What started as a Q&A show went off the rails with the very first question, as we accessed a portal to some of the most important overarching insights about how to properly structure a fitness program for life. 

You’ll learn about the common over-emphasis on cardio, how you can actually max your cardiovascular health and fitness with surprisingly little time, and how any workout delivers a cardiovascular training effect. You’ll learn the real secret to longevity and healthspan, which is to preserve functional muscle mass (and corresponding organ reserve) as you age. This entails performing brief, intense, explosive workouts — both resistance training and sprinting. By pushing your body to the limit, even briefly, you experience massive fitness adaptations and adaptive hormone responses. This references great insights from Dr. Doug McGuff’s Body By Science. You’ll learn how micro-workouts sprinkled into your daily routine can help you meet your fitness goals and your critical health objective to move more throughout the day and avoid prolonged periods of stillness. This is a great show resource when contemplating a fun, sustainable and maximum return on investment for fitness efforts. 

TIMESTAMPS:

Bob is asking about the Maffetone heart rate. Is there a heart rate you can kind of level off at as you get older?  [03:30]

You can get a complete fitness workout in 12 minutes a week if you do it properly. Preserve your muscle mass. [12:16]

The demands you place on your muscles are directly correlated to the demands you place on your organs.  [14:30]   

Move frequently at a slow pace, lift heavy things, and sprint once in a while. You are better off toning things down and getting rest and recovery. [18:04]

There are some do’s and don’ts to talk about. Forget about the 10,000 steps a day.  Shoot for 3,000 or 4,000 which is more sensible. [22:43]

Prolonged sitting causes systemic inflammation, the root cause of most diseases. [27:10]

Micro workouts during the day do a world of good.  You don’t have to have “exercise time” scheduled. [29:28}

Put your body under resistance load. Sprint once in a while. [31:06]

You can’t isolate the cardiovascular system, the heart and lungs from the rest of the body. [33:19]

LINKS:

• Brad Kearns. com
• Brad’s Shopping page
• Brad Kearns Jogging 2.0 video
• Run for Your Life, But not too Far and at a Slow Pace
• Body by Science
• Micro Workouts
• Primal Endurance
• Mark’s Daily Apple, Case Against Cardio
• Primal Essential Movements
• Brad’s morning routine
• One Running Shoe in the Grave
• Running on Empty
• Cardio Doesn’t Exist
• No Such Thing as Cardio

