The Science of Fitness Podcast

The Hierarchy of Fitness Needs

• Science of Fitness

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Most training advice skips the unsexy steps and sprints straight to sweat. We flip the script with a clear, usable hierarchy that protects your body, multiplies your gains, and keeps you training for years: robustness first, strength second, aerobic third, and anaerobic last. You’ll hear why you can’t build performance on dysfunction, how simple daily activation changes your ceiling, and where strength slots in to help joints share load instead of take the hit.

We walk through real examples—from older adults who want to lift grandkids without fear to athletes who need to decelerate and change direction at speed—and show how mobility, control, and technique become the bridge between rehab and heavy training. Then we map out the aerobic base that actually supports recovery and long-term heart health, and explain why HIIT should be the icing on a well-baked cake, not the batter itself. Along the way, we dig into pain as useful feedback, share how to scale load with confidence, and outline a weekly structure that survives busy schedules without sacrificing progress.

You’ll leave with a practical blueprint: get assessed, target weak links with daily robustness work, build strength you can use, expand your engine with steady efforts, and only then push peak output. It’s a smarter path to longevity, resilience, and performance—whether your “event” is a Saturday hike, a local triathlon, or simply pain-free play with the kids. If this helps re-order your week for the better, tap follow, share it with a mate who keeps getting niggles, and leave a quick review so more people can train without breaking.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Science of Fitness Podcast, where we aim to inspire you to live a more healthy and fulfilling life as we share evidence and anecdotes on all things relating to health, performance, business, and wellness. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Science of Fitness Podcast. This is another iteration of the solo series, which we haven't done in a while, and I'm really glad to be bringing this one back to you. Over the past 12 months, and very regularly as part of a business, I sit down and try and synthesize some of my thoughts in an EDM which we share to our mailing list. And if you want to subscribe to that, simply jump on our website and scroll down to the bottom, you'll see the opportunity to do so. But within the mailing list, I want to share everything from the evidence or the latest research research that we might know, right through to any sort of thoughts and philosophical kind of theories with which we really operate behind as a business. And so, as part of this latest solo series, I'm essentially just going to synthesize most of what has been written in the last sort of 12 months over our EDM series so that we can kind of share it out to you guys that might be watching or listening and yet to sort of sort of subscribe or actually be a part of what we do here at SOF. And so the first thing we're going to go into on this episode is a theoretical model that I sort of have referenced a number of times and the team references here at the gym in Brisbane and down in the Gold Coast. And it's what I like to term as the hierarchy of fitness needs. And what do we mean by this? Well, essentially, when you train and when you take on an exercise-based program, a lot of the time we sort of just associate with uh it needs to be really hard, it needs to be very heavy, we need to stress the system, and that's it. And you need to be a little bit more strategic with which how you approach this. Um, I've had the fortunate sort of career of being able to work with a versatile range of clients and bodies, um, you know, be involved in in evidence, work with researchers and work with some of the very best practitioners out there in the world. And the biggest thing I've realized is that it's not necessarily about a start-to-finish eight-week program or process, and it's much more about a holistic, sustainable, physically active life. And we want to set a hierarchy of sort of importance in terms of how you approach your training so that you can ultimately adhere to a regular exercise regime and more importantly, live a more active, healthy, fulfilling lifestyle. And so, this entire episode is going to go into the details of essentially the hierarchy of fitness needs that we approach everyone that we work with. And so, what are those fitness needs or what is the hierarchy? At the end of the day, the main rule over your training is you can't build fitness or performance on dysfunction. If you are injured or in pain, be it an elite athlete, be it someone in their 70s, be it an aspiring sort of junior athlete, if you are injured or in pain, you will not be improving your performance. You are going to have to rehab that injury or that pain. And so, as a fundamental principle, we need to be approaching our training with a bit more of a holistic view of going, how can I train, stress the system enough to induce enough adaptation that I actually get better, but not too much that I end up breaking. And so, first and foremost, the term I like to use, and I saw this in elite sort of rugby programs I worked in as an intern many years ago, is robustness. You want to build a body that is robust, a body that can handle all sorts of variables that might come at you organically through life, or in your training variables if you're really