This is EPISODE 1 of the HOW TO TRAIN series. We kick off this series by discussing something that matters, or should matter to all of us… Basic Health & Wellness.
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Transcript
The following transcript is AI generated, so please excuse any errors:
Gary McGowan:
Hello and welcome to the Triage Method podcast with me Gary McGowan and my co-host Mr. Patrick Farrell. I’m recording from a bit of a weird place in Portugal. You won’t recognize this background if you’re a usual watcher of the podcast. Average podcast watcher, unreal. We love to see it. Paddy, how are you?
Paddy:
I am positively splendid, Gary. Fantastic, even. I am a little unsure why you said that Portugal was a weird place, but we’ll take it. You know, all our Portuguese followers now are like, all right, that guy’s a dickhead. But look, we’ll leave it.
Gary McGowan:
No, I’m very, very pro Portugal. It’s just a little bit, you know, out of the normal for me.
Paddy:
Well, you know, you can try to backpedal, but you did just say that Portugal is a weird place. Anyway, look, we’re not here to talk about Portugal being a weird place, because I think it’s personally actually quite a nice place. We’re here to talk about something else. We’re starting a new series this episode going forward. And what does that carry?
Gary McGowan:
This is the first episode of the series, How to Train, and specifically how to train for X. So insert goal in place of X. Today we’re gonna talk about basic health. So the areas of most importance for those who just want to be healthy, who just want to preserve their health long term and promote health long term. Then what we’ll do is we’ll begin to transition into more specific goals. For example, bodybuilding, powerlifting, then specifically maybe training your chest, training your legs, all these different types of things. And then at the end of it, you either as a trainer or as an individual should have a solid idea of how to approach your training for each of these respective goals.
Paddy:
Yeah, because if you actually try to search online, you know, as you do, that’s where most people get their information these days. Like it’s actually quite hard to just get the like bullet points of, oh, this is my goal. What are the broad strokes of how I should train for that? You know, like you get all this like, it’s really hard because it’s like, you get all this like generic like, oh, you should go to the gym. It’s like, okay, cool, I understand that, right? Or you get this like incredibly in-depth fucking article or whatever video on the topic and you’re like well this is not specific to me well it’s kind of close to my goal it’s not my specific goal right you can’t really find those kind of broad strokes of like these are the things you should be thinking of this is like how you kind of think about setting things up you can use that framework or those principles to then create a tailored plan for what you have going on you know you can’t really find that very easily online. Like obviously for some goals, it’s a little bit easier to find, but for other goals, you get what I often call, or what we often call protocols. Like you don’t get principles, right? You get like, oh, here’s your four day per week training program to train for health, you know? And well, that’s fine. That’s good. You know, if you have four days to train, there you go. You just stumbled across the plan that might be able to help you, right? But what if you only have three days available to train? Now the plan, the protocol is not good for you. But if you understood the principles that went into designing that protocol, then you can create a plan, a protocol for you. So that’s kind of what we wanna cover. And like Gary said, we wanna go into a few different goals that we commonly see. Some of them are a little bit more niche. Some other ones are a little bit more, there’s a lot of people that are training for that goal. and like for example health like I would argue that a lot of people are training to improve their health and But we’ll get into it as we go through the series and as always guys if any of you do have Any specific goals or you know thoughts or comments or whatever that you’re training for and you want us to cover then by all means? Reach out and you know let us know what you’re actually looking to hear on the podcast
Gary McGowan:
And with that said, the primary goals within the topic of health would be to optimize one’s body composition, to improve cardiovascular fitness and to build muscle size and strength. So if you can achieve three of those things through your training over the lifespan, you will have much better health, much better quality of life and also likely better longevity. So these are the things that you want to focus on. And obviously nutrition and other variables have a… strong impact here, particularly with body composition. But training also plays an important role. And if you have your training roughly in alignment with these principles, you’ll be in a very good place. OK, so when we say optimize body composition, obviously we’re talking about two different things there, really, which are maintaining a lower body fat and then obviously a higher percentage of muscle mass. Other things then obviously would be having a higher bone mass. That would be good, too. And all of these. come from the same inputs more or less. Improving your cardiovascular fitness, we’re talking there about just the kind of general quality of having higher cardio respiratory fitness. That could be achieved through many different methods, but again, what we’re coming to is this common idea of if you improve your cardiovascular fitness long term, you’re going to have better health. So whether that’s from skiing, whether it’s from cycling, whether it’s from swimming, running, whatever it happens to be, once you have that improvement in the outcome, your health is going to be better over the long term. And the same thing goes then for building muscle size and strength. You don’t need to be a powerlifter. You don’t need to be a bodybuilder. You just need to have a practice that encourages a higher level of muscle mass and strength than the average person in the population over the long term. It doesn’t mean that you need to be bodybuilder or powerlifter spec. I think sometimes people get a little bit confused by that. They think, oh, well, I need to be gaining muscle for my health. When in fact, the threshold of muscle gain and strength gain is probably a bit lower than your average power lifter in the gym.
