My recent focus sprinting and high jumping in masters track & field competition entails a completely different approach to training than the endurance protocol and endurance mindset.

My former podcast guest Cynthia Monteleone (@fastover40 on Instagram) has been a big help recently for me to continue to evolve my approach and my mindset so I can thrive in track & field. In short, I’ve been applying endurance training principles to my high intensity peak performance goals and it’s been hampering my performance and recovery. This is where you have to make the crucial shift in mindset to prioritize high intensity training.

I reached out to Cynthia for more guidance because I’m getting annoyed at my frequent minor injuries that linger for too long. Immediately it became clear that I’m unwittingly trying to train disparate energy systems and it’s too much for my body to handle. In this show, I’ll describe how I’m evolving from “easy/recovery” days in the endurance paradigm to proper rest days for a sprinter/jumper. Remember, the aerobic system responds well to low intensity, consistency and volume. The anaerobic system responds well to high intensity, short duration, extensive rest, and low volume.

I’ve also learned in recent years that the more specific and lofty your goals become, the more you have to narrow your focus. I can’t pursue the disparate goals of Speedgolf and sprinting/jumping. Listen to my great show with Cynthia to learn more about her innovative approach and services at Mam808.org

This show will also inspire you to perhaps shift from an excessive emphasis on cardio/endurance training in favor of doing high intensity exercise and enjoying the best benefits for fat loss and longevity.

TIMESTAMPS:

Brad is taking days off.  It’s a new approach to his training. He’s found he doesn’t take enough rest and recovery days. [00:54]

We see most fitness enthusiasts are way heavily weighted to the cardio side and usually highly deficient on the explosive high intensity side. [05:41]

Around 50% of regular runners are injured every year from a flawed approach that is characterized by running at a pace that is too strenuous. [09:10]

You are encouraged to do harder, shorter duration but really explosive workouts. [11:24

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• Brad Kearns.com
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TRANSCRIPT:

Brad (00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast, where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life without taking ourselves too seriously. I’m Brad Kearns, New York Times bestselling author, former number three world-ranked professional triathlete and Guinness World Record Masters athlete. I connect with experts in diet, fitness, and personal growth, and deliver short breather shows where you get simple, actionable tips to improve your life right away. Let’s explore beyond the hype, hacks, shortcuts, and sciencey talk to laugh, have fun and appreciate the journey. It’s time to B.rad.

Brad (00:38):
If you’re someone who routinely gets on a stationary bike and pedals for 45 minutes looking at the TV screen or going to a class and doing those types of workouts, you can get a vastly better return on investment with less downside risk by

Brad (00:54):
Brad is taken days off <laugh>. I thought I would do a fun show about a recent evolution restructuring of my approach to athletic training, particularly as it relates to my primary goals of competing in masters track and field in sprinting and high jumping. And I’ve had some great support from my former podcast guest, Cynthia Monteleon. She’s the world sprinting champion at 400 meters when she won the Women’s 45 division and running a 56 second 400 meters incredibly fast and in fact faster than her performance as an NCAA collegiate athlete decades ago. She also coaches a handful of US Olympic athletes and athletes from other countries that competed at the very highest level, as well as numerous elite masters performers with her metabolic coaching that she discussed on our show. So I strongly encourage you to look her up. It’s called MAM, metabolic Analytics Maui, and all the great offering that she has on her Instagram site Fast Over 40.

Brad (02:01):
But it’s made a big impression on me because I’ve been continuing to struggle with minor injuries and setbacks that don’t seem to go away. And I wanted to have a breakthrough where I could train injury-free and really, you know, make the next level of progression toward my goals with sprinting and high jumping. It’s going great for the most part. In recent times I got the silver medal at the US Masters National Championships in the men’s 55 to 59 division in the high jump. But I see that bar raised up at the next height and I think I can do it and I wanna do it so badly. And then I go back and train and possibly training too hard, too arduously and thereby traumatizing the relevant muscle or tendon that gets tweaked. And so here I am nursing a back injury that occurred when I did a great sprint workout and then went home and decided to pull a few hexagonal deadlift reps and felt a nice, you know, strong tweak there in the lower back that takes a long time to heal at this age.

Brad (03:03):
So I said, Cynthia, I need even more help from you. I’ve been consulting with you for so long, and I turned over my precious training log information and she pulled out some really strong and amazing insights. And that’s the impetus for the show. And one of them is that I don’t take enough true rest and recovery days. So you’ll look through my training log and it says Recovery day bike ride, 45 minutes to the Farmer’s Market <laugh>. And I’m getting the pushback from Coach Cynthia here saying, what is that? Is that a rest and recovery day or not? And I think the big insight that comes out that the more you know, refined and lofty your goals are, the more focused you have to become, obviously. So you see the athletes at the highest level, the Tour de France rider are not in the gym trying to set new personal bests in the power lifting categories, nor are they playing flag football on the weekends with their families or trying to enter an open water swim event.

