Efficiency, Part II

A question about my article on training efficiently prompted this post, which delves deep into how to efficiently train for longer events. It's a re-post from last year called Training Short for Going Long, which chronicles my training throughout 2011 where I used a year of sub 1 hour training sessions to prepare for the World Sprint Duathlon Championships and parlayed it into three epic days (12-20 hours) in the month of November. It's completely with training schedules and evaluations to what went right and where it could have been better, so for those looking for a deeper analysis of my efficiency post this should keep you busy for a little while. Or you can skip to the end:

In conclusion, if you build a strong base and are smart about your specific training you can definitely compete in ultra events without having a lot of free time to train. Certainly longer sessions increase your ability to go fast. However, the risk of too much free time is overtraining, which is exceedingly common with amateur athletes and that can sink your results faster than being undertrained. This means that, for most of us, having “too little” time to train is probably preferable and, if done smart, will actually increase your odds of success. Finally, there is simply no doubt that P90X2 and Insanity: The Asylum are effective training programs for outdoor athletes. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find anything better.

Efficiency

Probably the most valuable thing I’ve learned in my long tenure at Beachbody is the importance of efficiency. As an athletic trainer it mattered but you always had leeway. Athletes want to win and care less about how much time and effort it takes to do it. Regular folks have more pressing matters than being fit and time is of the essence. Over the years we’ve gotten better and better at distilling the necessities for being fit into as little time as absolutely necessary. We have it down to a science, literally.

I love seeing articles like the one that popped up last week on Science Daily, showing how short exercise can be more effective than long exercise.

Instead of long stints in the gym and miles of running in the cold, the same results could be achieved in less than a third of the time, according to new research published February 1 in The Journal of Physiology.

It not only validates where we do it makes it easier for us to “prove” our results on TV. It’s funny—not in a ha-ha way—that we often can’t cite our actual results from our test groups because they’re beyond what the authorities have deemed “possible”. The fact is, if you train smart you don’t need to spend hours a day in the gym in order to keep your body at peak fitness. Sure, you can be fit using that model, but in my experience I’ve found that most people, including athletes, train more than they should.

On the basis of these novel and earlier findings from other laboratories, Professor Wagenmakers expects that HIT and SIT will turn out to be unique alternative exercise modes suitable to prevent blood vessel disease, hypertension, diabetes and most of the other ageing and obesity related chronic diseases.

We've been using both HIT and SIT for years, so the word unique seems a little strange, but that's probably why we run into issues with the FTC and such. Even though it’s not always “accepted”, we’ve proven that if you’re willing to make healthy lifestyle changes we can change your body composition from obese to healthy in as little as 10 minutes a day. With a 30-45 minute investment you can be down right fit, and an hour a day 6 days per week can have you as fit as people who use their bodies to make their living.

Another fact is that most of your super fit friends train more than they should. As your human lab rat I’ll be the first to plead guilty. I’m quite sure I spent most of my prime athletic years in an somewhat-overtrained and undiagnosed state. I now workout far less than I once did and, yet, since I’m smarter, my fitness stays high enough that I can get into competition shape for many different sports with a only few weeks of sports specific training. While I can say that wish I knew this years ago, I'm happy just to be able to pass on the knowledge so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes I did.

Look for a follow-up post, with examples and more in-depth analysis, later this week...

Is 30 Minutes of Exercise Better Than An Hour?

An article claiming less is more when it comes to weight loss and exercise hit the wires today. And while it’s decent if you read the entire thing it requires some explanation because the title is misleading. The details as to why are mainly left out, which come down to two physiological factors that I’ll go into today.

30 minutes exercise 'better than an hour of training' for weight loss

It’s important to first note that it’s not saying less exercise is better for weight loss for everyone. The title indicates this but the article shows it’s only better for the study’s demographic, which was both over weight and out of shape. So let’s look at why.

1. The first ten minutes of exercise is the key for most of us. This has been known for a long while but it’s been getting a ton of play lately. A recent study showed that 10 minutes of exercise can be better than an hour if it’s constructed correctly.

These 10 min studies highlight the importance of high intensity work and its effect on hormonal changes. While this study did not going into such depth, all exercise burns more calories in the first few minutes than when you settle in, no matter what you do. This means that you get the effect of high intensity training for a few minutes even when you aren’t exercising hard. This is because you burn muscle glycogen when you begin exercising until your body is warmed up. Once warm, your body starts to conserve; using fat stores for low intensity movements and saving glycogen for high intensity outputs.

