I did a heavy club workout today. 28 of the 32 minutes were spent in zones 2,3,and 4.
It is possible to do both at the same time.
Exactly. If you do weights with shorter breaks, more intensity, circuits, “every minute on the minute”, etc. it absolutely is cardio. Your heart rate is elevated. And there is plenty of muscle adaption in running and biking too.
It is a spectrum, but not a dichotomy. The basic principle in both is force is the product of mass and acceleration. Bigger mass and changing speed both lead to increasing strength, and the spectrum includes:
- Above limit strength, static, no movement
- Very high strength, very slow speed
- High strength, slow speed
- Strength-speed training
- Speed-strength training
- Ballistic (explosive movement) methods, low or bodyweight and high velocity or acceleration
Though traditional cardio incorporates the last two choices.
Key word there is the “if.”
Realistically few routinely do that while strength training, and programs that emphasize such often have quite a few who sacrifice form to accomplish their every minute goals or meet their named CF routine targets. I may now be resting off my lateral epicondylitis but, other than a bike accident, it is my first adult exercise associated injury ever.
Veering into less data supported and more opinion based, I am more convinced by the philosophies of aiming for one main focus on a session. When strength training focus on the strength goals, be that day plyometric or whatever. Focus on the form not the heart rate. When cardio keep primarily on that day’s cardio objective, be it long slow or lactate threshold or sprint or whatever.
Of course any combination or mix is much better than none! And your spectrum comment is of course on point.
ETA that there is some evidence that concurrent training decreases the strength gain and may slightly interfere with the cardio gain. For most of us however I doubt that level of statistical difference matters in any practical sense.
I agree. A lot of the evidence applies much more to dedicated athletes seeking to improve in a specific area than the aging person seeking to optimize health, however this has changed greatly over the last few years.
Why don’t I lift weights?? Them things is heavy, that’s why!
Want to add that such is a very valid reason! Probably the main one in reality with everything else as post hoc justifications … 
I’d note that the blue zone theory is not terribly rigorous.
Let’s say that we count how many people were killed by a falling meteorite - something completely random, geographically - and tabulate this per region (county, state, country, etc.). If you were to do that, you’d find that some regions are above average and some are below average. Even if you tabulate it on a per capita basis, this will still be true because random is…random.
Random things will cluster. If you flip a coin 20 times, 25% of the time, you’ll have at least one streak of 5 heads. Nature doesn’t try to smooth things out, ensure an even distribution, etc. Over an infinite amount of time, you’ll start to get things to converge but, looking at time spans of a few years or a few decades, you can get widely divergent results on the basis of simple random chance.
But let’s assume that there’s a lifestyle choice that causes meteorites to hit people. To see if this is true, we will compare regions on Earth that are on land, no larger than 100 square miles, and inhabited by at least 100 people.
If you were to do that, nearly all random selections would turn out to be rural land with small farms. Minus the 100 persons limit and your average result is going to be uninhabited land or a small slice of some mega-farm without enough residents to calculate anything from. We’re excluding those but, as a side effect of that choice, we end up only looking at the range of land between small farms and cities.
A city is going to have more people and thus a larger sample size. Larger sample sizes hew towards the average. Smaller sample sizes are going to be on the top of the scale and the bottom of the scale because we don’t have enough samples to pull things into the average. Cities aren’t going to appear in our output as a stand-out region.
If we take only the regions that are at the edge of the scale, then we will end up with some region that’s a small farm. Nearly all of our results, at the top of the meteorite hit scale and at the bottom, are going to be closer to the 100 person limit. That’s how you escape “average”. So, statistically, meteorites almost always hit in 100 square mile regions with about 100 inhabitants.
Now, other than the lifestyle choice of living inside of a region with about 1 person per square mile, the other lifestyle choices of people who get hit by meteorites is that they walk around a lot, farm, eat more whole produce, care for animals, etc.
These are also the lifestyle choices of people who are hit by the fewest meteorites per year.
To be sure, science does say that exercise, eating whole foods, etc. are beneficial to your longevity. But Okinawa may just have gotten the luck of the draw for having more 100+ year old people, and some other region had bad luck and a lot of early heart attacks. Maybe their main benefit is that the doctor who delivers most babies on the island was a big proponent of abortion and advised nearly all of his patients with weaker-looking fetuses, to abort. The end result is a above-average healthy population. Maybe their main benefit is that they were victims of WWII, and a lot of the elderly are those who survived a period of famine. Famine seems to trigger the sirt2 pathway to elongate the life of an organism. The end result is a large group of people who had a few years added to their life but, unless you want to replicate the experience of hiding in a cave for months, running away from soldiers and bombs, eating your own clothing and mud balls, you’re probably not going to take much from Okinawa that’s useful for life extension. Taking a supplement that affects sirt2 is a lot more practical.