pushing a high performance metric. And so, what is the sort of main principle and theoretical sort of application of robustness? At the end of the day, it's a combination of mobility and activation work of your muscles, of your movement system to build a system that doesn't break or that doesn't break so badly. If you think about older populations, there is a big difference between a someone that trips and falls and bruises and maybe grazes their elbow or their knees, and someone that trips and falls and breaks a wrist or worse, a femur or a pelvis. And so a robust system is a system that doesn't fall and break. It's a fall and bruise at the very worst case. And that's a nice analogy for the older populations to think about. In the same sense, a robust system that is playing an elite sport, going into heavy contact and heavy impact, it's a system that doesn't break. It's a system that bumps and bruises and might be in pain but recovers quickly and can go again, which is really the demands of high performance sport. And so you want to set that as your number one priority with your training. Yes, that's ahead of strength, it's ahead of endurance, it's ahead of aerobic or anaerobic fitness. It is a system that doesn't break because if you cannot turn up to train regularly and stress the system in a strength mechanism or stress the system in an aerobic mechanism to actually generate the adaptation you so desire because it's in pain, if you can't do that, you won't get better. And so you want to be strong, you want to be robust. And so after that, what's the next priority? And this probably applies a little bit more to uh, I guess, your general population or the longevity type aspiring individual, but can apply to an endurance or an elite athlete as well. But you need to prioritize strength. So you've built a heavy base layer of robustness. The next thing you want to build is strength, and you want to build a system capable of handing handling all variations or a range of variations of forces, heavy, fast, and frequent, so that you can continually engage with them and not break down in the process of exposing yourself to those forces. Let's take an example of an elite contact sport athlete. If you are running into contact, if you are running at high velocities, there is a number of forces that you're going to be dealing with all the time. A strong athlete is going to be able to handle those forces and actually be able to manage them as they come at the body, be it you know, from another athlete or be it as you change direction into the lower limbs. That's the strength element that really needs to be developed in a controlled environment like the gym for that athlete. If we take an older person that wants to be a little bit stronger and, you know, be able to get around the house and get in and out of a chair or lift a grandchild up above their head and shoulders, you need an element of strength to be able to do that. And so you've taken the time to develop a robust system. It's now about being able to maybe lift a little bit more weight, maybe have a stronger grip strength. And the difference between, you know, being able to dumbbell bench press five kilos each arm for an older person versus an older person that can do 12 and a half kilos each arm is pretty significant. And so that's where the measuring and the progressive overload and all those little elements from a training perspective become really important and become, I guess, something that you should prioritize. And I say this before prioritizing your aerobic fitness, your engine. And it sort of has done a 180 in a in recent times in the fitness industry, at least in the last 10 years. For a long time, fitness and health was considered go for a run, do endurance work, do aerobic work. And a lot of people did that. And not many people prioritize strength training, besides maybe your bodybuilders or your strength athletes or you know, elite athletes that required strength for their performance. But that's definitely shifted, that whole dynamic has shifted. Females are lifting a lot more weights, older people are lifting a lot more weights and actually prioritizing their strength, which is very good. And I would rather someone is strong and not quite so aerobically fit than being really aerobically fit, but being weak and being frail. And then that takes us to the next stage of our hierarchy, which is aerobic fitness. And so we've got robustness, we've got a system that doesn't break, it's pretty robust and solid. We've got a system that's now strong, so it's robust, it's strong, which is just going to reinforce its robustness. And now you want to look at building your engine. You want to look at building your aerobic fitness on the next order of the needs. And so, you know, if I were to set up your training week, I'd look at implementing some degree of long, slow endurance training. And that might be a walk for 90 to 120 minutes twice a week. That might be some, you know, cardiovascular zone three, zone four exposure for extended periods of time. There's plenty of variables as to how to train your aerobic fitness, and I'll leave that for other aerobic coaches and experts. But in terms of order of hierarchy, that would then come next after strength and after robustness. Okay. And then the final part, which is really funny because it's probably the one that's sold the most, is your anaerobic fitness. And I say sold the most, particularly to the young, fit, healthy populations, it's really pushed frequently and hard to do more high intensity, to