Coaching Different Body Types: Dr. Lon Kilgore on Anatomy and Technique

Dr. Lon Kilgore explains why "perfect technique" doesn't exist—and what actually matters for strength development.

In this episode of the "Strength Coach Collective" podcast, host Kenny Markwardt sits down with Kilgore, author of "Anatomy Without a Scalpel" and co-author (with Mark Rippetoe) of "Starting Strength."

Lon, a veteran strength coach with over 50 years of experience, shares lessons from his decades in in the gym, as well as his time as a professor and an athlete who’s still competing into his 60s.

Kilgore explains the importance of coaching cues clients can understand, how to balance technique with loading, and how human variation in limb length and body type should influence training technique.

He also discusses strategies for improving VO2 max and what masters athletes can teach coaches about strength development.

Whether you’re a young coach looking for clarity or a veteran searching for new perspectives, Lon’s stories and experience offer wisdom you can use immediately.

It doesn't matter if you're coaching beginners or elite athletes; this episode is full of practical insights on individualizing technique and programming based on real-world evidence.

Links

Strength Coach Collective

0:47 - Using terminology people understand

12:11 - Better coaching cues

17:06 - Strength versus technique

38:54 - Improving VO2 max

45:36 - Age and training volume

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

As strength coaches, it's hard to bridge the gap between science and practice. Fortunately, Dr. Lon Kilgore, author of Anatomy Without a Scalpel, Destructing Yoga, and many other books on the subject of strength and conditioning, is here to help us do just that. 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. I'm excited to talk to you, man. I read your book. I think we talked about this yesterday as we did some technological checks, but I read your book like 13, 12, 13 years ago. So this is really neat for me to be able to connect with you.

SPEAKER_00: 0:46

Yeah, it's been a while since I wrote that was anatomy without a scalpel so that was the first edition that was right after i had brain tumor and had it out it's about the size of half your fist came out of my skull so make sure make sure that i make sure that all the things were working i decided that i needed to write the book i had already made that almost everything in that book available to my students at the university because you know anatomy books are what 300 bucks i just put it online for free For them. Yeah. Then I decided well let's get it out to the rest of the world and I think I charged like 25 bucks for a book I illustrated and wrote and it's written in the layman's terms so coaches and athletes would actually understand it. Because most academics tend to speak in academic speak. Lots of academic jargon. Lots of scientific jargon. And that gets lost in translation out to the public. So I wanted to make sure that everybody that read it could actually understand it. So I tried to, well, I tried to talk like, or write like I talk.

SPEAKER_01: 1:57

Yeah, I believe you were successful in that. That was my, I was a non-traditional background for exercise. I went, I came into this late, decided I wanted to be a coach. And so I didn't have the anatomical background that I needed. And your book was what solved that problem for me. So I think you accomplished it for me, if that's worth it. that

SPEAKER_00: 2:19

is worth it's worth it for me because knowing that people actually get use out of it and I didn't just write it as a vanity project was that's actually fun the second edition is actually better

SPEAKER_01: 2:34

yeah you mentioned yesterday I can't I'm excited to pick that up but let's talk about the purpose of that so you were you it was anatomy in a way that was very easy to digest but also functional for the fitness professional to understand levers and to understand limb lengths and et cetera, et cetera. Can you elaborate on what I'm remembering from that?

SPEAKER_00: 2:58

Well, part of the first section is just, it's called anthropometry. And it's basically the variation in human conformation, limb lengths, trunk lengths, leg lengths. So technique, exercise technique, especially with barbells, is dramatically affected by individual variations in arm length, leg length, femur length, tibial length, you know, trunk length through the axial skeleton. There's lots of little factors that make things look different. You can be in an absolutely perfect pulling position for you. And since I'm built differently than you, if I try to assume the exact same position that you do in terms of angles of the back to the floor, you know, the knee angles, angles, hip angles, I'm going to be out of position, and I'm going to be inefficient. So the idea was to describe the human conformation in a way that a coach can rapidly see, okay, he's got long arms, so he's going to need to set up in this way. He's going to need a wider grip to get his snatch into the jump position. Or in the deadlift, you know, you're going to have to change your hip height and pull hip height. So there's a whole lot of little things I've discovered through my own experience over the past 50 some years that I tried to pass on. Most people would call them sort of hacks, you know, life hacks, coaching hacks. They're not hacks. They're just the way people are built differently. And that's how you coaches should adjust to scale technique. if you want to call it scaling technique, adjust technique, modify technique, whatever it is, the start position is critical in any exercise because if you're in the wrong start position, you're not going to produce the best amount of force, the best amount of velocity or actually the best amount of endurance because you're going to fatigue really quickly if your technique's not on point.

SPEAKER_01: 5:14

Yeah. Totally. I think again for the stage of my life that I was in when I read that book it was so illustrative both literally and figuratively because I had such a cursory overview of fitness and like you said star positions to then understand okay well I can't assume because this is what I was what I learned or what I pulled out from what I learned that I can then make that a universality to every single person that walks in I gotta paint with a couple different brushes here to make this efficient for everybody. I think it just opened the door to that recognition of how individual this is, regardless of how basic it could seem on the front end.

