The Show Up Fitness Podcast

Ep. 240 Bio-Energetics w/ Dr. Jacob Goodin | CSCS Accelerator

• Season 240 • Episode 3

Share episode

Send us a text if you want to be on the Podcast & explain why!

Dr. Jacob Goodin - https://www.drjacobgoodin.com/cscs-accelerator

Ever feel overwhelmed by energy systems, wondering why your clients need to know about ATP or glycolysis? Dr. Jacob Goodin cuts through the complexity to reveal how bioenergetics knowledge transforms your coaching from guesswork to precision-guided results.

The conversation begins with a clear breakdown of our three energy systems: the phosphagen system (lightning-fast but brief), glycolytic system (moderate speed and capacity), and oxidative system (slow but virtually unlimited). Dr. Goodin explains how these systems work in concert—not isolation—to fuel everything from explosive jumps to marathon runs. What makes this discussion particularly valuable is how he translates complex physiology into practical coaching insights.

Perhaps most eye-opening is the myth-busting around the "fat burning zone." While lower-intensity exercise does use a higher percentage of fat for fuel, Goodin clarifies why this approach isn't optimal for fat loss: "The most time efficient way to lose fat is to build muscle and do higher intensity exercise." This single insight could transform how you approach conditioning for weight management clients.

The podcast delivers golden nuggets about programming structure, explaining why putting cardio at the beginning of a workout compromises force production and hypertrophy gains. We learn why power and skill work should come first, strength second, accessory movements third, and conditioning last—a sequence backed by physiology rather than tradition.

What separates this conversation from typical fitness content is its balance between science and application. Goodin doesn't just explain what happens in the Krebs cycle; he shows how understanding these processes helps you design better work-to-rest ratios, choose appropriate modalities for different clients, and create training sessions that satisfy clients while delivering results.

Rea

Want to ask us a question? Email email info@showupfitness.com with the subject line PODCAST QUESTION to get your question answered live on the show!

Our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/showupfitnessinternship/?hl=en
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@showupfitnessinternship
Website: https://www.showupfitness.com/
Become a Personal Trainer Book (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Personal-Trainer-Successful/dp/B08WS992F8
Show Up Fitness Internship & CPT: https://online.showupfitness.com/pages/online-show-up?utm_term=show%20up%20fitness
NASM study guide: ...

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Show Up Fitness Podcast, where great personal trainers are made. We are changing the fitness industry one qualified trainer at a time, with our in-person and online personal training certification. If you want to become an elite personal trainer, head on over to showupfitnesscom. Also, make sure to check out my book how to Become a Successful Personal Trainer. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. Have a great day and keep showing up. Howdy everybody, and welcome back to the Show Fitness Podcast. Today we are lucky to have Mr Jacob Gooden and I screwed up by looking up his name by Doc Gooden and I got a bunch of stuff from the picture, but that's why you got Dr Jacob Gooden. So how are we doing today, doc?

Speaker 2:

I'm doing well. How are you, Chris?

Speaker 1:

I'm doing well, thank you, and I'm looking at your YouTube here. One of the most viewed ones that you have in the top five is bioenergetics, and that's something that we wanted to scratch the surface on, because it is not an easy topic to understand, especially if you do get into a textbook. You're looking at a Krebs cycle and all these ATP molecules and you're like what the hell am I reading here? It's a foreign language.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely man.

Speaker 2:

So I mean we can cover it top to bottom, bottom to top, however you want.

Speaker 2:

But it's definitely one of the harder subject matters, as you are a young trainer or young coach and you're trying to educate and level yourself up so that you can not just explain it to your clients and your athletes.

Speaker 2:

You don't want to be sort of that know-it-all like nerdy trainer, right?

Speaker 2:

They just want to get there, to get in shape or to have the outcome, or to be well-conditioned for sport, and so you have to have the understanding in order to apply nuance. Right, because we can innovate on top of a framework and on top of what is known and then be creative from there. But if you start just with your creativity and only with potentially a complete lack of understanding of the physiology, then you may still have some great conditioning sessions, you may still be able to employ good work to rest ratios from experience, but the nuance may not be there and you may not know why certain things are working, and so it's going to be a lot more trial and error, which, again, plenty of coaches have done very well, exceedingly well, without a background in physiology or even knowing what the energy systems are, but if we can know it, why not equip ourselves with those so that we can apply precise protocols in order to condition our athletes? So, yeah, do what. Should we start with the physiology of it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I mean just to start for those that are listening, I feel a lot of trainers and coaches come in kind of like with programming, if you don't master the fundamentals of the movement patterns, you're kind of just throwing shit at the wall. And you got to master those and understand them. And so I'm looking at these textbooks right now. I got ACE in front of me and literally in the back there isn't even a phosphagen system. There's one page here on ATP and how it's broken down into ADP and it can help create more ATP with creatine phosphate.

