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Episode 98: Capacities for Longevity Part 3: Cardio
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In this episode of the Movement Logic Podcast, we dive into cardiovascular health and the role of cardiorespiratory fitness in supporting longevity—especially for women as they age. We break down the science behind moderate and vigorous aerobic exercise, explain how it differs from strength training, and explore why both are essential for long-term health.
We also tackle some of the most persistent cardio misconceptions, unpack the physiological differences between strength and aerobic training, and share evidence-based strategies for integrating both into your routine.
Along the way, we offer personal insights and practical tips for building aerobic capacity—with a special focus on finding and sustaining moderate intensity. You'll learn how to gauge it using tools like RPE, the talk test, and heart rate zones.
Sign up for Bone Density Course: Lift for Longevity. THE CART CLOSES THIS SATURDAY, MAY 10th, 2025!
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00:00 Podcast Introduction and Vocal Warmups
07:32 The Importance of Cardio Respiratory Fitness
11:01 Understanding VO2 Max and Its Benefits
13:45 Physical Activity vs. Exercise
23:36 The Role of Cardio Respiratory Fitness in Longevity
30:30 Aerobic vs. Anaerobic Exercise
34:35 Recovery and Adaptation
53:30 Biology of Cardio Respiratory Fitness
53:46 Aerobic vs. Resistance Training
59:43 Understanding Lactate, Lactate Thresholds, and Exercise Intensity
01:02:31 Training Zones
01:22:07 Moderate vs. Vigorous Intensity Exercise
01:44:13 Best Exercises for Aerobic Endurance
01:49:58 Combining Strength and Cardio Training
01:53:56 Cardiovascular Health in Women
02:07:42 Why People Hate Cardio and How to Overcome It
02:21:44 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
RESOURCES
Read JAMA Network Open about cardio and mortality risk
Listen to Long & Lean pt. 2
Read VO₂ max associated with reduction in all-cause mortality
Listen about exercise recovery
Read Burn about human metabolism by Herman Ponzer
Read Eve about evolution and the female body by Cat Bohannon
Read about cardiovascular disease and risk factors for women
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Movement Logic Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Me, me, me, me. I'm trying to start the podcast. i'm just Your vocal warmups are preventing me from starting. ah but Unique New York.
00:00:11
Speaker
New York. You need... No, you you need...
00:00:23
Speaker
strength and conditioning coat and i'm dr sarah courtt physical therapist many years of combined experience in fitness movement and physical therapy we believe in strong opinions loosely held which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts or to gatekeep or fearmonger strength training for
Challenges Women Face in Strength Training
00:00:40
Speaker
women. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt?
00:00:46
Speaker
Whatever that means, we're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices.
Season 6 and Bone Density Course
00:00:53
Speaker
Let's dive in.
00:01:08
Speaker
Welcome to season six of the Movement Logic Podcast.
Community in Women's Strength Training
00:01:10
Speaker
I'm Laurel Buebersdorf and as always, I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Court. Sarah, what's going on? We are right now deep in our launch for our next cohort of the Bone Density course. The cart closes on May 10th and it's been really fun getting to talk to and meet a whole new bunch of women who are interested in getting stronger,
00:01:35
Speaker
in working on their bone health. And it's always my favorite thing. And I've talked about this before, I think. We did a free strength class, which was everybody like doing the class. And we did a Q and A as well. And in both instances, it's all over Zoom. So it's these little rectangles and you're just looking out on 20 rectangles of just really regular looking women,
Carlotta's Experience and Benefits of Strength Training
00:01:55
Speaker
right? So what I love about that is I hope that gives the women thinking about taking a course, a sense of community because they look around and like, oh, these other women who are considering taking this course I look like them.
00:02:06
Speaker
I'm not here sitting here with a bunch of 20 year olds in their Lululemon leggings and their bra cropped bra top or whatever. I'm sitting here with women wearing t-shirts and with gray hair and recognizing that we are in whatever part of our aging life that we are in and that this is something that we need to do. yeah I really do enjoy that.
00:02:26
Speaker
We also, we got an awesome testimonial from someone who just finished the most recent cohort. I'm going to read it to you. She talks about her skiing. And so she sent us some really cool pictures and I'm going to see if we can use them and share them with you because they're awesome. But yeah so her name is Carlotta and she emailed us to say, I wanted to share these two photos.
00:02:48
Speaker
This is me last year in a family ski race before strength training for you. And so that's the first picture and it's her going around. Are they just called poles when you're having to go around the thing, the pole? Yeah.
00:03:01
Speaker
Oh, I have no idea. Yeah. Who knows? Skiers write in and tell us that we're wrong. Is she slaloming? Oh, yeah. That sounds ski-y. Slalom. Slaloming. Yeah. she's She's doing the kind where you like go one way around a pole and then the other way around a pole. like It's not just that like straight downhill. That's slaloming.
00:03:17
Speaker
Sure. So she's slaloming around a pole. And I'm not a a skier in particular, but she looks like she's leaned over somewhat. She's not super close to the pole. And I think you're supposed to... The fastest line is usually...
00:03:30
Speaker
The straightest one, right? So she's probably going medium speed. And then she continues, this is me this year in the same race.
Bone Density Course Enrollment
00:03:40
Speaker
Oh, gate. She just says what they're called.
00:03:42
Speaker
In the same family ski race and the same gate after only four months of strength training with you. owning it at 48. No pain in the hip and a lot less in the back too.
00:03:53
Speaker
My teenage boys still not overtaken me. And then a smiley face. And then she went, thank And so the after picture, the only way I can describe it is it looks way more badass. Like she is right up again. Like she's brushing the pole over, which I think is like One of the things that you do, I feel like I've seen people, skiers do that, right? She's yeah leaned in way harder.
00:04:14
Speaker
She's over at a harder angle. It reminded me, I was telling Laurel, she's lower, lower she's crouched down lower. It reminded me so much of riding motorcycle and going around the corner because those are all aspects that you work on, right? You want to take a big swooping curve around the corner. You want to make a tight of a line as possible. You're leaned way over. You're trying to get your face closer to the ground, which sounds like a bad idea, it's actually good idea.
00:04:36
Speaker
So it really reminded me of that. But it was so cool. i definitely want to see if we can share these pictures because it's so cool to see the before and after. Yeah, they're such good pictures. And I don't know anything about downhill skiing, but she looks like she has a high level of skill.
00:04:49
Speaker
Yes. um I can stay on my skis, but she's doing things that would take me a long time to be able to do. And yeah, even I can tell... that the way that she's handling the movement in the second photo is, like you said, Sarah, just more badass looking. Yeah.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah. So loved that before and after picture and the translation of strength that we're doing in bone density course, primarily with the goal of longevity, right? Lift for longevity, but using it as well to enhance performance in your sport.
00:05:22
Speaker
Cause I'm all about that with strength training for running. My running has gotten more economical because of strength training. I can actually feel that. I don't know if my times have improved, like what percentages due to the very specific strength training I'm doing, but I definitely know my calves aren't injured and I'm running a heck of a lot higher pace. I'm doing the calf raise machine, my favorite machine at the gym, six sets a week at least and loading it up a lot. So Strength can improve so many different aspects of our lives and extend our lives in the process. So I love that.
00:05:58
Speaker
Yeah. It must be said that the cart is closing for bone density course lift for longevity very soon.
Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Longevity
00:06:05
Speaker
In fact, it's closing on Saturday, May 10th. Heads up, we are closing the cart on a Saturday. We typically close the cart on a Sunday. Don't let that throw you off.
00:06:16
Speaker
I think we're doing it because Sunday's Mother's Day. I can't remember, but I'm happy that we're closing it on a Saturday and not on a Sunday. So you should... Jot that down in your calendar if you're waiting until the very last second, because that's what most people do, wait until the very last second. Just take a heart attack. Maybe set an alarm.
00:06:36
Speaker
It's closing May 10th on Saturday. I set alarms for literally every... I wake up in the morning and I look at my calendar and I go, what might I possibly forget to do? And I set alarms for every single thing. Nice. um Set an alarm. Card is closing May 10th. Or just go to the show notes right now and join us.
00:06:55
Speaker
I think we're closing it on the the Saturday because we want to give people, there's a fair amount of material in the course yeah that we want you to look at. And so we want to give you enough time between the cart closing and when the course actually starts with the following Thursday, May 15th.
00:07:10
Speaker
Yep. We have a lot of content pre-recorded that will give you a really solid background on the most salient information you'll need to get started on the right foot. So that's right.
00:07:21
Speaker
that's That's why. and we need There's a quick turnaround between cart closing and and course starting. And so we're giving you as many hours as possible to familiarize yourself with the material. There we go. Cool. All right. Today, we're continuing our series on physical capacities, essential for longevity. This is part three.
00:07:38
Speaker
In part one and two, we covered strength and power, two big players in keeping us alive, independent, and able to engage in the activities that give our lives joy and meaning as we age.
00:07:49
Speaker
Today, we're diving into a capacity am very passionate about, but I suspect a lot of people in our audience have potentially overlooked when thinking about aging. I think particularly in our community of yoga teachers who have somewhat recently discovered strength and it started building the habit of strength training.
00:08:09
Speaker
And so the capacity I'm talking about is the capacity of cardiorespiratory fitness. In this episode, we'll define what cardiorespiratory fitness actually is, why it matters so much for your health and longevity, how it differs from but complements strength training.
00:08:26
Speaker
We'll also dig into how your body adapts to aerobic exercise at the cellular and systemic level. What kinds of activities actually improve this capacity?
00:08:37
Speaker
How much is enough to make a meaningful difference? And we'll look at why cardio has potentially been fairly and also unfairly sidelined or maligned in favor of strength in recent years. And when I say fairly, I mean that there's some real backlash having to do with the way women have been sold cardio as ah just a way to get smaller, which I think is fair.
00:09:01
Speaker
We'll talk about we think our opinion, strongly, ah loosely, strong opinion, loosely held, is that- Is it loosely or strongly? What opinion do I have?
00:09:14
Speaker
Depends on the day. Depends on the topic. We'll share with you why we believe the pendulum really needs to swing back to center. In other words, we really need both strength and cardio.