burn more body fat, to look a certain way. This for me is of least importance for the general population. If you're an athlete that requires a great anaerobic fitness or an anaerobic capacity, sure, you then need to prioritize it. But again, it becomes somewhat redundant if you've got a system that breaks or a system that isn't particularly strong and therefore its anaerobic thresholds are not even that high anyway. But at the end of the day, anaerobic fitness for the general population comes last on the list. Why? Because you probably don't need to do it as much as you think you do. Yet, and I know, particularly in the Australian market, a lot of people are doing a lot of anaerobic training, or they're coupling it with strength training and they're doing high-intensity intervals on a rowing machine or a bike or doing a sprint straight into lifting weights and then back into a circuit class that comes with high risk. And it's really hard to actually do that well. And a lot of the time people hurt themselves doing that type of training. And so what we need to do is consider okay, what are the needs, maybe as an athlete? If I do need an anaerobic capacity, sure, build a system that can handle it and train towards it. But if I'm an average Joe, if I'm really busy, if I lack time, doing a quick anaerobic high-intensity interval session for 30 minutes is not going to be enough for you to actually build a really healthy system for the next 10, 20, 30 years of your life. And so that's where I would actually say to someone, prioritize injury prevention stuff first, because I'd rather you able and capable to go on that hike or go on that surfing trip or go for that recreational run if your body can handle it. So robustness first, then getting strong, and then do your aerobic training. If you get the opportunity to do a bit of high intensity anaerobic work, great. But that for me is almost last in the priority list, particularly for the average population, or even those in the sort of longevity space that looking to live, you know, just a little bit longer and healthier and use exercise as a tool or mechanism. And so that sort of gives you a bit of a function of that hierarchy of needs, one more time, robustness being the priority. You're better off doing daily work of mobility and activation than nothing at all, or then trying to lift a heavy weight or do anaerobic work. Do the daily stuff because it'll set you up with a system that you're more confident to use, to then do strength training, which is next in the hierarchy, to then do aerobic training, which is then next after the strength training, and ultimately to do the anaerobic stuff, which really sort of sits as the uh the little you know icing on the cake in terms of this hierarchy of needs. Um, and so to sort of think about the layers of what inspired this, as a practitioner, you know, I get the opportunity, as I've said, to sort of work with all walks of life and and and different, you know, bodies and abilities. And a lot of people that come and start, or a lot of people that come and you know train with us and have had regular bouts of injury or all sorts of issues, or their body's broken down and they've needed meniscus surgery or shoulder operations or back surgery. It's often because they've had the best of intentions to train, but they've gone in and done something too hard or too fast and not managed their load or not had a system that had the capacity to handle it. And so a lot of the time we find ourselves spending the first eight to 12 to sometimes even 24, 30, 26 weeks actually building someone's robustness, building their ability to recruit the right muscle at the right time for the right activity, to improve their hip mobility, to improve their thoracic and rib cage mobility, to improve their respiratory strategies. And in doing so, you then improve their capability to step under a barbell and actually do a squat and handle the load and not put, you know, too much stress or threat on their lumbar spine, which has given them issues, or cause hip impingement, which has given them issues previously. And so, you know, having done this a number of times, even elite athletes that come in and see us in their off seasons, we take some time to really just go through the mobility and activation basics that will ultimately set them up with a system that can handle more capacity. And that's the whole idea with it. And that really is a message that we try and really sort of have to let settle into our clients when working with them. You don't come to see us to get in better shape. You come to see us to move better and get out of pain or do things that might prevent you being in pain. And as a result, you're then going to then get in better shape and actually adhere to programs and everything else. And it's quite funny because a lot of people tend to skip these foundational movement quality priorities because they're pretty boring and they're pretty slow. And they require you lying on the floor and doing some breathing and turning your consciousness to how do I actually recruit my deep abdominals? And can I then use my deep abdominals or stabilize at the pelvis to then generate forces and manage loads through my hips and through my spine? And you know, do I have the mobility to actually do that exercise or whatever else it might be? And so quite often people go, Oh, I want to do chin-ups or I want to get fit, I'm just gonna go and do the hard thing that I see fit people do without realizing that they may not actually have the capacity. And so