Brad (04:00):
They are pedaling their bike and they’re sleeping, eating. And when I was a triathlete, I had to dedicate all of my energy in my life really to swimming, biking, and running as a dramatic example of, you know, how much you have to dedicate to be at the highest level. I’m gonna assume most listeners have goals that are more relating to general overall fitness, anti-aging, feeling great, being, a healthy weekend warrior, being able to engage with your kids, your grandkids, stuff like that. So that warrants a more broad based approach. But if I’m gonna put out my stated goals of really being competitive in masters track and field, I have to narrow my focus a little bit. And one thing I realized was that my speed golf ambitions kind of had to go on the back burner because speed golf is essentially an endurance competition.

Brad (04:49):
You’re running five miles across a golf course, typically that’s around the distance at a tempo pace, you know, an anaerobic threshold pace. So it’s a very challenging endurance experience. And when you’re practicing and playing a lot of speed golf, you’re basically training like an endurance athlete. And I realized several years ago that it was just too much for me to be trying to prepare for track meets and jump over the high jump bar and then turn around and also dabble in speed golf. So I’ve been trying to focus on the track aspect as my most prominent goals here, but still in the background, it’s hard for me to shake this endurance mentality, I suppose. And therefore you see me out here on easy/recovery days riding my bike 45 minutes, or you know, I’ll take the dog out for a jog and I’ll be jogging for 15 or 20 minutes.

Brad (05:41):
And also doing my sprint drills and getting some good pushback there too, where Cynthia explains that, you know, when I’m stimulating the aerobic system for a training effect such as a comfortably paced jog or comfortably pace bike ride, that is the essence of the foundation of enduring, enduring training is building that aerobic base. However, if I’m wanting to be a sprint, a power explosive athlete, a jumper and a sprinter, you know, dedicating that time and that energy to developing the aerobic system is going to come at the expense of the best way to develop the anaerobic system and the explosive muscle fibers and the tendons and connective tissue resiliency that you need to be someone who can practice high jump on a regular basis and practice sprinting. So this is where we are gonna have to make a compromise, right? If you want to be, you know,a dedicated extreme endurance athlete and complete the ultra marathon or the the Ironman triathlon distance, you’re going to be be putting all of your energy into that.

Brad (06:49):
However, I’m gonna argue that if you want to be just that all around fit person that I described, I think what we see most fitness enthusiasts are way heavily weighted to the cardio side and usually highly deficient on the explosive high intensity side. Unfortunately, as we age, what we lose at a greater rate, a significantly greater rate are the fast twitch muscle fibers and the anaerobic competency. So as we age, if your goals are general fitness competency and longevity, you want to prioritize, or I will suggest that you want to prioritize or, or greater emphasize doing brief explosive, high intensity type movements and not dedicating all your energy or especially an excess amount of energy toward your aerobic conditioning. And don’t even get me started on chronic cardio that Mark Sisson and I talk about where you’re doing too much endurance training and suffering from a smattering of adverse health consequences, especially hormonal immune musculoskeletal breakdown and just that fatigue and that burnout that is so commonplace in the endurance community, multi-sport community.

Brad (08:10):
So with that general anti-aging goal, I’m going to propose that you slow down and kind of back off from the volume of endurance training that you’re doing in favor of throwing in some brief explosive high intensity sessions. And we’ve talked about this for so many years with the primal approach where you wanna do a couple proper strength training sessions a week, maybe a true all-out sprint session once every seven to 10 days. That’s The Primal Blueprint fitness pyramid. And then of course the foundation of frequent low-level movement, but at the correct heart rate so that it’s not too strenuous, and that’s at or below the fat max heart rate, which is defined as 180 minus your age in beats per minute. What’s happening unfortunately, especially in the endurance scene, is the enthusiast is routinely exceeding that very comfortable pace going beyond fat max heart rate and getting that chronic cardio stimulation where you routinely suffer from breakdown, burnout, illness, and injury.