Paddy:
Yeah, 100%. And I think it’s really important, again, with any of these lessons, podcasts, that we’re doing to just be very clear on the goals, because while we’re giving you generic goals here in terms of these are the things that you would focus on if you were trying to optimize health. Now, obviously, there are hundreds, potentially thousands of other things that you could focus on, but these are the big hitters, right? You wanna optimize your body composition, that’s gonna look different for everyone, but that’s one of the goals. Improve your cardiovascular fitness, again, it’s going to look different for everyone, but that’s a broad goal. And then improving your overall muscle size and strength, muscle function, that’s a goal. They’re good to understand in the broad strokes, but they’re also both specific to certain populations, like certain populations are going to need different targets for what optimal body composition is. cardiovascular fitness is or whatever, right? But then also they have to be individual, right? And this is very nuanced based on your background, based on what you need to optimize, what specific things, health conditions or whatever, you are more inclined towards. So there is a huge degree of nuance and individualizing of this stuff, but we still just wanna give you the broad strokes, the things to focus on. But if you come to this and you’re like, look, I was basically a, I don’t know, competitive athlete for my whole life, my cardiovascular fitness, like my VO2 max is in the top like fucking 1% tile, you know, it’s just like, it’s through the roof, you know? Like focusing excessively on that is probably not going to be a game changer for you, you know? So you might be able to then do a little bit less training towards that than we’re recommending. Whereas you might be like, well, my actual muscle size or my strength or muscle function or whatever is actually quite poor. So I need to dedicate more time to that versus the other things, right? So even though we’re giving you these kind of basic outlines or we will in a second, you still need to individualize this to yourself based on your situation. Would you agree with that, Gary?
Gary McGowan:
I absolutely would. Yeah, and that’s something to ask yourself, what do I have already in good capacity? You might be someone that is just naturally more well-muscled, you naturally have a good bit of strength. Maybe you work on a farm or construction or something like that, and you’re actually getting a lot of resistance training without even realizing it. So the priority for you for health, purely just health, wouldn’t be to be start going to the gym five days per week until it waits. You might get some benefit from it for sure, and we’d encourage it, but it’s… probably not the biggest lever when it comes to your health. So with that said, the guidelines that we talk about then when it comes to exercise for health can be broken down into three very simple areas. So there would be your resistance training, which looks like generally somewhere between two to four gym sessions per week. Your cardiovascular training, which generally looks like 120 plus minutes of cardio per week, of aerobic cardio. the recommendations begin to vary as we talk about different intensities and we get into that but we don’t need to worry about it too much. And then we’ve got about 7,000 plus steps per day. That’s 7,000 number you’re like, hold on people always say 10,000, what’s the 7,000 about? And that’s kind of really just looking, generally speaking, at the inflection point where maybe some of the health benefits start to plateau a little bit from doing more steps. You see it in and around there but it’s also really difficult to say because you know it varies depending on. how much cardio and how much the weight training you’re doing already. So if you’re not doing much of that, we’d actually recommend doing more steps. If you’re doing loads of that, we’d recommend doing less steps. So generally speaking, you want to be active, you want a generally active lifestyle with plenty of steps, or you might have physical labor that takes care of that, but a general active lifestyle is something that we always.