Understanding VO2 Max and Physical Activity vs. Exercise
00:09:27
Speaker
Okay. So let's talk about what cardiorespiratory fitness actually is, and then also why it matters so much for your health and longevity. So in simple terms, cardiorespiratory fitness or CRF is how efficiently your cardiovascular system works both during physical activity and exercise to supply energy to working muscles, as well as during recovery from exercise.
00:09:54
Speaker
So when we're talking about CRF, you might also hear terms like aerobic fitness, aerobic endurance, cardiovascular endurance, aerobic capacity, functional capacity, VO2 max.
00:10:07
Speaker
These are not exactly the same as CRF, but they're all under this umbrella of CRF. And the differences in each of the meanings have to do with the context. For example, aerobic endurance is discussed mainly around endurance performance in athletes,
00:10:24
Speaker
Functional capacity is often discussed more in the context of rehab, but they're all ways of talking about CRF. So I want to briefly touch on VO2 max.
00:10:35
Speaker
yeah I'm having flashbacks to PT school year one, semester one. which was the worst five months of my PT career.
00:10:46
Speaker
It was so brutal. We had can't remember what the class was called, but we had a class about like cardiorespiratory fitness and various things like that. And then it was like dunk somebody in water and see how long they can hold their breath. And I was like, what the fuck does this have to do with anything? but Let's talk. VO2 max sounds like super technical and maybe a little scary if you don't know what it means, but we're going to break it down.
00:11:07
Speaker
So VO2 max tells you how many milliliters of oxygen your body can use per kilogram of your body weight per minute during maximal exercise.
00:11:24
Speaker
Okay. So it's how much oxygen, right? Which is it measured in milliliters, right? Think about the liter of Coke. It's hard for us Americans because we're so used to things like ounces and pounds that actually make no sense at all and don't end in nice round numbers, but that's, that God forbid we change anything.
00:11:40
Speaker
ah Milliliters of oxygen, right? So imagine like a tiny bit of that liter of your Coke bottle per kilogram of body weight, right? So that's just how much you weigh per minute.
00:11:51
Speaker
So it has to do with volume of air weight of your body and time. And so that is what makes up your VO2 max. And so VO2 max is a measure of how efficiently your body can take in, transport around your body and yen use the oxygen that you're taking in when you're working as hard as you possibly can.
00:12:14
Speaker
The higher your VO2 max number is, the more oxygen your body can use, which generally indicates better endurance and better cardiovascular health. And researchers often assess CRF through a VO2
Incorporating Exercise into Modern Life
00:12:29
Speaker
max test, which is designed to measure that maximum amount of oxygen that your body can use when exercising intensely.
00:12:36
Speaker
You may have seen pictures of like people running on a treadmill with a whole big face mask on that's measuring their VO2 max. And then just as a side note, wearables like a a watch with a heart rate monitor, they often tell you what your VO2 max is, but it's not accurate.
00:12:54
Speaker
It's a estimate based off of your heart rate as a proxy for oxygen uptake, but heart rate is not the most accurate indication of this. It can put you in a ballpark area,
00:13:04
Speaker
And more usefully than whether or not it's specific is over time, is it trending up or down? So it can tell you whether or not your VO2 max is getting better. It just may not be super accurate on what the number is that it's telling you.
00:13:18
Speaker
You can also get resting heart rate from your wearable watch or whatever you're using. And that's a much more accurate reading because it's just reading your heart rate. A lower resting heart rate typically indicates a higher level of cardiorespiratory function.
00:13:34
Speaker
And a resting heart rate trending downwards over the course of weeks and months is a more reliable sign that you're making improvements to your cardiorespiratory fitness.
00:13:45
Speaker
So I mentioned earlier how cardiorespiratory fitness has to do with your physical activity and exercise, but let's define these two concepts as different things because they are different things, right?
00:13:57
Speaker
Physical activity is basically any movement that uses energy above sedentary levels. So this is just your day-to-day, what we would call in PT, your ADLs and your IADLs, right? Activities of daily living.
00:14:10
Speaker
So walking around the house, going to work, as long as you're not just sitting in your car, doing housework, climbing stairs, playing with your kid, going grocery shopping. These are all physical activity, but exercise is a different type of physical activity.
00:14:27
Speaker
Exercise is planned, structured, and it's done with a purpose of improving fitness, like running or lifting weights, right? Physical activity is just the movements that you're doing throughout the day.
00:14:39
Speaker
Exercise gives your body a more focused challenge. They can both improve aerobic fitness and contribute to longevity. And improving your CRF through either means or both means make you more tolerant of both in general, right? You can handle more activity, more intense, longer duration. You recover faster. You adapt positively to it. We'll find out why this keeps you healthier.
00:15:05
Speaker
And as it turns out, it builds longevity. Exercise has become really necessary in the way that we have built our world.
00:15:16
Speaker
and in essence, outsourced a lot of physical activity to make life more quote unquote convenient. And it's resulted in us becoming much more sedentary as a society. Like I was thinking about things like, I remember this, changing the TV channel used to mean you had to stand up and go walk over to the TV and change the channel. And then the remote came along and that changed that, right?
00:15:41
Speaker
Food never used to come pre-chopped. You couldn't go buy a bag of broccoli florets. You'd have to buy and broccoli and chop it up, right? Yeah. Even just dialing a phone number, right? You had to be on a rotary phone. that to did do do do dooooo And God forbid you missed one, you'd have to start all over, right?
00:15:56
Speaker
so That was a nightmare. And then came like the touch tone or whatever. Anybody who's a Gen Z or lower listening to this, who I'm sure is not listening because that's not our demo, doesn't never experience this. That's how it is. Even
Structured Exercise for Cardiorespiratory Fitness
00:16:11
Speaker
things like the toilet used to be outdoors.
00:16:14
Speaker
Now it's not. you don't have to walk anywhere to go to the toilet, right? Thank you. So we have to include exercise in our life to combat these sedentary effects of convenience. I'm going to tell you just really briefly, my honeymoon with Nathan, we went to Glacier National Park. We backpacked for three days. We packed way too much. Anyway, it rained the whole time.
00:16:37
Speaker
Glacier National Park, is in northern Montana. There are grizzly bears, quite a few of them. And I just remember the terror of being wet, having a leaking tent. Oh, God.
00:16:49
Speaker
Being in the middle of nowhere in Glacier, having to get out of my tent to go pee in the middle the night. It was the worst. I know. I can relate.
00:17:01
Speaker
I could still feel my terror and Nathan's sleeping. And I'm like, oh, fuck, I'm totally alone in the world right now having to pee outside. Anyway, just had to say, i love how sedentary an indoor toilet has made me. Yeah.
00:17:14
Speaker
i I want to just mention here that have a few thoughts about This difference between physical activity and exercise as it relates to boosting cardiorespiratory fitness, we're going to talk a little bit more about how we boost cardiorespiratory fitness. But just in general, like it's really important to remember that it can happen both ways. But I think there's a big difference between physical activity as a means by which to do it and exercise. I think that exercise, regular exercise, is the far more surefire way to do it.
00:17:50
Speaker
So I hear a lot online mostly and just in passing from people in various stages of their life. When I was mothering a small baby and that whole big change in my life, there was a lot of people I was listening to or taking advice from or hanging around that would talk about just how physical parenting was and like how like you've got to be strong to lift the baby and push the stroller and do all the things around child rearing.
00:18:21
Speaker
And i think a lot of times like the physical demand of that would sometimes be a little overplayed. It's so much exercise to be taking care of a baby and that's how I'm getting stronger and that's how I'm working on my physical capacities just by taking care of my child. Or but you'll also hear a lot about people who say, I do a lot of gardening, or i walk a really big unwieldy dog, or even teaching a movement class, which, i mean, is no joke. Like, I remember teaching several yoga classes in a day and come home and just be like, I'm running around new York City to do it up and down subway steps, right? Definitely a much higher level of physical activity living in New York than I now
00:19:01
Speaker
have to encounter even with a big yard to take care of in Alabama. And so, yes, if you're spending your day running around after kids taking care of babies, lifting laundry baskets, mowing the lawn, walking your dog, teaching movement classes,
00:19:15
Speaker
A big part of that physical activity can start to feel like cardio. You might be tired. You're sweating. You're definitely doing something right. And these activities, they definitely count towards your overall movement total for the day. And many of them do at times cross the threshold of being ah sufficient dose to make a change to your fitness, to your cardiorespiratory fitness specifically.
00:19:37
Speaker
They can also support musculoskeletal health and affect energy expenditure, mental well-being. Yes. But here's the catch. They don't always challenge your cardiorespiratory system enough to actually build or improve your aerobic fitness.
00:19:52
Speaker
To do that, it's like strength, right? You need to be progressively overloading it. And this means you'll need consistent, sustained, and ah appropriately dosed exercise with appropriately intense effort.
00:20:06
Speaker
And so it's not to say that any of these activities don't matter. They definitely do. They definitely help with general physical activity. They absolutely support your health.
CRF in Disease Prevention
00:20:17
Speaker
But if you're solely relying on something like gardening or walking the dog,
00:20:24
Speaker
Dogs stop all the time, Sarah, to like sniff shit. Like I walked Henry. i walked with you and Henry. Yeah. And like we were walking at a snail's pace because Henry, he's your baby. He gets to sniff whatever he wants. Right. like we're not like trying to get Henry exercise. We're just giving him some time outside and we were just meandering about.
00:20:42
Speaker
Yes. His legs are very short. Let's be clear. They're definitely maybe like at max eight inches long. So for him, he's actually trotting along and Laurel and I are taking like one step every five minutes, basically. So yeah, walking the dog. In fact, I've actually started when I take him on hikes, because the same thing happens. If I don't go on a hike by myself, it's like I'm marching along, right? I'm at a good pace. But when I do it with him, it's very like even more things to sniff. So I've actually started using a weighted vest when I hike just to keep my heart rate up.
00:21:11
Speaker
yeah And it actually works really well. Yeah. So if you're relying on these physical activities to build your cardiorespiratory fitness, there's a good chance you might be consistently falling short.
00:21:23
Speaker
Personally, I've acquired a a pretty high level of fitness compared to any other time in my life. And definitely going out into my yard and doing a full day of weeding, hauling, mulch, mowing is definitely going to leave me at the end of the day feeling like I did something.
00:21:37
Speaker
But I still consider it extra. It's not the main way that I train my aerobic system because it's not consistent enough. And for some, also I want to say this, like a full day of that type of efforting would be way too much, right?