SPEAKER_00: 6:05

Before 2000, I was basically doing modification of start position in coaching technique to weightlifters and athletes by just my intuition and gained experience i actually hadn't take at that time had only been a professor of about five years and so i hadn't actually taken the time to actually take that experiential knowledge and that intuition and frame it up into a way that i can present that better logically to someone else and have them adopt the same type of coaching things coaching banter or coaching instructions or how they actually use that information and this is one of the cool things of you know life life puts you in the right place at the right time most often and I got a job in Wichita Falls moved from Kansas State University down to Midwestern State University and that's where I met Ripito and we got together and we started codifying his intuition his experience or knowledge my what he was in powerlifting, I was in weightlifting and athletics. And so when we got together and we started discussing things, that's when we started really, as a pair, sort of gelling into how we think about exercise, fitness, and things like that. I had always known since I started in the exercise arena, even as, well, even as just an athlete, that there's a massive number of coaches and academics out there that have absolutely no idea how to actually exercise. So when you have people who have no idea of how to exercise, researching it, trying to explain it, then you get lots of useless and potentially damaging information out there. Here's one of the best examples, because I did an article about this and a cartoon. There was, I haven't seen the most edition of the NSCA Essentials, but in roughly the 2010s version, inside that, when they're talking about doing a power clean, they see that you need to hyperextend your cervical vertebra at the top of the pole. Perfect. What's the definition of hyperextension? Extending a joint beyond its normal range of motion and the outcomes of that, specifically cervical is damage to the cervical spines, the intervertebral discs, headaches, nausea, vomiting. So all those things, they're saying you need to do this on every power clean. No, you need to extend the vertebrae. Extend, not hyperextend. And the other example of that terminology is when people use the, when they do hyperextensions, you know, back extensions on a glute hand machine. They used to call that hyperextensions. And so the physicians, that's one of the reasons that exercise got such a bad rap. It's because they're using anatomical terms, scientific terms, medical terms, inappropriately giving everybody in the world a chance to say these guys are idiots. We need to control them. We need to certify them. We need to regulate them. So we as fitness professionals, coaching professionals, open the door for criticism because we didn't take the time to learn the terminology and be able to explain things in a way that people understand. It really annoys me when I have coaches use jargon and terms that they know that the individual will not understand. They're doing it so they can sound smart. No, don't sound smart. Sound good. Get them to do what you need to do.

SPEAKER_01: 10:14

Yeah. I said this on a one of these episodes but like I've stolen so much more from the kids class than I would love to admit because it's just easier people understand it you know if I say Zan like an angry gorilla they're gonna they got it but if I you know over complicate it then yeah I it's an ego stroking because I get to say hey I know all these cool words and you don't know that's why I'm up here but it doesn't achieve that it doesn't actually achieve what I'm wanting to them to achieve

SPEAKER_00: 10:46

yeah and it goes down to really simplistic things like you know when you arch your back you know you arch it but a lot of people don't understand arch back they think this is around is an arch kyle pierce one of the best coaches in the u.s and a really good friend of mine way back we ran a seminar at midwestern state university for juniors and he got him to understand arching by say bow up to him you get a bow up you know and so that got people to understand that when you bow up, you puff your chest out and you're going after somebody. And they understood that. And so we didn't use arch. We said bow up, bow up, bow up. And it worked. They got better.

SPEAKER_01: 11:31

Yeah. And it probably stuck. I'm sure that that stuck. And I'm sure that that's extrapolated out for anybody that's made that reference to somebody else. They tell the story. It sticks. It's like any sort of knowledge acquisition. You can make it sticky. It's going to be in there.

SPEAKER_00: 11:48

Yeah, one of the, you know, Riffito actually has just a plethora of clever statements. He's very gregarious, very outgoing, and absolutely zero afraid of stating his opinion, whether it's good or bad, or controversial, or widely accepted. But he goes, when we're trying to describe the structure and function of a Q, he said, a Q is is a short selection of words that you say to the trainee. So when he hears them, he does the thing that you want them to do. And so boa was that cue because arch didn't work. So step back. There you go. Use a different cue. Every, every coach needs to have at least a half a dozen cues to describe the same thing. So if this one doesn't work, that one will, or if that one and that one don't work, you just move down the list. until you hit the right one and everybody's a little bit different one of my

SPEAKER_01: 12:53

yeah and that's what makes it fun i think that's where the creativity i tend to look at this like a you know a chef in the kitchen we've all got our own flavors and ways of doing things that that that can work for us but like you said i think that i mean if you got to get a whiteboard out and draw some sort of diagram like you're you're going way that's way extreme but if you got a one syllable prompt that is a cue that can get someone to do something in the moment which is what we're trying to achieve, like sports performance, quick reaction, things happening in the nick of time or whatever. That cue is a very important thing.