Paddy:
Yeah, and I think that’s really important to understand again, what are the kind of basic guidelines, the things that we’re aiming towards to reach the goals. It’s like, okay, well, if we need to improve body composition and improve our muscle size and strength and everything, we’re probably gonna need to do some sort of resistance training, right? So that’s one bucket. And then if we’re gonna improve our body composition, improve our cardiovascular fitness, we’re probably gonna need to do some specific cardiovascular training, right? So that’s another bucket. But then to just improve all of those things it’s something that’s really highly correlated with healthier populations is we just need to be generally active, right? And tracking your steps is a good proxy for that. Excuse me, it’s a good proxy for that, but it’s not all encompassing. Like you said, I don’t care if your steps are 2000 per day. Like if you have this hard manual labor job where you’re like, I’m just, I’m very active. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a proxy. You know, it’s like, you’re not gonna get extra benefits, well potentially maybe you are, but you’re not necessarily gonna get extra benefits from having this hard manual labor job and then trying to layer on 7,000 plus steps on top of that. You know, it’s like, there’s a certain threshold point where like, yeah, you might see some small benefits, but the return on investment is much lower, you know? So this is why we’re talking about these kind of basic guidelines, right? So those are kind of three buckets. We’re like, we can do some sort of resistance training. We need to do some sort of cardiovascular training. And then we need to just generally be active, right? If you can take all of those things, cool, right? We can end the podcast here. We can go, right, you now know how to train for health. That’s it, right? Very straightforward, right? And that’s what we wanna give you with these episodes. We’re not gonna end the podcast here, but that’s what we wanna give you with these episodes. It’s like, right, these are the things to focus on. These are the big, big items. You get these dialed in, happy days. You’re sorted, right? how that looks for you, it’s gonna be different. And that’s where we kind of get into some of the nuance and some of the specifics, which we’ll get into now. So if we use those big buckets of things, the gym, right? So if we have to do some sort of resistance training, probably the most effective way to go about that is to go to a gym, right? Use the resistance machines, the weights, the whatever they have there to do some resistance training, right? That’s obviously going to look different for different people depending on what they have available to them, what they have access to, but it’s not the only way. You could also get resistance training to a degree from other things like you could be doing, I don’t know, like the guy said earlier on, like manual labour. It could be the stimulus you need to build muscle, build strength, build size, build function. It could be, I don’t know, maybe you do gymnastics or something where it’s like you’re using your body weight as the resistance. It’s not just a gym, right? That’s the first thing to understand. But having said that, the gym is probably the most convenient for most people and it’s probably the most effective from a time perspective for most people. Like you can go to 24 hour gyms in a lot of places these days. You can basically go to the gym at any time. Obviously again, it depends on what’s in your area, et cetera. Like that’s not everywhere. But even having said that, most gyms, they’re probably opening at like six o’clock in the morning. They’re closing at like 11 p.m. at night. So it’s like, you have a large time window that you can get to the gym. So that makes it very convenient for most people. And then also, there’s no set class structure, if you will. And that’s good and bad. Most people are somewhat conscientious. So if they know they have like, oh, I have to be there for the six o’clock class, like… they’re more likely to be on time and to make it to the gym and whatever. That’s a pro but also it is a bit of a con. But one of the things that is a pro of going to the gym is that you can go like time independent. It doesn’t matter if you show up at a quarter past six or twenty past or twenty two minutes past. It doesn’t matter. You can go when you have time to go. So that’s why the gym is very effective for people in this day and age because they have busy lives etc etc. You know? But as I said. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a gym. It could be like resistance classes. Like you could do some sort of like circuit training classes, some sort of like, you know, body pump and those kinds of type of classes. Like, are they the most effective? You know, maybe not, but we’re just looking for some sort of resistance training for the body, right? That’s kind of the target, right? Now, again, there are more or less effective ways to go about that. And we’re gonna get into what we think is a slightly more effective way, but at the end of the day, you are the one that has to do this stuff, you’re the one that has to actually go to the gym or do the training, so you better make sure that you actually enjoy it. You better make sure that it’s something that you can be consistent with, because health, you’re hopefully gonna live 90 plus years of age, so this is stuff that you’re gonna need to be doing for a lot, a lot of your life. A large percentage of your overall life is going to be spent doing some sort of training. You know, it just is, it just is the way it is, you know? So anyway, Gary, what do the gym sessions look like? Because everyone’s gonna have a different kind of schedule that they can adhere to. I know I have a lot of clients that, you know, they’re just interested in improving their health and maybe they can only get to the gym like two days per week. I have other clients that can get there like three days per week. Other clients, again, that can go like four plus times per week, you know? So how would we kind of think about first initially setting off? a program for two days per week, three days per week, four days per week, you know? Because I want people to be able to come away from this and go, okay, so they might not have taught me the exact program to do, but I kind of get an idea of how to do things.