00:21:51
Speaker
So this is also a reminder that physical activity, depending on what it is, it's a dose of stress. And we know the dose makes the medicine or the poison, right? So depending on who is being dosed with whatever particular duration and intensity of physical activity will either benefit or maybe not benefit from it because it could be too much or too little.
00:22:13
Speaker
So all of this to say is that the biggest issue, in my opinion, with physical activity as a means by which to, like, we we lean on it as our way of exercise is that it's unstructured.
00:22:25
Speaker
It's not typically repeated or overloaded. And this random nature of it, it doesn't detract at all from the potential positive side effects of it, not at all.
00:22:37
Speaker
But it does make it a less reliable way to ensure you are meeting the minimal requirements, which we'll talk about. You're making improvements over time to your cardiorespiratory fitness.
00:22:49
Speaker
So I guess what I'm saying is I wouldn't put all my eggs in that basket. I wouldn't put all my eggs in the basket of I'll just make sure I stay physically active. I would instead put my eggs in both.
00:23:01
Speaker
I try to stay physically active, maybe arrange my life so that I have to be physically active. Like maybe don't hire a gardener. Don't hire someone to mow your lawn. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Park a little further away from the store entrance.
00:23:15
Speaker
Definitely all of those are and strategies like that are great for just bringing more movement into your day for sure. Like more steps, right? There's something to that. But I think I'd also make it a habit of engaging in weekly planned and structured exercise.
00:23:32
Speaker
Okay. That was a bit of a caveat, but I think it had to be said. Yeah. Let's look at what the research shows specifically around longevity and cardiorespiratory fitness. It turns out cardiorespiratory fitness is very important for longevity because it basically can predict how likely you are to develop health problems like cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death globally.
00:23:58
Speaker
It can also predict how likely you are to get diabetes and even certain types of cancers. the higher your cardiorespiratory fitness. So again, VO2 max is the gold standard marker indicating your level of cardiorespiratory fitness.
00:24:12
Speaker
The higher your cardiorespiratory fitness as measured by VO2 max, the lower your risk of these diseases, these metabolic diseases, and the lower your risk of early death or just death in general.
00:24:26
Speaker
And to my knowledge, there's actually no cutoff point at which improving your VO2 max so stops indicating or predicting ah further improvement to your longevity, meaning the higher your VO2 max is, the likelier it is that you will live longer.
00:24:43
Speaker
It appears to be a linear relationship. The same is not necessarily true for strength, by the way. Research suggests that there may be a plateau effect beyond a certain point.
00:24:57
Speaker
Beyond a certain point, gaining more strength doesn't necessarily continue to reduce your mortality risk in this linear fashion the way that VO2 max does. A study published in JAMA Network open, we're going to link that in the show notes, found that individuals with higher cardiorespiratory fitness levels had significantly lower mortality risks.
00:25:17
Speaker
Specifically, those with elite performance levels had an 80% reduction in mortality risk compared to those with lower fitness levels. The study also noted a dose-response relationship.
00:25:28
Speaker
So what that means is that Even incremental improvements in fitness, which would come about by increases to duration and possibly also intensity of exercise, were associated with reduced mortality risk. So dose dependent, right? Linear relationship.
00:25:47
Speaker
More is actually better with the caveat of as long as you're recovering well from the more. Furthermore, research indicates that a one milliliter per kilogram per minute increase in VO2 max, right, that's the amount of oxygen your body can use, is associated with a 9% reduction in all-cause mortality, which is just a fancy way of saying death by any means.
00:26:12
Speaker
And so this also emphasizes the benefits of even modest improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness. I think this is why we hear so much advice that's like, just do something.
00:26:23
Speaker
Something is better than nothing. Get up and move. For these reasons, more than things like because it's going to build muscle or because it's going to build bone or something like this kind of cardiorespiratory benefit seems to show up pretty quickly.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yeah, it does. And we'll hear more about the CDC's physical activity guidelines, but when it comes to health and longevity, Literally any amount counts. You don't have to do exercise, like an aerobic endurance exercise, for a certain amount of time before it starts helping.
00:26:54
Speaker
One minute is beneficial. It's much more beneficial than zero minutes. So that's also cool. Cardiorespiratory fitness also has a role in enhancing your cognitive function and mood. So higher cardiorespiratory fitness levels are associated with better memory, lower risk of depression, and slower cognitive decline.
00:27:15
Speaker
It's not just your heart and vasculature and whatnot benefiting from this form of exercise, your brain also does as well. Okay, so dose response relationship.
00:27:26
Speaker
There's this dose response relationship between physical activity slash exercise that builds cardiorespiratory fitness and the subsequent acquisition of that fitness as a capacity.
00:27:39
Speaker
And then there's this proportional relationship between that level of which you have cardiorespiratory fitness, what your VO2 max is, and the amount of risk reduction this affords you for the contraction of chronic diseases. Okay. The big one is cardiovascular disease.
00:27:55
Speaker
Others are diabetes and cancer. Also, higher levels of cardiorespiratory fitness reduce all causes of death, all cause mortality. You're just less likely to die.
00:28:06
Speaker
You're less likely to die younger. So more
Sedentary Lifestyle and Exercise Recovery
00:28:09
Speaker
cardiovascular fitness, more better. Is sitting the new smoking? Yeah. yeah No. Yes. No. Maybe. so maybe You decide. Where's the magic eight ball?
00:28:18
Speaker
So yeah, there is this, so many things in fitness, the way that they are reported on in the news to make it interesting and terrifying, which is the combo that, that what is it? It bleeds. it If it bleeds, it leads, right? So sitting is the new smoking. And everyone knows that smoking the worst thing you can do for yourself. So now it's the worst thing you can do for yourself.
00:28:37
Speaker
Right? There are studies that show that higher levels of aerobic activity or exercise can negate the effects of sedentarism. So while it is true that sitting for long periods of time significantly increases your all cause mortality,
00:28:55
Speaker
The studies show that sitting for eight hours a day can increase, it always feels weird to say, increases your risk of death. Everyone's going to die, but it brings that, the time of your death, closer to now, let's say.
00:29:08
Speaker
Regular exercise, especially this kind of aerobic exercise, can eliminate this risk. Sitting is the new smoking is only true for people who are not sufficiently active.
00:29:22
Speaker
Sitting is okay if you're also sufficiently active. It's the sitting without activity that is the new smoking. It's the sitting, the people that would I would see in the clinic would come in I'd be like, what do you do for a living? And they'd describe some job. And I'm like, oh, it sounds like you sit in front of a computer.
00:29:39
Speaker
And they're like, yeah, you sit at the computer for all day. I'm like, do you get up? Sometimes. I'm like, don't know. When I'm doing my work, I sit down all the time because it's exhausting to stand up all the time. And standing up all day long is not automatically better than sitting down all day long.
00:29:52
Speaker
But I'm getting up and moving probably every three to five minutes max. So it's the lack of activity that is the new smoking. Yeah. Sedentarism, right? Sedentary ah behavior is behavior that doesn't elevate your heart rate much beyond resting.
00:30:08
Speaker
yeah So sitting is a form of sedentary behavior. Lying down is as well. As soon as you stand up, your heart rate is going up a little bit. But we'll talk about it. You want to cross the threshold into aerobic endurance.
00:30:22
Speaker
exercise, it's going to have to be more than so standing up as well. But I guess the point of this is to say that it's not so black and white and on and off, which brings me to another topic, which is what is aerobic and what is anaerobic? I think this is probably a good time to define it before we start talking about recovery and getting into more of the physiological underpinnings of cardiorespiratory fitness and aerobic endurance exercise. But just briefly, aerobic exercise is any activity you can sustain for a minute or more.
00:30:54
Speaker
It could be walking, jogging, cycling, swimming, where your body uses oxygen. Okay, that's the keyword. Your body uses oxygen to produce energy steadily over time.
00:31:06
Speaker
Anaerobic exercise is more about short bursts of higher intensity effort sprinting, lifting heavy, where your body is producing, it needs to produce energy quickly.
00:31:19
Speaker
So it cannot rely on oxygen. Using oxygen for energy takes longer. It's very efficient. So your body can produce a lot of energy with oxygen, but it just takes too long for activities that you need to perform in short, high-intensity bursts.
00:31:35
Speaker
For those types of activities, we're going to rely on anaerobic energy pathways and The thing about that is that we only have a limited time to use energy in that way.
00:31:47
Speaker
Using energy in that way means that we're going to become fatigued very quickly. So aerobic energy is slower, more steadily supplied. It's fueled by oxygen. You can go a long time.
00:32:00
Speaker
Anaerobic energy is fast and powerful, but it burns out quickly. It doesn't rely on oxygen. Now here's where I'm relating this to the it's not on-off switch because both energy systems are always at work.
00:32:16
Speaker
But different types of exercise lean or different types of efforts within exercise lean more heavily on one or the other. When we talk about building aerobic endurance, which is really what we're focusing on in this episode, we're mainly focusing on the aerobic energy system.
00:32:32
Speaker
That's the one that uses oxygen to fuel your muscles over long durations. Training your aerobic system through exercises that are probably best inclined for that, we'll get into that soon,
00:32:44
Speaker
This improves how efficiently your heart and lungs deliver oxygen to your muscles. This allows you to be able to sustain effort for longer, to recover faster, and to move through everyday life just with more energy, less fatigue.
00:32:59
Speaker
We also named the life-extending benefits of having a higher level of cardiorespiratory fitness or aerobic ah endurance or aerobic capacity. Now,
00:33:10
Speaker
Activities don't live in these neat little boxes. There's no activity that's like purely only aerobic or purely only anaerobic. When we talk about aerobic or anaerobic exercise, just remember we're talking about the energy system that we're leaning on the most or the metabolic pathway that's like really doing most of the work to supply us with energy.
Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Recovery Benefits
00:33:34
Speaker
But your energy systems are working all together at the same time. Your body's going to use energy in any way that it can to get the the job done, okay? So during an all-out sprint, for example, this would be mostly an anaerobic activity.