A strong hormonal response (triggered by glycogen-sucking anaerobic work) is what you want in order to make the quickest adaptations to your body. You always get one at the beginning of a workout but it's harder to induce them once you’re warm and moving easily. However, high-level athletic training reverses this so the most important period becomes the push you make towards the end of the workout when you are tired, which can create an even greater hormonal response provided that you are fit enough to handle the workload. So, while short exercise is better than longer exercise by some measurements, there are also times, especially in conditioned populations, where the end of longer exercise is what matters most.

2. Exercise is only as effective as your ability to recover from it. Hence the cliché that you only get stronger at rest. If you overtax your body more than you can recover from you get worse before you get better. This is more than anything else the key to this study. By choosing a deconditioned population they were ensuring success because over the course of the study those doing more exercise became overtrained and had to recover from that state before they probably saw a lot of weight loss.

What this study doesn’t tell us is that if you lengthened it, at some point, those doing the longer workouts would outpace those doing the shorter ones. The laws of progressive overload mean that continual stress must be placed on the body in order to keep fitness progression moving forward. This is why if you run 5 miles everyday it will have less an effect as you get fitter. 30 minutes isn’t better than 60 for everybody, but it certainly is better for some. But in fitness is a moving target. As you get more fit you require more stress in order to continue to get fitter. This is why P90X is harder and longer than Power 90.



any excuse to post the 'torture test' works for me.

I’ve written on this subject before from many angles, such as how to choose the right exercise program , but important to address it from many sides. We don’t all need to be able to do Insanity in order to look great and call ourselves fit. For some of us Hip Hop Abs would be the better choice. Less can indeed be more. The only constant is that the human body needs exercise to function properly and some is almost always better than none.

Special thanks to Denis over at the Fitness Nerd for inspiring this post.

Training Short For Going Long

One of the biggest challenges a weekend warrior faces is how to prepare for ultra endurance events when you don’t have time for long training days. Last year I experimented with this by training for Duathlon Worlds until Sept, a 1-hour race, and then targeting 3 ultra challenges in November. I primarily used P90X2, Insanity: The Asylum, and sports specific training that rarely exceeded 1.5 hrs a day. To help you create your own training program, here's a recap on how it went.



To analyze is going require some reading (click on the highlights). I posted a lot of training schedules last year so you could see what exactly I’m doing. Of course your personal plan will be different but it’s always easier if you have a reference of volume and intensity to work from.



As usual, the year began with a broad stroke training plan in December. With no goals until April, the off-season was spent with a periodizational approach focused on weaknesses. I used a lot of what was to become P90X2 during this time (above is a shot of X2 rehearsals, which went under the working title of mc2), with minimal sports specific training.



Training became targeted with more sports specific work, along with Insanity: The Asylum, for the first peak, Nats in April. Despite the worst spring weather in history, it went well and World’s was officially on. Here’s what I wrote about it:

While a lot of my sports specific fitness is nowhere near its peak my general conditioning is as good as it’s been in my life. I’ve got no acute injuries (other than some scrapes from falling off my mountain bike), my chronic pains are all at bay, and my strength base is very well rounded.

A long “recovery” period allowed me to train more outside and build-up sports specific strength for the next phase of training that would specifically focus on the world’s race. I managed a few long-ish days during this time (6-8 hours) and they went pretty well, a testament to how much having a solid fitness foundation matters. Here's some of what I said at the time. Click on it for a more in depth explanation.

Finally, sports all require specific neuro-muscular patterns (often called engrams) that, while somewhat retained, need to be refined if you plan on continual improvement. Again, these are gained by doing the actual sport. Also, if you’re training is sound you’ve gained fitness (strength, endurance, mobility) which must be taught how to perform. Play time, through specific adaptations of your training gains, will help you get stronger while you aren’t doing any actual training.



Training then became very targeted. After a block of PAP I focused solely on race-specific goals. Chronicled in a long post here (including a daily sched), you can see that training was short, intense, and targeted for an event that I expected to take about 1 hour. An injury derailed my World’s goal (though at least I managed to finish in a reasonable placing), and then it was time for break number two.

After this I became focused on November’s ultra goals: all challenges that would take between 12 and 20 hours of effort. Since one month isn’t long enough to stress and adapt effectively I had to rely on my fitness base to see me through these challenges. All training was specifically focused on other factors that can be changed quickly, such as building up skin needed in sensitive areas and getting used to eating and hydration protocols of endurance racing.



Though an early test (big climbing day) was grim a month later the results were surprisingly positive. Three big events in a month is a lot, even if you’ve trained specifically for them. As I said at the outset:

Now I’m about to test a train short/go long theory on something that is always advised against even for those who train long: three big days in a month (technically closer to 3 weeks). Let’s see what an hour of daily training can do for you when pushed into survival mode.