Gary McGowan:
Yeah. So firstly, you said there’s, there’s no class structure in the gym. And I was, his view, all I was thinking was the proletariat coming into the gym, mixing with the bourgeoisie. That’s true. And then I thought,
Paddy:
Which is also true. A 200 kilo squat, is a 200 kilo squat.
Gary McGowan:
Which is also true, all equal when it comes to the iron. Then I was thinking, yeah, for the listeners, we use. We use this software that gives us like AI clips from the podcast, just like gives us generated topics and stuff like that. So I’m praying that they give us what you didn’t know about the maxis structure of the gym.
Paddy:
Karl Marx and class structure in the Gym.
Gary McGowan:
Anyway, so yeah, now that we’ve said the name, it’ll be even better. So that was the first thing. And the second thing is that surprisingly, well, not surprisingly, really, it makes sense because health is a really precise goal. there isn’t actually really much evidence telling us what the best workouts, best gym structure, optimal volume for health is. Okay, so we’re very much talking about here coming from a very loose position with the evidence and trying to apply it practically. So when you look at the synthesis of the evidence, for example, from the World Health Organization or the ACSM, if you look at their guidelines, you’ll see at least two gym sessions per week or two resistance training. sessions per week, training all major muscle groups. That’s about as specific as it gets, okay? So obviously you could be doing four sessions of benefiting, you could be doing six sessions of benefiting. If you have a very low level of training, you can do one session of benefit. So what we’re talking about here is what’s most practical across the lifespan. And what we’d want to see at least really is that you’re getting to the gym at least twice per week, okay? That would be the starting point. And if you’re just going twice per week, something like a full body workout. on each day would be fantastic. So that would be a full body workout where you’re training your upper body pushing muscles, your pulling muscles, you’re doing your lower body, you’re doing everything in one session. It doesn’t mean you have to focus on every muscle group like isolating your rear delts and stuff, but you know you’re pressing overhead, you’re doing some sort of horizontal press, you’re doing a roll, you’re doing a pull down, you’re doing some sort of squat or lunge variation, et cetera. Okay, so you’re covering all your major bases in each of the respective sessions with some variance between the two. If you can get to the gym more than that, then you could do something like three full body sessions, or you could do an upper session, a lower session, and then one full body session. So if you have three days, you have a bit more flexibility as to how you begin to structure that. And then if you have four days, you have more flexibility again. Something like a four day upper lower, where you do upper lower, upper lower, could be wise. And the reason that we put it in that manner is not necessarily that you need to train everything twice per week for health, okay? That’s… not really that important, but that if you’re aiming for a significant amount of volume, like for example, let’s say you actually want to actively grow your legs and you need to get 12 sets for quads, for example, doing that across two sessions is going to be more productive than trying to squeeze it all into one session, okay? Because it’s just a lot to be doing in one session. So that’s the way the sessions would loosely look. But again, for health, it really is about starting. where you’re at. So if you’ve done nothing up to now, you’ve never been in the gym, getting there once per week is going to benefit you. Even if it’s 15 minutes, it’s going to benefit you. Ideally, we’d like to see at least twice per week. I think that’s the minimum for some significant progress that would take us into the level of having significantly more muscle mass and strength and thus having those health benefits. Very broadly speaking, what you’d like to see is somewhere between six and 20 sets per body part per week. So for example, if we’re thinking about the quads, let’s say we’re getting 10 sets per week, that would be maybe three sets of squats in your first day and two sets of leg extensions. And then in your second day, you have three sets of leg press and two sets of lunges. That would bring you to 10 sets that train your quads. Okay, so you’re somewhere within that window. Again, the same principle applies. Lower volume is gonna benefit you more at the beginner stage. As you become more advanced, you’re going to need more volume, but that becomes more of a concern. as it relates to maximizing your muscle mass as opposed to health. Because by the time you get to the point where you genuinely need 20 hard sets per muscle per week to keep developing, you’re probably not gonna gain much more health. You’ve probably pretty well muscled and pretty strong at that point already relative to the general population. And then the next variable would be the reps that you train or the rep ranges that you use. Somewhere between six to 15 reps is practical. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t. gain muscle and strength from less, of course you could. Doesn’t mean you couldn’t gain muscle and strength from more, of course you could. But from a practical perspective, six to 15 reps is where most sets should be most of the time. And ideally getting somewhere close to failure to the point where you have between one and three reps in reserve most of the time. What that means is that if you’re doing 100 kilo squat and your max is 12 reps, that you’d stop somewhere between nine and 11 reps. which would be one, two, three reps in reserve, meaning that you have a bit left in the tank to repeat that on the next set and not be sore going into the next session. The harder you push per set, if you’re pushing all the way to failure all the time, you’re going to be more fatigued, you’re going to find it more difficult to recover, and potentially, especially if your technique isn’t good already and you haven’t mastered it, you may be at higher risk of injury as well, especially if you’re on an exercise where you could fall over or have some sort of catastrophic injury if you fail the rep. And then as we already mentioned, you want to train all major muscle groups. Okay, so just generally having a strong muscular body is a good thing. You can still have preferences within that framework. You know, maybe you want to work more on legs. You want to work more on upper body. That’s fine. But ideally you train all major muscle groups. An example of where that would be important would be, let’s say you’re getting into your later years and you have a fall. If you have a fall and you’ve never trained your legs and you’ve got weaker legs. Maybe you don’t have the strength to stop yourself or you have weaker bones and you’re more likely to get a fracture. Similarly, if you’ve never trained your upper body but you have trained your legs and now you fall over and you put your hand out, now you don’t have the strength in your upper body to support yourself and you get a fracture in the upper body. Okay, so that’s just an example as to why it would be important to train the whole body even from a basic health perspective.
Paddy:
Yeah, 100%. And I think it’s really important as well to keep in mind that when we’re talking about resistance training, what we’re really focusing on with that is what we often call like progressive, can’t even fucking speak, progressive resistance training, right? So the focus is on making progress, right? So you’re not just going in and just kind of going through the motions and going, oh yeah, like I did a resistance training session. Like, yeah, that’s fine. You’re still gonna get some benefits from that, especially like more metabolic benefits from like contracting your muscles. all that kind of stuff, right? But if we’re actually looking to build more muscle, build more strength, build more function, size, et cetera, right, we do need to focus on slowly doing more over time, right, and that can look different for different people, you know, or depending on the exact goal, but for most people, practically speaking, you know, set your volume in terms of how many sets you’re gonna do, pick a certain rep target, you know, maybe it’s like six to eight reps, and then. slowly try to increase the weight that you use over time. It doesn’t need to be every single week. For most people, once they’re outside the first six months to a year, it’s not going to be every single week that they make progress on their strength or whatever. But we do wanna see that slow trend towards heavier weights. Now, some people don’t necessarily like, you might be a little bit hesitant to increase the weight, but what you can do in that case is use a kind of progression model where you add reps. So you might choose the rep target of like 6-8 reps for this exercise and you might do 3 sets of 6. I don’t really want to go heavier but I could definitely do maybe another rep. So you do a set of 6, a set of 6 and then a set of 7. And then you slowly build all of those up until you’re doing 3 sets of 7. And then you go okay now I’m going to do 2 sets of 7. and one set of eight. And you slowly build it up until you’re done three sets of eight. And then you increase the weight. So it’s just, you wanna make these small improvements over time because that’s what’s actually going to drive the strength gains, the muscle gains, the overall function, right? Obviously, when we’re talking about the entire lifespan, there’s gonna come a time where, despite your best efforts, there’s probably gonna be some sort of functional decline. Like you’re not seeing many 70 year olds benching the same weight that they were benching when they were in their twenties and they were a athlete or whatever. I’m sure there’s some people out there. So there is probably gonna be a time in your life where there is some sort of decline, but we’re not trying to stop that, we’re just trying to delay that. we’re gonna try to delay that functional decline. It’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen to everyone. It’s just the, it’s aging. Maybe by the time we get there, they’ll have super viruses that they can infect us with that just make us live forever, which would be phenomenal. But it’s a natural part of the human life experience where you’re gonna get old, you’re gonna die. But up until that point, we can still be looking for that small, incremental progression. with our training. if you actually try to progress things in some manner, shape, or form.