00:33:48
Speaker
You're mostly tapping into anaerobic pathways to supply your muscles with energy to sprint. There's still going to be a small contribution from your aerobic system. And likewise, even during a long, more steady endurance effort, maybe you're going on a long bike ride,
00:34:04
Speaker
your aerobic metabolism is probably doing most of the work, you're still going to be leaning a little bit on energy from your anaerobic systems. Okay. So you're going to hear phrases like metabolic pathways or energy systems.
00:34:18
Speaker
And I think that's maybe a better, more all encompassing term rather than just saying this is purely aerobic or anaerobic. Let's talk about what system might be biased a little bit more. Yeah. So I just wanted to define those words and then talk about how it's like not an on or off switch.
00:34:34
Speaker
Okay. Let's talk about the recovery benefit. The recovery benefit of having a higher level of cardiorespiratory fitness means that you are better at recovering and not just recovering from aerobic endurance exercise, right? The type that would lean more heavily into aerobic energy systems or draw on your aerobic metabolic pathways, but you're better at recovering when you improve your cardiorespiratory fitness, you're better at recovering from all forms of physical activity and exercise, which I think is so cool.
00:35:09
Speaker
So what this means for us practically is that When you enhance your cardiorespiratory fitness, you enhance your tolerance for physical activity and exercise such that you'll be able to tolerate more of it.
00:35:22
Speaker
And when we say tolerate more of it, it means literally you'll be able to do more of it and benefit from more of it and in the process likely suffer from fewer injuries, all right? The amount of physical activity and exercise that you can tolerate will increase and it will be less likely to become too much for you.
00:35:42
Speaker
Another big benefit of improving your cardiorespiratory fitness is that it helps reduce your risk of getting injured. This is something that maybe people don't immediately think about when they think of aerobic fitness, but the connection is there. So when your cardiorespiratory fitness is higher, your body just becomes more efficient at delivering oxygen to your muscles.
00:35:59
Speaker
And so this means your muscles don't get fatigued as quickly. That could mean you're less likely to move in ways that are sloppy or inefficient. that could potentially cause overuse injuries or injury. You're also going to recover quicker between efforts within the workout and between workouts.
00:36:16
Speaker
So your tissues, when you give them the time and the nutrition that they need to repair and adapt, it's how you avoid those nagging overuse in injuries or burnout that comes from doing too much too soon.
00:36:28
Speaker
Higher levels of cardiorespiratory fitness means that repair and adaption process or adaptation process happens more efficiently. And there's also your overall movement economy.
00:36:40
Speaker
okay So movement economy is key for being able to do movements more efficiently. When your cardiorespiratory fitness is higher, your body just uses energy more efficiently.
00:36:52
Speaker
And this might mean that you actually move more efficiently. So you're less likely to look like you're moving under fatigue, which can look a lot more inefficient. If you watch someone start a race and then watch how they're running when they end the race, they're using whatever they can to get across the finish line. Yeah.
00:37:08
Speaker
Last 200 meters. But objectively, you wouldn't want to see someone start a race with the same running form that they end a race with. That probably wouldn't be a very efficient form of running. It's efficient for the end of the race because it's all they got left.
00:37:20
Speaker
But just know that movement economy can also be enhanced by a higher level of cardiorespiratory fitness because you're just less likely to be operating, moving under fatigue because you're less fatigable.
00:37:31
Speaker
You're actually less fatigable. Cool. When we talk about recovery, I want to distinguish between different types of recovery. So the difference between the kind of recovery you do when you're in the middle of doing some physical activity or exercise versus the kind of recovery you're doing after physical activity or exercise. During the activity or exercise, recovery is happening when you take short breaks between sets of work or bouts of effort, right?
00:37:59
Speaker
Catching your breath between a set of weightlifting, slowing down between work intervals and a run. It could be stopping to have ah a sip of lemonade when you're doing yard work. It's me when I've been wrestling with a motorcycle, trying to fix it.
00:38:15
Speaker
and drop it and then have to pick it back up again. And then I just need to go outside of my little impromptu garage work shed and drink some water and think about my life choices, right? It's anything like that.
00:38:29
Speaker
So your ability to recover more quickly or need less rest between efforts is a sign of improved cardio respiratory fitness. It's a bit of a paradox of exercise because exercise makes you feel tired in the moment, right? But over time,
00:38:44
Speaker
exercise makes you less fatigable overall. You can handle more volume, more intensity. Your window of tolerance is bigger. And this makes sense because as we're developing this ability for your heart and circulatory system and your lungs to deliver oxygen to your muscles more efficiently during activity and exercise, and then the waste products that build up are also cleared more quickly, all of this means that you're going to be able to keep going longer,
00:39:12
Speaker
ah perhaps at a quicker pace or a higher level of effort with more steadiness without feeling exhausted as quickly. I think about this hike that I do with my friend Alex, where we haven't done it in a while, but it's a beast. And there was a summer where we were doing it, I think during the pandemic, because it was like the only kind of exercise that we could that was outdoors. The first about mile, I would say of this hike is it feels it's not vertical, but it feels like it's vertical, right? I've done it. It's a tough hike.
00:39:38
Speaker
Oh, you did the brand hike with me? I think you took me to... No, we went to Runyon, but this one is terrible. Yes. It's a three hour hike. at a minimum. Oh, wow. um Yeah, it's brutal.
00:39:49
Speaker
And so when we were doing it regularly, I distinctly remember, like that we would bargain with each other, be like, okay, we're going to stop when we get to that electric pole up there. Okay, how many more? Let's go three more poles before we take a break. And then as we did it more often, the breaks happened less often.
00:40:06
Speaker
And then when we went back to it, maybe a year or two ago was the last time I did it, I needed a break like every 10 steps practically. So you can gain it and then you can also lose it. So if we contrast this during exercise recovery with what Laurel is going to talk about, which is post-exercise recovery,
00:40:23
Speaker
Yeah, this is when your body repairs itself after physical activity or exercise is over. Okay, so this is when all those beneficial adaptations happen, the improvements to the capacity that you targeted specifically with the form of exercise.
00:40:36
Speaker
So in this case, the capacity you're targeting with ah aerobic endurance exercise, which is hiking for sure, it's the capacity to deliver energy efficiently to working muscles.
00:40:47
Speaker
Okay. And all the systems that are involved in it that's the capacity. So efficient energy delivery while doing physical activity or exercise that helps you demonstrate that ability, that capacity, it's during the recovery, that capacity then improves.
00:41:04
Speaker
It's strengthened. So it's not improving while
CRF's Role in Reducing Inflammation
00:41:06
Speaker
you're doing it. That's the paradox of understanding exercise versus recovery. Actually, we'll link an episode in the show notes about recovery, but While you're exercising, your fitness is reducing.
00:41:20
Speaker
Like you're getting more tired, right? You're getting more fatigued. Your fatigue is increasing and your ability to continue exercises is getting smaller. But then a day or two later, it's actually improved as long as you recover well.
00:41:33
Speaker
One of the most common things we hear from women is that barbells are intimidating and they don't think they can use them. At the same time, this same group of people is nervous about balance, falling, losing strength, and an osteoporosis diagnosis.
00:41:48
Speaker
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00:42:10
Speaker
Implement impact training, scale to your ability for even more bone building. Ask your questions and join a community of women who are determined to get strong AF. Click the link in our show notes to sign up.
00:42:22
Speaker
We start May 15th.
00:42:28
Speaker
And that brings us to our next topic. What if you're not recovering well after exercise? That's something I think we've all experienced. We've all experienced the overdoing it, negative side effects or injuries that arise when we aren't recovering.
00:42:40
Speaker
Okay. We're not adapting well to the stress we placed on our body. So instead of getting stronger or more capable, you might end up injured. And then as a result of that, experience a setback and not be able to exercise. And then experience detraining. Detraining is the reduction of fitness as a result of cessation of exercise or just stopping exercise.
00:42:59
Speaker
This is where training load, exercise prescription is really important. We need to get the dose of physical activity and exercise correct for the individual so that they can adapt positively to it. We don't want that dose to overwhelm our capacity. We talk about this a lot with strength training, but the same goes for aerobic exercise.
00:43:18
Speaker
In fact, there's more injuries per 1000 training hours for many aerobic endurance exercise formats than there are for strength training, which indicates that people are less good at correctly dosing aerobic exercise than they are strength training.
00:43:35
Speaker
At least that's what that indicates. To me, in fact, I think a lot of the times people overdose their aerobic endurance exercise and they underdose. there strength training. That's just my hot take. I have no research to back that up.
00:43:47
Speaker
Although there is research showing that a large percentage of people in the weight room, men and women, both included of all ages, are not making progress on their strength, even though they go regularly to the weight room, which I think is wild.
00:43:58
Speaker
Hot take feels emotionally right. yeah have no I have no basis for it. Like, that sounds right. I like that. And we're talk more about why people hate cardio. And I think that this chronic tendency to overdose Aerobic exercise is at the heart of it, mostly overdosing intensity. But with better cardiorespiratory fitness, your body becomes better at recovering from post-exercise stress.
00:44:22
Speaker
And here are the ways that it does. It becomes better at repairing the small amounts of damage that occur to your tissues during exercise and then rebuilding those tissues stronger. It becomes better at replenishing your energy stores that become depleted.
00:44:35
Speaker
It becomes, and this one is really cool, I think, it becomes better at reducing inflammation. So exercise actually causes inflammation. Inflammation is not a bad thing inherently. During recovery, though, your body is working on reducing this inflammation and repairing that tissue damage that took place during exercise.
00:44:55
Speaker
And this reminds me of this big light bulb moment I had when reading Herman Ponser's book, Burn, on metabolism, which i was doing research for our episode on our three-part series on long and lean, and it was the part two episode we'll link in the show notes.
00:45:10
Speaker
because we were talking about like, how do you actually get lean? What does that even mean? And so I had to learn about metabolism. In his book, vern Herman Ponser explains how exercise helps reduce disease by shifting your body's focus.
00:45:22
Speaker
right So while your body is managing the temporary inflammation caused by exercise, it's not producing the chronic low-grade inflammation linked to diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers.