Brad (09:10):
And we have the shocking data from the running community where around 50% of regular runners are injured every single year from a disastrously flawed approach that is characterized by running at a pace that is a slightly to significantly too strenuous and also exhibiting poor form because of poor overall musculoskeletal conditioning. So, you know, tone things down. If you’re an endurance enthusiast or a regular guy who jogs a couple few miles several days a week and goes to the gym and touches a few weights once in a while, you’re gonna get a lot more payoff from putting more energy into strength training. And then introducing things like brief explosive all-out sprints. I’m not expecting you to head out right now and to do the high impact running sprints on sprints on flat ground, however you can get going by doing low or no impact sprint exercises such as on a stationary bicycle or running up a steep hill or a steep staircase where the impact load is minimal or inconsequential, and you can become good at sprinting and then eventually transition to running wind sprints on flat ground and then real sprints someday, because that’s gonna give you the best benefits for fat reduction.

Brad (10:28):
And bone density is running high impact sprints on flat ground, but it takes a while to accommodate to that. But in the meanwhile, for example, if you’re someone who routinely gets on a stationary bike and pedals for 45 minutes looking at the, the TV screen or going to a class and doing those types of workouts, you can get a vastly better return on investment with less downside risk by turning that workout into a sprint session. And I’ve talked about my CAROL bike before, that’s the artificial intelligence logical stationary bike that programs your workouts and learns from experience how much resistance to give to you when you’re doing sprints. But the CAROL protocols, uh, only last for like eight to 12 minutes. And so you’ll do a session like a couple few minutes warmup, an all-out sprint for 20 seconds as as much power as you can put out, uh, a few minutes of recovery, another all-out sprint of 20 seconds, a couple few minutes of cool down, and the workout is over in eight to 12 minutes.

Brad (11:24):
And it seems silly the way we’ve been programmed, like what do you mean a 12 minute workout? That’s it. But these workouts are very, very challenging and deliver phenomenal fitness benefits in a short time. Another one I like to do on the CAROL program, and of course you don’t need the fancy bike, you can do it on any stationary bike, but it’s eight seconds of sprinting, 12 seconds of recovery, eight seconds of sprinting, 12 seconds of recovery. And you do that 30 times in succession. So I think that’s a six minutes or no 12-minute session. And boy is it challenging and a great fitness adaptations. You get really fit in cycling with literally a 12 minute workout, couple minutes of pedaling on either side to warm up and cool down. So that’s what I want to encourage you to consider is some harder shorter duration, but really explosive workouts.

Brad (12:15):
And that of course means strength training, but also sprinting. And as a consequence, perhaps if you’re immersed in those chronic patterns, taking recovery or easy days, like I am now instructed to by Coach Cynthia. And so she wants me to take, and this is just a personal example of three rest days per week where I’m not doing much of anything, just walking, which is the foundation of recovery, of leading a healthy, active lifestyle and not putting yourself at risk of overstress or delayed recovery in my case. So that’s something that has already delivered phenomenal benefits, and I can tell just, just from, you know, trying this for a short time that things like my nagging foot injury, even with one day off, so let’s say a 48 hour break from a hard workout on Monday morning, like a sprint session or drills or strength training or whatever, where I’m really challenging the Achilles tendon that I’m rehabbing and then not getting back to anything till Wednesday.

Brad (13:15):
It feels great with that 48 hour break, but if I even do such things as easy jogging, easy pedalling, and dabbling in fitness every single day, the thing seems to be more nagging and there and a little hot and lit up. You might know from these characterizations if you’ve had long-term nagging injuries. So rest is really, really important as you integrate the very, very important brief explosive anaerobic type efforts. If you are feeling insecure or uncertain about, for example, slowing down your pace from a jog to a walk or taking days off. If you have evolved athletic goals like I do, and I need those days off in order to continue to escalate my performance when I’m pushing myself hard, let me suggest that you most likely already have an A-plus in cardio if you’re a generalized fitness enthusiast who goes and does those jogs a few days a week and goes to the gym.

Brad (14:14):
Because remember, all types of exercise, all types of muscular demand stimulate the cardiovascular system. So when I do a sprint workout, like three times, three times 60 meters, right? So nine times 60 meters, that’s covering very little overall distance, but I’m doing it sometimes at 92%, 95% of my max, maybe 85% of my max, a very short duration workout with only a total of what nine times 60 is 540 meters. That’s only a lap and change. But I am getting a fantastic cardiovascular training effect to the extent that it carries over into me being competent for doing my crazy occasional all day hikes. Like I talk about Cactus de Cloud in Palm Springs, or hiking Mauna Kea, which, you know, I’m out there for hours exercising at a slow pace, but I feel great due to my commitment to sprinting. I’m not practicing over and over and over to take a nine-hour hike on the steepest trail in the United States of America, but somehow I can do it because when you get competent sprinting, it makes you competent at all lower levels of exercise intensity in a profound manner.