SPEAKER_00: 13:27

The only time I would draw on a board would have been before we actually start the workout. If I was going to focus on teaching the deadlift or a clean and I wanted to have a good flat back or an arch back, I'd draw that up on the board before we even started. And then if there was a problem, then I would point that out, use that as an aid, and then I would model it myself, and then model them. So in a two-minute period in between sets, you could get the correction across. How much do you

SPEAKER_01: 14:01

think people retain in the retention of those kinds of things? How many cues do you feel like people can retain in a short period of time? In other words, we want to triage the thing, we want to address the one thing, but if you go down and down and down the line, and you try and get them to remember all these things, how far back do you think they can go?

SPEAKER_00: 14:23

You go major, minor. You can't fix everything in one session. So what's the biggest mistake? You focus on that. And after they've done a few sets mastering that, not mastering it, but being competent at it, then you can start adding the next major flaw if they have major flaws. But it's about a hierarchy of what's going to F them up the most to let's... All right, these... All right, you're pulling with your elbows bent. Come on, let's try to work that out. That's minor. Whereas a rounded back or your bars out over your toes, those are going to be major flaws that screw everything out upstream or downstream. Yeah, downstream after the initiation. Yeah, I had to think for a second.

SPEAKER_03: 15:08

That's

SPEAKER_00: 15:08

all right. But in elbow pull, I would try to deal with that toward the later end because world record are set with elbows bent and they're clean. So, I mean, it's not efficient, but by God, people can still do it. So that's one of my least, one of the low ends. I had, I don't know if you'll mind me telling, you know, calling him out. Josh Wells went to the Pan Ams, I mean, you know, Pan Americans, or juniors, and he pulled, his entire life, he's pulled with his elbows bent. Could not, you know, some people, you can coach and they'll get out of it Josh would not get out of it because he was successful and he really didn't need to well how much performance gain would a tiny bit of elbow bend induce no one's ever quantified it so we're just theoretically suggesting that the straight arms because it's better for force transfer because when you bend the elbow it acts like a spring and so when you really really crank on that bar at the top of the pole, you know, your elbows tend to straighten out. But some of the guys just still can deal with that.

SPEAKER_01: 16:27

Yep. With that said, I went through a period of time where I was almost agnostic, like where I was like, I don't know, like maybe this is... Do you ever find... Do you ever... You have rules like you have to follow. You know what I mean? Like, if you look at sports performance, you look at the highest end, like you could probably find examples of people that are able to do things that may not make sense on paper, but do for them. Do you know what I mean? Like, because at some point or another, I was like, I don't know. Let's see what happens here. Like, let's maybe this does work. Maybe this. I don't know. Well,

SPEAKER_00: 17:05

in weightlifting specifically, being stronger is always better. And people tend to think that you can make up for some weakness by having better technique. I have an observational argument against that. And it's a big one. It's because its name is Shane Hammond. Shane Hammond, I think, was the first human to squat 1,000 pounds. I saw him do 880 for a set of five with a belt, some knees sleeves t-shirt and gym shorts and they weren't just they weren't just yeah no they were five it was just effortless for him

SPEAKER_02: 17:53

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 17:53

he i think the best he ever got internationally was fifth at the games the world championships and i asked him one day why what is it about these guys that are beating you i mean you you deadlifted five you know a thousand you know i think he deadlifted close to 900, did 1,000 squat, and bench pressed, I don't know, 600. I don't. But the deadlift part was, the squat part was important because that's shared between Olympic lifters and weightlifters. And even though they squat in different techniques. But he flat out said, everyone that beat me is stronger than me. This is the world's strongest powerlifter at the time. And the weightlifters were doing better than him, not because of technique. He had pretty darn good technique for his work. his recent recent transition but they were just stronger so stronger is always going to be better no matter what you think technique can make up for some things but it cannot make up for everything my technique has actually got is fairly decent for an old dude but at the world championships last weekend i got smoked by uh cantinoso from france because he just power cleaned the that dude was fucking strong pardon my language Strong. Strong. And kicked my ass. So, I just got to go back to the gym and get stronger. At 67. Because he's in my age group forever. So, I'm going to have to get stronger than him. Well, there

SPEAKER_01: 19:31

will come a time when you will win that

SPEAKER_00: 19:32

battle. Yeah. In Masters Weightlifting, actually, there's only... I think I may be one of the longest participating Masters athletes because I started my training career for weightlifting in 71, competed my first time in September of 72. So that's 53 years ago this month that I started competing. Most Masters lifters as of last year have less than six years experience in the sport.