that's sort of the whole idea behind it. And quite often when people do really drink the Kool-Aid and they actually sink in and consider, oh, this is something that I need to do, they suddenly realize how important and how valuable it is. And at the end of the day, they sort of realize a lot of the time when their body breaks down or lets them down, they might have a niggling knee that blows up every time they try and run, or a shoulder that irritates them every time they try and get better at push-ups or bench press. That's when they can work out if their system's robust or not, if their system can actually handle stress and load, and therefore they need to take a step back, work out the movement priorities, build a bit of robustness to ultimately then you know build a capacity that is stronger, more aerobically fit, anaerobically capable, and so forth. And so, you know, when it comes to pain and misconceptions in and around this space, people often just get told or sort of absorb a narrative of, oh, that's just my body, and it just lets me down. Yet very rarely do they take the time to consider the movement and mechanical strategies that are required to really load the system well and load the system safely. And this, I think, is really the future of health and fitness is practitioners hopefully spend a little bit more time understanding muscle mechanics, movement, pain, and pain-based principles, so they can work really closely with doctors, other physicians, physiotherapists, and other clinicians in closing the gap at teaching someone how to move and get strong and then handle more capacity for more work without overloading the system, causing an injury, causing pain. And this is where I think there's a big breakdown in the system because at the moment, majority of people are in pain. They might go straight to a physician. The physician isn't trained in movement mechanics really, um, and isn't trained in actually understanding the load and the stresses that might go through the system when they're running regularly. And so, therefore, the approach might be the same as how we approach disease. It's either, you know, pharmacologically intervene, or, you know, the advice generally is just stop doing it. Don't do the thing that hurts you, stop bending over, stop running, stop doing these activities. Yet we want to be fitter and healthier, and we know that we need to be doing them to do so. So seeing a professional and practitioners that actually understand the mechanics and what might be going wrong, and they can work closely with other clinicians and physicians to one, manage the pain, and then two, build a system that can actually handle the work without causing injury, flare-ups, and pain. That for me is really where the future of health and longevity and even medicine is going, is practitioners that can work together to connect the dots to help someone stay more active. Because at the end of the day, we know if you're more active, if you have more muscle mass, if you have an improved VO2 system, a better VO2 max, a cardiovascular system, you're gonna live longer and you're probably gonna live a little bit happier. And so that's kind of the whole idea behind this hierarchy of fitness needs is being able to break it down to what's most important and what should be prioritized, and then what layers can we then start to add on on top of that. And so if I sort of consider robustness and how does it fit into someone's training week, this is where it really gets nuanced and it depends on the individual. But at the end of the day, I like to consider you know the basics of muscle recruitment and movement patterns. It's balance, it's being able to squeeze the right muscle consciously. Can you activate your glutes like we all can activate our biceps, right? Can you squeeze your shoulder blades and extended the thoracic spine? Can you rotate and access ranges of motion through your mid back? Can you, you know, access ranges of motion through your hips? That is priority number one. And then two, do you have the ability to activate and have control in those motions and in those positions? Because at the end of the day, when you're on your next run, you might have to skip out the way, you might slip and find yourself in a lunge position. But if you lack the capacity to handle that position, you don't have the strength or the robustness to handle that, your tissue might let you down. It might strain, you might, you know, cause some damage at a joint or a ligament, and then the problems occur and we have to then mitigate for them and go into rehabilitation. And so a lot of the time the language that is used is called prehab or preventative rehabilitative type exercises. And, you know, if you think of movements and activities such as Pilates, they really start and set up that foundational component and they're invaluable because they help you consciously turn your attention to specific muscles and areas you haven't moved or don't get an opportunity to activate, particularly if you live quite a sedentary life, which most of us do. We're stuck in chairs in our commute, we're stuck in chairs for our career, and we're stuck in chairs when we get home from work. And so being able to take some time to deliberately activate muscles and pour a bit of consciousness into how they feel and how they might contribute to the way you move really is the sort of nuts and bolts of robustness. And then from there it's going, okay, can I integrate that activation into a little bit more strength or balance type movement? And