Strength Coach Collective
Welcome to the “Strength Coach Collective” podcast, where we bridge the gap between cutting-edge fitness science and real-world coaching.
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Strength Coach Collective
Mastering Aerobic Training: Joel Jamieson on HRV and VO2 Max
If you want to help clients live longer and perform better, you need to train the aerobic system.
In this episode of “Strength Coach Collective,” Joel Jamieson—creator of Morpheus and author of “Ultimate MMA Conditioning”—joins host Kenny Markwardt to break down heart-rate variability (HRV), VO2 max and the science of aerobic training.
Joel explains how aerobic fitness influences recovery, adaptation and longevity and why more coaches should be using HRV and VO2 max to guide their training plans.
He unpacks the evolution of HRV monitoring, addresses common misconceptions about recovery data and explains how aerobic training drives better outcomes for everyone from elite athletes to general-population clients.
Also up for discussion: Joel's three-zone training model, his recommendation for two to five hours of cardio training per week, and how to program the right blend of intensity and volume to create long-term results.
Links
Strength Coach Collective
2:03 - Heart rate variability
20:10 - What impacts HRV?
30:15 - HRV and V02 max
38:08 - Improving VO2 max
50:53 - Zone 2 for women?
If you want to help your clients live longer, you need to improve their VO2 max. If you want to optimize their training and lifestyle to improve their VO2 max, you need to monitor their HRV. I'm here with Joel Jamison of 8 Weeks Out and the author of Ultimate MMA Conditioning to talk about how to do both. Welcome to the Strength Coach Collective, a podcast brought to you by Two Brain Business. We are here to help advance the strength and conditioning coaching community by bringing you a wide range of experts in the field. Join our group at strengthcoachcollective.com. For today's episode, I'm your host, Kenny Marquardt. Joel, welcome. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, man. I've been following your stuff for a long, long time. In fact, right before we got on, I looked on my bookshelf and I've... the ultimate MMA conditioning, right? Sitting on top of my super training book. And it's still sitting right behind me over here. I would definitely recommend reading your book and probably not reading super training. Cause that is a good way to go to sleep every night if you want to. But that was one of
SPEAKER_00:the first like in-depth science books I read that kind of opened my eyes to how much more there was the training that I had thought. Cause I'd been reading bodybuilding magazines and the same stuff everyone else was. And then I got in super training. I was like, man, there's so much more. to train than I ever knew. And you're right. It does put you to sleep to some extent, but it also is just a great reference point to realize how much you don't know. And that's really what it did for me, I would say.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, totally. I think the problem I had with it was like, what do I do with this information? Like, this is amazing, but I don't know how to apply half of these, more than that actually to my people.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I was fortunate. I spent three or four days at Mel Stiff's house, the author of that book, just asking him questions and hanging out. So he used to have workshops. You could go to his house for three days for like$300, and you just talked and went through various things that were in the book and asked questions. It was awesome. So I got some of those questions answered, but it was more of just a gateway drug than anything else.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sure. Yeah, that's a good segue, actually. I wanted to start with HRV. You're the guy in that as far as I'm concerned, and I think you were one of the first in– the U.S. to start working with heart rate variability.
SPEAKER_00:Is that right? Yeah, definitely earliest and early on, I would say. I don't know if the first. Actually, I'm not the first because I heard about it originally from a coach named Randy Huntington, who's a coach that was around my area in Washington State. He'd been a longtime track and field coach, jumps, sprints, that kind of stuff. Worked with Carl Lewis. Sorry, worked with Mike Powell, who broke Carl Lewis's long jump record after 20 years. Just a really experienced coach. And he turned me on to this system called the Omega Wave back then. And that was really the earliest commercial sports-oriented HR system in existence. Because up to that point, HIV had been used in research. It was developed originally by the Russians for their space program. It had been around before that, but the Russians really used it in a meaningful way for the space program back in the 60s. And it was literally in space. The very first cosmonaut up there was Yuri Gagarin. They measured HIV in him and they had started the whole thing. And so they basically pioneered the concept of using this in a sports concept or a sports context, I should say. And the mega wave was the first application of that That was introduced by Randy. And the problem, or challenge, I should say, it was a very expensive system. It was like$35,000 at a time. It was a big laptop, way before iPads. And it was a bunch of electrode you had to put on people's body, basically, that was not the most... easiest thing to do in a gym setting, but you had to do basically a six-lead ECG and gave you mountains of data and didn't tell you necessarily what to do with it. But that was the early days. And again, I looked at that thing and I was like, wow, this thing is the future. I could instantly see the fact that I could have a meaningful gauge of recovery and readiness and all these different things without having to test them every single day or without having to just guests more or less and have insight into how all these things are impacting them to me was just mind blowing. So I dug in head first and got started.
SPEAKER_01:And what context were you using it in at the time?
SPEAKER_00:Uh, so I actually, I got the make-away before I opened a gym. So it was like 2001 or two. So I was training a lot of athletes that I'd worked at university of Washington Seahawks, and then was working at some smaller gyms and consulting around going to teams and doing things like that. So I just started testing anybody and everybody I possibly could try to understand what the data was telling me. Cause again, it wasn't super user-friendly to be honest. It was just a lot of data. They'd give you not just one measure of HIV. They gave you like 12 different numbers. And so you're like, how do I make sense of this? They had some kind of metrics that were supposed to be a little more composite numbers, but it was just a lot of data. And so I tested, like I said, anybody, everybody I could, tried to understand what it was telling me, asked them a lot of questions, and then just kind of figured it out over time slowly.
SPEAKER_01:Crazy. So how long did you do that for? Do you know?
