Training For Life

Let’s Define Cardio;

Low Intensity Long Durational Cardio (aerobic – needing oxygen to supply energy) (heart rate is between 50-65 % of your maximum) aka jogging for 60-90 minutes

When you do this type of cardio work, your body gets the majority of energy it needs from fat.

Interval Cardio (anaerobic, not needing oxygen to supply energy) (heart rate is between 90-100% of your maximum) Four to six challenges that are 60 – 90 second bursts of exercise with rest periods in between.  Each progressive challenge is incrementally more intense than the last.  As each challenge becomes more intense, the rest periods become longer.  The goal is to be totally recovered and ready for each challenge.  Example; the 100 yard sprints that you used to run for football practice.

When you do this type of cardio work, your body gets the majority of energy it needs from glucose (blood sugar) and from glycogen stored in the muscles & liver, and from ATP and creatine.

Glucose & Glycogen are like gasoline (fuel) that your motor (muscles) uses to perform.

Your body takes the carbs that you eat and breaks them down into glucose & glycogen.

The common myth that jogging is better for fat loss, fitness, & health is a strong one that is wrong;

The old school text books & simple minds say; “To burn fat, you must stay in the fat burning zone (heart rate between 50-65%) for 60-70 minutes.  You don’t start burning fat until about 20 minutes into the work-out.  So if you do a 70 minute session, you will get 50 minutes of fat burning.

I am going to clear this up for you once and for all.  You see for fat loss, it is not about where your body gets the energy from the work-out for (slow go cardio / fat, interval / glycogen) nearly as much as it is total calories.

You see the instant that you are done with low intensity jogging; your body is done burning calories.  But, do an intense set of intervals, and your body burns calories for the 2-4 hours after the work-out.  So the total amount of calories burned form intense interval far exceeds that of jogging type cardio.

Another big advantage that you get with interval cardio that most do not know about is that it changes the way your body stores your calories in the future: and in a very good way.  You see most of the benefits of exercise come after the exercise are completed.  It is how the body adapts and changes.  Tear down muscles by weight lifting, and in the 1-2 days after, the body repairs the tiny micro tears back so they are a little bigger & stronger.

Well cardio is much the same way.  When you do low intensity jogging type cardio, your body says, “It’s a good thing I had that fat there to supply energy for that work out”.  So it makes sure that it has plenty of fat there in preparation for the next “slow go cardio” session.

But when you do intense intervals, your body says, “It’s a good thing I had that glycogen in the muscles for that interval cardio”.  So when it breaks down your future meals, it stores more of the carbs as glycogen in the muscles and the liver in preparation for the future “Interval Cardio” sessions.  In essence, your gas tanks enlarge with useful energy.  This is great for at least two reasons.

• You will have more readily available quick burning fuel (glycogen).  Which means you can have more quick usable energy to do intense activities.
• Glycogen burns energy just sitting there it raises your BMR (basal metabolic rate).  The more muscle and the bigger your glycogen gas tanks are, the more calories you will burn while you are just sitting or sleeping.  That is a great thing.  It is just like the difference between muscle & fat.

In fact, I believe that traditional CARDIO KILLS;

• Your time
• Your immune system
• Your joints
• Your body composition

Traditional Cardio kills your time. You have to do hours upon hours to see results.  The only way to progress is by going farther; which takes more time.  Eventually, if you want to keep progressing, you are going to run out of time.

Traditional Cardio kills your immune system. When anyone uses traditional cardio 2 or 3 times per week, carcinogens are released.  A ground breaking study of long-distance runners showed that after a workout, the blood levels and oxidation of LDL (bad) cholesterol & triglycerides increased.  They also found that prolonged running disrupted the balance of blood thinners and thickeners, elevating inflammatory factors and clotting levels—both signs of heart distress.

Traditional Cardio kills your joints. No one has perfect symmetry with their bones, tendons, ligaments, flexibility, range of motion, strength, etc.  When you repetitiously do the same thing (jogging stride) over and over again, the pounding of the pavement puts stress in bad places.  Consistent pounding of the body from traditional forms of cardio lead to severe injuries in your back, knees, ankles & everywhere in between.  Just take a look at the Chicago marathon; ¾ of the runners have on knee braces.

Traditional Cardio kills your body composition.

Cardio does nothing to improve your lean muscle to fat ratio.  In fact, most marathon runners lose muscle.  Look at the difference between the physiques of an elite marathon runner and an elite sprinter.  Which physique do you want?  Then train like a sprinter.  He does sprints.  Most marathoners go into a starvation mode; the body becomes catabolic, and burns muscle for fuel.  Best case scenario, is a cardio hound that starts out like a pear shape, ends up a smaller pair shape.  Not my idea of progress.