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B.Rad Podcast

Brad (1m 26s): Checked check, sound, check, sound, check. Greetings listeners. Thank you so much for the incredibly interesting, insightful, thoughtful questions that we will cover in this Q and A show. Hey, I want you to play, I want you to be part of the game. Part of the team. So if you have anything to say, even if it’s feedback or questions for the show podcast@bradventures.com. We read and carefully evaluate every single submission. We appreciate your listening so much. We also appreciate you spreading the word. Brad (2m 8s): If you could so kindly leave a podcast review would be a huge help. I know that there’s a large percentage of the podcast world listening on apple podcasts. So if you can go there now, you can do it from your mobile device with a click of a couple buttons or wherever you listen to podcasts. It’s kind of cool. If you have a less popular player, your review can get more notice. Like I listen to Overcast because I love the, how the app can organize shows and make playlists. And you also have a choice of listening at regular speed or 1.2 speed or 1.5 speed or 1.7, five speed. Anyway, go where you go and leave a friendly review between five and five stars. Brad (2m 50s): We’d really appreciate it. And we also look forward to your questions, feedbacks, comments, everything, and that brings us right, an incredible list of questions. Let’s see how many I can progress through. Hey, sometimes I go off on long tangents, but I’m always thinking in the back of my mind, how would this answer this commentary benefit, the wider audience? So this is not a show for one-on-one coaching support from Brad Kearns but rather a forum to pick up on the themes and topics that are of interest to many people. And indeed we do see some recurring themes areas of confusions requiring further clarification. Brad (3m 31s): So that’s what I like to harp on. And if I talk for five minutes about one person’s questions it’s so that all you all can benefit, or we can get really clear on some of these matters that keep coming up. So Bob teased me up first. Hey, I love the recent Q and A on the podcast. And I thought I had a question popped in while I was doing my morning run. I’m a big fan. I love listening to Maffetone, Mark Sisson, and you. I was turned on to Maffetone by my friend Carsten Solheim, the ultra runner who was also behind the Ping golf club company. Yeah, he’s run the a hundred mile race, a prominent name in that, in that scene. So Bob has been reading Maffetone and Primal Endurance books for a long time and been running at this honoring this maximum aerobic function, heart rate that 180 minus your age calculation, which is so critical, so important for endurance athletes training for daunting goals. Brad (4m 26s): You want to do the vast majority of your training, your endurance exercise at a heart rate of 180 minus your age in beats per minute or below or well below. And I think a lot of people get stuck on that part where they’re frustrated that they’re running so slowly. It takes a lot of trust and faith that you are actually developing the aerobic system when you are training at what seems to be too comfortable of a heart rate to get any significant amount of work or training adaptation. But indeed we have to train the aerobic system, the fat burning system at the proper heart rate. And for most people, it’s an adjustment in mindset because you’re moving pretty slowly when you’re at at that optimal aerobic zone. Brad (5m 13s): And so the major goal here is to go and set your alarm, whether you have an apple watch, a smartwatch, or a wireless heart rate monitor, set that beeper alarm for 180 minus your age and do not exceed it except for rare occasions, when you’re doing a high intensity training session or a race, or what have you. So that’s the MAFF heart rate for you. Bob has been going at it for four to five years, but here’s my question. Bob says, is there a heart rate you can kind of level off at, as you get older, I’m going to be turning 55 next month. And each year the MAFF is getting lower and lower, right? You’re subtracting your age. Brad (5m 53s): So at a certain point, indeed, when you’re a fit healthy, let’s say 60 year old or 65 year old or 70 year old, we see these amazing athletes on the starting line, still doing these long or ultra distance events or competing in the faster events and looking much fitter than their counterparts in those age groups. And so Maffetone himself agrees that at a certain point, you don’t have to get this linear subtraction of your training heart rate because a fit 60 year old, if you go 180 minus 60, that’s 120, but if you’re fit, if you’ve had a succession of good results, lack of setbacks, lack of injuries, illness, breakdown, the things that a lot of endurance athletes struggle with, you can probably level off at a 125 or a 130 heart rate. Brad (6m 45s): And indeed I’m 56 now. And I have been keeping my limit alarm at 130, which correlates to a 50 year old because I feel like I’m adapting just fine to the aerobic workouts that I do. And if you