SPEAKER_00:Years. I mean, years. I opened a gym in 2003. So I'd spent a few years, a couple, three years, whatever it was before that, just freelancing and doing that kind of stuff with teams. And then once I opened my gym, it just kind of became the standard practice. I mean, anybody and everybody that would come in, I'd measure their HRV. It was just part of the game of at least individual training. It's obviously more difficult with groups. I couldn't measure 15 people. That was the other problem with it is you only, you know, you had to be in my gym to measure. I had to lay you down a massage table in my office it took 10 minutes or whatever. So it was not the most practical solution from a large group standpoint, but I just measured as many people as I could. I started training fighters pretty regularly from the beginning. So I was really looking at helping these guys peak for a fight because that's what it comes down to is how ready you are to perform in fight night. And it's such a brutal, high volume, high intensity sport that if you beat yourself up getting up to the process or getting up to the fight then you might not fight up to your potential so it's a lot of a lot of tweaking and programming and managing with them
SPEAKER_01:yeah and so what how long till you like figured out what to do about it i mean where you just started to experiment and then retesting people because i mean we'll get into this in a second but you know taking daily measurements is what we're up to now yeah i mean it was how are you seeing that respond
SPEAKER_00:yeah it's just a process i mean the biggest The problem I had early on is I was twofold, two big factors. you know, for the people that weren't coming in every day, I was seeing just a snapshot and I, and I really wasn't getting enough of the big picture. And then two, you know, a lot of people are coming in the afternoons and evenings, you know, they had had some caffeine maybe before they came in, they had spent time in traffic. They had, you know, done a bunch of things. Maybe they didn't work out in the morning before they came in the evening. Who knows? Like there was just a lot of variables that I wasn't able to keep track of. And then this is pre wearable. So I It was just a lot more difficult because you just weren't seeing the complete picture and there was a lot of unknowns. It gave me the output, but I just didn't understand the inputs. It was just always a process of learning and experimenting and learning and asking questions. It's not like one day the light bulb goes off and you've got it all figured out. Human body is complex. But it was just a gradual process of learning more and more and expanding the way I was using it and getting better at it and then launching my own HRV system in 2011, which allowed people for the first time to measure at home in the morning on their own. And I could see that data. And then I started just get a much more clear picture of what was actually happening. Cause I could fill in the gaps of, of what wasn't there before when they were having to come into my gym to measure. So it was just a progression.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I love the, like just the nerdiness of being willing to just take, just accumulate data and not knowing what you're going to do with it. I think that's just, I don't know. I think that's cool. What was that first one called? What was that 2011? Because that was like
SPEAKER_00:a red light, green light. BioForce HIV. That was the first one. So it was, again, not the first. There were other ones out there, but it was one of the earliest ones for sure. And it was really the earliest one I think got launched in the fitness industry or in the crowd at a meaningful level. I had a pretty big following by that point. And I had a lot of athletes all over the place using it. I got into a lot of tactical military groups and special forces. Some big organizations were using it. So it was early days of technology. And at that point, everyone was trying to figure out what to do with data. So it was interesting to roll it out to people that never seen a wearable or never heard of HRV and on a large scale. So you just get a lot of you realize how little, you know, operations out there. So I got just, as you can imagine, massive questions every day of what does this mean? What does that mean? Why is it up? Why is it down? And, you know, I'm trying to educate people the same way to educate myself. So it was really, like I said, the earliest stages of that. And I think we have much broader awareness and millions more people using it. But I think there's still a lot of the same questions, honestly.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I was going to say the same. I feel like that's just trickled down to a different, like that's more of a general population is now asking those questions rather than the performance-based athlete asking those questions. Because I have the same, you know, so now everybody's got a wearable and they all, I mean, not everybody, but a lot of people have an indication of their HRV or their body battery or whatever the device is that's calling it and trying to understand what the implications of it are and how to affect it. So I think it's just, yeah, it's now more universally held. metric that people are referencing. With that topic in mind, we actually probably should define heart rate variability for the audience and then talk about best practices and go from
SPEAKER_00:there. You can get deep into the weeds here. The broad topic is just that your body has the autonomic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system's role is really kind of twofold. It's to keep the internal environment stable enough to support life. So that means things like pH and blood pressure and blood glucose and all these things within your body have to be kept within somewhat narrow ranges or you die pretty quickly, right? So if your body temperature goes up to like 106, you're not going to last very long. Or if your pH gets off, you're in trouble quick. If you don't have oxygen for just a few minutes, you're dead. So the autonomic nervous system is keeping track and controlling all these different variables throughout all your body's major systems to make sure that you're alive. And that means producing energy. And so its second task is to use the energy your metabolism creates to do whatever it is you need to do. And you can kind of have two broad categories. You can break down energy that you can go use to do something. And that's primarily the role of what's called the sympathetic nervous system. People hear the fight or flight. That's the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. And then there's the other side of that, which is the parasympathetic branch. And that's more about rest, digest, recover, drive energy more into repair, regeneration, growth, those sorts of things. And they work in tandem to, again, keep you alive, but also to make sure that your body is getting the energy it needs, where it needs it and when it needs it. And so. Heart rate variability is essentially measuring at baseline, so at rest, the input or the activity of that parasympathetic nervous system. And because you're measuring in a rested state, there should be not a whole lot of that sympathetic system turned on very highly. And again, these are the best way to think about these is more like dials or knobs that can get dialed up and dialed down. They're not like on-off switches. But when you're at rest, when you're measuring HRV, you really shouldn't have much of that fight or flight response turned way on because you're at rest. And so the sympathetic shouldn't be very high. The parasympathetic should be the dominant one there. And you're measuring the activity of that to get a gauge of how active that system is, which reflects what your body is doing and what your body is doing in response to the previous day or two. And the way that it does that is it measures interval between heartbeats. It does some math on there and measures the variability. Higher level of variability for many reasons is basically just a higher level of that parasympathetic system, that recovery regeneration, whatever you want to call it, system and generally a lower level of the sympathetic. When that variability goes down, it's a reflection of the opposite. It's a reflection that you have less of that parasympathetic system firing and you have a little bit more of that sympathetic system firing. So it's the numbers behind how your body is managed managing stress, and then from that, we infer to the rest of our ability why your body is doing that, why it's turned way up or why it's turned way down and what the progression is and all that sort of stuff. You don't really need to understand the math or all the calculations, but broadly speaking, you're just measuring that resting baseline level of that parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. From that, we can learn a lot.
SPEAKER_01:So you said something there that it should be measured at rest. Now, most people are wearing their stuff all day long. Are most devices measuring that all day, and is that a problem?