Speaker 1:

And then you go to the NASM textbook and they just have, you know, 20 pages and it's ATP. And then you got glycolysis oxidation. So kind of for the, for the person who's listening, maybe like an intro, like the fundamentals where would you start? And to you know, listen to some of the tricks that you would help better understand this. And then, more importantly, like you were saying, the, the practical, because you don't want to be explaining the Krebs cycle to a client or the Corey cycle. They're just going to look at you like you're a weirdo.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely dude. Well, I'll say the one fun thing about knowing the energy systems is you can make those offhand jokes, insider nerd jokes about them, like okay, bro, careful, you're walking too much, you're going to activate that Krebs cycle. You know, you don't want to get all aerobic on me, things like that and so, but what I would say is if you want to learn the energy systems, to level up the programming you can provide, don't start with the physiology textbook, but start with applied and then fill in, you know, kind of backfill it with a level of understanding of the physiology, because you always have to stay rooted in the in the applied sense. And so what I'll say is, starting from the surface level, we have three basic energy systems that are not used. You know one and then the other and then the other. They're not a binary on or off switch, they're all functioning all the time. We just emphasize the use of one over the other and the differences. The key differences come down to rate of ATP production versus capacity of ATP production. And remember, if you recall back to your early days in biology, or if you took an adenine fizz or whatever ATP is quote the energy currency of the cell. Really, it gets everything done in the body, and so we convert food into energy, we release that energy from food and then it goes towards re-synthesizing ATP. So ATP can be used like a monetary exchange system to get work done. And the three energy systems are the three ways of re-synthesizing this ATP, replenishing our bank account so that we have more energy to go do stuff.

Speaker 2:

Now, depending on how quickly you need to expend that energy. Well, we're going to tap into the various systems, and so, from fastest to slowest and from lowest capacity to greatest capacity, we have the phosphagen system first, or the CPR system we were talking before we hit record and there's like a lot of names for each of these, right, the creatine phosphate system, and this is a very fast system allowing you to resynthesize ATP very rapidly. And often we also lump into that the body's own stored ATP, which lasts for just a couple seconds, very fleeting stored ATP which lasts for just a couple of seconds, you know, very fleeting. And so this system gives us ATP in vast quantities, but only for about 10 seconds, maybe up to, you know, 15 seconds. And so if we apply this, this is an all-out effort for, let's say, 100 meters.

Speaker 2:

Okay, depending on how fast or slow you might be. This is an all-out 10-second effort on the assault bike, or this is any effort, even if it's not all-out, lasting for less than 10 seconds. If I was to stand up from this incline bench that I'm sitting on and suddenly walk across the room, there's going to be a bit of an uptick in my PCR system, giving me that ATP that I need. And then the aerobic system is going to come in We'll talk about that in a second here and slowly, you know, resynthesize creatine phosphate, sort of reload that system. But any immediate action is PCR, creatine phosphate. Then from there we go to and stop me anytime, chris, if I'm getting too much in the weeds but from there we go to the glycolytic system, and we can roughly divide this into two systems the fast glycolytic system and the slow glycolytic system, or the anaerobic and the aerobic. Anaerobic meaning without the presence of oxygen, aerobic meaning in the presence of oxygen.

Speaker 2:

Right, and so the fast glycolytic system is what we use in, let's say, the 400 meters all out. 400 meters lasting anywhere from you know, if you're pretty darn fast 150 seconds to, if you're like the rest of the human population, somewhere north of 60, 70, 80, 90 seconds. Okay, so that system has more capacity than the creatine phosphate system and it's still pretty fast, but not quite as fast as far as delivery of ADP. And you'll know this because when you go try to run a 400 all out, you're not running it as fast as you're running that 100 meters all out. What's crazy is that at the elite level they're not. You know, as far as absolute time. Their a hundred meter splits are actually not that much different on the whole of it. Like you know, world record for the 400 is now in like the 43 second range, which is insane. You divide that by four and dude you're. You know those are some fast, like sub 11 second 100. That's still very, very fast.

Speaker 2:

Anyways, now that fast glycolytic system, the thing about it is in those molecular pathways there's pathways, there's a certain point where we have this molecule called pyruvate. And if you're studying for any of ACE well, I guess probably not ACE because they don't have any info on it in their book, but maybe for NASM, probably definitely for the CSCS through the NSCA. If you're studying for that, you've got to know what happens to pyruvate and why. That is a pivotal step in the sequence. And so this pyruvate molecule in the production of ATP using glucose? Right, I should have said that at the start. The creatine phosphate system does not use glucose, it uses creatine. You guys should be taking your creatine. I took mine this morning. Did you take yours, chris?

Speaker 1:

I did Wake up and start.

Speaker 2:

Yes, sir, dude love it. And so pyruvate. If you need ATP fast enough, it will be shuttled over into. It'll be turned into lactate. Okay, lactate's not bad, lactate's actually good. Your body can reuse it as fuel. The okay, Lactate's not bad, lactate's actually good, your body can reuse it as fuel.

Speaker 2:

The thing is that concurrently and in parallel with lactate production, we also have the production of hydrogen ions and other metabolites that accumulate. And that's where you feel that burning sensation in the muscles. Right, you do a set of bicep curls, you know set of 15 to 25 reps, maybe a giant set or something like that, and you're feeling the burn. Or you do a drop set or something right, or you're running that 400. You feel that bear jump on your back. At the end you feel the sort of weightiness, like there's something holding your muscles back and there's a burning sensation. That's the hydrogen ion buildup and other metabolites slowing you down. And so we can get into that later if you want.

Speaker 2:

But really that system, that fast glycolytic system, is limited to around 90 seconds at full production. If you go farther than 90 seconds in your output, in your event, whatever it is, now we're getting into the slow glycolysis and into the oxidative system. The oxidative system is the third of the systems and it can use carbohydrate, it can use fat, it can use even protein in order to create ATPs. And remember, the whole purpose of all these energy systems is to take substrates substrate meaning like things that we eat, macros, essentially and convert them into ATP. Not convert them into, but you know, like resynthesize ATP using the released energy from those things that we've eaten. And so the slow glycolysis system is is oxidation using carbohydrate or glucose, and then we also have fat oxidation and even, like I said, amino acid oxidation, which all happens under that oxidative system. Now, it's the slowest of the slow.