Written By Darin Steen

Although classifications do change, a body fat percentage that is considered obese is anything greater than ~35% for females or greater than ~25% for males, whereas an overweight body fat percentage is greater than ~29% for females or greater than ~20% for males. (Because they carry more natural body fat, women will always have higher percentages.) Here are some other helpful values (the older you are, the higher end of the range you’ll typically fall into):

Body Type

Female

Male

Athlete

17% or less

10% or less

Lean

17-22%

10-15%

Normal

22-25%

15-18%

Above Average

25-29%

18-20%

Can your body fat drop too low? Absolutely! Your body requires “essential” levels of body fat, necessary for hormone

formation, joint health, insulation, padding, and more. Although the exact percentage depends on genetic body type, most men need an essential body fat of 2-4%, while most women need an essential body fat of 10-12%.

GFG

By Mike Tuchscherer

Okay, I admit the title is a bit like the kid on your school bus who used to shove pencils up his nose – starved for attention.  But while the title may be a bit excessive, what is surprisingly not excessive is the notion of training every day.

It may come as a surprise to many that I advocate training everyday for all kinds of athletes.  Iron Sports athletes especially could use this as a change in mentality.  But does that mean I have my athletes in the gym squatting heavy on a daily basis?  Not in the least.

You see, what I mean is training in the more broad sense of the word.  “Train everyday” does not mean “lift everyday”.  There is a lot more to preparing yourself as an athlete than just picking up heavy stuff.  There are large components of fitness that are not addressed during traditional lifting workouts that can be very important to the overall development of the athlete.  But rather than rehash all of the potential areas that need training, I’ll just point you to this article.

As you can see, there are certainly a lot of areas that we need to develop in our training program.  And once you consider the hectic and chaotic nature of life in general, you realize that some days are better than others for different lifting objectives.  For example, maybe a particularly stress-and-drama filled day leaves you feeling drained.  Is it really a good idea to go for a maximum deadlift attempt or maybe wait until tomorrow?  I can’t really give you an answer outright because each situation is so different.  Maybe this person can’t get to the gym tomorrow, so it’s better to suck it up today than not do it at all.  But on the other hand, maybe it’s better to just let this one go and live to fight another day.

Answers to these questions are really part of listening to your body.  There are many ways to do that, but there are very few ways that offer objective feedback in helping you to make that decision.  TRAC is one of them.  TRAC offers a fantastic level of insight on the functioning of various body systems, which allows you to determine how to get the most bang for your training buck.  And that’s the essence of what I have been doing lately to train everyday while keeping an ideal level of functionality in my body systems, all the while avoiding overtraining and other problems.

The overall design of this includes a training plan.  We plan to train on specific days of the week, but if things happen that create a condition where the training won’t be effective, we change what it is that we are training.  The original training plan actually looks like most that you see; on Monday do this, on Wednesday do that, etc.  Then non-lifting days are planned for GPP training and all that it entails (prehab, neglected muscles, energy systems, etc).

The key here is that training each day is adjusted depending on what TRAC says that we need.  The main workouts are fairly straight forward.  We have our plan and if TRAC indicates good functioning of body systems, then we continue training as planned.  If our stress levels are elevated or if CNS is depressed, we adjust our training in accordance with TRAC’s recommendation.  This could be anything from a slight reduction in training volume to restricting PR attempts to cutting the session in favor of light recovery work.  Adjusting the main training sessions is actually pretty simple when you have TRAC making the calls based on your actual body physiology.

If you are planning for a GPP session, TRAC is still very helpful.  What you do to adjust your GPP sessions has to do with understanding GPP’s role in your training, both for the short term and the long term.

In the short term, GPP sessions should prepare you for the next workout.  They should restore any muscle groups or body systems that need restoration (nutrition plays a huge role in this as well).  In the long term, GPP still serve the purpose to prepare you for the future training requirements, but it looks different.  Over the long term, GPP serves to build work capacity, develop energy systems, develop strength in neglected muscle groups, etc.

Just by getting a feel for both short and long term GPP objectives, there is a difference in intensity, taxonomy, and the overall stress induced by those sessions.  Short term GPP tends to be kinder and gentler where long term focused GPP workouts can still be very tough.  TRAC allows us to figure out which style of GPP session is most beneficial to us today.

If all of your systems test well, then you can probably afford to push your GPP training a little bit.  These can be sessions focused more on the long term objectives of GPP.  Where this starts changing is when systems show signs of fatigue and over-stress.