Real, scientific research will generally run away from region-to-region comparisons. There’s too many confounding factors between history, local culture, environment, etc. to allow you to tease out what’s really affecting the output.
The blue zone journalist dude is not doing science. He’s selling books. His stuff sounds good and it’s fairly unlikely that he’ll identify a region that’s doing everything wrong and, yet, somehow getting a large number of centenarians. But you’re better to look at medical science than at Okinawa for tips on how to live longer.
Thanks, that is interesting. Especially in light of books like The China Study.
I lift for strength and stamina and to maintain a good figure. I also stretch before and after in order to keep maximum flexibility.
Technically, it’s more complicated than that. If you can reduce the number of confounding elements - e.g. keep it all in China, where they all have the same legal structure, a similar historical background, similar economic status, etc. - and you do a good job at the math of factoring in the normal distribution of expected results, then you can start to tease out some details.
Ideally, there would be a quick and easy rule that you could apply to say, “This is a valid and perfect scientific result” and another that says, “This is nonsense BS.” Unfortunately, everything exists on a continuum between those endpoints and there’s no hope of taking anything from any of it without a lot of math, rigor, and combining techniques.
Regional analysis is best for producing hypotheses. Maybe Okinawa had a pro-abortion doctor, maybe they had a famine, maybe they eat purple potatoes, maybe it’s the sum balance of all of those things. You can identify it as a region of possible relevance, and thus a foundation for generating hypotheses. Those hypotheses then need to be tested under lab conditions and small cohort studies. That’s when they migrate from “curiosities” to something useful.
And for providing additional corroboration. If the only evidence for the lifestyle patterns was that these communities have these habits and have long lifespans, then it would be pretty weak evidence.
But the evidence for the benefits of those general lifestyle patterns also comes from many independent lines. With little evidence that disputes it.
So then you come to the other value of these regional comparisons: they make for effective tools to communicate the concepts of healthier lifestyle pattern. The best scientific evidence often makes for a poorer story …
Gift linked.
Huh. It paywalled me. The new Mom energy definitely resonates, though. It looks like it might make a worthwhile point about decision fatigue.
Right now my goal is to walk, and going outside in the f**ing cold to walk is a feat in and of itself. And I will keep brushing my teeth on one foot, a simple yet challenging practice that has had striking results I never would have anticipated. I’ve had trouble getting down low for years and the other day I actually squatted to retrieve something from a low shelf.
I dislocated my right wrist at age 11 and something has never been right about it since, despite X-rays showing the bones to be in the right place. It hurts to lift anything heavy with it.
But I still want to do some sort of weightlifting, so I’ll look into alternatives that don’t affect the wrist, or can be done with legs, or whatnot.
I would love to lift more but I’ve had so many injuries lately that lifting is tough. My latest is a separated shoulder. I’m over a month out and still in quite a bit of pain. The tissue damage pain is going down, but I’m getting nerve pains and I’m worried the “hump” isn’t going away and is pressing on the nerves. I have an ortho appt but it still a few weeks out. This is 3rd separated shoulder (both arms) but this is the worst. I haven’t really been able to play bass during this either. The good news is the pain is down enough that I can get back to cardio: Walking long distance, hiking, and biking (I’m very careful on my commuter bike now that it is finally snow season but I have my studded tires on) and indoor cycling. I’m hoping to start doing light lifting again soon.
To perhaps throw the documentary under the bus a little. It did mention that Okinawa went through a period of famine, where they mostly survived on a local sweet potato. They never mentioned sirt2, and instead concluded that that sweet potato was the secret.
Because lot of people in America work blue collar physically demanding skilled trade jobs, warehouse and jobs that requires 12 to 16 hours a day for five days a week. So how will they have time to lift weights and exercise? People have bills and rent or mortgage to pay. Even people have to take care of their kids and spouses.
This is true. However, these people would still benefit from taking multiple five minutes exercise breaks during the day, using stairs, walking dogs and other things less strenuous or time consuming than a commercial gym. Anything that seems like work is exercise, but even a physical job is unlikely to provide ideal balance between muscles.
True. In the weekends instea did going to bars the blue collar workers with physically demanding jobs can go to gym on the weekend to exercise and lift weights.
I kinda think if you have a physically demanding job you ARE exercising. I hired a mason last year. He said someone had asked him if he worked out. “Worked outside” is more like it. The guy literally lifted rocks all day long.