listen to the show, you’ll know that I have tremendously deemphasized steady state cardiovascular exercise in recent years in favor of a more varied workout pattern and doing things that integrate explosiveness, balance, flexibility, mobility, rather than just trudging along and peddling my bicycle or jogging for 30, 40 minutes at a comfortable heart rate. Brad (7m 29s): Straight ahead, look on YouTube for Brad Kearns jogging 2.0, and that’s a video, an actual video of a workout that I do all the time, where I tried to show you guys what happens in, in place or an evolution of my typical morning jog with my dogs. So now I’ll go and look for different challenges that will involve jumping or flexibility drills, breaking it up. And then as a consequence, I am interspersing a lot of rest and recovery where I’m walking or Hey, back to jogging for a little bit, then I’ll do something slightly challenging in one way, shape or form might be even an upper body exercise and then walk it off, walk it off. Brad (8m 16s): So the workout is not too strenuous, just like a slow and steady jog would be, but I integrate so many other fitness capabilities into the session. It’s much more fun. It’s more challenging. It keeps me interested. And so not to denigrate those who love to do the steady state exercise, but really the main reason would be to prepare for a competitive goal of that nature. So if you’ve just signed up for a marathon run or a 50 K trail run or a century bike ride, yes, you’re going to benefit tremendously from putting in the hours the necessary of steady state cardiovascular exercise in pursuit of that goal. Brad (9m 1s): But if you’re going for total all around balanced everyday fitness, as you can listen to in prior shows and YouTube links like Dr. James O’Keefe’s great Ted talk titled Run for Your Life, But not too Far and at a Slow Pace. And also Doug McGuff’s fantastic book Body by Science. It’s a short read, but it has a lot of scientific research backing this idea that you can max out your cardio vascular health and fitness benefits quite easily, much more easily than we might think. So if you just put in a paltry couple hours per week of steady state cardiovascular exercise, you’re good to go. Brad (9m 43s): You got an Aplus in cardiovascular function and heart disease, risk protection prevention provided you’re eating well and not adding other stress factors like smoking and consuming a lot of industrial seed oils, right? But in terms of getting your cardio into a, a respectable level, it doesn’t take hours and hours and hours of 30 miles a week or 40 miles a week, or peddling your bicycle for an hour every day and five hours on the weekend. And in fact, when you exceed this modest standard communicated by very respected science, when you exceed that routinely, you are inviting the risk factors of chronic cardio as detailed in the book, Primal Endurance, and on Mark’s daily apple with the case against cardio, the epic landmark post that was published in 2006 and is referred to by enthusiasts all over the fitness scene, it was kind of Mark Sisson’s calling out the cardio protocol as potentially unhealthy and not terribly beneficial. Brad (10m 50s): And I love how Dr McGuff gets right into this in his book where he says, look, if you’re going at a sub maximal effort, such as jogging down the road dutifully keeping your heart rate at 180 minus your age, so you don’t get overstressed. But if that’s your go-to workout, you’re getting a little bit of fitness benefit. Of course, it’s better than sitting on the couch all day. But if you’re the person that goes and gets on the StairMaster and watches CNN for 45 minutes at the health club and goes home calling that your fitness regimen, you are missing out on the most profound and easily access benefits that come when you push your body really hard for a short duration with these brief explosive high intensity workouts. Brad (11m 34s): We just did a great show with Dr. Craig Marker, where he talks about this concept of high intensity repeat training, where you’re going, you’re putting in an explosive effort, very short in duration, 10 to 20 seconds is the sweet spot, the window where you’re going to get the most benefits with a lot of rest in between these short efforts. And these short efforts could be sprinting on flat ground would probably be the best for bone density and the genetic signaling to drop excess body fat. But of course you can do it on a stationary bicycle. You can do it swinging kettlebells. You can do anything that’s explosive and lasts for around 10 to 20 seconds with a lot of rest in between them. Brad (12m 16s): And so as the subtitle reads, wait, I think it’s in with reach. I got to read the subtitle to you. So the book is called Body by Science. Here’s the subtitle: a researched based program for strength, training, bodybuilding and complete fitness in 12 minutes a week. Yes, you can work out for 12 minutes a week and get fantastically fit and very likely with a greater return on investment than a workout regimen that lasts for six to 10 times to 20 times, as long as that. So in 12 minutes, if you