If you are getting ready for a GPP session, but your stress levels are high, then you probably want to focus on low intensity energy system work and/or stretching.  This will have the greatest impact on getting you ready for your next session.  If stress is low, but CNS is poor, then you should take action to stimulate your CNS.  This tends to be very low volumes of light, very fast work.  Think of a light, explosive warm up using exercises that you don’t often do.  Olympic lifts, jumps, and throws work particularly well here.

It’s also important that you keep all this in perspective.  Personally, I would balance the information that TRAC suggests with what you know from your daily life.  If your CNS is shot, but you also haven’t slept more than 2 hours in as many days, perhaps a good night’s sleep will serve you better than a GPP session.  But circumstances like this are usually pretty obvious.  The tough training questions are when the answers aren’t so obvious.  Those are far more common as well, but fortunately, they are also the ones TRAC can help with the most.

Before closing, I’d like to take a moment to shed some light on Adaptive Reserves.  Those of you who use TRAC will notice that Adaptive Reserves tends to move about more slowly than the other factors.  This is normal, but it is also important.  If your adaptive reserves fall below a 6, then you should take steps to reduce your overall stress levels because your body is running low on adaptive ability.  Getting yourself into moderate or even high stress situations is important to causing the body to adapt and change, but if it is causing your adaptive reserves to fall too far, then it’s too much.  Granted, it’s a fine line to walk, but it’s much easier to walk it when you can SEE the line rather than just stumbling along blindly.

So this is the general system some of my athletes and I have been using to train every day.  Each day there is something you can do to get closer to your goals.  Should you ever take a day completely off of training?  Sure, but it’s mostly a mental need, not a physical one.  If you can find a way to closely manage the functioning of your body systems and train according to that need, you’ll be rewarded with higher levels of performance and better gains than you’ve experienced in a long time.  As is always the case, you have to give your body what it needs to be a better athlete.  And this is one highly effective way of doing just that.

Do you ever wonder whether that morning cup of coffee before you head to the gym might be doing more than just giving your brain a wake-up call? In other words, could caffeine actually help you work out? The answer is yes. Here are 3 quick and dirty tips for getting the most out of every drip:

Try capsules: Caffeine consumption can help you go up to 10 times longer during endurance exercise like swimming, running or cycling, although it doesn’t have any effect on maximum muscular force. But the best benefits don’t come from a cup of coffee.

Instead, most subjects in studies that showed this big benefit were consuming pure caffeine capsules, which could be risky (see note at end of newsletter).

Exercise on an empty stomach: Caffeine may also help to increase fat burning, and for this reason, it is a popular ingredient among fat burning supplements. But if you can’t afford weight loss pills, you can get good benefit out of simply consuming a cup of coffee and exercising on an empty stomach.

Get the right amount: Last, caffeine can reduce your “rating of perceived exertion”, meaning that with caffeine in your system, you can exercise harder, but not feel as much discomfort. To get the effects of caffeine, you should typically consume 2-5mg per kg of body weight 30-60 minutes prior to exercise (1 pound is 2.2 kilograms).

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There is a deep, dark, mysterious exercise secret that personal trainers and fitness pioneers have struggled for decades to hunt down. Like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and goose that laid the golden egg, the one who discovers this elusive secret will go down in infamy and live eternally glorified in exercise manuals everywhere. Folks, that’s how most people understand the fat-burning zone, but by the time you finish this article, you’ll know the best way to discover your personal fat-burning zone, and exactly how to use it.

How Does the Body Make Energy?

As you learned in “How to Tone and Lose Fat In One Body Part,” your body relies on fat as a primary fuel. But because the body is a complex machine, it is able to make energy from other fuel sources too–like protein and carbohydrates. Throughout the day, each person uses a combination of carbohydrate, fat, and protein fuel sources to create the energy necessary to sit up, climb stairs, filter blood in the kidneys, make the automatic lung muscles function, help the heart to beat, and even lift a fork to eat.

Fat: the Most Efficient Energy Source

The most efficient energy source is fat. One pound of stored fat can provide 3,600 calories of energy, which is far more than most people burn in a single day. In comparison, a pound of storage protein or carbohydrate provides less than half that much energy. Because fat provides so much energy, the body relies primarily on fat during rest and during relatively slow and easy physical activity. From an evolutionary survival standpoint, that makes sense, since most people can only store about 2,000 calories of carbohydrate on their entire body. If you burned carbohydrate as your primary fuel, you’d have to be finding food and eating all day long. Furthermore, if your burned protein as your primary fuel source, your body would have to break down muscle and other organs to get the protein fuel–or you’d have to be rooting around for nuts, seeds, eggs, and meat all day long.