Brad (15:29):
Whereby, and the research supports us very strongly that even a few minutes of near maximum effort delivers fitness benefits that are equal to, or in many ways better than workouts lasting, you know, 10 or 20 times as long. So an hour walk is great for your fitness, for your conditioning, for your aerobic system, your muscles and joints, but a six-minute sprint is going to bypass the health benefits and the fitness benefits of that hour walk very easily. These are kind of, you know, big picture suggestions here, not perhaps it’s something that you’re gonna just trade and you’re never gonna go easy again. You’re just gonna sprint because you need the aerobic conditioning base in order to absorb and benefit from the high intensity exercise. So they go hand in hand. But what I want you to get away from is that medium difficulty workout that you’re doing on a regular basis day after day in the name of fitness thinking that it’s getting you fit.

Brad (16:27):
And I’m even going to put myself here in the mix because that easy 45-minute bike ride to the farmer’s market and back very likely compromise my ability to recover from the sprint workout that I describe. And I do all kinds of different sessions and sets on the track that are related to my particular sprinting goals, but to just dabble in it and get slightly competent sprinting, there’s some short duration sprints, are gonna deliver massive fitness breakthroughs, vastly superior to your dedication to going out there and jogging at a medium to difficult pace for a couple few miles several days a week. And then same with dabbling in weights. I would love for you to continue to escalate your commitment to strength training so that you’re putting up bigger numbers when you’re using the machines or you’re just feeling better and getting stronger and looking better.

Brad (17:16):
Of course, your body composition and your physique is gonna respond much more dramatically to gaining competency and strength training versus getting out there and running more weekly mileage or picking up your pace a little bit from a walk to a brisk walk. So that’s a great foundation for leading an active, energetic, healthy, happy lifestyle, getting outside and walking, but you gotta push yourself. You gotta do the explosive efforts. If you want to truly get the anti, the maximum anti-aging benefits and going hand-in-hand with that is you might find yourself requiring more rest, true rest and recovery time. And you heard me talk for many years about my Brad Kern’s morning routine where I got up and the first thing I did was hit the deck and do this exact sequence of flexibility, mobility, and strengthening exercises. It took about 40 minutes.

Brad (18:11):
I have a whole online multimedia educational course about it, developing the ultimate morning routine. It’s called, you can see it on brad kearns.com. And it’s a, it’s a great way to just get your day started on a positive note and really build a resiliency base so that you can tackle more advanced and more difficult athletic challenges. However, after doing it every single day without a break for six years, I realized that I had to evolve to the next level of my fitness journey because the routine got to be so ambitious that it was potentially compromising my recovery from the workouts that were escalating in degree of difficulty in the areas of sprinting and high jumping. So I now traded that in for a much shorter basic wake up mobility exercises where I go through some foot and some foot mobility and some basic yoga moves before I, you know, leave the bedroom.

Brad (19:11):
I just hit the deck and do a very simple thing that takes maybe five or 10 minutes instead of 40 minutes. And then I will step into the varying parameters of my weekly training schedule. So some days I’m just gonna unleash up the dog and walk around the block, and that’s my morning exercise instead of this ambitious 40 minute routine that I did every day for six years. And then other days I’m gonna go to the track and I’m gonna really be pushing the limits of my fitness capabilities whereby I will require a complete rest day afterward. So I’m gonna ask you where you stand on these spectrums here. If you’re kind of leading a lifestyle that’s too much inactivity and your fitness pace is really poor, I would strongly encourage you to integrate a morning routine where you were getting some work done every single day and conditioning those muscles and joints and tendons whereby you can go be a weekend warrior and, and tackle some interesting challenges.

Brad (20:09):
But, you know, get some habits going where exercise is the first thing you do every single day. And from there, if you’re kind of trending toward my example where I wasn’t taking true rest days and I had an endurance mentality applied to sprinting and high jumping goals, that’s not going to work either. So this is Brad reporting in that you will see me on certain days of the week not doing much in the way of fitness and stimulating the energy systems and instead resting, doing some mild stretching and of course, walking as the foundation of healthy, active, energetic lifestyle. And it feels really great and hope that gives you some, some, some value where you can kind of rethink the approach to whatever goals you’re pursuing. But again, speaking to that general audience, if you have basic, broad-based functional fitness longevity goals, you’re gonna have to push yourself really hard at times to stimulate those fast twitch muscle fibers. They’re lost very easily through aging, unlike the aerobic fibers and thereby consider taking more rest. So go hard, go home, get out of that middle ground where you’re just kind of putting in hours and getting tired. And let me know how that works. Let me know some comments, questions, feedback, love to talk about this subject more and I’ll report back further too. Thanks for listening. Watching podcast@bradventures.com is where you email to connect. Thank you.

Brad (21:43):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email podcast@bradventures.com and visit brad kearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.