Speaker 2:

If you're running a marathon, you're using that primarily. If you're going for a walk, you're using that primarily. If you're sitting here talking to Chris having a great time, like I am, you're using that primarily because it doesn't supply ATP very quickly, but boy does it go for a long time. And especially because we can use fat for it. And we all have even the leanest individuals have a large amount of fat that can be utilized for this energy system.

Speaker 2:

And if you run out of fats or if, let's say, that you're fasted or very low on carbohydrate and muscle glycogen. Well, it can switch to fat and even protein oxidation. So your body says, hey, you know, we don't want to use the muscles for fuel, we want to spare that as much as possible. But in periods of extreme endurance events, long, long hikes, multi-day events or periods of survival and starvation the body's like, okay, well, we're going to have to start using this tissue because it's metabolically expensive to keep and it's packed full of these proteins that we can actually turn into ATP resynthesis fuel. And so those are the three energy systems from the fastest and lowest capacity to the sort of mid range, to the slowest energy system but with the longest capacity.

Speaker 1:

So that's when you look at some terms you may hear of in a book. You have your Corey cycle. That's going to be more with what's happening with that pyruvate, and then you get into the Krebs cycle and obviously we don't need to get into the weeds on that stuff. But that's that divide right there where Cori would be more the anaerobic aspect. Is that correct?

Speaker 2:

So yeah, the Cori system comes into play when you are actually utilizing lactate and sending it through the liver in a process called gluconeogenesis, where you take that lactate Remember I said it could be used as fuel. It's actually a good thing. Lactic acid is sort of this myth and like a byproduct from the past, you know 30 years ago and so it's really lactate that's being used as fuel and that's the core cycle. And you're absolutely correct that when you go sort of net anaerobic right Because, remember, all the systems are still in play the whole time You're still breathing, right, Oxygen is still entering the body, You're still utilizing it, even if you're anaerobically using those energy systems. And so at that point where pyruvate is being converted to lactate instead of shuttled over to the Krebs cycle in the oxidative system, you're absolutely correct that then we're going to kick into gear the Cori cycle to try to use that lactate and then also the buffering systems of the body to try to tamp down the buildup of hydrogen ions.

Speaker 1:

And if you're trying to take that CSCS, you may see a question on breaking down a glucose molecule how many net ATP that cycle? Correct me or better explain it. There will be energy being used while you break down that ATP. So technically you're at like what? Like 36 or 38 versus, you see, maybe 40 ATP generation. Is that correct or is something correct?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's some energy being used in the breakdown and I'm going to be fully honest, I don't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head. But also, it does depend on the efficiency of your mitochondria and the health there, and so there can be a little bit of loss. And so, from 31 to 36, I've seen different reported ranges right there but it's a big difference, right. So, anaerobically with fast glycolysis, it's about two. It depends on where the glucose comes from, right, if it comes from the blood glucose or the glycogen, the muscle glycogen, but it's about two ATP per glucose molecule, whereas in the oxidative system, if you're breaking that down oxidatively, you get about 30, like you said, 32 to 36 ATP, which is quite a big difference, right, but then? But what's crazy is that that rate is so important for us sometimes when we have to give those all out efforts, which we're often doing in sport.

Speaker 1:

So those most important factors, the duration and intensity, and you may be getting anywhere, just 30 to 40, let's say. But when we look at breaking down a triglyceride molecule, you're looking at you know 400 plus what? 460 molecules or something like that. So the amount is just significantly more.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and it depends on the length of that fatty acid chain right.

Speaker 2:

And so the type of triglyceride, and you know, that's where we kind of get into the weeds as far as like, what types of fats should you be feeling with?

Speaker 2:

Is it medium chain triglycerides, you know, short chain, all that kind of stuff which, again, I think, at the applied level, yeah, if you're dealing with endurance athletes, that might be something that you want to take a look at, especially fat adapted, because we have such vast stores and can create such large quantities of ATP per fat molecule.

Speaker 2:

Or is carbohydrate still the way to go, and overwhelmingly? Well, I wouldn't say overwhelmingly because it was about, you know, kind of neck and neck for a while, but now I would say the most of the evidence is pointing towards still relying on a carbohydrate for most of the fuel during something like a competitive marathon effort. However, as you go into those extreme endurance events, ultra marathons, that's where we definitely need a mixed fueling approach because the intensity is lower. But man you have to have, you have to be able to support all of the body systems over the course of a day, multiple days, whether it's in the saddle or running through the woods like a crazy person. I say that with all love towards endurance athletes because I'm a recovering endurance athlete myself, but really, marathon and below man, it's all about carbs.

Speaker 1:

And that's the great thing about nerding out on this stuff, because you can get into the weeds and as you get a better understanding for it you'll see the fads that will come out. So you hear someone say oh, you know, I want to be in the fat burning zone because on paper you're burning fat, but you don't realize that you literally don't need that much to produce a lot of those molecules. And so could you talk a little bit more, not necessarily about the misconception, but where that comes from, because people will be like oh, I'm working out too hard, my heart rate's too high, I need to be in that fat burning zone and just better help people understand what that means.