SPEAKER_01: 20:11

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 20:12

And that's a function of CrossFit. Because people get confident in their abilities. They get introduced to weightlifting. And this goes for the juniors all the way up to the masters. And then they hop over to weightlifting because it's fun. And they found it fun. You know, where did the fittest woman on earth, where'd she come from? Weightlifting. Yeah. And where did Maddie Rogers come from? get introduced to it. Got introduced in CrossFit. So it came over. So there's a nice flow back and forth between these two bodies, but it increased our recruitment pool massively. That's why we're in a renaissance of weightlifting in the United States right now. Every bit as good as the 1940s and 50s is because instead of pan-picking people and supporting them like Bob Hoffman used to do, I mean, it was a big deal to be on the york barbell team i mean that was a big deal because if you made it there you're likely going to be on american national teams and off you go because he supported his people but not many people have that opportunity to get supported as an athlete so there's with six years of the average crossfitter or master's weightlifter coming over they don't know about the history they don't know about technique they don't know a lot of stuff but they damn well do really good because they're so fit. And, you know, Mike Bergner's done a pretty darn good job of developing his seminar system, and his kids are doing a really good job of delivering it and making introductory coaches. And so we're seeing the results of that, of having thousands and thousands and thousands of entry-level coaches out in every box. And even though they're not certified by USA Weightlifting or anybody else, they're producing good athletes, good weightlifters. And then when they move over into the historical pathway of development for weightlifters, they start getting some support.

SPEAKER_01: 22:23

Yeah. what change what's the biggest like so what do you mean by that elaborate a little bit on that the historical support what coming from like a beginner level coach who is now now training athletes in that avenue what does that tell me more about what well

SPEAKER_00: 22:43

well it's really changed based on era in the 1970s when i came up when you were in the top you know the rank top juniors top you know when i was i think i was 13 when i broke into the top 10 in the flyweights in the united states and then after the 74 junior olympic nationals got invited to go to the national training camp never heard of a national training camp because i was a little kid from mexico missouri out in the middle of nowhere i knew nothing about how things worked so after that found out that you know you could go to national training camps with the national coaches if you were they offered it to the gold medal And if he didn't take it, the gold and silver medalists, if they didn't take it, they would keep going down the line. But I got invited every year. I went to three of them. And they were a lot of fun. And you get exposed to not only the other lifters from everywhere around the country, but also to some of the best coaches in the world at the time. In the 80s, they started. In the 90s, they had the Olympic Training Center where they would invite kids out and they spend short-term camps out at the olympic training center then they also developed a residential program where you could if you were good you know like going you're going you're you're on the team for the worlds you're going to go to the olympics or you're a developmental guy that's going to or girl that's going to be potentially there next you could go and stay at the olympic training center free room board national coach athletic trainers physicians everything Everything you need. Okay. That was the support system. And then you got funded. You got your trips to international events were not at your expense and things like that. That went away a few years ago because the USOC basically removed USA Weightlifting from their residential program. So there's no longer a place that we can send people to get top flight support in their... their drive to make an olympic medal so during that middle middle time when there is that's where we lost a lot of of uh metal potential because the coaching staff tended to spend more time with those elite athletes trying to refine technique so they would just overlook the strength the strength part of it. Shane Hammond is a good example. 1,000 pound squatter. He said he was never programmed for more than 660, 300 kilos in his programming. That's 60%. You're just doing 66%. That doesn't even drive homeostatic disruption. It doesn't disrupt anything, so it won't drive adaptation. So they were letting him get weaker, but at the expense of spending more time doing reps per technique. So we had a lot of mal-approaches during that intermediate period where we dropped from the 60s, 50s, and 60s down to not getting any medals other than a few here and there. Wes Barnett was one of them. Got a bronze medal at Worlds with a clutch clean and jerk one year. But that was the best we'd done since the 1990s. for 30 years he was the best ever but now we have coaches everywhere that can support and we have people like Tim Soares down in Houston Bergner's Garage there's a bunch of really really good Olympic weightlifting coaches that have really really good operations locally that people can go to and I can also tell you from personal experience you can make it to the national level without ever leaving Oh, sure. Yeah. Then at that point, I had to go outside 24, you know, it was 365 days a year. If I trained, I was outside. Yeah. So it was, you know, in the wintertime, it was put the bar in the house in between sets, wearing really, really deer hide thin gloves, get the bar back, get the bar back outside, load it back up, take the gloves off, do lift, strip everything off, put it back in, put the gloves on. Then about a minute later, take it back out. So it was a hard thing. Nowadays, I don't... Now I have a little bit of air conditioning in the gym and a little bit of heat. Oh, man. So I can actually do it inside all the time.

SPEAKER_01: 27:59

Yeah. There...