do it properly and throw down some really challenging stuff where you’re breathing, your muscles are burning, they can’t continue anymore. Brad (13m 1s): Whether it’s sets of pull-ups sprints, bicycle, sprints, whatever. If you do a sprinkling smattering of that every week, you’re going to get more benefit than trudging along and racking up the miles. And I think this is especially so as we get into the older age groups where the number one goal for pursuing longevity, as well as functionality or what they call health span. So the goal should never be framed as just living in a long time, because who wants to get wheeled around nursing home in a wheelchair for 12 years with various family members visiting, none of whom names you remember, that’s not what we’re talking about. Brad (13m 43s): We’re talking about health span, where you can be healthy and vital and energetic and go and enjoying outdoor activities and a life of fitness and energy that comes from anybody want to guess? Preserving muscle mass. When you preserve functional muscle mass, that muscle mass that’s being used. So we don’t have to be bodybuilder with the giant muscles walking around. That would be called aesthetic. What do they call that superficial muscle mass looking good in the tight shirt? No that’s way beyond functional muscle mass, right? So functional muscle mass would be just looking fit and toned on the female side. And on the male side, most of us want to see additional muscle mass and less of the spare tire around the middle. Brad (14m 30s): So redistributing some of that weight that’s gone to the wrong places over time. But if you can preserve that muscle mass as you age through the age groups what’s going to happen is this is directly correlated with a, a concept called organ reserve. And organ reserve is the functional capacity of your organs to operate beyond baseline level. So here we are sitting in a chair, you’re driving along, you’re listening to the podcast. You’re watching Netflix in the evening and your organs are all working just fine. Your liver, your kidneys are filtering fluid. Your heart’s beating. Brad (15m 11s): Your lungs are breathing air. But that’s the baseline level, which is not a big challenge for the body. But when you get up and are asked to ascend two flights of stairs, or asked to walk a half a mile on a trail around a park, that’s when your organs, all of your organs have to kick into gear to do a better job answering to the muscles demand, right? So the demand you place on your muscles is directly correlated to the demand you place upon your organs. You’re trying to breathe and send blood to the extremities when you are walking that path around the park. And so therefore these organs are involved, powering the muscles to climb up the mountain, walk around the park, lift the weight. Brad (15m 55s): And so by preserving muscle mass, it’s kind of an indicator. You’re looking like someone who, if you took the, the, the scan inside the body, the organs are looking pretty darn good. In contrast, when you are experiencing diminishing muscle mass through the, through the advanced age groups, this is corresponded, directly corresponded to diminishing organ function. And those people don’t fare too well, especially when a challenge presents itself, such as a surgery where you have to recover from a traumatic event under the surgical knife. Yes, they saved your life. That’s great. Brad (16m 35s): We got your appendix out, but how are you going to heal up when things are a challenge due to, you know, something coming, coming from the outside unexpectedly. And so that’s where we’re looking for this fitness baseline of functional muscle mass. Okay. Let’s also understand that visually you can’t tell the whole story at a glance, right? So some people have a genetic predisposition to carry very little body fat, and some people have a genetic predisposition toward a bigger boned, a bigger size human. And so what we want to realize here is with functional muscle mass, you can probably best test it, not by glancing at someone wearing tight clothes, but going and performing and testing yourself in the gym under resistance load of some kind. Brad (17m 23s): So it could be weights. It could be pulling resistance tubing, right? You can get those things. I love to talk about stretch cords. You can buy them on Amazon has just two handles attached to a flexible tubing and you can pull and do all kinds of upper body workouts. The X3 Bar I’m super, super excited about. I think it’s a wonderful fitness product. That’s very portable and gives you a fantastic body workout in a very, very short time by stretching polling and contorting with the eight template exercises on this very thick resistance tubing. So whatever your choice is, it’s super easy to put your body under resistance load. Brad (18m 4s): We have the primal essential movements. You can go on Mark’s daily apple and download the free PDF, talking you through push-ups pull-ups squats and planks, or look on YouTube for demos of the primal essential movements and all these things that challenge your body with the resistance are