Speaker 2:

And correct me if I'm wrong, chris about 60 to 70% max heart rate, depending on the max heart rate model that you're using to calculate it. And the idea there is that if we put you on a treadmill and hook you up to a metabolic cart, your RER, or respiratory exchange ratio, is a number that we can get by measuring the expired gases that you're breathing out. So we're looking at the amount of CO2 and oxygen that you're breathing out, and so we're looking at the amount of CO2 and oxygen that you're taking in versus what you're breathing out. And those ratios, the respiratory exchange ratio and when you're burning more carbohydrate, you're actually going to be exhaling more CO2. Okay, it's easy to remember, because carbohydrates, co2, they both start with C, and so the higher that number, the greater your reliance on carbohydrate in that moment. And the sort of the highest RER numbers that we've seen and that I've seen in our lab is, you know, around 1.2. Maybe you'll get a spike up to 1.3. And so that means you're relying fully on carbohydrate. Now, if you get numbers lower than 1, you know 0.9, 0.8, 0.7, that means that you're relying to a greater extent on fat oxidation for the resynthesis of your ATP, for your energy, and so we would want to be running or working out in that zone to have a higher percent of your ATP coming from burning fat. Right, and that's kind of what people want to do when they go to the gym want to look better.

Speaker 2:

When they say toned right, we know, chris, and those listening probably know it just means bigger muscles and less fat, you know. However, the thing is, if you only focus on that, then what's happening is that, overall, the total caloric expenditure is going to be less than if you were exercising at a higher intensity, right. And so, at the end of the day, if we consider the whole organism, not just in that time point, but over the course of the day, over the course of the week, we know that the laws of physics cannot be transgressed. We can't, we can't break them. Okay, and so if you're burning, overall, more calories than you're taking in, yes, there are some after effects. There's like the neat effect and there's a.

Speaker 2:

You know your body will try to conserve energy if it's overly tired, all of that kind of stuff. But if you burn more calories than you take in, you will lose weight. And if you burn more calories per session, whether or not. You're in the fat burning zone. Whether you're burning fat in the moment or overall, the caloric expenditure is much higher. Even if it's more carbohydrate, you're going to lose more fat, and so the fat burning zone may be great, especially if you need a low impact, low fatigue, longer session.

Speaker 2:

And there's other benefits for it as well. Right, think about the mitochondrial health benefits. Think about the cardiovascular benefits of sustained lower intensity, although you know technically high intensity as far as exercise domains, but like zone two type of work, even zone one type of work, so good for your health long-term. But are you, is it the most efficient way, time efficient way to lose fat? Absolutely not. The most time efficient way to lose fat is to build muscle and at the end of that, or separate from that later in the day or earlier in the day, do higher intensity exercise and then, yes, absolutely for your heart, health and longevity and your endurance capacity, do some zone two steady state work a couple times a week as well.

Speaker 1:

So, just to give us some cliff notes, we got our gear one, as I say, our readily available ATP. We can resynthesize with creatine phosphate, which I would call gear two. Gear three is going to be fast glycolysis, and we're more aerobic with slow glycolysis, and then we have oxidation and and duration and intensity are the big things we want to take a look at here. We're never just in one, so you'd sit down. We'll be using more fat as a fuel source, but it's always like a combination. And then you'll hear some terms like ventilatory threshold. And what the hell are we talking about when you hear that? Vt1, vt2,? Can you help better explain that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. And so the ventilatory thresholds VT1 and 2 are really sort of laboratory metrics and so we use them as terms, really as surrogates, to talk about what's happening with lactate as well. And so for the general population and for athletes, they don't need to know what that stuff is for the most part, unless we have them in the lab all the time, and it becomes more relevant to them. But as practitioners, what we can understand is what's happening is the dynamics between heart rate and breathing rate and energy expenditure and power output on something like a VO2 max test. And so those different thresholds are the thresholds. If you're monitoring the outputs on the screen from the individual right they're breathing into a mask, they've got the heart rate monitor on You're actually going to see the ventilatory rate and the heart rate sort of decouple from each other. And so these two different points they're actually used more so as, like I said, estimations of the threshold, of the lactate threshold system. Some may call it the anaerobic threshold, the point at which you go from mostly aerobic ATP regeneration or resynthesis to mostly anaerobic, and so I actually think it's much simpler for trainers and for coaches to think of this in terms of lactate. And so when we think about lactate, remember that's that pyruvate molecule, whether it goes over to lactate or goes to the Krebs cycle.

Speaker 2:

When you are exercising at a steady state let's say running, because most people have gone for a run and you're con, it's a conversational pace, you know you, you don't have to take super deep breaths. You could nasal breathe, potentially and you can have a full conversation as you push a little bit faster, a little bit faster. Now, actually, it's a bit harder to sustain that conversation and we call it the talk test, right, if you can't have full sentences in your conversation. We're actually approaching the first of those so-called thresholds where lactate production is actually going to go slightly above the lactate utilization right and the lactate and hydrogen ion buffering, and so if we were to measure lactate in your blood, it's going to actually tick up a little bit to somewhere around two millimoles, you know, which doesn't really matter so much, other than if you did a lactate prick like a finger prick, it would read around two and you could sustain that pace for a while. But if you keep going it's going to get up to around three and then four millimoles. And four millimoles is really the second of those thresholds. And so if you looked at a curve with increasing intensity across this axis and as you go and you're increasing intensity and lactate is on this axis, it's going to stay the same, stay the same until you start getting to that point where it's a little bit harder to talk.

Speaker 2:

And then it gets to that point where it's like, oh dang, I don't want to say a single word, I'm just everything's kind of going into this focused effort. Right now you can still sustain it, but that's right at the threshold pace and there's different heart rates, percent heart rates and different percentages of your VO2 max, depending on how well-trained you are. But that's going to be close to around 70, maybe 80% of max heart rate and in elite athletes and well-trained athletes this can be up to a very high percentage of their VO2 max. Even that they can sustain at this lactate threshold level like 85, 90% of their VO2 max output.