SPEAKER_00:No, generally speaking, they're not. So there's two kind of states you can measure in, and one I think has a lot more advantages than the other. The first one I would call passively measuring, and that's what– Garmin and Oura and Whoop and a lot of them, they basically just measure it overnight and they take an average. Now your HRV or your parasympathetic system makes sense. It's the most active during sleep because you certainly don't need that stress response. You don't need the sympathetic system cranking up energy because you're just sleeping. So the parasympathetic system is most dominant at night and so they just capture that across your sleep period and they take an average of that sleep period and say this is your HRV overnight. Now, that was really created mostly by these wearable companies because it's more convenient, but it doesn't really have a ton of research behind it compared to the decades of how HRV is typically measured, which is what I would call active, which means you lay down or sit down or whatever. You spend two to five minutes depending on the system. Morpheus is two and a half minutes. And you take an active measurement of where your body's at right there and then. And we recommend, generally speaking, right around you get up first thing in the morning and seeing where your body's at then. It reflects where you are right now, which is the summation of where your body ended up after sleep and the day before and everything else. And that gives us more of a, here's where you are right now. Here's what that means in terms of what you should do the rest of the day or what's appropriate. versus an average of overnight, which is reflective of just an average, which can be a big swing up and a big swing down. It's just kind of the average of whatever that comes out to. So the best analogy I use, I think people get this one, is if you were going to weigh yourself every day to try to gauge whether or not you're losing weight if you want to or gaining weight if you're trying to build muscle or whatever, if you measured yourself first thing every morning, you'd have a really good context of where I'm at and what that means from the previous day. If you were to just weigh yourself throughout the afternoon, you might get a pretty good gauge over time, but your daily swings would just reflect hydration of when you weighed yourself and what foods you ate right before you weighed and all sorts of time of day you weighed in, all sorts of things. And so I think that you know, convenience is great. It makes it easier for people to do it. But I would generally tell people if you're measuring just overnight averages, I don't think the daily changes are nearly as impactful as if you're measuring first thing in the morning or on a consistent basis like that, because you're just getting too much noise of what you did prior to bed and you're getting all sorts of fleet variables that may not reflect the big picture. And you know, it's not that they're, it's not that measure overnight is totally useless. I think it still is valuable for looking at longterm changes that if you're trending down over a month, that means or trending up over a month, that means something. Or if you're not changing every month, that means something. But I wouldn't use that for daily feedback to make decisions about training or other things. So that's why Morpheus has you measure in the morning. I think it's just a better, more effective, more accurate way to see where am I at right now and then what should I do with that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. What is Morpheus?
SPEAKER_00:So Morpheus is my HRV system I developed. It's the evolution of what we talked about, BioForce HRV. And the biggest thing that Morpheus does that BioForce HRV didn't and other ones don't do is we take that HRV, we give you a recovery score. We look at other data from sleep and activity steps. You know, if you have other wearables that track those, Morpheus does not track those, but if you have a Fitbit or an Apple Watch or Garmin or whatever, it'll take the steps and sleep data from those. And then we give you heart rate zones for the day, as well as a weekly idea of how much time you should spend in each of the three heart rate zones. So we have a low intensity heart rate zone, moderate intensity and high rate zone and high intensity, three zones. And then we'll tell you roughly per minute or per week, how many minutes per week you want to spend each of those zones. If your goal is to improve your, your metabolic conditioning, primarily aerobic fitness. So we're trying to turn that HRV, that recovery and all your other data into something that's helping guide your training. You know, if you're based on your fitness level, your recovery, it'll, it'll give you these numbers each week to target. And we just looked at a lot of data across a lot of people and those were based on what people that were seeing improvements were doing. And then over time, it looks at your recovery, it looks at your changes and scales those up or scales those down and makes adjustments. So try to keep you on track. So that's the biggest thing I'm trying to do with Morpheus is get and make it so it's not just a number and then you gotta figure out what to do with it. It's actually giving you some meaningful information in terms of volume intensity each week. Because really at the end of the day, that's 90% of the results. If you get the right amount of volume and the right amount of intensity week in, week out, you're gonna continue to progress. If it's too much, you're eventually going to overtrain. If it's too little, you're going to hit a plateau. It's finding that sweet spot and how much and how hard that is the hardest part, but it's also the most important because that's what's going to guide everything in terms of results.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, totally. So it adjusts your heart rate zones and your volume. So intensity and volume, like you said, but that is nice. So I am, I use the system and it is, it is great to be able to have that stuff shift down on days that I need it to, rather than just. you know, hit the, hit the gas and pin it and see what happens. The systematic approach to a daily volume or intensity changes. Really? Like, that's just great. Even for someone like me, like I've been doing this a long time and I understand it, but to have it right there in front of you is really slick. Yeah. It clicks over like, yeah, sorry to interrupt you, but as it clicks over, like you're, I'm trying to stay blue. I'm trying to say green. Like if it clicks over, like it's an automatic, okay. Like that's just a visual representation of where I need to be is a really, really solid thing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, then we built in intervals that are in there that you can customize and go through it. So if you say, hey, I need to get some, maybe I need to get some high intensity work in today, you can pick some of the red high intensity intervals. If you say, I just wanted to stay in my blue zone, get some lower intensity work, you can pick some more blue intervals. So it's just a way to, you know, make it a little bit easier for people to get in the work they need and play around with different types of training methods that I've used over the years. And again, I think that's the most unique thing about Morpheus. And it's something we're continuing to build on.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. To really, I think I've had all my coaches start to use that as well. And an under appreciated, I think aspects of that is the education that comes with it. Like there's a ton of resources and materials for both the user and if it's a coach to be able to learn about, about HRV, about heart rate zones, about training methods. Like there's a ton within that product. That's a, I think a secondary thing that with, uh, approach to it
SPEAKER_00:yeah we have like a 30-day we call it recovery challenge that we recommend people start with when they get the app because it walk you through 30 days of lessons and you get to see how you basically just get broad points for your recovery score and taking lessons and that kind of stuff but if you spend the first 30 days of using Morpheus going through that reading all the lessons you'll come out the other side with a much much better understanding of not just HIV but like you said heart rate training and recovery as a whole and programming and sleep and all the the big picture items that impact everything so My goal has always been to educate, and that's clearly been a big part of what I've done in my career, and that's what I wanted to build in Morpheus as well. I'm still working on more stuff for that, of course.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's really pretty tremendous. What do you see as biggest impacts on HRV?