super important. And so it’s all about putting your body under high intensity, super challenging, short duration workout, and getting your body under resistance load. That would be The Primal Blueprint, the original laws of The Primal Blueprint remember? The fitness laws were move frequently at a slow pace. Brad (18m 45s): So we definitely want to get a lot of daily movement and a lot of walking and comfortably paced cardiovascular exercise. And then we want to lift heavy things, and then we want to sprint once in a while. So that’s a huge difference from just showing up at the gym or walking or being a, a endurance enthusiast who’s putting in there 30 miles a week running, or a hundred miles a week cycling. And thinking that that is the key to fitness. That is a very small sliver of the overall pie of what it means for functional fitness. Anti-aging preserving muscle mass as you age. Okay. Finishing up with Bob told you I had the potential to go on a ranting tangent. Brad (19m 27s): He was asking for a little, love, a little help with his maximum aerobic function, heart rate. And I said, sure, when you’re 55 60, you can probably depart a little bit from that linear regression of 180 minus your age. But I will end this comment in general, by saying that we have fielded so many emails and requests from people that I interact with directly, that I’ve coached for the years about this 180 minus age heart rate. And by and large, most of it is asking for a little leeway, where can I add five beats because blank, blank, blank. And for the most part, you’ll be much better off taking it, easy toning things down a little bit and getting away from anything that has even the slightest sniff of being chronic and overly stressful when it comes, do endurance training, that means more days off, that means shorter and slower recovery workouts. Brad (20m 25s): And yes, once in a while, you can go push yourself and do a super cool track workout or a hill repeats with your buddies when you’re training for the 10 K or the half marathon. But by and large, most people are out there putting in workouts that are slightly too stressful, too frequently with insufficient rest and recover coverage between these sessions. And again, they’re working this tiny little sliver of fitness. I don’t know why this has taken hold and become the mainstream approach to fitness. Perhaps we’re looking at the great elite athletes of the world, whom many of whom we got to see in the recent Olympics from Tokyo, and you see these beautiful marathon runners like Eluid Kipchoge, running, and doing something great. Brad (21m 10s): And you’re inspired too to go participate and try for a 26 mile challenge. But we can’t look at this example of the elite athletes and try to apply it to our own lives because it’s so extreme. They are much more genetically adapted to doing crazy stuff like racing for 26 miles at a pace per mile of four minutes 32 seconds. That’s what Kipchoge’s world record a sub two hour marathon equates to. It’s unbelievable what they do, and they’re at the very highest level of human performance. So what we want to do is kind of take some basic insights of the best way that the body works, minimize these overly stressful patterns that are so common in the fitness industry, and do it right. Brad (21m 51s): So you feel fun, lively, energetic. You’re not tired. You’re not trying to recover constantly from workouts that, that knock you out and make you sore and give you a little bronchitis that lingers for nine weeks every winter, none of that stuff, we just want to push ourselves a little bit once in a while, make it nice and sharp and aggressive and explosive, and then go home with a little bounce in your step after you went and did some great work in the gym rather than lingering in there too long. Oh, okay. At this rate, we will not be bingeing through a ton of Q and A, but I think that set up was so important that I’ll probably just have to call this breather, show the, the ultimate, you know, choice of what work has to do to promote longevity health span and get away from the chronic patterns that are so common. Brad (22m 43s): So this over arching concept about how to design a fitness program for longevity, for health immediate instant gratification and fitness benefit, as well as looking down the road to how to age gracefully. I think we should wrap it up with some takeaway insights, some do’s and don’ts. I went through the three the Primal Blueprint Laws very quickly, but let’s see how this would look in yeah. General everyday application. So aside from those training for the next Olympics, Hey, only three years now, instead of forests, you better get on it for most of us here, just trying to balance busy life with some fitness objectives and make the most of our time, get the best return on investment for what we’re doing out on the roads in the gym or in our home gyms. Brad (23m 32s): Let’s kind of end with some, some takeaway message here. So we start with the cardio, which was the, the beginning of the show and what heart rates best and all that kind of thing. And we definitely want to achieve