00:45:37
Speaker
Essentially, your body is so focused on repairing the temporary inflammation that arises from the stress of exercise that it doesn't have the bandwidth to sustain that harmful long-term inflammation that contributes to chronic health issues. And that's the type of inflammation that it does have time to do when we're overly sedentary. So exercise essentially redirects your body's processes away from that chronic inflammation production in order to repair and adapt to recover
00:46:09
Speaker
from the exercise induced inflammation. I just think that's super cool. It's like kind of like a distraction to the body. Hey, body, look over here. Stop hurting yourself and instead fix this issue over here. it literally sounds like, you know, and I, this is a little facetious, but It sounds like put down that donut and let's go outside and take a walk. Yeah. You know? No, I think that's like a good analogy. And then i'll also want to say like donuts are awesome and I love them and it's Eliana's favorite food. Fucking donuts. And sitting is also awesome, right? and The two together. Yeah.
00:46:40
Speaker
What we're talking about here is not that sitting and donuts need to be demonized. It's that we need to be exercising. That's really what we're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Eat the donut and also exercise. Eat your donuts and sit on your ass, but also try to exercise.
00:46:53
Speaker
Yeah. We need both. Both. I need donuts. i don't know about you. All So remember that higher levels of cardiorespiratory fitness mean you get better at dealing with this post-exercise inflammation. That's called recovery. You get better at recovery.
00:47:10
Speaker
so that you can exercise more, right? People who recover faster, they have the green light to exercise more. People who don't recover as fast, typically when we're new to an activity, we don't recover as fast.
00:47:23
Speaker
Part of a fitness adaptation is just getting better at recovery. So people who are more experienced at strength training can handle more strength training. People who run for longer consistently can handle more running.
00:47:34
Speaker
Part of what's happening there is your body's getting better at handling the inflammation of your exercise and taking care of it quicker, more efficiently. So my big takeaway from this book was that, and it seems like this is what Herman Ponser was communicating, which is that this is quite possibly one of the main reasons why more physical activity and more exercise is actually better.
00:47:58
Speaker
Why higher levels of cardiorespiratory fitness mean living longer And why it's this dose-dependent relationship between exercise and physical activity and living longer is the big part of this, and it's complex as fuck, and it's not simple for sure, but a big part of it has to do with reducing chronic inflammation in your body.
00:48:17
Speaker
That's what improving your cardiorespiratory fitness does.
CRF and Cardiovascular Health
00:48:22
Speaker
What else happens when your cardiorespiratory fitness improves that enhances your ability to recover? You get better at rebuilding your tissue stronger. So your muscles rebuild.
00:48:30
Speaker
And this includes your skeletal muscles, right? Think biceps, glutes, hamstrings, but also your smooth muscles. Those are the ones that make up your vasculature and your cardiac muscle. So that's a muscle that makes up your heart.
00:48:42
Speaker
So with better cardiorespiratory fitness, your body gets better at rebuilding and strengthening all of this musculature. And during aerobic exercise, your heart, yes, indeed, works harder.
00:48:54
Speaker
It works harder over time. You're challenging your heart. You're challenging it to be able to improve its strength and efficiency, to pump blood more effectively and in greater quantity with each beat.
00:49:07
Speaker
This means, like the other muscles of your body, generally speaking, that your heart gets stronger. It gets better and more capable of delivering oxygen and nutrients to muscles and tissues.
00:49:19
Speaker
Additionally, regular aerobic captiv activity stimulates the growth of new blood vessels, like increased capillarization in your muscles. This makes circulation actually more profuse, is that the word? Allowing your body to deliver oxygen to your muscles, to your organs, to your tissues.
00:49:41
Speaker
Improved perfusion. Okay. Perfusion, perfusion, not profusion. that even word? No, I don't think so. So this strengthening of both the heart and the vasculature and the skeletal muscles, to some extent, we'll talk about that, supports better overall cardiovascular health.
00:49:57
Speaker
and enables your body to perform much more efficiently during exercise and daily activities. I just want to say like your skeletal muscles aren't necessarily getting stronger with cardio past a certain baseline, but we'll we'll talk about how they're actually getting better at dealing with the stress of aerobic endurance exercise and how the muscles actually change to be able to do that.
00:50:17
Speaker
Okay. To bring it home. Improving your CRF doesn't just boost your endurance, it improves your ability to recover from any type of physical activity or exercise, whether it's aerobic or anaerobic.
00:50:30
Speaker
So this includes strength training, okay? You're going to probably need less rest between sets of your strength exercises with a higher VO2 max.
00:50:41
Speaker
And what does that mean? It means that you might be able to get more into, if you have an hour to train, you're going to be able to do maybe an extra couple sets, right? And that's simply going to drive improvements to your strength, right?
00:50:53
Speaker
Positive adaptation means adequate recovery. And it's basically the antithesis of an overuse injury. So when you adequately recover, your tissues fully repair.
00:51:05
Speaker
And if the stress was high enough, they become stronger. Okay. They become more injury resistant. So higher CRF improves recovery, but it also potentially, i don't want to use the word I hate the most, which is bulletproof. You could still get injury, but it makes you less injury prone.
00:51:23
Speaker
If you do a lot of running, You'll recover quicker from activities on your feet, but this might not translate as well to say recovering from swimming, okay? Because they work very different groups of muscles actually.
00:51:36
Speaker
or like rowing, for example, or even strength training in so certain contexts, right?
Aerobic vs. Resistance Training
00:51:41
Speaker
It will translate somewhat. So I just want to point out exercise, the benefits that you get from a specific type of exercise are living always in these two realms of their systemic benefits, their global benefits, but then they're also very specific to the type of exercise you're doing.
00:51:57
Speaker
The more I run and recover from running, the more I can run. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a one-to-one transfer to if I started swimming.
00:52:08
Speaker
I would need more rest to be able to recover from swimming because I barely know how to swim. So first i have to learn how to swim. Then I have to start swimming. and Wait a minute. You barely know how to swim? I'm not very good at swimming.
00:52:20
Speaker
That's wildly surprising. Yeah, a little bit. I had a really bad swim teacher when i was young who would trick me. into going underwater. oh I hated how cold the pool was.
00:52:31
Speaker
was terrified. She would walk me out to the deep end and then pretend to trip on a pool drain and dunk me underwater. because She thought that was like a good way to expose me. and That made me terrified of the water. so then it i didn't i live and i like Here's the real kicker. I grew up on a lake.
00:52:46
Speaker
yeah and I really didn't know how to swim. It's like those stories of the dad that just throws their kid in the water to teach them how to swim. And it's like, well, that didn't work. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So interesting. yeah So while like if I signed up for swim lessons, which I actually want to do at some point is like actually hire somebody to teach me how to swim properly.
00:53:06
Speaker
I would not recover as quickly from swimming as I do now from running. Right. But I do think that you're running- But would overall, overall, yes. But it's not so specific as it's going to come as easily and I'm going to ramp it up as quickly with swimming as running because it absolutely would not work that way.
00:53:23
Speaker
Okay, so how's everybody doing? Are we hanging in with all the science and the video? Because guess what? There's more. But this is actually some of the biology, which is one of my favorite pre-rec classes was human biology because there's so much cool stuff.
00:53:37
Speaker
So let's talk about how ah CRF is both different from and complements resistance training. So we're going to start by looking at the specific adaptations that result from aerobic endurance training.
00:53:53
Speaker
versus resistance training. And resistance training as a term just includes the development of power as well as the development of strength, just as a FYI. So they're two very different kinds of exercise and they create very different changes in your body.
00:54:09
Speaker
Sorry, there's some crows like staring at me through the window. A murder of crows? Just two. Does that count as a murder? I think more than one is a murder. Okay. Some murderous crows are outside.
00:54:20
Speaker
I love them. i think they're beautiful. Anyway, I'm not going to distract you with stories about crows. Okay. Endurance training or what we might call cardio. It's all about building your body's efficiency at delivering energy to working muscles for sustained activity over time.
00:54:37
Speaker
It primarily targets those slow twitch muscle fibers, which fatigue resistant and built for long duration effort. So over time, consistent aerobic training leads to More mitochondria, which if you remember high school biology is the powerhouse of the cell, right?
00:54:57
Speaker
The more mitochondria you have, the more efficiently your muscles can produce energy using oxygen. And we've got some fun facts about mitochondria. I actually, i love this fact about mitochondria. That's coming up. Greater capillary density, meaning more of those tiny blood vessels through your muscles, delivering oxygen to them.
00:55:16
Speaker
Improved cardiac output, which means your heart gets stronger and pumps more blood per beat. So every time your heart contracts to basically eject blood from it, that amount of blood that's ejected from the heart is called stroke volume. Okay?
00:55:34
Speaker
So stroke volume is the amount of blood ejected from your heart each beat. And so when we're talking about improving cardiac output, it the equation is your heart rate multiplied by stroke volume.
00:55:48
Speaker
Okay. Your heart rate is beats per minute times, let's say it's 95 beats per minute. multiplied by however many milliliters of blood is ejected from your heart.
00:56:00
Speaker
Each of those beats, that gives you your cardiac output. With improvements to cardiorespiratory fitness, the thing that improves is the amount of blood your heart can shoot out of it every time it beats.
00:56:14
Speaker
The heart gets stronger, but it also becomes more elastic. The chamber is able to expand more. It's really cool. So Aerobic exercise also improves your lactate clearance, which is what helps you keep going longer before fatigue kicks in. We're going to dispel a myth about lactic acid in a second.
00:56:35
Speaker
It creates shifts in your lactate threshold and your ventilatory threshold, which basically means it allows you to train and perform at higher intensities without getting completely gassed as quickly.
00:56:47
Speaker
It leads to an increased blood volume and therefore also increased red blood cell count, which improves how much oxygen your blood can carry. And it creates an enhanced ventilatory efficiency, meaning that your lungs become better at moving oxygen in and carbon dioxide out.
00:57:05
Speaker
Now, okay, so here's the fun fact about mitochondria. They weren't always part of our bodies. They weren't even always in our cells. What? Yeah, so scientists believe that mitochondria were once free living organisms like bacteria.
00:57:22
Speaker
so Yeah, I know. And then they were engulfed by an early cell in a symbiotic relationship around 1.5 billion years ago. And then over time, the mitochondria became not only part of the cell, but it's what now produces energy for us. So they moved in and unlike a virus or something, they were like, Hey, guess what?
00:57:42
Speaker
We're here to help. um Mitochondria also have their own DNA that is separate from our cells' DNA. That is nuts. I know, right? It's part of why we believe that they had this independent existence in the past.