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, the main thing that's going to drive it is aerobic fitness in terms of like your average, like where you're, we can talk about HRV from two standpoints, like what drives changes in the very near term, you know, which is like, how does it vary across a few days or a week? And then we can talk about what is, what drives your overall baseline level. And the overall baseline level is going to correlate the strongest with aerobic fitness. People have higher VO2 max, high aerobic fitness are going to have higher HRV in general. There's also a genetic component, just like anything else, just like there are people who can lift a lot heavier weights than others with much less work. There are people who have much higher functioning aerobic systems and higher HRV without having to do as much work. There's just genetically more predisposition or inclined towards that. So over the long run, if you want to build HRV and move it up, it's an aerobic fitness challenge. In the short run, over a day or a few days, it's really reflective of everything you're doing to your body, which is obviously working out and your sleep patterns and your nutrition and your mental stress and everything in between. Sleep obviously has a huge impact because that's when your body is spending the most energy on that recovery side. Mental stress plays a certain role depending on how your levels of stress are throughout the day. That can play a pretty big role as well. Training obviously is impactful. Maybe sometimes I'd say it's not as impactful as people expect it to be in the sense that they just kind of have this idea like, oh, I worked out hard, so my HRV must automatically reflect that. Well, your workout's an hour, whatever. If you're used to doing that workout every day, it's probably not as impactful as you think it is because your body's used to it. You'll see the greatest swings in HRV from a training standpoint when you're doing a new program or you're scaling your volume intensity to a meaningful level. But if you're just kind of going about your normal workout, like that one variable is not the only thing that's going to change your HRV. It's all the other things I mentioned. So that's the beauty and the challenge of HRV is that reflects a lot of things, right? It tells us the outcome of everything you're doing to your body, but we can't say like, oh, 25% of that was the workout and 18% of that was your sleep and 14% was your activity. It's just submitting a lot of information. The body doesn't segment like that. It responds as a whole. And so again, that's where some interpretation and really being deliberate about these things trying to keep some of the things the same. So you can analyze the impact of new things and evaluate and adjust, you know, becomes important, but it's also a challenge and why you get so many questions about it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Is there a kind of an accepted range or an expectation during a training cycle that you would want to see somebody, because you don't want to be 100 all the time, 100 being the highest score. You don't want to be 100 all the time, correct? Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:no. I mean, you want to see, again, the point of training is to force the body to adapt. And that usually reflects itself in a pretty clear pattern. So in the earliest stages, if you do a new workout, you do a new program, you tend to see more, I guess the way I think of it is more instability in the HRV. In other words, it's going to be changing more. more you're going to see more changes up and down and that's one thing i would caution people against under thinking is it's not always that the people have this idea that like down is bad and up is good but both down and up are just reflecting different parts of the recovery and stress process. As you go through a training period, you put your body under load, your HRV is going to decline, and then as you go into recovery phase, it's going to go up, and it's going to go often up above baseline before it then settles back around where you started. So if it's really high, that's not necessarily meaning, oh, I'm fully recovered. No, you're really high because your body is really putting resources into that and it hasn't finished that process yet. But anyway, when you first start a new training program or you do something stressful, you tend to see just more instability. It bounces around a lot more, it's changing more rapidly, you're seeing bigger swings. Once you kind of get into the more middle stages, you'll see that stabilize and you'll see fewer changes and things become a little bit more regular. And then if you ramp things up again, you'll see a little more instability. So you typically expect it to change quite a bit in the beginning, you see less change kind of as you're getting more used to it. And then at that point, I would say you want to see an average. We generally tell people we want to see an average recovery score of around 80 to 83% across a week. So you definitely don't want to be 100 because it means you're not putting the body under enough load. If your HRV is static, you're not really doing enough to force the body to adapt. But if your recovery is down the 70s and your HRV is all over the map, it means your body is not able to do you're doing too much, your body just can't accommodate to that or adapt. So that's where just making adjustments. I think the biggest thing people understand is I look at everything from a weekly cycle and that's an easiest way to look at it. I'm not going to overtrain in a day, but I can push myself that direction in a week. And if I do it two weeks, three weeks, now I'm really pushing myself or heading that way. So I look at this weekly picture of I want to go through this process of training my body and then recovering and getting a little bit better and then repeating that over and over again each week. And so I look at these weekly cycles and see how much stress my body was under last week. And I make adjustments for the next week and just repeat that over and over again. So it's just thinking about things in terms of putting my body under stress, recover, adapt that stress, repeat weekly and weekly cycles is a way to look at it.
SPEAKER_01:So as a representation of that week, would you expect to see a gradual decline? Is that what I'm hearing? Are you, are you seeing, tell me what that would look like for you on that?
SPEAKER_00:It could depend, right? So one thing we see is in people with a bit lower fitness, they're more likely to spend more time, the bottom end of that curve, meaning I'm going to spend more time major below the major be high because my body is not as good at recovering people with higher aerobic fitness or, or when you're just really well trained and you have years of training history, your body tends to get better at turning off that stress response system faster and turning that parasympathetic system on greater. Someone with higher HRV is gonna recover faster than somebody with lower HRV in general. So if somebody is at a low level and they're just starting out, like yeah, you're probably gonna see a moderate decline across the week when you first start doing something and then you should see that change as you get more in your program. On the other hand, somebody who's already pretty well conditioned of high aerobic fitness, been trained a long time, they will tend to see gradual changes even trending up across an early week because their body is just like, man, what's going on? I really need to dial up this recovery end of things and turn down that sympathetic thing. So sometimes you'll see, or oftentimes you'll see, they will show you a trend up across a week, even though that trend up isn't necessarily increased fitness so much as just the body really focusing on recovery heavily because it's a new stressor and it's going to adapt that very quickly. So again, it's really hard to make generalizations and tell people, hey, your HRV He's always going to do this. And then again, as I mentioned earlier, it's not always just the workout. So you could have a stressful week at work and that's going to impact your numbers tremendously. That tends to drive your HIV down more than anything else. Or you could just get terrible sleep or you could start drinking some wine before bed or whatever. There's all sorts of things you could do that will obscure the training itself because the training is not the only variable that we talked about. And so again, that's why it's really important helpful if you can control as many variables as you can while you're trying to make adjustments to a program or whatever else. Because if you're changing your sleep every day and your nutrition is not consistent and maybe you're traveling, all those things are just noise in the system that make it harder to understand what the body's doing in terms of just the training. But that said, it still impacts you and that's why you still have to make those decisions accordingly based on what the data is showing you, not just based on the workouts.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for sure. I've noticed it a lot traveling. and getting sick. I'll see them right away. I'm like, oh, okay. Again, I had a cross-country flight. Okay, it's dug me in a hole, or I'm about to get sick, or I am sick. That's when I see the biggest changes. I think approaching it scientifically, like one variable at a time, then you can understand the outcome a little better. Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, much. And I'll say too, the other thing is your body changes. I can tell you I'm in my mid-40s now and my HRV is significantly different than it was in my 20s. You can see the slowdown. Because I've been doing this for a long time and I know how my body normally responds, I can see the changes in my ability to recover from given workloads. I can see how much slower it is for me to deal with jet lag and travel. I can see how much longer it takes me to fully recover from being sick. I can see all these things that you read about and you know are happening, but it's really interesting to look at HRV and be like, man, this workout that I used to be able to do or this weekly pattern, this weekly progression used to work, and now it's just too much. I can just see my body can't recover as well, and my sleep's not as restorative as it was when I was 30. You can just see the body's machinery of recovery and stress adaptation gradually declining, sadly. But it's good to see it. Yes. know be aware of it because you know you you otherwise you get stuck in this idea like i can just keep doing the same things like trust me you can't you can try but sooner or later you will pay the price for that so it's been interesting and i guess depressing but yes but yet insightful for me to see it happen in my own my own training and lifestyle