Speaker 2:

And then you go above that and, chris, that's where lactate really starts to accumulate, because now suddenly you're going very anaerobic, you've crossed that threshold and you can no longer buffer it. You start to feel the buildup of those metabolites and as soon as you cross that thing, if you don't slow down. Your time is limited as far as how long you can continue to go, and so anybody who's done an endurance event and gone out too fast knows exactly what I'm talking about, because at some point that fatigue will slow you down. It becomes limited. And so for our endurance athletes, right, if they're running, let's say, a marathon, it has to be a bit slower than that pace or else they're going to flame out. If you're running a 5K, it's definitely got to be a lot higher than that pace for most of the people running it, because if you're below that you're not pushing it to as fast as you could go. Now it's very uncomfortable to go above it. But that kind of hopefully explains in more practical terms what those two ventilatory thresholds are getting at.

Speaker 1:

That's what's pretty amazing when you look at the organism and you see some phenomenal genetic freaks.

Speaker 1:

Like you know, you have Mr Kip, who's able to run a sub two hour marathon, where for me that's going to be ATP PCR running on a treadmill for 15 miles per hour, but for him his system was able to make that aerobic, which is just nuts. And another really impressive thing, talking about the talk test, you see someone who does a sprint, say 200 meters, and then just a couple seconds later they're interviewing them and they're huffing and puffing, but they're able to get words out and actually have a conversation. You talk about heart rate recoverability. Right there, that's the sign of a really healthy heart. Where you know a lot of our clients. They'll come in, walking out from the car and they're huffing and puffing, which sign which is the sign of, you know, not a really healthy heart. So could you maybe talk a little bit more about the application of some of these things, cause you'll hear things like work to rest ratio and how the trainer or coach can take this now and put it into application for their clients.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely so. When we're thinking about the different fitness levels of the clients and their ability to respond and recover from these different efforts, you're absolutely right. Whereas something that we may you know, based on our charts or our prediction, a client may need, let's say, one minute of rest, based on their one minute of work one-to-one, it may be the case that they need a much longer duration in order to be fully recovered for the next interval or segment. And so work-to-rest ratio and interval design. To me, that comes down to two things. One is going to be the desired outcome that you're trying to elicit, the stimulus and the ability of the athlete to meet that demand, and so a different athlete or different client may need a different interval design to get the same stimulus.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and here's what I mean. Let's say that you have I'll use an athlete sort of example. Let's say that you have a distance runner and you have a soccer player. Both of them are, you could say, endurance athletes. Let's say that you have a distance runner and you have a soccer player. Both of them are, you could say, endurance athletes. Let's say that the distance runner is a middle distance runner, more like a miler or 5k, and so they're going to actually have somewhat similar, similarly developed aerobic systems. The difference is that the soccer athlete is all repeat sprint ability, speed endurance, so to speak and the distance athlete is much more continuous, right, they don't stop and walk during their event and they go at a consistent pace. Now that distance athlete is not going to respond as well as a soccer player to something like suicides or a beat test or the yo-yo test or something where they're doing starts and stops, accelerations, decelerations, changes of directions, slightly higher intensity running, with recovery that's either standing around or jogging. Now distance athletes do that type of interval on the track where they either jog or stop in between, but there's no changes of direction and they tend to be longer, okay, and so, uh, because of that, because of the different muscular development, like a distance runner has no brakes, you'll see when they do their strides, they take forever to slow down. Soccer athlete could stop on a dime, or they shouldn't be able to.

Speaker 2:

And so if we're going to train us a soccer athlete, well then it makes a lot of sense to do something like 80 meters in an extensive tempo, mimicking sprint technique, and have them decelerate intentionally, whether they start decelerating at one line and then have to stop by 10 meters later or 15 meters later, whatever it is, whereas a distance athlete very rarely. Are you going to have them doing intervals that are that short. It's going to be much longer, more sustained intervals, even if you're training the same system. And so now we extrapolate that to our clients. And so maybe one client is, for their body mass is quite high and they have a lot of adipose tissue, and so maybe they're on the order of 250 pounds or so and not very strong. So are we going to have that athlete do the type of sprints a soccer athlete would do? Definitely not even to work the same energy system. Would we have them do sustained runs in order to hit the energy system like a distance runner? Still, probably not, because we're going to be asking for orthopedic injury if they're coming in deconditioned like that, even if we want to train the same system.

Speaker 2:

And so for our, you know, now we're thinking like energy system needs, but we're extrapolating toward client needs, like what's their history. So now I'm thinking, okay, change the modality so that we reduce the forces going up through their body, we reduce the eccentric rate of force that they're experiencing, reduce the pounding. And so now we pick a different modality Maybe it's elliptical, maybe it's the assault bike, maybe it's a spin bike where we now we can do, you know, all kinds of different intervals. We can have different intensities and we're not worried about actually giving them a musculoskeletal injury in the process. And so then you can get very creative.

Speaker 2:

You know you're going to have some athletes or sorry, some clients who really just enjoy going a more steady pace, and then you're going to have some who just they just want you to crush them. Like they come in, they're like I'm paying you to make me hurt because I'm not going to do it on my own, and so they're going to want those types of intervals that are more anaerobic and they're going to get them. You know they're going to make them puke or whatever, and whether or not we should make our clients puke is another thing, but depending on training satisfaction, that's going to keep them coming back and keep them bought into the process. And so what I've noticed, you know, in my years, both training athletes and early on when I was doing, you know, putting in my time, personal training, like all manner of individuals, learning so much in that time, training satisfaction was one of the primary things that that drove adherence for them and kept them showing up and kept them paying me the next time, because you need to be.