SPEAKER_00: 28:02

I want to

SPEAKER_01: 28:03

tie that thought I want to go back to that thought we were talking exercising a little bit before about the you know the strength versus technique and like juxtaposing those two in terms of athletic development for if we can talk about that in terms of you know a coach managing a stable of athletes or even just in a crossfit box like what's what does that look like in terms of the balance there for the for the general population

SPEAKER_00: 28:30

okay on highly technical lifts, it's going to take you a little bit of time before you can load. Load them up. Start loading and start progressing. Things like the squat, the bench press, the deadlift. We can teach those in a day, in an afternoon, in just a bit. If their range of motion, their flexibility is appropriate in the squat. Squat's the most difficult out of those because can you get your hips down below your knees? Can you Hold the bar where it's supposed to go. But you can still do those really, really quickly. Contrast that to the snatch, and that's much more difficult. It's gonna take some people. I can still teach a lot of people in just one afternoon. We can spend a session, and we can at least get a decent power snatch. Done that with athletes all over the place. You can get functional, competent technique in a day if you're good at coaching I hope I'm good. And the athlete is coachable. And there's a real problem is because athletes, especially collegiate athletes, have huge egos. I know better than you. And so they make it hard. They just go, I know better than you. So it takes a while. But a naive, especially, I love coaching women because they listen. They're infinitely more coachable than men because they're coming from a place where they understand that they didn't have that at that those guys did and so they and also I also love it because they can progress so fast and it makes you so happy as a coach to see people progress yeah without fight without a fight so it I love that but the you can't also you can't just I see lots of weightlifting coaches and lots of people on the internet says you know you have to perfect your technique before you start loading no the perfect is the enemy of the good you have to be competent before you load competence means mechanically efficient there may still be minor technical errors that deviate from perfection but there's nobody in the fitness world medical world clinical world scientific world that have defined what perfect technique is because they can't define it for every single person what's perfect so when these people say I'm going to perfect your technique they're just blowing smoke up your ass and they're just trying to I don't know what they're trying to do they're not doing anything for the benefit of the client they say maybe it's going to reduce injury rate but competency reduces injury rate competency because if you're assuming this person is incompetent until they're a master not a master an expert then you have a huge amount of time where that person's not doing anything except technique work and no fitness improvement. So you're just killing their progress, killing their goals by ignoring the elephant in the room is that competent technique is definitely enough to be safe.

SPEAKER_01: 31:54

Yeah, I find that a lot. I encounter that so often where people will say, well, I just want to make, I wanted to have perfect technique I really want to focus on form. And I get the sentiment, but at the same time, it is at a massive detriment to progress. And there is a requirement of some resistance in hitting that, you know, the magic spot of, I don't know, challenge to where it causes the adaptation and it causes you to focus on the improvement. Because if you do it perfect all day, then what's the point? Is that what you're saying? Am I echoing? more what

SPEAKER_00: 32:32

your point is? You're in the ballpark there because when I'm just doing technique work, I'm not doing anything other than working motor coordination because I'm using, well, do they even know how much their 1RM is or their max is when they're doing this? Because they're not loading them, so how much weight are they actually using? They don't even know what that relative stress load is on that person because They're using an estimation. So they have a low load. It doesn't drive any adaptation. The only adaptation that can occur is you're ingraining those motor patterns into the brain and into all your reflexes. But when you train for strength or power or speed, you have to overload what they have done before. If there's no overload, and I'm not saying you can big overloads. I'm talking about small ones. There is no overloads. There is no adaptation, adaptational drive. So you don't go anywhere. You don't get stronger. You don't get better. You don't get more fit. That's one of the things I really liked about the CrossFit model is that they were pushing every day. They pushed. And it was in a logical process. I love Greg's original template because it was codified in a really clever way with you know one day strength then the next day is endurance and gymnastics then strength endurance gymnastics all in one day day off then you do it again or you go down the pyramid whatever way you wanted to do it but it was clever and understandable for anybody who wanted to use crossfit model of programming so i love i love that because it pushed and it was also short term i hate long slow distance anything because the only people that have any use for long slow distance or people that are going to go long slow distance so and even then you know you see crossfit crossfitters running marathons with never running a marathon so those long slow distant things you know in cycling we just call them junk miles and in running they're just wasted miles and i well people are going to that listen to this and know me are going like oh you're just biased you hate running i'm going yeah long distance for me is 50 yards

UNKNOWN: 35:01

Ha ha ha.

SPEAKER_01: 35:03

all right that's wait are we talking so can you can you elaborate on that a little bit more are you talking about general fitness are you talking about performance like what because i would push back a little bit on that if we're talking general fitness in

SPEAKER_00: 35:19

in general fitness i mean here you go vo2 max right everybody has heard how much oxygen your body consumes during maximal exercise

SPEAKER_02: 35:32

okay

SPEAKER_01: 35:33

so

SPEAKER_00: 35:33

Long, slow distance never puts that out into an adaptive requirement because you're not going supra-maximal. You're going like at 60% to 70%. Maybe if you've been running for a long time, you're running about 80% of VO2 max. So you're never driving your VO2 max, your aerobic fitness up. What you're doing with long, slow distance is depleting energy stores so you increase the amount of carbohydrate and lipids that get stored inside the cell and in tissues that are regularly regularly accessed for that energy so it makes you able to run longer not faster so so what i've come to

SPEAKER_01: 36:22

understand was that it was building a bigger base so that your p like you know talking it's like the hypertrophy of of of aerobic exercise right like we're talking about building a bigger base so that our p can get taller like we talk about with hypertrophy, building that bigger, so you can... No,