that A-plus in cardiovascular fitness and disease prevention. So what we’re talking about here is logging enough hours at a comfortably paced heart rate that we’re going to ask the cardiovascular system to be strong and functional, and that’s surprisingly low, but Hey, a lot of people are not even getting off their butt enough to walk the requisite steps per day. Brad (24m 14s): You’ve heard a lot about that 10,000 steps per day. I feel personally and other experts agree that it’s kind of a ridiculous notion to spout out there as trying to get entrenched in conventional wisdom that we need to walk 10,000 steps a day. That’s five miles, which is an extremely long distance for almost everybody, except for some of these bright, shiny countries like Australia and Switzerland, both seem to have populations that are averaging that routinely. I know a lot of people in urban areas like New York city are probably getting up near 10,000 steps a day, just from the way that life is structured, where you’re using public transportation and walking as the norm due to traffic congestion or whatever other reason. Brad (24m 59s): Maybe people out there in Mennonite, Amish territory are easily walking that much, walking around the farm property. But for most it’s probably too much to ask and it’s a little intimidating, or we feel disconnected from the goal because it’s like 10,000. I know Mia Moore is playing around with their new toy, her apple watch. And we have an extremely lengthy walking day where we do a great hike and walking around town on vacation and looking at the thing. And it says 8,700. It’s like, are you kidding me? How much more do you want us to walk before we can get into the gold star zone? So I’m going to say for a moment, forget about that 10,000 steps a day. Maybe you should shoot for a more reasonable, sensible goal of 3000 or 4,000 and realize that that is an extensive amount of exercise and physical movement with walking at the centerpiece. Brad (25m 49s): Of course, there’s other ways to get your movement objectives in like pedaling a bicycle or a stationary bicycle or a rowing machine. But by and large, if we can just get out there and move around, maybe more than usual, but not this huge obligation or time burden we’re going to be doing quite fine on the cardiovascular exercise objective. If you have this goals, different story, right? Don’t go trying to participate in a marathon. If you’re doing 3,800 to 7,200 steps a day, no you’re going to have to go there. And approximately the challenge of the, the competitive goal on a, on a regular basis in training. Brad (26m 30s): But let’s just say for a moment that most of us probably are doing pretty darn well in cardio. We kind of have to now add this objective of movement, right hand in hand with cardio, but that’s kind of two things. So we have this heart and lungs. How well do they function? Are you getting your couple few hours a week of proper cardio exercise? Okay. Okay. Movement is a different story because the human does not like to remain still for prolonged periods of time. So there’s this extreme health objective. It’s super important of just getting up and moving around throughout the day. Brad (27m 11s): Our genes expect a day featuring near constant movement of some way shape or form. And it doesn’t have to be walking, but walking is the centerpiece of this objective, but it can also be active stretching. It can be my morning, flexibility, mobility, leg, and core strengthening routine that I talk about so much. And you can see on YouTube just doing things in the pattern of daily life, that entail movement. As you heard on my shows with Dr. Herman Pontzer, an interesting phenomenon occurs when we sit still for hours and hours on end. And what this does is it prompts the horrible health condition of systemic inflammation. Brad (27m 54s): And this type of inflammation, this system-wide undesirable inflammation is believed by most medical and health experts to be the root cause of virtually all forms of disease in the body. It starts with inflammation. And so by no fault of your own, you weren’t, deviously throwing down giant liters of root beer and Cheetos, whatever, just sitting can trigger a disease patterns. It’s amazing. That’s why this acronym sitting is the new smoking has a lot of relevance and literally is true. So what that means is whatever you need to do, set an alarm on your device, get up, move around, even for one or two minutes, every 20 minutes, we’ll kind of kick you out of that. Brad (28m 43s): High-risk zone of being a, a sitter, a stillness person, and do the active lifestyle category. So it doesn’t take much, it doesn’t have to get your heart rate up super high and be something incredible or for super long duration. But just the more we can kind of get up putz around, take a break, focus our eyes on distant objects instead of just at the screen all day long. This is also in that first kind of basket of fitness objective to get your cardio as well as your everyday movement. And I’m such a big fan of micro workouts. You can find some programming on that, on this channel entire shows