SPEAKER_01:yeah i like the hard data behind it too because then it gives you something to to measure that rather than just feeling old. Like that's where I'm like, no, this is like, I can see it here. I need to make better decisions.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, I used to do two day workouts all the time. He used to lift weights five days a week and do a bunch of cardio in the mornings and I could recover from it. Like I just, I built up a high work capacity and I can still be just fine. And I just can't, like, I probably cut my train volume back 40%, three to 40% from what I used to do when I was, you know, in my twenties, which was two decades ago. Um, and it's just been a progression, you know, it wasn't like a one day I fell off a cliff. It's just a gradual decline. But of course, the goal is to slow that decline down as much as possible. And that's where not overtraining and not overstressing and not, you know, working in your 40s like you did in your 20s helps slow that down quite a bit.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, for sure. You mentioned high VO2 max, high aerobic capacity as being impactful on VO2 max. Sorry, on HRV. Let's talk about that, the improvement of those, or the improvement of VO2 Max specifically, because as we're looking at longevity and lifespan, healthspan stuff, that seems to be really predictive. Can you define, sorry, my words are not coming in. Can you define VO2 Max for us?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, sure. VO2 Max is just, I mean, the... Easiest way to think about it, it's the horsepower of the aerobic system. We're measuring how much oxygen your body can process and get through the system in a relative term per minute, per kilogram of body weight. Usually we get the number, but ultimately, again, it's the aerobic system's ability to just generate aerobic energy, which is just with oxygen. So it's how much oxygen your body can put through the system. And broadly speaking, we know those correlates well. It's longevity for a lot of reasons. The primary one, or one of them at least, is your metabolism is run on aerobic energy throughout your entire life. It never stops. And people kind of have this idea that when you do something really hard, it's all anaerobic. It's not. It's a mixture of aerobic and anaerobic. And your body will always produce as much as it can aerobically, and then it'll make up the difference what it can't anaerobically. And all of this cells in your body... are relying on aerobic energy to stay alive. And a big piece, that's what's called the mitochondria, where energy is produced, but mitochondria is also involved in things like hormone production and iron homeostasis, a whole bunch of things. The mitochondria really help, or I'd say quarterback the stress response, meaning they figure out which cells need how much energy. They communicate back and forth with the nucleus of the cell to make sure everything is working correctly. They regulate immune function a lot of ways. They're hugely, hugely important. They're not just like these little mindless powerhouses power plants of energy. They are, again, communicating with the nucleus and the cells they're in to figure out, hey, how much energy do you need? Where do you need it? They're managing this whole process of the stress response and recovery, regeneration, growth, repair. They're managing all of this in a very meaningful way. And of course, as we train aerobically, we are not only increasing the number of mitochondria we have, we're also improving their function in a lot of ways. And we're getting rid of the mitochondria that aren't doing their job very well. So we're thinning the herd in that sense. And that's a big part of what aerobic training, VO2 max training is doing is just giving you far more mitochondria that are much higher functioning and they are able to quarterback at a better level. And they're able to figure out the right amount of energy and they're able to match the nutrient needs to the nutrient they're sending. And everything just gets done in a much more coordinated, you know, metabolic way that leads to greater health, resilience and everything else. So it's, it's, uh, it's gotten a lot of press. Like you said, lately, it's been a big topic and it's, it's great. Cause I think in a lot of times in olden times, I would say not that long ago, VO two max was not thrown away anywhere thrown around in the fitness field other than endurance athletes. It was like, who cares what your two max unless your endurance athlete. And it was almost like a bad thing. Like, oh, you want, do you want to look like an endurance athlete? You know, it was, it was almost a bad thing in the strength world. So I think it's. really important that people are understanding that endurance athletes, people with high VO2 maxes, they live longer and they live longer for a reason. It is lifestyle, of course, that plays a role. Genetics play a role. But having a higher functioning aerobic system is a really, really big part of resilience and metabolic efficiency and effectiveness. And it's an important part of training. It's not just something to be overlooked or a 10-minute thing you do at the end of your workout. It should be a core piece of that if your goal is health and longevity.
SPEAKER_01:before we get into improving it, how are you measuring it or how do you recommend measuring it for?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. I mean, the most accurate kind of gold standards is a VO2 max metabolic test where you go into a lab and they put oxygen or they put a mask on you and they measure it directly and you get a report back that shows you all sorts of stuff about your VO2 max. That's the gold standard of measuring. It's by far the most accurate. But that said, some labs are better than others. and some protocols about others, some software about others. But in general, it's going to give you a pretty solid, accurate measurement of what your VO2 max is. Then aside from that, there are ways to estimate it, which I would say is probably the number two way of getting it. You can do a Cooper's test or you can do a 12-minute run as far as you can go. And then you can go into these, you can just literally search up or search VO2 max test, Cooper's test, whatever. And there are forms or calculators, you'll say, I went this far, I'm this age, I went this far in 12 minutes, or I did a mile and a half in this time. It'll estimate your VO2 based on that, right? So it's not a direct gauge of oxygen. All they did is build an algorithm that predicts, hey, if someone can run this far in 12 minutes, they probably have a VO2 max in this area. And so it'll give you a number, but it's more about a range. Like if you can go run a mile and a half in, let's say, nine minutes, you probably are some VO2. If you can do it in six minutes, you probably have... So those are good measures of just predicting based on your output relative to what other people are able to do in that range. And then the third one is like your Garmin watch or some of these wearables will just measure you as you run and say, oh, this person runs 4.5 miles an hour at a heart rate of 110. And then they can ramp up to 7 miles an hour at a heart rate of 125. And they're looking at their own algorithms to predict what your VO2 is based on those sort of metrics. And I would say Garmin's probably the best one. It's probably the most accurate in terms of predicting based on that variable. I would say the Polar one's kind of crappy. Other ones are not very good, but Garmin's reasonably decent at it. But it requires you to either run or bike because that's what their algorithms are based on. And that is the challenge. If you go to a Cooper's test and you run, you have never run, like it's not going to reflect a very high number because you're probably not running in condition. So those are the two main ways. And I think kind of the third way that's also somewhat indicative is resting heart rate and even average HRV to some extent will correlate. Again, they're not predictive as much and you're not doing an actual output measure. You're not running, you're not doing something to gauge it. You're just looking at a general marker of aerobic fitness, which is resting heart rate, lowers, generally speaking, higher aerobic fitness. So if your resting heart rate's in your low 50s, you probably have a higher VO2 max than if it's in your 60s. And if you're in your 60s, you probably have a higher VO2 than if it's in your 70s, broadly speaking. So that's a real indirect, just kind of correlative type way to look at it. But all of those can be used to measure improvements. You can still use, if your heart rate's going down, your HRV's going up, your VO2 max is probably turning in the right direction. It doesn't mean it's changing by some exact percentage, but it just tells you things are headed the right direction.