Speaker 2:

I think as a trainer, you learn that there's not just one way to roam, not one way to skin a cat or whatever. That's a weird saying I've always thought. But we don't skin cats anymore, do we? There's so many different ways, creative ways, to get at the same outcome. And so it gets back to your first question, chris, which is why does understanding the energy systems actually make us better trainers? Well, it's because if you know the adaptation you're trying to get, then you know there's different ways to structure intervals to get that. But now you also understand your client and you're thinking okay, this client is going to be more of a fill in the blank, more of a you know, make me hurt coach versus a hey, let's do this in a steady way, a little bit lower intensity. We could talk the whole time and it may take longer, but as long as they understand that you know you're getting a similar outcome. Hopefully, I don't know hopefully that rambling answer made sense.

Speaker 1:

I love it and that's why when we program, we teach in the first couple of circuits we typically like to keep it more weight based and you'll see people like go into a orange theory or something like that, because they'll annihilate them and they think that the harder is better. But when you put cardio in the very beginning, you're taxing the opportunity for force production. So if you're back squat and say 135 pounds and then you go into a pull-up and you jump rope for 30 seconds, you're really going to be huffing and puffing. So when you come back to that 135, your force production is now compromised and, as we know, if you want to optimize hypertrophy we need that tension and so why are we compromising that tension? So it'd probably be better to incorporate circuits with cardio more at the end or at a different session. Would you agree? Incorporate circuits with cardio more at the end or at a different session, would you agree?

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, a hundred percent. And again it depends on the design of the stimulus. And you're right, no-transcript, you know the numbers for scalability. Like two people could show up or 20 people could show up and it's going to be the same, right, or something like F45. And again, they're maximizing for, like that community feel and not so much although the clients may not know it they're not really maximizing for strength, for power, for hypertrophy. Really, if there's anything, it would just be for like a general conditioning sort of all around, which is great and that's fine.

Speaker 2:

But I think as trainers we have to understand well, if our clients are paying us for a private or semi-private or group session targeted towards their needs, that's not going to target anybody's needs. It's a very general approach to training. You know. It's just you throw it all in a bowl and mix it around and you get a little bit of everything with every bite and that may be a fine culinary experience, right. But if we're going to get very precise, we can find ways to get the same training satisfaction and community feel and enjoyment and scalability, but being much more precise. And so that's why you know textbooks like the essentials of strength training or, sorry, essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning for the CSCS exam or, I'm sure, the NASM cert as well. They have a preferred order for the session, and so if you're working with an athlete or with gen pops, the first thing of the session should be your skill-based and power-based work, because fatigue will impact those two things the most, more than anything. After that we have strength-based work, because fatigue will impact those two things the most more than anything. After that we have strength-based work, force production, like you said, and if we do that second, well, now we might have a bit of a potentiation effect, meaning that the power training actually makes the strength training even better. You can lift more. Because you did the power work first, you've got those high-threshold motor units activated.

Speaker 2:

Now, after strength and those high muscle mass, high forced movements, then we move on to our accessory movements that we do for a bit higher volumes, maybe a bit higher reps, maybe it's more single limb, single arm, single leg, maybe it's even some isolation movements as well, kind of your beach muscles or whatever. You can do those in a circuit. You can do your strength training in a superset as well. You know, number two on the list, that's fine, but just knowing that there may be a little bit of interference with fatigue, but that you know those accessory movements uh, those are easily programmed in a circuit.

Speaker 2:

And then after that, if you have conditioning still to do, and if you're not separating your conditioning by six hours or to another day, you're still doing it in the same session then that would be the time, because now force production is taken care of, your motor skill learning and acquisition taken care of, and now you can really gas them without worrying about what's going to happen next, cause the next thing is just going to be a little talk, probably about nutrition, while they should be eating.

Speaker 2:

Hey, good job, here's the improvements I saw, you know, and then they're out the door and so finishing. That's why you know at the end of a session something like a finisher quote unquote, finisher we wouldn't do that first. The finisher is designed to really hit the check, those boxes. As far as having the client leave feeling like they really, really worked out. You know, if you've ever trained somebody and let's say they say their goal is strength or their goal is power, and so you're training them in that way, at the end of the session they might actually not feel super tired Like they would expect to feel, especially if it's power, because CNS fatigue feels quite different than cardiovascular fatigue and then local muscular fatigue, and in power training you get neither of those, and so they might be like what am I even paying?

Speaker 1:

this guy for.

Speaker 2:

Like I'm not even tired after this, Like I could go do this again. What they don't realize is that if they did it again, their technique of power output would suffer dramatically and that they're still getting those adaptations they asked for. So that's why, you know, especially for gen pops, I'm like, hey, let's do our power training, but then, yeah, at the end we, we've got a finisher and you're going to, you're going to be feeling it tomorrow, which is what you paid me to feel like Right. And so balancing those things is is is an art and a science.

Speaker 1:

I love that because you're you're taking why it's so important to to master the fundamentals and the technical aspects, because you wrapped it all together there very nicely. And it would be easy just to annihilate a client when they come and do some burpees, do some sprints, whatever, and they're taxed at the end and they're thinking, wow, this is great. But then they sign up for 12 sessions saying they don't get the results they want. And so that's where the business side comes in, because, as you're saying, I really liked the reference to like going to an orange theory and you get the general aspect where it's like you're going to fast food Okay, it's easy, it's convenient, but when you're coming to me, I'm the you know, the the five-star chef. I'm going to really taste this just for you, which is going to help you optimize your goals.