dedicated to this concept. Brad (29m 29s): But what that means is for some of your movement breaks, you can actually do some explosive high energy output of very, very short duration. So it doesn’t really count as a workout. It’s not strenuous. You don’t have to prepare for it, but let’s say that one of your movement breaks involves a set of pull-ups or rushing up one or two flights of stairs. So you’re, you’re punching the gas pedal a little bit, and that is keeping your vehicle in, in top, top form. So it doesn’t always have to be just a regular casual stroll around the block as your movement break, go do something wild and exciting. I think there’s a YouTube video called micro workouts during the day or something like that. Brad (30m 12s): And you can see where I have the hexagon deadlift bar loaded with a moderate amount of weight, and it’s located on the path to the garbage can. So if I’m going to go throw away the garbage from the kitchen, which happens or does that happen once every other day or something? It’s my rule that when I pass by the bar, I do a single set. Hey, sometimes I might do more, but it’s just kind of a fun thing to say, Hey, I have these micro workouts in place in my daily life. And it’s just sprinkled into my, as a habit sprinkled into my routine. Same with climbing the stairs. My rule in the home is that when I have to ascend a flight of stairs during the day, I try to sprint every single time or do a kind of a hopping drill or lunging glute stretch, or glute activation, something differently than just trudging up the stairs mindlessly. Brad (31m 6s): I want to be a little punchy and make it a little workout. So that’s the movement objective hand-in-hand with cardio. And that leaves us with two more. One of them is to put your body under regular resistance load, right? You want to challenge the muscles with a weight, whether that’s body weight, whether that’s pulling resistance tubing, or lifting actual weights, or working with the machines, that’s going to help you preserve muscle mass as you age. And then kind of in the same category of doing brief high intensity, explosive exercise is sprinting. But we like to categorize that the three of, you know, moving frequently lifting heavy things and then sprinting once in a while. Brad (31m 48s): But these precious workouts that don’t have to be done more than once a week in most cases can have an absolutely magnificent, shocking, surprising impact on your fitness, on your fat reduction goals and on your general, everyday health, energy, vitality, brain function, everything. And that involves opening up the throttle and going maximum effort, ideally with high-impact running sprints, because that will help with your bone density, with your, your balance, your prevention from routine accidents and falls that occur so frequently among the elderly. If you become good at sprinting, you will become vastly better, more functional at all lower levels of intensity of any other kind of physical exercise that you do. Brad (32m 37s): So sprinting is where everything else flows downstream from building a little bit of competency in all out sprints. Go to Brad kearns.com. And I think you can find the link to the video primal fitness videos. It’s one of my plane lists on my landing page for YouTube, or you can go to Brad Kearns YouTube page, but you’ll see all these different videos that we’ve now categorized really beautifully, including some running technique instruction, some sprinting instruction, and me talking you through on the video, how to conduct a proper workout, how to do drills that get you to improve your running technique. Brad (33m 19s): But if you can do well at sprinting, everything else is piece of cake. I mean, imagine becoming a good sprinter, how much better you’re going to be at jogging or going somewhere in between jogging and sprinting. So we have the obligation to move frequently throughout the day, build that cardiovascular fitness with some workouts that challenge the cardiovascular system. And, oh, by the way, I didn’t mention this, but guess what’s happening when you’re sprinting or doing a strength training set working through the machines at the gym or whatever you’re doing, pulling the stretch tubes. That’s right. You’re improving your cardiovascular fitness along the way. So Doug McGuff likes to say, “there’s no such thing as cardio.” Brad (34m 3s): Search for that on YouTube. We’ll have it in the show notes also, but that’s the title of this video. It’s only a few minutes long, two and a half minutes, I think. And he’ll give you the gist there. And then there’s also a related video. I forget who the host is, but we’ll find it in the show links. And it also talks and talks for an hour about how there’s no such thing as cardio. And basically the general takeaway is that you can’t just isolate the cardiovascular system, the heart and lungs from the rest of the body. So anytime you pick up so much as pick up a, a dumb bell to do a bicep curl, you are engaging the cardiovascular system and it becomes a cardiovascular workout. Brad (34m 43s): No, it doesn’t have to be steady state