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for the majority of people, do you think it really matters? Like if you just did a 10-minute run a row and just kept that as the standard?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, 100%. Like I think if you don't care necessarily about the number itself, like you can just do a 5- to 10-minute bike as far as you can go. And if you can go further the next time, you're heading in the right direction. Whether or not your VO2 max number would be massively different is less important. It's just you are improving your aerobic system because it means you're able to go– you know, a longer distance in the same amount of time, it means you did that with the aerobic system and that means the aerobic system had to get better for that to happen. So yeah, I think for your average person, I like to just, you know, someone who's deconditioned, I don't necessarily need to go run them for 12 minutes as far as they can go. You can literally stick them on an Airdyne for five minutes, you know, or 10 minutes and just see what their capabilities are and make it easier to start with. Or if someone's really deconditioned, you walk for 10 minutes and see how far they can walk in 10 minutes or whatever the case may be. Progress is the most important thing rather than, you know, having an exact idea of what your number is And I think as long as you're making progress, that's all that matters.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for sure. How do you improve VO2 max? This is a broad answer, I'm sure, but at a baseline, what does that look like?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, you can talk about this for hours, but the broad picture is you need volume and you need intensity. And if you look across endurance sports, you look across kind of the big picture, even when we saw the Morpheus database, you know, somewhere around 80-ish percent of your work is going to be lower intensity work. And that builds the foundation. It's so into cardio and what I call tempo intervals. It's, you know, it's just steady state work. Well, why? Well, because in the slow twitch muscle fibers and in the parts of the body that have lots of mitochondria, they need volume. They need volume and they need metabolic time or time over a certain duration for the body to really adapt. And also at the same time, it's building the heart in a way that allows it to grow in size. It dilates the left ventricle and the heart. And that happens because the heart is filled with lots of blood for a long period of time. It's like a balloon. If you were to put a lot of water in a balloon and leave it there, it would stretch out over time. And the heart needs that blood filling the heart and the left ventricle in particular over time, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever, over time. to get these changes to happen. And also we see the blood vessels and the vascular system has to adapt, and that means volume. So you need volume. And then on top of that, you do need intensity. So your higher intensity of work is training the mitochondria and the fast-switch fibers. It's training the mitochondria in the heart itself. It's developing the mitochondria in the brain and all sorts of areas. So you have mitochondria in all your cells. And the higher intensity of work is just gonna get those cells that are you know, don't fire until you ramp up the volume or sorry, ramp up the intensity and produce more force and power and challenge them more. So somewhere around 80% of your work, lower intensity, slow methodical zone two type stuff can be intervals, but just lower intensity. And then around 20% of your work is going to be higher intensity. And it doesn't have to be the exact same pattern week after week, but just broadly speaking, you're gonna spend the majority of your time doing lower intensity work and you're gonna spend a lesser amount doing high intensity work. Now, that said, if someone says, well, I'm just not gonna do cardio more than once a week, I'm probably just gonna do some high intensity work because you have so little of it, you're gonna get more bang for your buck if you did 20 minutes of high intensity work a week versus only 20 minutes of low intensity work. So if you're limited, then you're not gonna ever achieve the same results but you also have to kind of take in the real world if someone just says i'm not going to do more than two days a week of of cardio like i'm probably gonna have to do most of that high intensity realm because it's going to be more effective in that shortened context but in an ideal world you know you're getting in somewhere and again the research is of all point is direction this is a broad range but somewhere between two to five hours a week of cardio is kind of this sweet spot where we see the gains maximized over time for the majority of people and again somewhere in that 80 of that time will be lower and somewhere in 20 will be higher so if someone's just starting out you know an hour might be more than enough if someone's really developing over time it might take that four to five hours to continue to see improvements it just depends on where you're at, but I would just say the majority of people between two and five hours a week of cardio is where they're going to get the most benefit, build VO2 max, and see the most improvements in health and longevity.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Got to build the base of the pyramid to make the tallest peak, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, exactly, and that's a good analogy. People say that, and it's true. The low intensity work you do sets the ceiling. There's just no way around that. Now, I will say there are people who have, again, like we talked about, much better genetics. and they're gonna adapt faster. They're gonna need lower volumes. And I would say a lot of times too, you see people who grew up playing sports. They grew up playing soccer or basketball or whatever. They spent their whole childhood or teenage years playing sport and they took a long layoff. They often just tend to get it back much quicker. You'll see people like that progress a lot faster than somebody who just didn't do those things, didn't have some of those capabilities. You'll see they will respond a whole lot quicker and have a much higher ceiling because of that. I hate to give generalities, but two to five hours a week is the range, but most people are going to fall somewhere in there, but not everybody. This just comes down to individual genetics and train history and all those sorts of things.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Let's talk about modality of the low-intensity stuff. Because I think this gets confounded where people think it's strictly a heart rate zone and they start to include things like strength training or if they're in the zone, they're doing zone two or whatever. And that's not the case, right?
SPEAKER_00:No, I mean, so again, like I mentioned, our biggest thing is when we're trying to build that foundation, that base, the pyramid, you're trying to develop the slow twitch muscle fibers. And that, again, takes volume and takes time. Now, if we start ramping up the intensity and recruiting the fast-twitch fibers, and particularly if we're doing strength training, which is driving our blood pressure very high and challenging the heart in a very different way than lower intensity, then we're changing the stimulus quite a bit and we're not getting the same effect as long-form duration, more steady. Now, For the most part, you know, you want to be doing, I think, low impact activities for your average person, like a bike or a rower. I mean, swimming. You can run, certainly, if you build up the volumes of running. But for a lot of people, running might not be the best form if they're just not built for it. They have, you know, injuries and aches and pains or whatever. So whatever sorts of low intensity things that you can do and hopefully find somewhat enjoyable because if you hate doing them, you're less likely to do them. Those things are going to be the best for you. You want it to be as reasonably steady and consistent. You don't want to be doing stuff that's spiking heart rate up to 180 and taking five minutes to come down. You want to keep it in that range. You're not like a metronome. It doesn't have to sit at an exact heart rate or exact level of exertion. The rule of thumb is the talk test is a reasonable gauge for most people. If you can, generally speaking, You can have some level of conversation with somebody at that pace. That's probably around the level you want to maintain as that steady state work. Even if you're not using heart rate, that's a good gauge of just, am I going at the right pace? Can I maintain a conversation or I just stop every two seconds, take a breath? If you have to stop every two seconds, take a breath, you're going too hard. And again, it doesn't have to be perfect. You just have to stay in that range the majority of time. And I'd like to see you do a set of 10 reps of squats and talk to them the whole time. Clearly, that's not the same thing. It's too high intensity. It's recruiting fast-fix muscle fibers. It's driving up that sympathetic system very high. It's taking time for it to recover. So You know, it's just not the right approach to try to use strength training to build endurance any more than you would try to use endurance to build strength. They're just not the right tools for the job. You want to keep the right methods for the right purpose and cardio is cardio and strength is strength.