How the Body Uses Carbohydrates

However, once you begin moving quickly, you suddenly present your body with a fuel paradox. Though fat is plentiful on your body (even a 150 pound individual with 5% body fat has 27,000 calories of stored fat energy!), and provides many calories for exercise energy, it simply doesn’t provide that energy as quickly as carbohydrates. When the body needs to get from point A to point B quickly, or needs to hoist a heavy object overhead, it needs immediate energy, and that’s where carbohydrates come in. They may not provide as much energy, but they certainly provide it far faster than fat.

So as you progress from a standstill, to a walk, to a jog, to an all-out sprint, your body begins to tap into carbohydrates more and more, while reducing its use of fat as a fuel. Of course, during this entire progression, you’re burning more overall calories too. So while the percentage of fat used as a fuel is decreasing, the total fat calories you burn might still be increasing.

What Is the Fat-Burning Zone?

For example, if you burn 200 calories per hour while walking, and burn 60% fat, then you burn 120 fat calories per hour. But if you burn 600 calories per hour while jogging, and only burn 40% fat during that time, you still burn 240 calories of fat per hour, twice as much as when you were walking. Using this concept, the point at which fat burning peaks during exercise is referred to as the peak “fat burning zone”.

How to Find Your Fat-Burning Zone

In most individuals, the fat-burning zone occurs at 45-65% of the maximum heart rate, and that is the typical calculation used by personal trainers. They’ll take the number 220, and subtract your age to find your maximum heart rate, then take 45-65% of that number to find your maximum fat-burning zone.

But this number is highly variable and tends to be erroneous, primarily because the maximum heart rate is highly variable. So here is your quick and dirty tip for finding your personalized fat-burning zone far more accurately:

1. Warm up on a bike for 10 minutes.

2. Pedal at your maximum sustainable pace for 20 minutes. You should be breathing hard and your legs should be burning, but you should be able to maintain the same intensity for the full 20 minutes.

3. Record your average heart rate during those 20 minutes.

4. Subtract 20 beats from that heart rate. Add and subtract 3 beats from the resulting number to get a range, and that is your peak fat burning zone.

For example, if your average heart rate was 160, 160-20 is 140, 140+3 is 143, 140-3 is 147, and so your peak fat burning zone is when you have a heart rate of 137-143 beats per minute.

Compared to the results that I have obtained from hundreds of individuals in a professional exercise physiology lab with all sorts of gas masks and gadgets, this method obtains very similar results. But if you did want a laboratory test to find your personal fat-burning zone, then you would be looking for something called an Exercise Metabolic Rate test, also known as a VO2 Max Test.

Congratulations. You’ve now discovered the elusive fat-burning zone. But don’t go celebrate yet!

How to Exercise with the Fat-Burning Zone

As you learned earlier, the fat-burning zone doesn’t necessarily burn a high amount of calories. If you do all your exercise in the fat-burning zone, then you’ll never develop strong lungs, muscles, or much fitness and athleticism.

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Furthermore, research shows that both cardio intervals and resistance training help you lose weight faster than exercise in your peak fat-burning zone.

An ideal workout program mixes cardiovascular exercise in the peak fat-burning zone on easier, recovery days with a combination of resistance training and cardio intervals that go above the fat-burning zone on harder days. Here is a sample workout week that incorporates the fat-burning zone:

Day 1: Strength training (refer to this page for more strength training tips) – 40-60 minutes

Day 2: Peak fat-burning zone cardio – 40-60 minutes

Day 3: Cardio intervals (refer to this page for cardio interval tips) - 40-60 minutes

Day 4: Off

Day 5: Strength training (refer to this page for more strength training tips) – 40-60 minutes

Day 6: Peak fat-burning zone cardio – 40-60 minutes

Day 7: Cardio intervals (refer to this page for cardio interval tips) - 40-60 minutes

With the workout above, you give your body a chance to burn fat fast with the resistance training and cardio intervals, but you also get to utilize easier days to also burn fat, but without quite as much strain on the body. And compared to hunting down Bigfoot, this approach to exercise is far easier to implement and it gets much more satisfactory results.

BEN GREENFIELD

Perhaps you’ve seen them before: those silver handles jutting out from the treadmill or on the handlebars of a stationary bicycle or elliptical trainer. The basic idea is that you’re supposed to grab that silver area with your hand to get a reading of your heart rate. But do they actually work

?
On this type of “hand” heart rate monitor, the sensors in that silver-colored handle are picking up your heart rate from your palms and fingertips, but you must have your hand absolutely still to get a proper reading, and if your hands are very dry, you may not get a reading at all. Because you may be bouncing around or moving as you work out, this can present some difficulty.

But provided you can hold still, and you have a little sweat on your hands, you can actually get an accurate reading from the heart rate monitors, and you can use the  reading to make sure you’re able to follow the recommendations that are listed on the machine for your age category.