this is really the breakdown of Pilates in that it gives you that activation, but it doesn't necessarily give you that stress stimulus that a decent amount of strength or loading work does. It doesn't give you that complexity that a decent amount of strength or loading work does. For example, you might do sideline clams and activate your glutes. How does that contribute to the way you squat? How can you relate the mechanical properties of the sideline glute activation exercises you're doing a Pilates session with the mechanical properties of your squat? And that is where the gap and the sort of relationship between robustness and therefore being strong or going to that strength category is essential. And that for me is again a major gap in what health and fitness is sold as, and then rehabilitation, physiotherapy, clinical health, clinical exercise, physiology, and right up to physicians and being able to close that gap between activation and associated movement movement mechanics and strength, and therefore then strength being able to pass on to the way you move, you run, and recreationally be active. That is really the whole sort of combination of process, the the sliding scale of your ability to move that needs to be um prioritized and actually taught and set up for people to successfully move and be healthier. So, how does you know teaching people how to move differ from just training them? There's a huge difference, and this is where practitioner knowledge and practitioner understanding is essential because understanding the origin and insertion of muscles, understanding the roles of joints, understanding the loading principles on eccentric and concentric phases, all these complex different language type terms for your um high-quality practitioners, that is really important because if we can communicate with physicians, with clinicians, and understand the movement mechanics and the principles of doing them really well, and then communicate that language to someone who may not be as well versed, that for me is the most important job of a trainer. It's not about writing a really good program with sets and reps and progressive overload. That's a small part of the role, and sure we need to have that. But being able to teach people how to move is one of the most important things a high quality practitioner can practitioner can learn to do and actually specialize in doing. Because once someone knows how to execute a squat well and safely, you can then actually load that system and reduce or mitigate the risk of doing a loaded squat as you start to develop your strength, or you can mitigate and reduce the risk of annoying the Achilles tendon if you've done the right tendon loading, rehabilitative, prehabilitative strategies. And so the how to move principle really is that connective piece between robustness and strength and should be prioritized by any decent strength training or exercise-based practitioner or professional. And so, you know, what would the journey of pain to confidence to high performance look like for an athlete? Well, you know, working with athletes that have done some severe injuries from hamstrings through to ACLs, the initial stage is really pretty heavy and pain-guided. Pain is information, it's a really useful tool. Um, and we can use it to sort of guide how we load that system. And obviously, too much load will generally cause pain. And so we then get to learn that lesson. And then there's a whole bunch of sort of you know, literature and theoretical models that have been placed out. Um, every individual responds differently to different loading and different pain. You get elite athletes that come back from typical ACL surgeries in six to nine months and they're playing at an elite level. And then you might have someone that takes 12 to 14 to 24 months to come back from an ACL. So it's going to be different for each individual. But at the end of the day, pain is the mechanism and the tool with which we can use to guide how we load the system. And then from there, once that pain has subsided and we're able to load the system really well, that's where the psychological and conscience, conscious confidence really comes in. And it makes a huge difference to the practice, uh, the participant or the patient's experience when they can consciously and confidently load that injured site or that injured joint or that area that gave them grief and actually use it to start to build a little bit more capacity. And as that load and capacity starts to build and improve and improve and improve, and that confidence goes with it, we suddenly get to put the athlete or the patient or the individual back in a performance state, in a performance mindset. And our approach to working with older people should be no different. If you're an older person that's had a foot or an ankle injury, for example, let pain guide the initial stage and don't do things that cause too much pain. We need to load the system, build the strength, and do it in a way that the body can then handle a little bit more stress as the pain subsides and the capacity to do more work in a controlled environment like your gym or like a controlled little home workout program. As that capacity to handle that work improves, your confidence will go along with it. And ultimately, when that confidence improves and you're able to load the system more and more and more, you can then almost stress the system in this controlled environment a little bit more than you might do every day. And therefore, then your day-to-day performance of