SPEAKER_01:Where does that blend in like a mixed modal environment where, you know, people are doing kettlebell swings and they could probably do a talk test and they're not having to Valsalva their way through a lift. Is that an appropriate approach? Does that depend? Is there a line? Is there guidelines?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, again, I don't think any of this is like exact science where it's like, oh, this is exactly right and this is exactly wrong. It's not like an all or nothing in terms of how the body's going to adapt. But it's this question of overall effectiveness for thousands and thousands of hours over years. Like, what are you trying to achieve? I would say, yeah, something like kettlebells could be work. It's a low enough resistance. But are there really that many people who are going to do like 30 minutes of kettlebell swings? I mean, sure, if they... really like doing that, then more power to them. They can do it. I'm not going to do that personally. But again, it kind of comes back to whatever... activity that you enjoy and are willing to sit there and do, because it is volume, right? Like it's, you know, let's say a minimum, ideally it's 30 minutes, two to four times a week, or it's more than that. Like if you hate doing it, you're not going to do it. And if someone says, you've got to do kettlebell swinging for 30 minutes, four days a week, like you can just kill me now. I'm not going to do it. But if people love it, then more power to a more medicine ball throws or, you know, dragging a light sled, or, you know, there's lots of things you can do as long as it's kind of, again, falls into that framework. And if people People like doing it, then do it. Even if it's not maybe the ideal thing, but they really love doing it, then do it.
SPEAKER_01:So they can sustain the volume and it's not irresponsible to... I think what I'm thinking is doing a long circuit of a mix of things where you are able to talk, you are able to... maintain integrity of positions and stuff where it's...
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, exactly. And that's one point I'd say is it doesn't have to be the same thing. And I always recommend people that get bored on one thing, which includes myself. You know, you can do 10 minutes on a bike, you can do 10 minutes on a rower, you can do five minutes of med ball throws, maybe throw in a circuit of kettlebell swings in there somewhere, and then maybe you repeat that a couple of times. In my old gym, I had a bike, a rower, an endless rope, a Jacob's ladder, a versed climber, and would be a forced treadmill. We just rotate through those things at the right level of intensity and you... got less bored when you're switching things every five minutes than if you're sitting on one for 30. so some people love the monotony of it they'll sit there and listen to a podcast or they'll just meditate or whatever and they want to just be on that one thing going forever and they have no problem with it and then some people hate that which is me so yeah variety is the spice of life and you know training if you if you're in that mindset and there's no reason you have to do one thing the whole time you can change it up as much as you want
SPEAKER_01:yeah How much can VO2 max be improved? How much of its genetics and how much do you see is a reasonable rate of improvement for somebody?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and that really depends on where you're starting. Someone who's starting in the 40s is going to improve a lot more than someone who's in the 60s, obviously, just like anything else. I would say most people can improve it pretty significantly. I mean, the aerobic system has a tremendous capacity for improvement. I would say the biggest thing that genetics do is they determine how easily that happens. Like somebody with really good genetics, they're just going to be able to improve much faster rather than slower. And then they're going to have a much higher ceiling because it's ultimately set by the size of your heart, the size of your lungs and the things that are limited in terms of how much you can change in the high end. And, you know, there are definitely people who can have an HRV or sorry, a VO2 max in the seventies and eighties that the average person is just, it doesn't matter how much they could train their entire life. They just can't, get there. Same way some people are going to squat 500, 600 pounds that the average person just could never get to no matter how many times they lifted weight. The VO2 max side of things is very, very adaptable. I would say it's more adaptable as a whole than the anaerobic side, the strength and muscular side because it's so crucial to life. There are so many pieces of it that have the potential to adapt over time. Your average person, I would say over weeks, months, years can get their HRV into the 50s, 60s for the most part. Some people might not be able to get it much in 60s but it's got the potential to improve a lot it's really just genetics determines the upper limit and how quickly you can get there
SPEAKER_01:how does that correlate between like an extension of lifespan you know i i think i saw i think you showed me a slide like that once
SPEAKER_00:yeah i mean there's a bunch of stuff that just looks at vo2 max and life life expectancy or all cause mortality things and you know the upper two percent or whatever they can look at these different graphs that put people in groups of four or five of in terms of level of vo2 that there's really no diminishing there's no there's no point where a higher vo2 doesn't seem to correlate with higher uh longevity but it definitely is the major return towards you know once you get up above the 80 90 range of the population like it's a very small increase above that and we can't necessarily say it's purely that increased VO2 max itself was the sole cause, right? There's variables. Maybe people with very high VO2 maxes have great genetics. Maybe people with very high VO2 maxes have a great lifestyle or both, you know, diet. Okay, there's lots of things. But in general, we just see this line of higher VO2 equals, you know, on average, greater life expectancy in people across multiple populations and multiple studies, both men and women. We see, actually, interestingly enough, we see women tend to get more benefit from cardiovascular work than men, and they get more benefit from strength training than men. by a fair amount. I want to say the men's kind of strength training tops out around three sessions a week and the women's does too. But they tend to see the same longevity benefit or at least have the same association in longevity benefit about 1.1 sessions per week. So they get almost, I don't know if you can say it three times results, but they have significantly greater correlative benefit and life expectancy from strength training and cardiovascular training than we do. So... It's universal. I've never seen a study where people with higher VO2s and higher fitness in general aerobically weren't noticeably improved in the longevity side.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you brought up something that was a bit of a hot topic like a year ago where women were allegedly not supposed to be doing Zone 2 training.