Gary McGowan:
Check. And that brings us to cardio, okay? And cardio again, as we said, encompasses a couple of different things, including the basal daily activity, getting enough steps per day. And again, we don’t exactly have a threshold as to what enough is, but somewhere between, let’s say, 6,000 and 10,000 as a broad range would be a good place for most people to start aiming for, especially if you’re trying to hit some of these other targets as well, like getting to the gym and getting in supplementary cardio. And what I would say is, you know, when you start to set these step goals, it doesn’t mean that if you go over it, it’s bad, or you double it one day, it’s bad, and the next day is lower. It’s fine. It’s just a rough average that over time, you’re maintaining a generally active lifestyle. That’s all it’s serving. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. Then when it comes to your cardio training, there’s a similar component of flexibility here because what we talk about are heart rate zones or percentage of max heart rate or aerobic versus anaerobic. And what we want is that most of your cardio is aerobic. So maybe somewhere between 60 and 80% of your max heart rate. That’s the kind of point where you’re able to sustain that activity without getting super fatigued. You shouldn’t be like maximally short of breath, muscles burning, et cetera. That should be tolerable for you. So for example, if you had a 200 beats per minute max heart rate, that would be between 120 and 160 beats per minute. Again, as you get to 160, more fatigued, 120, less fatigued. Okay, so that’s where you want to be most of the time. And the thing is, that doesn’t necessitate any particular activity. So for example, when I was at home last week, more of my cardio target would have come from like formal cardio in the gym and also jiu jitsu. Okay, so that would have contributed to my overall target. This week, while I’m on holidays, I’ve been doing more swimming to reach that target. I’ve been going for long walks, especially in like hilly areas and stuff, which is achieving the same goal of getting my heart rate up. the odd jog, these types of things. Okay, so I’m adapting to my environment and still hitting the rough target of trying to improve my cardio respiratory fitness with at least two hours per week. I try to get at least three, but again, I’m a fairly well-trained individual. So I need a little bit more if I wanna keep improving that capacity. If you look at the general exercise guidelines, you’ll see between 150. 300 minutes per week of moderate intensity aerobic exercise as the recommendation. And we generally say, let’s try to get to at least two hours. And if it’s a beginner, what I’ll say, let’s aim for one to three, three hours. If we can get there and climb that range over the course of the first few months, that would be fantastic. OK, so the thing with the aerobic fitness, cardio respiratory fitness is that the threshold, the threshold of benefit or the point at which you continue to get benefit. is actually really high, like surprisingly high, as in there’s research demonstrating that up to elite levels of VO2 max, so the 97.5th percentile is the, I think the highest one that’s been studied, continues to confer health benefits, okay? So you’re talking about being fitter than 97.5% of the population and you’re still benefiting from that, okay? So that’s clearly something that is to strive for. Now that doesn’t mean that in those individuals it couldn’t be. other things like the fact that they obviously led a very healthy lifestyle and had to prioritize their sleep and their nutrition etc to get to having that high VO2 max. But the point stands that up to very high levels of A-Robby fitness, health continues to benefit. So I would recommend starting with a target of at least two hours per week. If you can get that done and you’re adapting to that over time, actually continue bumping that up if you can. I think that… the evidence is not convincing that there’s a clear upper limit, at least a practical upper limit. Like I think you do begin to unmask maybe some problems in health if you go like 15, 20, 30 hours a week like you’re an ultra endurance athlete, you might have some problems depending on the environment, other health factors, etc. But for most people I always say there’s practically no upper limit of the benefits of getting more cardio training. please continue. And then,
Paddy:
Yeah, just on that last one, it’s important to understand that it’s both the result, like the end result, like this high VO2 max, and then the actual act of training itself, right? So you’re getting benefits, even if you’re like, oh, look, I just can’t afford to do 20 hours of cardio per week, like you’re still getting benefits from the two hours that you do or the hour that you do or whatever it is, right? From just the act of doing it, even if it isn’t vastly improving your overall fitness. So there’s still benefits from the act, completely disentangled from the outcome. But there are also still benefits to be had from improving the actual outcome. VO2 max in this case or resting heart rate. So that’s important to understand. But what’s also important to understand is you don’t necessarily need to do what some other person is doing to get the same outcome. Like I know some people that just, they just have a really high VO2 max and they just don’t train, or they just have a really low resting heart rate and they just don’t train, right? So they already have the outcome, right? Now, could they get further benefits from training more? Yeah, probably, right? But it is important to understand that both of those two things, like they’re basically two vectors here that we can look to. we can look to the actual benefits we get from the active exercise, and then the actual benefits we get from the end result of the improved fitness, right? And the reason I bring that up, and it’s really important to understand, because you might be doing your two hours of cardio and looking at someone else doing 20 hours, and thinking, oh, I’m just not doing enough because I’m not doing the 20 hours that this other person is doing. But if you’re still improving the end outcome, in terms of, let’s just say, again, VO2 max, or resting heart rate. like you’re still seeing improvements in your data, like you don’t necessarily need to do more, you know? Like yeah, there potentially are benefits there to be had, but there are also potential negatives, right? None of these interventions are completely, you know, without risk, like you could be at the perfect level of volume for your body to recover from and get these specific adaptations that you’re looking for while also fitting in all the other stressors you have going on in your life. So adding in more is potentially just gonna detract. from your overall health. So it’s important to understand, but again, practically speaking, it’s not hugely relevant because most people do no cardio. So going from zero to going to one hour to two hours or whatever is probably gonna be the biggest return on investment thing that you can do rather than thinking, oh, well, should I go from two hours to three hours? Like that’s gonna be just a lower return on investment than the person that’s going from zero to two hours is getting.
Gary McGowan:
Absolutely. And that brings us to the final point, which is just in relation to anaerobic interval training, et cetera. That again, fits within this framework. Okay. So to increase your VO2 max, increase your cardio-arbitrary fitness, that can happen in zone one, zone two, as we say, with lower heart rates, or it can happen in zone four, zone five, where you have very high heart rates. The differences just come down to practical programming. So you’re obviously not going to do you know, three hours a week or at zone five, where you’re like pretty much pushing yourself maximum. Okay, it’s gonna be very difficult to recover from that. And the reason we talk about the kind of moderate intensity aerobic work so much is that it’s very easy for people to, it’s very easy for people to do. There’s not like a massive threshold for entry, either physically or psychologically, because if you’re gonna do like hard hill sprints, like that’s psychologically challenging, it’s very physically challenging. It can cross over with your resistance training. So we always just get started on, you know, doing their continuous aerobic work and then maybe some interval training, depending on time availability, facilities they have access to, their goal overall and so on. So just for health purposes, it can be time efficient. There are some differences in adaptation. So I would like to see someone do some interval work, some anaerobic work. But really where I emphasize this more would be. in athletes who need to have that anaerobic power, who need to have some differences in their adaptations for their specific sport. But I don’t really get too worried about it for the general population. I’m happy for someone to get on the incline treadmill and walk for 30 minutes and get their heart rate up to 120, 130. If we’re just talking about health, that’s not going to leave them very fatigued. It’s not something they need to get hyped up to do. So again, we’re always thinking about the practical aspects of programming here.