And while I’m certain I could have been better (faster--though we finished 3rd in a 24-hr race and beat the prior year's winning time) with more focused training my body handled these with relative ease, especially the recovery aspect. Even though the final event, the birthday challenge, wasn’t as hard as planned I was very well rested after it-—birthday challenges that have me digging deep (like this one or this one) often take months to recover from.

In conclusion, if you build a strong base and are smart about your specific training you can definitely compete in ultra events without having a lot of free time to train. Certainly longer sessions increase your ability to go fast. However, the risk of too much free time is overtraining, which is exceedingly common with amateur athletes and that can sink your results faster than being undertrained. This means that, for most of us, having “too little” time to train is probably preferable and, if done smart, will actually increase your odds of success. Finally, there is simply no doubt that P90X2 and Insanity: The Asylum are effective training programs for outdoor athletes. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find anything better.



Here is a recap of last year’s training, by numbers. It should help any outdoor athlete better understand how to work the balance between indoor and sports specific training.

And, ‘cause we all like looking at pictures, here’s a photo recap.

Why Short Intense Exercise Is Best

I was asked to critique Dr. Mercola’s critique (like the show we once wanted to do where we came on after Sneak Previews and critiqued Siskel and Ebert’s movie reviews) of a USA Today article on how short, intense exercise is better than long, easy aerobic exercise. We’ll begin right after this word from our sponsors.

Mercola can be sort of fringe in his thinking. I don’t always agree with him as he’s got an even more skeptical view of mainstream nutrition thought than I do. He also spends a lot of time pitching his products but, hey, a guy’s got to make a living. Anyway, he rarely discusses exercise and in this article he goes into quite a bit of depth. Of course, as a nutritionist that is the line he tackles first:

I actually view exercise as a drug with regard to being properly prescribed and having proper dosage, And it's one that you can readily substitute for some of the most common drugs used today for things like diabetes, heart disease and depression. All of these conditions will improve with exercise and with the help of an experienced natural health care clinician.

Nearly one in four people in the US have type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes and it is my experience that most of them could be reversed with the appropriate diet and exercise regimen -- exercise being the crucial key.

This article is definitely worth a read and my only critiques are about its hyperbolic nature. The idea that short and intense exercise is better is not new, as he states. Those in the business have always known it. Granted, it isn’t the way mainstream health clubs or the medical community has spun things but, as I’ve stated before, this has a lot to do with liability. Many professionals are afraid to prescribe intense exercise because of lawsuits. It’s much safer to advise walking around the block.

If you look at our Beachbody products we’ve always used intense exercise done in an interval format. This goes back 12 years but we’re playing on principles that have been around all of my life. Sports trainers and coaches have always known (I would submit the Greek’s knew this) that for maximal performance you need to train every energy system and stress the muscle fiber types that are specific for performance. We are pitching HIIT training with the new Turbo Fire program but, remember, our very first products (Great Body Guaranteed) were intense 10-minute workouts.

And the powerful link between diet and exercise he addresses is, indeed, the cornerstone of our company. We don’t just provide exercise programs, diets, or supplements. We sell the entire package. So, again, there is nothing new there from our perspective. I mean, he’s even teaming up with Kathy Smith and she is one of our trainers!

He also fails to mention the importance of not training the same way all the time or how longer more intense exercise can yield even more benefits. There is benefit of training all other systems, and even that walk around the block is not a waste of time. But I’m going to let him slide here because it’s not the article’s premise to discuss all aspects of training. His point is the easy aerobic cardio is not a very efficient way to change your body, which is true.

Where there is some confusion amongst Beachbody-ites is in his dietary guidelines where he recommends not eating, especially sugar, after your workouts. He’s not wrong here because the entire article is addressing 10 minute workouts only. I will, however, take exception with the growth hormone spike window being up to a couple of hour when the research I’ve seen shows this happening within about 20 minutes. But, more importantly, in 10 minutes you cannot extinguish your body’s glycogen stores. When they are exhausted, however, your nutritional needs change and sugar becomes vital because the longer it takes to recharge those stores the more damage is done to your muscle tissue. This is why we recommend Recovery Formula with our longer workouts like P90X and Insanity programs only—and with Turbo Fire in it’s later stages—and not with programs like Ten Minute Trainer. Different situations call for different nutritional strategies. And that’s nothing new for us either.

But do give the article a read. Mercola makes you sign up for a free account and sends you newsletters daily. And while I wouldn’t blindly believe everything he says it’s probably a lot more valuable than watching Fox News. The Straight Dope says two thumbs up for Dr. Mercola's critique of USA Today.