. Oh my gosh.

I love this product and I love what this company’s all about. Go on their website, ancestral supplements.com. Read one of the most impactful and inspiring mission statements you’ll ever see from accompany. Listened to how they described their product. Traditional peoples, native Americans and early ancestral healers believe that eating the organs from a healthy animal would strengthen and support the health of the corresponding Oregon in the individual. The traditional way of treating a person with a weak heart was to feed the person the heart of a healthy animal. Sound Hokey to you, I’m sorry, but this is extremely well supported with scientific evidence confirming that these are the foods that are DNA evolved with and are sorely missing from the modern food supply. That’s why ancestral supplement says that they’re putting back in what the modern world has left out to return people back to strength, health and happiness, and hey, if you’re a clean living person, that Kinda doesn’t like the idea of popping a bunch of synthetic vitamins in the name of health, going over to GNC and buying 12 bottles. This is an entirely different story. This is real food packaged conveniently so that you don’t have to worry about your liver making skills or how to best cook a kidney. Just swallow the pills. Man. I throw them in my smoothie every morning, so I’m taken about four or five capsules of the various ancestral supplement products I’m throwing down the beef organs, the beef liver, the bone marrow. There’s so many other ones on there. Absolutely fabulous and educational website. Thanks for trying it. Ancestral supplements.com. You will love it.