where your heart is beating at 137 beats for 45 minutes consecutively while you’re climbing the stairs, watching CNN. But the cardiovascular system perhaps prefers what Dr. Art DeVany calls a stochastic type of pattern where it’s haphazard. The heart’s going maybe even higher than that for the 30 seconds where you’re really working hard and recovering from an explosive effort. And then it’s going down below your typical training rate. So it’s dropping down to 110 or 115. Maybe you have to sit on the bench and answer a text message. I see most people in the gyms doing that during their workout, but Hey, it’s giving them a sufficient rest. Brad (35m 24s): So no harm there. And then you’re stepping back into the fray and moving onto your next machine or whatever. And so you’re getting this awesome cardiovascular workout, even though it’s a spiky graph, it looks like the earthquake Richter scale, rather than that steady state. In many ways this is a better training and health adaptation for the cardiovascular system than the steady state stuff. The heart does not want to go up and peg at steady state cardiovascular is steady state heart rate day after day after day for an hour or two hours or three hours. And there was a lot of commentary about that in our books. And I’m the case against cardio articles. Brad (36m 5s): I referenced a couple very shocking and disturbing lengthy articles and recent years one’s called One Foot in the Grave. One’s called Running on Empty, talking about the serious disease cardiovascular problems that some of the elite ultra athletes have experienced from just running the heart into exhaustion, scarring, chronic inflammation, things like that. So finishing the show up here. Get moving. Do not sit still for longer than 20 minutes ever. The human body is not meant to do so. And you will promote chronic inflammation if you can’t achieve that minor request. Brad (36m 46s): Next, strength training, resistance training. Put your body under some form of resistance load, whether it’s body weight exercises, working with weights, pulling the stretch tubing, doing the machines. And we have generally discussed this as something where you could do a formal workout. A couple of times a week. The workout lasting between 10 and 30 minutes. And I would also say that if you can do enough micro workouts, you will get your strength training objective met simply by hitting the pull-up bar or swinging the kettlebells a couple, few times a day for one minute here, two minutes there. Remember the subtitle of Dr. McGuff book, 12 Minutes a Week to Superior Fitness. And then finally the third category is sprint once in a while. Brad (37m 27s): Let’s say that once a week would be a great objective to conduct a formal sprint workout, where you’re doing the warmup, the proprietary technique drills, and doing a main set where you’re going for a maximum effort for between 10 and 20 seconds, taking lengthy rest intervals and having this nice package of a sprint workout, which is going to be a massive return on investment for the minimal time that you commit to a proper sprint workout. And that, my friends, is the secret to a long, healthy, happy, energetic life. Get your fitness objectives dialed. Thank you so much for listening. Let me know what you think. Try it out. Brad (38m 7s): If you’re deficient on some of those categories. Oh my gosh, you can ease into sprinting of course, by starting on a stationary bicycle or a rowing machine or something, that’s no impact, but you want to envision a constant progress toward one day being able to actually run on flat ground. Some semblance of sprinting, whatever that means for you and whatever level you get to. It doesn’t have to be ready for the next Olympics in Paris, but to, to be able to move your body at maximum effort is going to have tremendous downstream benefits. Okay, there you go. Good luck. Thank you. B.rad. Brad (38m 47s): Thank you for listening to the show. I love sharing the experience with you and greatly appreciate your support please. Email podcast@bradventures.com with feedback, suggestions and questions for the Q and A shows. Subscribe to our email list of Brad kearns.com for a weekly blast about the published episodes and a wonderful bimonthly newsletter edition with informative articles and practical tips for all aspects of healthy living. You can also download several awesome free eBooks when you subscribe to the email list. And if you could go to the trouble to leave a five or five star review with apple podcasts or wherever else, you listen to the shows that would be super, incredibly awesome. Brad (39m 30s): It helps raise the profile of the B.rad podcast and attract new listeners. And did you know that you can share a show with a friend or loved one by just hitting a few buttons in your player and firing off a text message? My awesome podcast player called Overcast allows you to actually record a soundbite excerpt from the episode you’re listening to and fire it off with a quick text message. Thank you so much for spreading the word and remember B.rad

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