00:57:56
Speaker
Yeah. I just flashed on probably 10 years ago. I went on a date with someone who I believe was a Scientologist. I didn't know that before beforehand. I sort of discovered it. There were some clues in the conversation. And one of the things he said to me was, he said, well, the aliens are here and living among us.
00:58:12
Speaker
And I just said, uh-huh, with a straight face, because I was like, you're on a date with a new person. This is hope they don't murder you. But that sort of makes me think of the mitochondria. Like the mitochondria is a bit of an alien. And not only is it living among us, it's living inside us. We we are part alien, which I is awesome. I learned about the mitochondria thing but while reading Eve, the book.
00:58:31
Speaker
It's just an absolutely astounding book. It's called Eve, How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution by Kat Bahannan. Sarah, that's a guest I'd love to have on, hint, hint.
00:58:44
Speaker
I like to put these ideas in Sarah's head because she's got way more guts than I do when it comes to inviting on hot shots for the podcast. sos Oh, I'll go find this hot shot. Kat Bahannon. That'd be a good one. That'd be a real good one.
00:58:55
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So mitochondria are super weird and amazing and crucial. to aerobic activity because there are these little powerhouses inside your cells that help your muscles use oxygen to produce energy. So the more you have, the better your muscles are at being able to keep going for longer without getting tired.
Cardio vs. Strength: A Balanced Approach
00:59:17
Speaker
And so this is why aerobic exercise is so important for increasing stamina and endurance. The more you train, the more mitochondria your muscles will grow.
00:59:29
Speaker
And this is going to make your energy production more efficient. In contrast, during strength training, mitochondria play a smaller role. The focus is on generating immediate force and power, not on long-term endurance.
00:59:43
Speaker
I want to talk about that myth around lactic acid. Lactic acid is still phrase you'll hear people reference as to why they have that burning sensation in their muscles during intense exercise. They'll say, I've got that lactic acid buildup.
00:59:56
Speaker
Or they'll talk about it in reference to post-exercise fatigue, like muscle soreness, and they'll blame it on lactic acid buildup. But in fact, your body doesn't really produce lactic acid in the way people think. It actually produces lactate.
01:00:13
Speaker
which is actually a useful fuel that your body can recycle and reuse, especially when your aerobic system is well-developed. I think the confusion is what happens during high-intensity exercise is that your body's breaking down glucose, which is sugar, and without enough oxygen to do it, it will start to lean into those more anaerobic pathways.
01:00:40
Speaker
and produce lactate and then hydrogen ions. Okay? So when those are connected, that's an acid. Okay? But they're immediately disassociated, so it's not an acid. The lactate itself is not the problem.
01:00:53
Speaker
It's the accumulation in terms of what we're feeling, that fatigue, that burning, that rubbery feeling, even that sick feeling when you're really fatigued during high-intensity exercise. That's due to the accumulation of hydrogen ions.
01:01:05
Speaker
And that leads to acidosis, okay? That's what's causing the sucky feeling. So it's not actually lactic acid buildup causing the fatigue or burn. It's that your body's in a more and so acidic environment from the buildup of hydrogen ions. So basically, improved cardiorespiratory fitness means that your ability to clear both lactate from the muscle, send it into the blood, and then recycle it and reuse it.
01:01:32
Speaker
And your ability to clear hydrogen ions efficiently is a key marker of, like one of the ways that you're gonna improve your CRF is your ability to more efficiently clear this buildup, okay? So the TLDR is your body produces lactate, not lactic acid.
01:01:49
Speaker
The burn comes from hydrogen ions, not lactate. In addition to other things, it's not just hydrogen ions causing it, but that's a big part of it. Efficient clearance of both, lactate and hydrogen ions,
01:02:00
Speaker
You know, that improved efficiency is a marker of improved cardiorespiratory fitness. Lactate can be reused by other muscles or your heart as fuel, especially during recovery, or it can be sent to your liver.
01:02:15
Speaker
and It's called the Cori cycle, where it gets turned back into glucose that your muscles can use for energy again, which is pretty cool. So maybe if you've you've heard anything about aerobic endurance sports or training, you've heard people reference their lactate threshold.
01:02:31
Speaker
So this is where these terms, while technical, might be helpful to introduce as it relates to exercise. And these are called lactate turnpoints or lactate thresholds.
01:02:42
Speaker
Okay. So there's actually two lactate thresholds. There's lactate turnpoint one or lactate threshold one and lactate turnpoint two or lactate threshold two. We'll reference these again when we talk about heart rate zones, intensity, the physical activity guidelines, what is moderate, what is vigorous, and also why so many people hate cardio, my hot take on that.
01:03:03
Speaker
Let's introduce these terms now, lactate threshold one and lactate threshold two, because now we understand what lactate is, right? So as exercise intensity rises, your blood lactate and hydrogen ion levels begin to climb.
01:03:20
Speaker
So at the first lactate turn point, it's also called lactic threshold one, LT1. This is called also the aerobic threshold. It's at this point, as intensity is rising, that your body is still able to clear the lactate as fast as it's being produced.
01:03:39
Speaker
And so that means that you can maintain that intensity for a long time without fatiguing quickly. LT1 marks the transition point at the top of zone two.
01:03:50
Speaker
So it's the highest intensity you can sustain while staying very much aerobic, meaning your body's mostly using oxygen to produce energy. It hasn't started to rely very heavily on anaerobic or non-oxygen pathways yet.
01:04:06
Speaker
Now, once you cross that threshold, you move into zone three. And this is where anaerobic energy systems start contributing more and lactate begins to accumulate faster.
01:04:18
Speaker
For trained distance runners just past, LT1 typically aligns with a marathon race pace. It's a steady, sustainable effort. It's comfortably hard, okay?
01:04:29
Speaker
The second turn point, lactate threshold two, or lactate turn point two, is also referred to as the anaerobic threshold. Okay, this is where lactate and hydrogen ions accumulate rapidly, but your body is struggling to clear them from your muscles efficiently.
01:04:48
Speaker
Crossing that threshold means that fatigue starts to set in fast. You start to, quote, feel the burn. You start to get that rubbery or even sick feeling. If you're doing some type of cyclical activity, you're maybe trying to step on the gas and go a little faster, at least maintain your pace, but you're not speeding up. No matter how much your RPE is, like your pace is staying the same.
01:05:12
Speaker
It almost feels like your legs don't work as well. You might even be slowing down. And if this is the case, you've probably crossed that lactate turn point too. LT2. And it's this is when it starts to really suck.
01:05:25
Speaker
This is where we get the expression, cardio is cardio. So improving your aerobic endurance raises both thresholds, but it is specific in that you're going to more effectively raise LT2 by training close to or on the other side of LT2.
01:05:43
Speaker
I, for example, in a week of running, I i run six days a week, I'll do one threshold effort where I'm trying to get close to or surpass LT2.
01:05:54
Speaker
So I'm going to hurt myself. Basically, i call it hurting myself, but it's like hurting myself in a good way. I'm like, this is going to be really fucking hard for ah couple of minutes of this run. And those are typically interval runs.
01:06:06
Speaker
That's going to be a much more efficient way to improve my ability to clear lactate is to actually push the limit of my LT2 to try to raise it so that I'm hitting it at a higher heart rate.
01:06:18
Speaker
For LT1, we improve LT1 by training across multiple intensities a little bit more readily is my understanding. So it's actually not as hard to raise LT1 to improve your aerobic base. You can improve your aerobic base with higher intensity interval training in addition to improving your anaerobic base, I guess.
01:06:37
Speaker
The thing that we'll talk about is that the LT2 training is at a much higher fatigue cost. Okay, so i run six days a week, but I'm really only training at threshold for one of those workouts.
01:06:51
Speaker
And then the other five, I'm really much more around that LT1, right? I'm maybe a little bit under it because I can recover so much more efficiently and accumulate a lot more volume at LT1.
01:07:07
Speaker
And that increased volume of running is going to drive up my VO2 max. It's also going to improve my mitochondrial size and density. And it's going to improve my running economy and all types of things.
01:07:18
Speaker
But I want to do the LT2 as well, at least once a week, so that I can, in a race situation, handle that suck, that burn, that that point in the race where I really fucking want to stop.
01:07:33
Speaker
And I can potentially hit that point a little bit at a little bit faster pace, right? Or hopefully increasingly faster pace, right? So yeah, when I race, I know it's going to hurt. And that's because in a race, I'm basically going at the fastest pace I can for the and duration of the race.
01:07:50
Speaker
So the first third of the race is fun. It's exhilarating. What I imagine is happening is my lactate levels are ramping up, but they're not high enough yet. to not be able to clear them.
01:08:01
Speaker
Then the middle third of the race, and this is for 5Ks or half marathons, right? The middle third is starting to suck. The levels are high. I'm so probably barely managing to clear the lactate and hydrogen ion accumulation.
01:08:15
Speaker
The last third of the race is pretty painful. Right. I start to hit the wall. My legs feel rubbery. My whole body wants to stop. Then there's a last 200 meter sprint of the race, which is basically torture. And I disassociate from my body. But glory awaits me on the other side of the finish line. So let's fuck go.
01:08:32
Speaker
And I always cross the finish line, a total wreck. But then I'm a wreck for about five minutes and then I'm looking for coffee. Like recovery is just very swift race situations like that.
01:08:43
Speaker
i don't train at that intensity. Basically, I save it for the race. I train maybe 20% of my running is happening at LT2 or like flirting with LT2.
01:08:55
Speaker
not the whole Not even the whole workout is at LT2. Like half of a maybe 45 minute to an hour workout is very challenging. And part of what feels so challenging about it is that stress, that metabolic stress of having to clear those waste products and deal with the discomfort of their accumulation.
01:09:16
Speaker
There's got to be a huge psychological component as well. Yeah. Yeah. So your body is getting better at using oxygen. It's getting better at sending oxygen to your working muscles. Your muscles are getting better at using it. That's mitochondria, right? And then you're also getting better at clearing waste product buildup. Those are the three, I think, big things that we're seeing get better and improved with aerobic endurance exercise.
01:09:40
Speaker
Okay. All right. So then if we contrast resistance training, with this. Resistance training is focused on building your body's ability to generate force, and it primarily targets the fast twitch muscle fibers. They're great for short bursts of activity, but they fatigue quickly.