hiking or jogging or riding will actually be there and available for you to access. And so ultimately that confidence in and developed through a controlled environment in the gym or in the rehab space will give you the ability to perform day-to-day. And it's something that is totally worth considering and totally worth investing in, both time and financially, from a rehabilitative perspective. And even more so in a preventative perspective. If you've been through a rehabilitative journey, if you have injured yourself and you're not confident in your ability to load your system, you need to take the time to learn how to do so safely and properly in a controlled environment with a practitioner that knows how they uh what they're doing and how to do so, so that ultimately you can have the confidence to perform in whatever that might be, be it an elite sport on the field, in the court, in the pool, whatever it might be, right through to just your day-to-day life of playing golf or recreationally going surfing or going for a run with mates. And so if you could apply one principle tomorrow to build or develop your robustness, I would say go and get an assessment. Go and get an understanding of where might there be a limitation movement-wise. If you have the luxury of accessing high-quality objective assessments like range of motion or force plates or grip strength, dynamometers, whatever it might be, go and access them and get that assessment done. And then go and actually take action on the areas that aren't meeting a high quality threshold or standard, be it your mobility, be it your activation of certain muscles, and actually take the time to work on the system to be able to build its capacity to handle a little bit more stress and load. And if there is a daily activity system, if there is a daily little stretch routine or down regulation or up regulation activation routine that you need to do that you can get taught how to do, and you're capable of implementing that in your life day to day, then make the time to invest in what that system might look like. Experiment on yourself, see what works, see what suits you, see what suits your schedule, and then just do it and stick to it every single day. Because at the end of the day, we need to move more and we need to have a system that can be able to handle more movement. And if you find yourself stuck and sedentary throughout the day regularly, your ability to be sedentary and stuck in that position is going to be good. And therefore, your ability to move regularly and handle a lot of load is not going to be good. And so you need to put a robustness, preventative mechanism or routine in on your day-to-day basis so that you can ultimately handle more stress, handle more workload, and actually enjoy a really healthy, active lifestyle without hurting yourself or having a system or body that breaks down. And so to wrap up this episode, nice and short, nice and sweet, it's understanding that if you were to set up a hierarchy of needs for your training and your health and your fitness and your longevity, you would prioritize robustness, prioritize the things that keep you capable of handling the training and handling the performance demands physically. And then from there, you want to set up a strong body, a body that connects that robust activation range of motion system and is then strong through the range of motion and strong enough to handle the variable requirements that are going to come at you through life and whatever lifestyle it is you want to lead. And then from there, you look to build your aerobic function and your capacity to handle more workloads. And if you are robust and strong, you're going to be able to build a really effective aerobic system. And then ultimately ask the big questions of the system. Do the VO2 max type training sessions, put stress on the metabolic system through your anaerobic training, but only do that if you can handle the stress and the loads that will go through your body, that will go through the system when you do that type of training modality. Because ultimately, there's no point in trying to get fit, strong, be really active, run a marathon, do triathlons if your body breaks down and injures and you injure yourself, causes you pain, and stops you from adhering to that active lifestyle. And so, in a nutshell, robustness, then strength, then aerobic fitness, and wash it down with your anaerobic work. If you can set up your week where you are doing robustness work every single day, you're lifting weights and getting strong a couple of times a week, you have two or three long, slow endurance aerobic sessions, and then one, two, maybe three anaerobic sessions to top it off. You're gonna have a really effective program system. If you're gonna miss anything, miss the first or the second one, get your robustness work in, get your strength work in. At the end of the day, your body will be able to handle more and you'll thank yourself later. Thank you for listening. Thanks for tuning in to the Science of Fitness podcast. Be sure to check us out across all forms of social media and subscribe to this channel if you want to stay up to date to the latest episodes and any other anecdotes with which we might share across these video platforms. If you ever find yourself locally in Brisbane, be sure to drop into one of our facilities or down on the Gold Coast in Burley. You can also check us out at scienceoffitness.com.au and see all things relating to what we offer in programming and performance, whether it's online or in person.