SPEAKER_00: 36:38

your VO2 max does not go up unless you're a beginner with long, slow distance. So, if you're talking about a bigger energetic base, meaning I have more gas in my tank, yes, long, slow distance will do that. So, you can, you have more to use. Now, theoretically, they could say, well, if you have more to use, you can use it at a higher rate faster. But then, if you haven't done any interval work, sprint work, or anything like that, you don't have that innate mechanism to be able to accelerate beyond what you currently were at at VO2 max previously. It doesn't make any difference. If your hose is only this big around, it doesn't make any difference how big that tank is that you're trying to pump it through. It's only going to go through that at a maximal rate dictated by diameter and the strength of your pump and if the heart hasn't been stressed by maximal resistance from sprints heavy lifting or from other interval type training like CrossFit the high intensity then you're not increasing the strength of the heart and some people will say yeah you get a bigger vascular diameter with long slow distance but I would defy you to go try to find that evidence of cause and effect in elite athletes you can see that in somebody that just got up off the couch and their capillaries and venules and arterioles are about this big and then after a couple years of training they're this big so yeah there is an adaptation in those early times and they're really good but we can't we can't use control people or untrained people and their response to exercise to describe what happens to the elite, the advanced, or even the intermediate. Because they're different populations, they respond to training in a slightly different way in terms of volume and intensity, basically the training programatics.

SPEAKER_01: 38:53

Yeah. So if you were trying to improve somebody's VO2 max, that was the primary objective. What would program design look like for you for that person?

SPEAKER_00: 39:01

It has some nasty intervals in there. That's That's where you're driving it. It's nasty intervals with big efforts, low rest. I mean, that's where you're going to go. That's where you're going to get the biggest drive. Anything that makes you, if your goal is to run a fast 10K, and you don't do any high intensity work, like at the 400 meter, 800 meters, as fast as you freaking go, low rest, fast as you can freaking go again, low rest, You know, do those kind of things. You're going to get better, maybe, but not until you start doing these intervals. Then you're just going to explode in your progress. And we've seen article after article in the research literature that supports this. One of my really early articles for CrossFit, I think it was 2006, 2007, was a facultative anaerobe meeting. takes the air out of aerobic training or I forgot what the exact title was but I tried to be really clever and funny but actually in that it has a table that has been included in a bunch of academic textbooks and has been part of many many many different discussions because I lay out what each type of interval what kind of training that aerobic people need to do or shouldn't do so it's a table of here's what the description is here's the system it affects here's why it affects it and here's the outcomes so that one actually is fairly useful I really liked that article for a long time it was fun fun to put together because it is because even the military is long slow distance was long slow distance forever when I was in the army did we do anything other than run three to five miles in morning PT no that's what you did that's all you did so yeah the military was you know well you did push-ups too but they were sucked you know two push-ups okay i can do one arm or two you know come on but there's in the general fitness world i would still say that you should you would still preferentially use the interval type work Preferentially because the long, slow distance only increases the amount of stored carbohydrate, stored lipid in the body. It doesn't do much for protein synthesis and rebuilding muscle because it doesn't really build muscle. Look at the people that do long, slow distance. What do they look like? It's long distance that repeated slam, especially if they're heel strikers, that's catabolic that's one of the reasons that uh many runners have you know a doping a doping positive on runners doesn't necessarily have to be on erythropoietin or other things it is often it's testosterone you know steroids because it helps in recovery and helps them not helps them carry bigger mileage without losing muscle mass

SPEAKER_03: 42:29

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 42:30

so it's so i'm still firmly in the trench of it's more important to do your intervals and develop them because those will... Well, just think about this. I move my squat from 200 pounds to 400. How many reps can I do with 200 pounds now? A lot. You're talking on the neighborhood of 30 reps or somewhere. If you believe the formulas.

SPEAKER_01: 42:59

Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 43:00

sure. So if you do the intervals and you increase your VO2 max that really slow long run that you're doing is an even lower percent of your VO2 max so it's easier to do. So even if you hadn't done run 10k but you've improved your VO2 max you're going to be able to move through that 10k faster than you would if you only did the long slow distance.

SPEAKER_01: 43:35

so yeah right so not it's just not one or the other though if we're gonna balance it out i guess that's yeah if you're definitely if it's gonna if you only got time to do one thing intervals yeah