01:10:01
Speaker
So with consistent resistance training, your body adapts by increasing muscle fiber size, which is called hypertrophy, by improving neuromuscular efficiency, right? How well your brain and your spinal cord actually talk to your muscles and tell them to do the activity.
01:10:18
Speaker
It strengthens your connective tissue and it improves your capacity for anaerobic energy production. right So both types of training, aerobic and resistance, lead to muscle rebuilding, but in very different ways.
01:10:33
Speaker
Aerobic training builds more of your endurance capacity. Strength training builds more of that muscle size and that maximum force production. So yes, both types of exercise make your muscles adapt, but they do it through different physiological pathways and they result in very different outcomes. You can't just pick one of these and hope to get all of the benefits of all types of exercise.
01:10:56
Speaker
And so this leads me into our next segment, which is why cardio won't make you strong and why strength won't make you enduring, meaning like why strength won't lead to more aerobic endurance. So let's talk about this. It's sort of a ah common misconception and it's something that actually keeps people stuck in their fitness, right? So the reality is that strength training and aerobic endurance live on totally opposite ends of the physiological spectrum.
01:11:26
Speaker
They each target a very different primary limiter, right? And they demand adaptations from Totally different systems in your body. The aerobic endurance exercise really targets that heart and circulatory system, what we think of as cardiovascular exercise.
01:11:42
Speaker
Your resistance training is doing a lot more for your neuromuscular systems, how your brain and your muscles interact with each other. So yes, all exercise uses energy, it produces force, and if you do enough of it, it can make you tired.
01:11:57
Speaker
The source of that energy, the kind of force you need, and the limits on your performance are completely different. Strength training relies on your neuromuscular system, which is your ability to recruit those fast-twitch muscle fibers to generate tension in your muscles and to withstand heavy load.
01:12:16
Speaker
It's fueled by these short-term exercises anaerobic energy sources. It does not place any meaningful demand on your cardiovascular system. And for those of you say, or are thinking like, yeah, but um when I lift weights, I can feel my heart rate going up. We'll talk about that in a second.
01:12:30
Speaker
It doesn't improve your VO2 max. It's not going to shift your lactate threshold. It doesn't give you greater mitochondrial density versus aerobic training, which relies on your cardiovascular system, right? Your heart, your blood vessels,
01:12:45
Speaker
those slow twitch muscle fibers, it improves oxygen delivery and usage. It improves waste clearance, energy efficiency over time, but it doesn't stress your muscles enough to trigger any significant strength or hypertrophy adaptation.
01:13:00
Speaker
Right? And this is called the SED principle. And SED stands for specific adaptation to imposed demand. What that means is your body adapts only to the demands that you actually place on it.
01:13:12
Speaker
So lifting weights is not a cardio substitute and running is not a strength training program.
Misconceptions about Heart Rate and Cardio Fitness
01:13:17
Speaker
Yeah. I really like the metaphor of using cardio to get strong is like using ah fork to eat soup.
01:13:27
Speaker
But not really enough to nourish you before you throw the bowl across the room and it smashes and then you have to clean up your soup. Using strength training to improve cardio, that's like scooping salad with an ice cream scoop into your mouth. That's also going to be frustrating and not very effective. It's not what the tool is for.
01:13:44
Speaker
Yeah, just because your heart rate goes up during heavy sets of squats doesn't mean you're doing cardio. And again, we'll talk about why. And then for runners doing hill sprints, I'll often hear, this is really good for leg strength. No, it's really not.
01:13:55
Speaker
You're not building force production as much as... Fatigue tolerance, sprinting, the crossover is maybe not as separate. Or whatever I'm saying, like being able to sprint is more related to force production than endurance.
01:14:13
Speaker
ah Sprinting and endurance are relying on different energy systems. We talked in power about how power is the ability of your muscles to contract quickly. And it does also rely on large threshold motor units.
01:14:28
Speaker
But sprinting is relatively low load, even up a hill. And so you're not going to be loading your legs with enough force to make measurable improvements to their strength. It's much more that you're taxing your energy delivery systems when you're sprinting up a hill.
01:14:48
Speaker
But yeah, I hear this a lot from runners. It's like they'll refer to hill training as strength training. Like, oh, yikes. ah So once you're no longer a complete beginner to something, whether it's cardio or strength based exercises, doing cardio is not going to make you stronger.
01:15:09
Speaker
doing strength work is not going to make your cardio better, again, unless you're a little bit more deconditioned and a total beginner. Like you could definitely get stronger by running if you have been doing very little on your feet.
01:15:21
Speaker
And you could probably improve your VO2 max a tiny bit if when you start strength training, that like constitutes a meaningful amount of activity and to get your heart working.
01:15:32
Speaker
But yeah, and not much more past that first initial point. We have to really look at what's limiting us in a particular exercise format to understand what it is that we're then challenging primarily, and then what changes we should expect to see, what benefit we should expect to see from that format.
01:15:52
Speaker
If your breathing and not your leg strength is what is really holding you back in a heavy squat, okay, you probably need more cardio, but my guess is that's not going to be the limiter. It's going to be your leg strength. Likewise, if you feel like your calf muscles are just giving out when running,
01:16:12
Speaker
in not, you're not like out of breath. he Yeah, okay, maybe you need some calf strength, but it's probably not going to be the thing you experience. It's probably just going to be that you feel really breathless and like you, you can't catch your breath, right?
01:16:23
Speaker
At the end of the day, aerobic performance is limited by energy delivery and waste clearance efficiency. Strength performance is limited by neuromuscular force production.
01:16:39
Speaker
And to improve one, whether it be energy delivery and waste clearance efficiency or the other, muscular force production, you have to train it, you have to challenge it in a specific way. You don't really want to choose between cardio and strength. You want to do both because you actually need to do both in order to have longevity, capacity, and a well-rounded level of fitness.
01:17:05
Speaker
Okay, here's why manufacturing an elevated heart rate, so we talked about heart rate being elevated in a heavy squat, here's why it's not cardio, okay? Your heart rate will increase for a lot of different reasons that have nothing to do with energy delivery to your tissues that do not indicate that you're improving your aerobic endurance.
01:17:23
Speaker
So here are some reasons why your heart rate might go up. One day I was hiking in the land t trust near my house and I saw a fairly large king snake, Oh, fuck. mot It was like six to eight feet long, right across the path.
01:17:39
Speaker
King snakes, by the way, are not venomous. It's actually a really good snake to around because it eats rodents. But dude, my heart rate was high. I could feel it beating in my chest.
01:17:51
Speaker
And so what that fright would indicate is that your body's in a fight or flight mode, right? You are probably experiencing a surge of of adrenaline and maybe some other hormones preparing you to run, defend yourself and keep yourself alive. So that's a survival mechanism. That's not exercise. It's maybe you're prepared for exercise, right?
01:18:12
Speaker
You're prepared to run or fight, but it's not exercise. If you smoke, okay, if you take stimulants, even caffeine, cocaine, your heart rate will increase because these substances stimulate your nervous system. They're stimulants.
01:18:26
Speaker
They artificially ramp up your sympathetic nervous system response, okay? not because of energy delivery requirements. During a heavy set of strength training, okay, your muscles are contracting so forcefully that what happens is that they temporarily squeeze the blood vessels inside of them and cause vascular occlusion. So basically, deoxygenated blood is not able to return as quickly to the heart to become oxygenated again, like to pass through your lungs and become oxygenated again. So this reduces blood flow back to your heart.
01:19:07
Speaker
And your body sees this as a kind of a stressor. Your heart rate starts to elevate in order to keep blood moving out of your heart. So remember when we talked about stroke volume is the amount of blood ejected from your heart each beat. If there's less blood coming into your heart,
01:19:24
Speaker
This means there will be less blood coming out of your heart. But meanwhile, your body, especially now that you're exercising, your lifting weights needs to continue to produce the same amount of cardiac output.
01:19:35
Speaker
So remember, it's heart rate times stroke volume. If stroke volume is smaller, heart rate needs to be bigger for that cardio output to stay the same. So your heart rate will increase to account for the fact that stroke volume is temporarily reduced.
CDC Guidelines for Aerobic Exercise
01:19:50
Speaker
Once you set the weight down, your muscles relax, right? That venous return speeds back up again. But it's a manufactured elevation of heart rate that we perceive as being exercise stress to our cardiorespiratory system. It's not really, right? It's more of just the outcome of creating a lot of tension in your muscles.
01:20:10
Speaker
The same thing can happen if you're doing the Valsalva maneuver while bracing. This can also kind of fire up your heart rate and increase your blood pressure, causing your heart rate to spike a little bit more as well. So there's a couple of things going on in strength training that might elevate your heart rate that don't have anything to do with stressing your oxygen delivery systems.
01:20:30
Speaker
Okay. So in these examples, yeah, your heart is working harder, but not in a way that would ah improve your aerobic capacity because there's no sustained demand for oxygen delivery to working muscles over time.
01:20:45
Speaker
CRF, cardio respiratory fitness improves when your heart, your lungs, your blood vessels, and muscles are all challenged to work together for extended periods of submaximal effort. Okay.
01:20:56
Speaker
That is what drives the adaptations to more efficient oxygen delivery and uptake. Just getting your heart rate up. It doesn't mean you're doing that. How much is enough, right? How much is enough of anything?
01:21:10
Speaker
How much is too much? Do you feel like we're too much? Is this too much? I think it might be too much. Have we crossed our own lactate threshold?
01:21:21
Speaker
And are we now ready to throw up All right. So how much is enough to make a meaningful difference to longevity when it comes to aerobic exercise? According to the CDC, so at a minimum, minimum you're aiming for at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity each week or some combination of the two.
01:21:45
Speaker
Essentially, every minute of moderate counts as one minute. Every minute of vigorous counts as two minutes, right? So some combination of the two that adds up to at least 150 moderate minutes per week.
01:22:00
Speaker
And this is like you' just your baseline dose for better cardiovascular health, improved energy, and longevity. But how do we tell the difference between moderate and vigorous? There's a few different ways. Because some things are moderate for some people and not moderate for other people, right?
01:22:15
Speaker
For some people, walking is a moderate intensity exercise. Other people, it's not,
Understanding Exercise Intensity
01:22:20
Speaker
right? But running or jogging would be, right? So it ah depends on your own fitness level in terms of your aerobic capacity.