Speaker 1:

When was the last time you worked with a qualified coach who had a systemized approach to help you get your goals? Or, unfortunately, today, a lot of trainers don't have that foundation and they try to play the game just by annihilating, or, unfortunately, we're very anecdotal based. I have a six pack and I do a million crunches a day. Therefore, that's what you have to do. So I really like how you wrap that whole thing together. Right there you can tell you're kind of a smart cookie.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I don't know about that. But but you know, some people say I can talk well.

Speaker 1:

And there's a term that you used earlier. I think it'd be good to get the actual textbook definition, but maybe die down within reason, because I know it probably deserves its own podcast. But you said VO2 max, and could you explain a little bit more what that exactly is?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So VO2 max is a measure of the amount of oxygen that you can utilize, that you can breathe in and then utilize at a given work capacity, or rather, I should say it's the maximum amount of oxygen that you can do, and the work capacity that you do it at would be your capacity or your velocity at VO2 max. And so when we put someone on the treadmill for a VO2 max test and we hook them up to that mask I've talked about, as they're breathing in air and then breathing out air, we're measuring the amount of oxygen they take in and then that they breathe out, and the differential is the amount of oxygen that they're using per minute. But then we have to also like to make it the most practical. We have to also look at what outputs are they achieving with that oxygen?

Speaker 2:

And so too often people will go say, oh, I have a high VO2 max, and if they're an athlete specifically, then I'm saying great, you're healthy, but what can you do with that oxygen that you're utilizing? And so, as a health marker, vo2 max is correlated with health markers. That said, there's a lot of research that's thrown around showing that is, I would say, overly generalized and regressed towards the mean in the sense that they took different I don't remember if it was like quartiles or quintiles, but essentially groups, buckets of VO2 max ranges, and then they grouped those individuals together and then made comparisons over long periods of time as far as their health outcomes. And so it's not to say that if you train your VO2 max really hard, that because the VO2 max number went up by one or two, that you're suddenly healthier because the number says something different.

Speaker 2:

It's more that all of the other byproducts of doing the training to increase your VO2 max, or the other genetic factors that influence you to have a high VO2 max, those things are what we're really chasing, and so you know, typically the number for VO2 max is going to be scaled to body mass per minute, and so it's in milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute, right, and so a really high VO2 max, I'll say like roughly the average VO2 max for men and women is going to be around like 40 to 45, I think, if I'm, if I'm not mistaken, maybe you can, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. There Is that right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and then when you start getting below 35 and it's not, that's not the best right, yeah, below 40.

Speaker 2:

Uh, and we're saying okay, like let's, let's look for ways to shore this up and above, and really above 50 is like okay, there may be some kind of athlete or genetically predisposed. And then, above that, I know more of distance running type VO2 max, because that's who we typically test in our lab when we're testing athletes who want VO2 max tests, and that's going to be primarily 60 and above, although you can be a fairly decent sub elite distance runner if you have something lower than 60. Men tend to be higher than women just because we have more muscle mass and, you know, larger frames, larger lungs etc. And so more oxygen to utilize. Now you can have two individuals, both with 70 like like 70 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram body weight, per minute of utilization, but one could be much faster than the other in a race, and so that comes down to other factors like the velocity they are running at VO2 max, their running economy, their lactate threshold, which we talked about previously.

Speaker 2:

Those other things probably influence the outcome of races, more so in that, especially at the elite level, than something like VO2 max which has a window of trainability Like in long-term training studies. Dude, there are individuals who followed every single part of that study to a T and they saw almost no change in their VO2 max, which is so sad for them. But the thing is they got a lot of other benefits as well, not just the oxygen that they're utilizing. No doubt they improved running economy, no doubt they improved their lactate threshold, no doubt they probably improved body composition and no doubt they probably grew more mitochondria right. But their oxygen utilization for some reason, when it was tested, the way it was tested, stayed exactly the same.

Speaker 1:

So I appreciate your time. This was very fulfilling. For those that want to dive into the trenches a little bit more, there's some references. I highly suggest your YouTube. That's a great one. When I was at the University of Connecticut one of the doctorate students who's now pretty well-known, dr French. He has a great book out there, a textbook from the NSCA. Are there some sources that like, okay, you want to really dive into the weeds, get this resource, get this book. What are some suggestions that you have?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean Dr French's book is great. I didn't get to hear him speak last week, but I saw him on stage doing something. Last week I was at the NSCA conference over in Kansas City. There are lots of great speakers. I mean I'll give a plug for one of my homies, dr Sukumel.

Speaker 2:

Dr Tim Sukumel was a colleague of mine during our grad school years. He just put out a new textbook and honestly, I forget the title, but if you type in you know S-U-C-H-O-M-E-L strength training. It's something about the science of strength training and he's done so much research about, like weightlifting, derivatives and the application of sport. I mean, you know that's if you're, if you really want to geek out about advanced strength training methodologies, for those who are interested more in in the general uh concepts in order to improve your coaching, and for gen pops, I mean I would strongly consider like picking up a textbook. To be honest, especially if you're not certified yet. Um, I like what I tell my students okay, is that we can find information anywhere. You can find it on YouTube. I learned a lot from YouTube, but I'm also in the field, in this field, somewhat of an expert and so I can sort of vet things against my current framework. But you have to build your framework first before you just go. You know, glean from a wide variety of sources, and that's my that's.

Speaker 2:

My advice is like find whether, if you're a NASM trainer, if you're an NSCA trainer, whatever go read that textbook and then look at the sources they're citing and go read those sources. There's lots of resources, resources that will help you to understand some of the research. But my advice is, if you're reading research for the first time, first of all, no single study proves anything. Second of all, 10 single studies are like enough to have a footnote and to say, hey, maybe there's something here. It's not until you get something like a meta analysis or these meta reviews like these even a narrative review can be very helpful that we start to get some consensus. So what I would say is stick to the narratives, the narrative reviews, to the meta-analyses. Ignore the stats somewhat.