SPEAKER_00: 43:46

the the and that i'm i'm about time efficiency in the gym you know what is it malcolm what's his name says 10 000 hours to expertise yeah gladwell yeah that's that's bullshit too because like you can make you can you can make an expert in the gym expert technique in a real short period of time. 10,000 hours. Just calculate that out. No. That means that most Olympic athletes aren't experts. Because they haven't made that 10,000. How about those people that are going to the Masters that are going to the World Championships in six years? They haven't made 10,000. But they're going to the World Championships. So I mean, there's the concept that you have to take a lot of time to train. is not as hard and as fast as you would think. However, it is true. Because when you have an Olympic athlete, a world national level athlete, somebody that's striving to get to the national level, and they're teens, 20s, 30s, they may be spending upwards of 10, 15 training sessions a week. And so that's a lot of time. But You don't necessarily need that if you train smart. But they still do it. And it's still required because they've got to keep pushing the edges of their ability. And that takes time to slowly and progressively and logically move your work capacity slowly up. You can't make these big massive jumps in three workouts. You're talking about maybe three years to get where you need to be. Yeah. So they do need to. But after about 40 uh i just looked at the data on this is that by about 40 you went from being about 10 to 15 workouts to five workouts a week wow so so when we see some of this decay of strength over the age groups some of it is some of it is aging not as much as we think most of it is the change in the way that we're structuring the training of older people

SPEAKER_01: 46:06

Can you elaborate on what that data was? Can you tell me more about what that was

SPEAKER_00: 46:12

representative of? Well, there's lots of observational or basic questionnaire research. How many training sessions do you do? They take athletic populations. Any athletic population will fall into this. Track and field, weightlifting, judo, whatever. They tend to have more training sessions. sessions it's all in published research you search national library of medicine you find all those things but for there's a couple recent uh studies by hubner going back to about 2018 they started collecting data on masters weightlifters big big data sets and they found that at about age 40 they dropped down to five by 50 it was like 4.8 by 60 it was down about three point eight or 3.5 somewhere in there then by the time you get to 70 it's just barely right at three so you you just see this steady decline of exercise sessions

SPEAKER_01: 47:22

this is self-reported how many sessions you're doing based on age

SPEAKER_00: 47:25

yeah okay and it's fairly you know most most of us my age we're going to tell you what we did because what does it matter you know we're not trying to we're not trying to look look cool because we suck you know my strength level is my strength level was down from when it was when it was at its peak between 48 and 52 and yeah you know and one of the reasons it was my strength peaked at 40 to 52 is because we were working on training projects with glenn penley jacob reeves a whole bunch of uh of our researchers that work worked with me uh my graduate students and midwestern we come up with these ideas i don't make any athlete or anybody do a training session or training program I had not done so I was part of the subjects in the pilot study so when I was in my late 40s early 50s I got up to 13 training sessions a day hated every minute of it because it hurt all the time but I got strong lifetime bests so if you look at where is it that we're going to be biologically drop off you have to drop off that's unknown because like Jennifer Thompson she's 50 she just set another world record in bench press a few weeks ago you know it's 132 pound woman doing 3 I think it was 345 this time so and she just keeps she's had those records for like 25 years and she just keeps adding some every year and she's 50 so we're still seeing strength increases And I experienced strength increases all the way up to 50, but then life got in the way, you know, brain tumors and shit, you know, all getting divorced, you know, there's, there's life gets in the way of things. And, but you can still come back to that.

SPEAKER_01: 49:23

Well, that was kind of what I was initially thinking. It's like when I was 20, I could have trained all day, every day based just because of life. Like I had classes to go to, but I could have gone in and I had the, you know, the, the physiology to, to, sustain it as well but there's that balance and then at 40 like that's how old I am now I couldn't possibly I barely can get my hour in the gym right now it's a have to but if I tried to squeeze in a couple other ones I might be also divorced and not have

SPEAKER_00: 49:50

a couple businesses either so maybe that maybe that is why I am divorced I don't know well still getting stronger so yeah and one of the things that did happen a couple years ago my body weight was unrestricted and I I was working on bench press because, you know, I'm doing both weightlifting and bench press in old age, or weightlifting and powerlifting in old age. And when I, my best bench press was at 20, well, when I was like 18, at 114 pounds, I did 220. Then when I was in the army, did 245 at about 155. Then at, would have been 59, I did 281. So that tells me that muscle strength can continue to be developed even in the 50s. And what I'm trying to do now, I'm in my late 70s. I'm trying to get my deadlift and my bench press back up to where they were in my 50s and exceed that. It's hard to do weightlifting because the technique. Sure. Have you ever watched a master's weightlifting program? Oh, yeah. event, you notice that once you hit 50, almost everybody power cleans or power snatches. Because our knees, our shoulders hurt. They're not pathologically, you know, it's just ache. I don't want new knees. I don't want new hips. I don't want new shoulders. They all work fine. I've got great range of motion. It's just that, eh. But then I start moving and they feel better. I'm one of the few that still uses full squat technique and the snatch and the clean and my age grouping up because I work on that range of motion and I also may have a decent pain tolerance but I feel so much better when I move I feel better when I move and that's what a lot of people don't understand at my age and well anybody above 55 that is not getting out and moving is setting themselves up for debilitation and it doesn't have to be I'm not saying just go out and and you've got to get into the gym and do everything. Yeah, you can do anything. The surgeon generals, healthy people, 2020 or 2030, they want physical activity, which is just moving. That's noble, but it's not going to give you better function overall to stay out of the nursing home. So you need to get to the gym to stay out of a nursing home. You need to move to minimize your pain, to tolerate, to get rid of some. of your pain.

