Companies like Gatorade made their bones by claiming they helped athletes perform better; PowerBar was the first of many to claim they improved recovery between exertions in the 1980s. This has been much expanded by other modalities and launched many businesses: ice baths, a thousand powders and drinks, active release therapies and many physio modalities, vibration therapy, various different massage techniques, saunas and many other expensive gizmos making claims. All most people really need is time, healthy eating and sleep habits, and to drink when they feel thirsty. Athletes want any legal edge. Most teams take things like sports nutrition very seriously.
You are of course familiar with medical studies producing conflicting or equivocal results. Exercise studies often involve a dozen or two students, maybe with some limited experience, doing something. They are much better than they once were. But are often not adequately powered to draw important conclusions even if they were always consistent with similar studies. “Meathead science” came from experienced lifters doing what they thought worked and discussing these with other lifters. Some of it worked well, some was useless, some only worked if using the same stuff the lifter was.
But some coaches who trained lots of different people used methods that broke many lifting records. Sometimes they invented equipment which did not previously exist. Often these coaches wrote books or gave seminars or trained others in their methods, before the Internet made exposure easier. A number of articulate lifters also shared their ideas. Some lifters got graduate science degrees and became well known for training many successful athletes doing every conceivable sport as well as average dudes, elderly folks and those who needed physiotherapy. The people I think give the best advice tend to have been competitive lifters who studied science, did research, trained hundreds of other top-level athletes with different needs but also regular people with diverse needs, goals, ages and health concerns. It is a mixture of applied real world experience with the improving but limited available research that makes the most sense to me.
The current trend is for Internet influencers, many (certainly not all) of whom have more charisma than useful knowledge. I’ve lifted for over two decades and have seen what seems to work for me and what doesn’t. You want to understand the research and trends without being wedded to them.
So far so good on small daily amounts of strength training. It’s nice to be pain free.
Question: For increasing VO2 max, would it work to just do as many burpees as possible for say, 30 seconds, then rest until my heart rate comes down, then do more burpees, etc?
I’ve been lifting weights as exercise 2-3x week for about 15 years now. It started with a New Year’s resolution and has been the only one I’ve ever kept for more than a week.
In my opinion, the endless debate about how to maximize your gains/benefits from working out is really pointless. The most important part, by far, is just sticking with it for the long term. The second most important point is to use progressive overloading. In other words, stick to it and push yourself to your limits either rep-wise or weight-wise for every set of exercises you perform. And if you want to increase strength, ingest a lot of protein.
Sure. What you describe is a version of HIIT. Burpees are a great exercise to use. And HIIT is a great approach for many to use.
Why though the specific interest in increasing VO2max per se? It’s not like that’s the easiest metric to accurately follow.
I don’t think you find much disagreement here?
The “debate” is fitness nerding and recognized as such. There are a small number of elite athletes for whom those small differences are of potential significance. But for most of us your basic two are on point: sticking with it and sticking with continuing to keep challenged.
Some reasonable debate to be had on how much strength training for the goal of longest healthspan. Some definitely. But for that goal it seems like there is a real dose response curve.
Seems like. Not proven. Could be other unmeasured correlated behaviors. Maybe high protein use is associated with more frequent weight training and midlife high protein is deleterious. Could be. Or something else.
Which gets to the next bit: how much protein for strength and how much for … life? Covered earlier here - many lifters do beyond diminishing returns. The big strength and hypertrophy impact comes from the exercise with relatively little change between moderate to higher protein intake and seems to top off at 1.6 mg protein per kg per day. Huge gains are possible with much less. Even staying at the standard 0.8 mg/kg/d.
VO2 needs lab measurements and is specifically associated with fitness. But so are many similar things. If you can do more exercises in a given time, are breathless for less time after doing some, can do more consecutive exercises at once, or more exercises in total than you are making measurable progress.
How many of us need one? If we are exercising for health then doing the aerobic exercise, in a wide variety of possible combinations of intensity approaches, at nearly any frequency, little much better than none and more better than less so long as recovery is respected, will do it. Measure or don’t and VO2max will improve and health measure definitely. The health measures improvement, the very likely longer healthspan, even if there was somehow no measurable VO2max improvement.
And the measure we all have is what matters most to those who are competitive: can I run (or whatever I am doing) faster, further, and/or for longer?
I guess where I’m getting this is, my fitness watch gives me a VO2 max score and it never goes down. And in the year that I was running, I found myself running for longer distances but not particularly faster. And by longer I mean, I could probably run, slowly, at least 90 minutes.
Now I can sustain a fairly high heart rate for 30-45 minutes without a problem, which I’m not sure I could do before. But it’s not reflecting on my fitness watch as improved VO2 max. And I’m still very slow at running and stuff. I haven’t been running this year in favor of more low impact activities, but I guarantee you I’m still very slow.
It seems like I have a lot of capacity for cardiovascular endurance but it doesn’t make me any faster.
I have no idea how accurate or worthless the fitness watch VO2max numbers are. But honestly would only bother if it was an effective proxy to motivate the behaviors. The hitting some target number would matter little though. Just that it was a motivator to keep yourself challenged.
But if your goal is to be able to run the same reasonably long distance faster (a great proxy for improving your cardiorespiratory fitness) then you can train for that. And as we discussed somewhere in this long thread, I am convinced that “polarized training” is the best for to get there. Lots of training time at lower intensity, like 80% of training time at 70% of HRMax, a fair amount, like 20%, at very high intensities, 80% or 85% plus, sprints, HIIT, whatever, and least in the middle. If using HR zones. Or just by perceived exertion works fine. Then every so often do your target distance as if in a race.
Why though are you committed to keeping the weight static and varying reps number only?
My personal preference is to lift each set to where the next rep would no longer be good form. I adjust the weight or difficulty so that point is in whatever rep target I am aiming for.
I added some weight to my squats today! I’m sure it’s not as rapid progress as if I was working out for an hour a day, but I am seeing improvement with just 2-3 exercises per day. I just make sure every rep counts.
I’d increase the weight to where you can do fewer reps. If this is difficult because at home there is just one weight of barbell, say, I would suggest doing trickier exercises, using other exercises to fatigue the muscle first, or decreasing the movement speed.
Don’t know if education leads to better choices, but…
What is your goal? Are you training for strength, hyper trophy, or endurance?
Typically, 35 reps is way too high to improve the size or strength of a muscle.
But if I am training in a lower rep range for the purposes of growing or strengthening the muscles, then it does make sense to do a few warm-up sets short of going to failure before finally doing one or two work sets were you actually do go to failure.
But when I say lower reps, I’m talking between four and 12. For me, it’s usually between four and eight reps per set.
(There is a school of thought that promotes one set to failure, and argues that the early reps in the set constitute a warmup. If doing that, I recommend doing very slow reps so as to avoid injury and ensure sufficient time under tension),
There isn’t much that isn’t questioned by someone, and it is true beginners will grow with anything, and any exercise is better than none. It is true doing a mix of ranges is wise. But if you have a specific goal and some experience some ways are much better than others. The conventional wisdom about reps is not perfect, but is a reasonable approximation. Different muscle fibres (say type 2b) are activated with high loads than low ones. If you lift enough light weights, you can still eventually recruit these with enough fatigue. But it’s not a great way to do it in terms of time or efficiency. Of course there are many ways to cook a steak.
If you read the article that is one of their conclusions!
A strong point on the strength front is that strength gains are often exercise trained specific and less clear what generalizability is. Which makes sense.