Paddy:
Yeah, exactly. And I’m very similar with the anaerobic stuff. I’m like, I might put in a very small amount. Like we start with the lowest dose that we could potentially need. And like I might, you know, put that in. Maybe I’ll do some like bike sprints or air bike sprints at the end of a couple of workouts. You know, if you’ve got two workouts per week and I do, OK, you’re going to do five minutes of bike sprints at the end, and they’re going to be like, I don’t know, let’s just say 10 second interval with 50 seconds recovery. We’re just starting out. So that’s still. That’s more a-lactic, but we’ll just say that’s where we’re starting out. And then we might go to, okay, we’re gonna do 20 seconds of an interval with 40 seconds recovery. And we’re gonna just do that like three to five times. It’s like literally five minutes at the end of your workouts, your two workouts per week, cool. All of the rest of your cardio is spent in that more aerobic training then. And that’s just, I’m just putting it out, that’s not necessarily what the individual listening to this needs to do. I’m just saying like, you start with the minimal, like the very bare minimum. You just want to touch into those anaerobic pathways, you know, if you can get benefits from that, happy days. If you really want to maximize them, yeah, you’re probably going to need to do more. You’re probably going to need to have specific anaerobic sessions, like again, if we are dealing with athletes or whatever, like I very often program, I’m like, okay, well we’re going to do like a 20 to 30 minute anaerobic focused session here, sprints, hill sprints, fucking whatever it is, you know, it’s like. we’re very focused on those anaerobic adaptations and maximizing them. But for the average person who’s looking to improve their health, there are potential, like there are potentially some benefits from just touching into that anaerobic system and just developing it a little bit. But you get a lot of those adaptations or those benefits I should say, from just doing resistance training. And then you also get a lot of the cardiovascular benefits from doing aerobic training, which is so much easier to do. for most people. If you’re unfit, you can go for a walk and you’ll be in that kind of zone 2 to zone 3 place if you’re just unfit. And then as you get fitter, obviously that’s going to be a lower intervention, that’s just not going to be getting you into the kind of intensity levels that we want you to be in. But you can also still just continue doing walking as your mode of cardio and just add something like a… heavier backpack or a weighted vest or something like that. You know, basically like rucking if you will, you know? Like it’s so like item or intervention independent. Like you can basically just go, well, I just have to get into this rough heart rate zone. You know, I just want to be training aerobically. How do I do it? Oh, well use whatever you actually enjoy. Swimming, cycling, go to the gym, do cardio. Like go for a hike up the mountain, whatever the fuck it is. You know, it’s like, you have so many options.
Gary McGowan:
Check, and that covers it all. Anything else to add?
Paddy:
Eh I don’t really have anything else to add. As I said, the health one is actually just a little bit easier in terms of it’s quite broad and we just want to paint the broad brush strokes with this stuff so we’re not diving into the exact nuances of like, well these are the exact protocols that I’d use. But I feel like if you’ve listened to this and you’re thinking, okay well how do I train for my health? Am I ticking these kind of boxes? You have a bit of a framework now. You kind of go, okay well what’s the main goals? What are the kind of rough guidelines or buckets I should be thinking of to achieve those goals? And then how would I actually like practically set that stuff up, you know? And that’s what we want you to get from these episodes. You know, I just want you to be able to come away and go, okay, I kind of know what to do. I kind of know how I should be thinking about training, how I should be thinking about organizing things for this specific goal, you know? And health is a very broad and specific yet unspecific goal because… We have all these different metrics that are potentially correlated with better health, but it does still have to be individualized. And when we talk about health, we have to kind of think about what we’re actually maximizing for. Like you could say, oh, we’re maximizing for longevity, but that might have different interventions than if we’re maximizing for health span, rather than like lifespan. It’s like, are we trying to be a 90 year old who can still… douche or are we trying to live to a hundred or live as long as possible but we don’t actually care about our ability to interact with the world, right? So there are obviously different specifics and whatever, this is just a broad strokes, bullet points, these are the kind of things you need to be thinking of and then the actual specifics, they’re specific.
Gary McGowan:
Absolutely and we will get to those specifics. So that’s it for this week guys. We do have coaching spaces available if anyone would like to work with us on a one-on-one capacity online. So that goes for a B goes for Patty and goes for the remainder of the triage coaching team. So there’s info in the description box below for that. The same thing goes for our nutrition certification. So that will be closing on June 30th. Okay so the first intake will finish on June 30th. If you joined before then that means you still get in on this intake and importantly, it doesn’t mean you have to finish the course before the end of the month. Okay, you’ll be able to continue with it once the intake itself closes. So if you don’t get on this one, it will be at least December or early next year when we relaunch. So if you’ve been thinking about it, now is the time to take action on that. We also have lots of other content that we put out, so make sure that you’re subscribed to the triage method newsletter. Again, that’s in the description box. It goes out every week. It’s very valuable. We get great feedback. Make sure that you’re on it. We also have our social media, a triage method on Instagram. That’s where we put out a lot of our content. We’d also find us on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, et cetera. All the usual spots. And then we also have our YouTube channel. Putting out a lot of content on the YouTube channel currently, this is content that you’re not going to find on the other platforms. You may see snippets here and there on Instagram, but we’re big believers in long form educational content. So if you want to see some of those slightly longer, more detailed videos, make sure you’re subscribed to the YouTube channel to keep up. and I think that’s everything.
Paddy:
I have nothing else to add and hope everyone got something from this and enjoyed it.
Gary McGowan:
Very good, stay well, goodbye.
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