Speaker 2:

If you're a lay reader, read the introduction. That's going to be full of so much good meat. Read some of the conclusions as well. I would just stick to introduction conclusions and then go to the methodology and then read it top to bottom, but do that only after you've read the textbook, to give you that framework of understanding. Now, if you've done that, man you're, you're ahead of like 90% of the individuals, and now you can go start to see okay, what's this trainer saying? What's this coach saying on their Instagram, on their YouTube? Is it lining up with this textbook and understanding that, hey, there's going to be different ways of interpreting that literature. So, you know, it's one of those answers where it's like well, it depends on this context, et cetera, not just super straightforward.

Speaker 2:

I would say, though, that when you're looking at individuals and trying to figure out whether what they're saying has quality behind it, these days, because there's so many folks with their PhDs interpreting the same evidence in different ways, it can be a little bit hard to navigate, and so that's where I look for a consensus amongst multiple professionals, multiple experts, where it's like, if you've got this guy over here saying that you only have to, you know, eat bananas all the time or something, and that's the single way to get whatever health outcomes, and maybe he has his PhD, maybe he is very glib, maybe he's citing research.

Speaker 2:

It's like, bro, he's citing research, he must be right. Well, how many other experts are in his corner right? And how many are maybe speaking against it, and so we're looking for consensus of experts and that's why we've made the advancements we've made as humanity because we have things like the written word we can pass it on. We have textbooks. Have things like the written word, we can pass it on. We have textbooks. We have experts who build on each other's work, and it's not just the one-off who learned everything on their Facebook research or through having a six-pack, naturally, or whatever it is. It's a consensus of experts across domains. That's my professor answer for you, and hopefully that helps.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to throw a cherry on top of that because I agree with you, but my challenge with what we're trying to create with our certification and our program is we're not given the tools for critical thought in the beginning, and so when you get into a textbook, it's very esoteric, and then what people typically do is I don't get this, so I'm going to go online and I'm going to follow the person who has the most followers or the best six pack and just get through it ASAP, whereas you have a program where you can get a textbook but then you can also ask you questions and there's literally nothing out there.

Speaker 1:

That's better when you can go and read something, like you would in college, and then you go back and say you know what, doc? I don't know what the fuck this means right here, can you help better explain it? And then you have the expert right there breaking it down for you. So, unfortunately, we're trying to. You know, the society today wants to put everything into a TikTok or an Instagram post, so we do cut out a lot of information, and so being able to ask questions really separates you from how the average person learns today. And so where can people find more about what you offer and how they can get involved with you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely, chris. I appreciate you bringing it to that because, like you said, without a mentor or a guide, a lot of times this stuff doesn't make sense. We have to humanize it. You have to hear the stories, you have to hear the context and and here's someone say, hey, here's, here's how I did it, here's how I applied it, here's where I went wrong, maybe here's how I did it Right and that's what. That you know segment in the textbook that's super esoteric sort of means. And then they're like, oh, that makes a ton of sense. And so I do so on YouTube, as you mentioned, I do have a series going through breaking down, um, most of the topics in the CSCS textbook and so, if you're sitting for that exam, that's been helpful to a lot of people.

Speaker 2:

And this year I've gone a step farther and after so many emails of saying, hey, doc, when are you going to start a course on this? Finally launched a course that, bro it gets. We go deep in that textbook and the thing is, is it's conversational, paced lectures where what I'm putting in is my experience in the lab, my experience from coaching, my experience from personal training, my experience as an athlete and into what each of those sections, even the densest ones in the essentials of strength and conditioning textbook means, and you can read a paragraph, you can read a section and it can mean literally nothing to you. And then you can hear it in context and hear how it's applied, and hear a couple of examples and you're like, oh, that clicked and so that. Like, oh, that clicked, and so that's my goal. With that course, dude, it's called the CSCS Accelerator Course.

Speaker 2:

12 weeks to passing the CSCS exam and for me now that's what I'm putting all my effort into, that's the flagship for me, because my goal as a professor and teacher and still coach, part-time, but you know, former strength coach my goal is to level up the coaches who want it and who need it, who are investing in their craft and who need to get certified to open those doors, open those opportunities for them. So, 12 weeks to pass the CSCS, you know, stop sitting on your hands. For years, dude, I've. You know there's coaches out there who are. It's been four or five years and they're just meaning to do it, but it's such a hard task.

Speaker 2:

So sign up to hold yourself accountable in a community who's coming in a small group to be mentored live, two to three sessions per week, just like this, where we're talking, asking questions and doing that is going to, I think, accelerate your career because with that certification under your belt and understanding how to apply it right, that's good. That could be the gateway for you for your first internship, your first assistantship job or, if you've been in the in the uh your career for a long time, maybe you're making that transition to the university strength and conditioning sector um, that could open up that other branch um in your career path for you. So, cscs Accelerator you can find the links on all my YouTube videos or on my Instagram, dr Jacob Gooden. Yeah, pretty much anywhere I'm online, you'll see that link.

Speaker 1:

If you go to a conference at SCA. This guy's a celebrity, so you'll have to make sure to get in line.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, those are always fun always going to take, take photos with the, with the so-called fans really just the coaches who are going to surpass me one day and I'll be like, hey, I made, I had a bit of a hand in helping them out and that's. That's what it's all about, dude, that's all right.

Speaker 1:

Well, doc. Thank you for your time today and have a great rest of the day yeah, thank you, chris, appreciate it, man.