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I thought that was it. I just looked at the research and I just don't agree with the interpretation and also the amount of research that's looked at this now is far greater when you look at, like I said, there was one not too long ago, like 427,000 people and 55% of them were women. And you saw the same trend, more volume of aerobic work was associated with greater amounts of longevity. they're not doing four to five. And the top end of the volume was like five, six hours a week. But no one's doing six hours a week of high intensity. It's pretty clear that the majority of this work is still in the lower end because it just can't be possible that you're doing five, six, four hours of true high intensity. And if this idea that low intensity training zone two wasn't beneficial to women, you wouldn't have seen such improvements across the longevity board that correlated to increases in volume of aerobic work. So I think you can get too deep. Oh, well, women, the other thing I'll say which is my soapbox here. When you do look at the data in men versus women, you have to understand that these are changes in averages. And we have to understand when we're looking at longitudinal, like big populational data, you're saying like on average, women do this. On average, men do that. But you're not the average. Like not everybody. It doesn't mean that every single woman is this fat-burning machine and doesn't need to do zone two cardio because they're already great at fat-burning. That's not true. It just isn't true. And it doesn't mean that every single man falls in the same category as the average of every single man. There are plenty of cases where men and women are reversed. One's higher and one's lower than the average. We're all individual people. So you just can't take this like, here's the average across hundreds of thousands or millions of people and say, well, that applies to every single woman or every single man. That's just not true. And I've talked to lots of people that run VO2 max testing centers. And I'll say, I asked them, like, can you tell me any possibility that you could look at a metabolic test from one person versus another blinded and tell me which one's a man and which one's a woman? And they're like, there's absolutely no possible way I could do that. You don't just see like, oh, women look like this metabolically and men look like this metabolically. That's just not true. And that's spoken by someone who's never done VO2 max tests with people on a large scale enough to see how individualized these things actually are. So yeah, when we look at data of thousands of people we can see differences across genders or across age groups or whatever but that's not relevant to the individual person all that might say is you're slightly more likely to have this because of your gender or age or whatever doesn't mean you have this because you're a man or you have that because you're a woman so i just hate this idea of people taking these mechanistic studies or these large studies and trying to extrapolate them into like oh you need to do this because you're this like that's just nonsense like you're an individual You need to do what you need to do as an individual. So that's my soapbox for the day.
SPEAKER_01:No, I love it. It's the same. I think we saw so much and have for decades about nutritional dogmas. Yep. Same kind of like, yeah, same thing. It's just, everyone's an individual.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, it's like just because, I mean, diet is probably the biggest one. Like, oh, here's this diet. It worked great for Susie. You should do it because it worked for her. I mean, okay. I mean, maybe try it, but you can't assume that because somebody worked for somebody that's going to work for you unless you're them. You know, like I'm not Michael Jordan. I couldn't go to do his training routine and be Michael Jordan. It's just not how it works. Like we all have different genetics and different environments we've been exposed to for our entire lives. We're different people. And, you know, copying what someone else is doing because it worked for them is not usually the greatest recipe to find success. It doesn't mean we can't learn from other people's results or we can't learn from other people and try things. We should be doing that. But just make this assumption that you're the same as somebody else or another group of people because you fit in that demographic is just not the right thinking.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, totally. That's awesome, man. I know I got to steal you for about an hour here, but we can wrap this thing up. What are some big, like, I don't know. We talk about a lot takeaways, though. To build your VO2 max, give us your specifics on a specific generality.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, a general specific thing, as I mentioned, is 80% lower intensity, 20% higher intensity. Now, what that means in practicality, for most people, if you're at a reasonable level of fitness, you're going to need probably four days a week, of some level of cardiovascular work. And probably three of those days are going to be the lower intensity and probably one of those days are going to be higher intensity in some level. If you're at a reasonably higher level than that, like let's say your VO2 max is already in the 50s, you're probably going to need five, maybe six days a week, in which case four of those are probably higher intensity and two of those are, sorry, four of those are probably lower intensity and then two of those are probably higher intensity. So just look at where you're at now and if you're doing zero, then It might take 30 minutes a week and you're going to get better. If you're doing three hours a week, you might need to do three and a half hours a week. It's always about where you're at now and then just making small improvements over time by adding a little bit of volume and then a little bit of intensity and a little bit more volume and a little bit more intensity because people always want to say, what's the recipe? Is it two hours or do you need to do two and a half hours? Well, if you're doing zero, start with one. Start with whatever it is that you're going to improve from and that's the biggest thing I would say is your goal is improvement not to like follow some exact template that's you know for somebody who's a much higher or lower level of fitness and you just start with enough to get better and then gradually turn up volume first and then ramp up intensity a little bit and then gradually increase volume a little bit more and then add a little more intensity over time that's it's a process and as long as you're using some way to gauge improvement whether it's doing actual vo2 max test every couple months or three months or it's doing some sort of 10 minute all-out gauge to see how far you can go on some particular thing, or it's looking at changing rest and heart rate, looking at how heart rate comes down after doing exertion, that kind of stuff. As long as you're gauging whether or not you're improving, you have a very clear way to know, like, okay, I need to ramp up a little bit. My numbers are kind of static. Let me try a little bit, let me try an extra 30 minutes a week or an hour a week and see how that changes things. Or maybe I need to, I haven't done much, maybe I'm not doing enough high intensity. Let me try an extra 30 minutes. It really is that simple of, am I improving? Well, no. Okay. Then the answer is either one of two things. Do a little bit more or make it a little bit harder. Try one of those. See if your numbers improve. If they improve, great. Keep doing that. If they don't improve, keep trying a different dial. You just have to be strategic about it and deliberate about it. I think that's the biggest thing. The problem with a lot of people's approach to training is just kind of like random and it's just all over the place. And how do you really know what to change if it didn't work? Or how do you even know if it's working if you're not measuring anything? So have a measurement, a weighted a gauge, have a plan, and then have a way to retest to see if it's improving and then have an idea of what lever you're going to pull. If it's not, that's what all of it comes down to.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, totally. Science. Changing one variable has the outcome. Yeah. Cool. That's great, man. Where can people find you?
SPEAKER_00:8weeksout.com is the easiest place to find me. IG Coach Joel Jameson. I-E-S-O-N, not like the whiskey, unfortunately. But 8weeksout.com is the best place to find all my stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Cool. Morpheus is on there as well.
SPEAKER_00:Morpheus is on there as well, yep. Trainwithmorpheus.com, but you can find it eight weeks out.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Wonderful. Thanks, man. I could do this for hours and hours, but you've got stuff to do, so do I. Thanks for the time you were able to spare.
SPEAKER_00:No problem. Thanks for having me on. All right,
SPEAKER_01:Joel. Talk to you soon. As always, thanks for listening. Don't forget to join our group at strengthcoachcollective.com.