SPEAKER_01: 52:38

Yeah, love it. Well, that's probably a good thing to end on. I think that's sage advice for all populations, but especially because you're kind of representing the canary in the coal mine still getting stronger in your 70s. That's pretty sweet. I think we can all learn from that.

SPEAKER_00: 52:54

Well, not 70s. I'm 67. Oh, sorry. Three years away. But I'm okay with that too. I'm not an ageist. I don't have any... You can call me a geezer. You can call me an old fart. You can call me whatever you want to because I am. With respect. There's only 9% of the population older than me, which tells you what I'm seeing in my future here.

SPEAKER_01: 53:27

Yeah. That's great. Well, I appreciate the heck out of your time. This has been a joy, and I appreciate all that you shared with us today too.

SPEAKER_00: 53:36

Not a problem. it's always fun to talk to people that share the same interests I mean it's great fun but I don't do these like I told you yesterday you're the second podcast I've done and the first one was with Chris way back 10 11 might have been 2014 might have been 15 I don't remember which but I don't do them because I want people to look at my work not look at me because

SPEAKER_01: 54:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 54:07

You know, I'm a hobbit. My kids call me a dwobbit because I share the features of dwarfs and hobbits. So they've been calling me that since 2001. All of my kids, all four, they all call me hobbit or dwobbit. But people look at me when they don't even recognize that I wrote things because they see this tiny little guy, you know, Gutfeld is taller than me, you know, and I'm just this tiny little guy that doesn't really look like he's strong or knows anything because I don't have either Lex Luthor you know bald head or you know Einstein hair and when I was in the UK since I'm an American I was teaching in the UK they all thought I should be six foot something and weigh about 350 so they would tell me everybody would tell me that oh you don't look you don't look like an American okay really you know really yeah let me point to my right over here in the gym there's a what a four foot by six foot flag you know no I'm not American. I got an American flag in my gym. Yeah. So that, but there's, I really enjoy people like you read my book and you told me about it. I really enjoy it when people did do that. When I was at the power lifting, there was the strength, the master's festival of strength in Las Vegas was where they had the world championships weightlifting.

SPEAKER_01: 55:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 55:28

So I did that on Friday and on Saturday they had the desert rampage power lifting event. So I did power lifting the day after. Oh, I rapidly learned there's two bits to this story one is like I've done powerlifting and weightlifting separated by two weeks before but never by less than 24 holy shit I was I was sore until about three days ago that kicked my ass because but it also I also learned a little data point about myself is that I that maximal weightlifting performance on friday led to about a 10 percent decrease in what i was capable of on on saturday and i was really glad that i just i dropped my openers by 15 kilos on friday i had two weigh-ins on friday uspa weighs in on the day before so you give them opening attempts i gave 15 kilos across the board less good decision good call yeah yeah yeah but when i was back in when we were back in the in the weigh-ins, a guy just came up and says, are you Lon of Lon Kilgore and the Strength Standards? And I go, yeah, that's me. And so we got into a nice discussion. He's a strength coach. He works at a gym, and he also has other business as well. But he goes, there's too many people, especially kids, coming in with these big cocky ideas of how strong they are compared to everybody else. And so he just hands them a copy of the new standards and says, read this and you'll see where you're at. And he goes, they always come back more humble. I like that. That's great. I always get something like that when I'm out in an event and somebody actually has read my stuff and it's also disbelief. They don't really think that this little tiny guy out there is the guy that did it.

SPEAKER_01: 57:30

That's funny.

SPEAKER_00: 57:32

And that's fine.

SPEAKER_01: 57:33

Now they know.

SPEAKER_00: 57:34

That's great.

SPEAKER_01: 57:35

I'm glad I had the honor of uh being your second podcast and putting some more uh more to the name and yeah i don't plug your books too at the end here

SPEAKER_00: 57:44

yeah i keep getting uh emails from from talent talent agencies that want to manage you manage me for podcasts and other and i'm going like no because that's one i don't know if they're if it's legitimate and two i don't want almost everything most of the stuff i put out is free to everybody to consume or price so low that I make like a buck or two off of a book. So, I mean, I don't, I'm not here to, I'm here to inform. I guess this goes back to my professorial and coaching things. I've never, in weightlifting, I've never taken a penny for coaching, which is stupid for most people, but that's where I grew up. I grew up during the era of volunteer coaches. I wouldn't be where I'm at if I hadn't had volunteers. But in When I was an NCAA strength coach, yeah, I got paid for it.

UNKNOWN: 58:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 58:40

All

SPEAKER_01: 58:43

right, Lon. Well, thanks again. Appreciate the heck out of this, and we'll talk to you soon.

SPEAKER_00: 58:48

If you need anything, just yell at me.

SPEAKER_01: 58:50

All right. Deal. All right. Talk to you later. All right. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to join our group at strengthcoachcollective.com.