01:22:29
Speaker
But if you're working at a moderate intensity, you're working hard enough to raise your heart rate. You might break a sweat, although sweating has got got a lot more to do with different things like temperature and also like women, apparently. I don't know if this is really true, but I heard that women sweat later in a workout than men do. They don't sweat as soon.
01:22:50
Speaker
who Who can say? That's a maybe. But anyway, sweating, it's like when people would go to hot yoga and tell me like, they're like, i worked out so hard. I sweated so hard. like, you sweated so hard because you're inside a fucking furnace. You weren't even work out that hard. You just did some stretching in a sauna.
01:23:04
Speaker
Yeah. Anyway. People sweat in very different amounts. Yeah. I'm a very sweaty person. So the talk test is usually a better indicator. So if you're doing moderate level intensity exercise, you can talk, like you could carry on a conversation, but you probably wouldn't be able to sing, which requires more lung power.
01:23:26
Speaker
And then the difference between that and vigorous intensity activity, again, depends on the person. For me, for example, who does not enjoy running and therefore I don't do it. Like jogging would probably be vigorous for Laurel. It would absolutely be moderate, right. Or something like that.
01:23:42
Speaker
yeah So we can't say walking is not cardio because it depends on so many factors. Who's walking? How fast are they walking? Are they carrying a load? Are they on an incline? Right. I don't know who Kipchoge is.
01:23:55
Speaker
Kipchoge is the world record holder for the marathon. All right, if you stick 60-pound pack on that guy and send about up Mount Fuji at a clip, he's probably going to find that pretty vigorous. Yeah, it might be vigorous. The thing about it is that it's not specific to the way he typically trains. He runs on the road, right?
01:24:10
Speaker
Not the same mode of cardio as hiking up a mountain with a pack on your back, but his VO2 max would make him at baseline better at that than most people. But I think if this incline were high enough and the pack were heavy enough, Kachogi would find walking cardio, okay? just Right.
01:24:27
Speaker
Important to remember that it's all relative. We can't make broad sweeping claims about exercise without taking into account the physiologic individuality of the person that we're actually exercising. It's person dependent and it's situation dependent.
01:24:42
Speaker
Yeah. So vigorous intensity, if we use the talk test, at vigorous intensity, not only can you not sing, but you can't really say more than a few words at a time, right? That's how you know you're in that higher intensity zone for you.
01:24:57
Speaker
There's also something called the rate of perceived exertion or RPE scale. We use it a lot in weightlifting. And it's a simple scale from one to 10, where one is very little effort, five or six is moderate effort, seven or higher means it's vigorous effort.
01:25:13
Speaker
This is obviously subjective because it's your personal experience. And honestly, I don't know, i haven't looked any any of the research around RPE and aerobic activity as far as like how well do people self-report?
01:25:25
Speaker
And I think something where if your crf generally is higher, if your endurance and your capacity is generally higher, you you're going to perceive your effort as lower, right? Because again, it's subjective versus I wonder, have a lot of people who conflate effort with pain.
01:25:44
Speaker
And so I think for those people, RPE might not be that great of a chart because until they start to understand
RPE Scale and Exercise Effort
01:25:51
Speaker
pain and effort. It's also important to calibrate it. So what does one mean and what does 10 mean? So the way I think about it is one is sedentary. it's sitting on a couch and 10 is imagine the hardest you've ever physically efforted in your life, right? Like I would imagine the last 200 meters of a race.
01:26:05
Speaker
Okay. So then based on those lower and upper bounds, like what is a five, what six, what is a seven? And I would say that you're right. I think like athletes have a much higher pain tolerance, even when working at relatively high percentage of their maximum heart rate.
01:26:24
Speaker
and or not being able to say more than a few words, they might rate that lower than someone working at a similar percentage of their maximum heart rate, also not able to say a few words because they're just, the pain is like part of what they're dealing with daily as athletes. You know what I'm saying? So I agree.
01:26:41
Speaker
yeah The other thing about the talk test is that as your cardiorespiratory fitness increases within a particular activity, you'll be get better at talking while being in that RPE 7 and 8. And so that's it they're imperfect ways of really assessing your respiratory rate. That's the talk test. And then assessing basically the bigger picture of how your body's feeling both physically and mentally.
01:27:06
Speaker
RPE can be affected by like your mental state. It can be affected by the weather. It can be affected by the temperature outside for sure. It can be affected by so many more things other than just your respiratory rate.
01:27:16
Speaker
I like to think of RPE as being very personal. No one can look at you and know what your RPE is, only you can feel that generally and put a number to it. But people could listen to your talking or breathing and get a feel for like how hard you're working just by being in the room with you or even listening to you on the phone.
01:27:35
Speaker
So when I think of moderate intensity in terms of the talk test, I tell my personal training clients, and my members of my virtual studio, that a five or a six is you talking on the phone while doing your cardio.
01:27:48
Speaker
And the person listening to you having a vague notion that you're doing something that's slightly more physical than just sitting and talking to them, but they're not concerned about you. They're not like, what the fuck are you doing right now?
01:28:00
Speaker
Sit down. Whereas when you're in that seven or eight and talking to someone on the phone, first of all, you're probably not talking to someone on the phone because that's just too much to focus on. But the person listening to on the phone would be like, what are you doing right now?
01:28:13
Speaker
Are you okay? Are you running from a bear? What's going on? So using the talk test in that sort of what would someone else say about my level of effort right now based on how I'm talking and breathing, I think it is a good way to do It keeps you more objective.
01:28:28
Speaker
Yeah. Sorry, Victor is stopping. He's on the move. So I would say like in terms of subjective to objective, RP is more subjective and talk test is more objective. But that subjectivity of RP doesn't actually make it worse than talk test because the benefit of it is that it's subjective.
01:28:46
Speaker
You are the only person who knows how your body is feeling while exercising. You're taking into account ah what hurts. You're taking into account how fatigued you feel. You're taking into account whether your heart is really in this workout or not, or what just happened before the workout, or what you're worried about, the weather, or the annoying person or car or whatever that's driving
Challenges in Targeting Exercise Intensity
01:29:06
Speaker
you crazy. Or maybe you're afraid you're in a kind of a scary neighborhood. like All of that's going to impact your subjective experience. And it's important to have your finger on that pulse when exercising because
01:29:18
Speaker
I'm going off topic here a little bit, but we'll talk about this. I think a lot of people think they hate cardio because they haven't learned to use these ways of subjectively observing their experience in order to target a particular intensity effectively and accurately within the workouts they're doing. They just get on the machine and they just go balls to the wall and they're like,
01:29:37
Speaker
Oh God, it's so hard. But it's like you actually learned how to slow down. ah And I think it's also the impression we have is not that, oh, I could just do it slower. I think a lot of the impression we have is it only matters if it's this hard. Like this is what it needs to be.
Heart Rate Zones and Tracking Methods
01:29:53
Speaker
So another way to track the intensity of what you're doing is by tracking your heart rate zone. Yeah. Problem with the zones, I'll just say, is they're not standardized. There's a three zone model. There's a five zone model. Yeah. Oftentimes people will be talking about a zone, but they won't have clarified which model they're using. We're going to share up the five zone model. Yeah.
01:30:10
Speaker
But generally, this is like a rough way to sort figure it out. So the way that you can estimate your maximum heart rate 220 minus your minus your age So it's not deeply accurate, but for the purposes of getting into the right general area for health and longevity, it's fine. You might want something more specific, like ah some sort of like a watch with a heart rate monitor. If you're really concerned about performance or if you're like Laurel and you're training for things like that, I use one because I like to get a real sense of what my...
01:30:41
Speaker
moderate and vigorous intensity minutes actually are because with the kind of cardio that I like to do often, it's bouncing back and forth in between. It's not just like steady state. We've got our max heart rate, 220 minus your age. So moderate intensity is between 50 to 70% of that maximum number.
01:30:58
Speaker
So it's moderate intensity. And then vigorous intensity is anywhere between 70 85% of your maximum heart rate. of your maximum heart rate So it's past LT1 and even possibly approaching that LT2, right? Depending on exactly how vigorous you're going.
01:31:20
Speaker
So for example, if you are 50 years old, your estimated max heart rate is 170, right? 220 minus 50. Moderate cardio would keep you somewhere between 85 to 120 beats per minute. And vigorous would push you closer to 120 to 145.
01:31:34
Speaker
two one forty five right? You can track it with a watch, a heart rate runner, or you can just take your pulse manually. And the way that people usually do it is take it for 10 seconds and multiply it by six. I find it much easier to take it for six sites seconds and multiply it by 10. It's probably more accurate too, actually. Yeah. Because that the longer you stand there, the more your heart rate. Right. It's going down. I'm like, multiplying something by 10 is a lot easier than multiplying something by six. For me, it's always about making the math easier. And then as your cardio fitness improves, you'll notice your heart rate doesn't spike as quickly. You recover faster between efforts, right? That's your progress. So the bottom line is not about just moving more. It's about moving intentionally, using these tools to find like the sweet spot for the intensity for you.
01:32:14
Speaker
And that way you're making sure that you're really actually hitting the targets that build aerobic endurance. Okay. So here's where we can map the five zone heart rate model. onto moderate and vigorous intensity as those terms, moderate vigorous, are defined by the CDC. And we can also layer in the RPE and talk tests that we talked about as well to help make it more practical.
01:32:39
Speaker
So moderate intensity exercise, according to the CDC, is defined as working at 50 to 70% of your max heart rate. That corresponds roughly to zone one at the low end. That's that 50 to 60 percent. And then zone two, 60 to 70 percent.
01:32:55
Speaker
In terms of the talk test, you should be able to talk in full sentences. Maybe not sing, though. The RPE is probably five to six.
01:33:07
Speaker
depending on the person. During zone two cardio, you're building your aerobic base and this zone falls squarely within what the CDC calls moderate intensity.
01:33:19
Speaker
Okay, now vigorous intensity exercise, according to the CDC, is defined as 70 to 85% of your max heart rate, which overlaps with zone three. Zone three is that 70 to 80%, and it also overlaps with the lower end of zone four, which is That 80 to 85 percent, ah technically zone four is like 80 to 90 percent, but the CDC calls vigorous intensity 70 to 85 percent. So that 80 to 85 percent is moving into zone four.
01:33:45
Speaker
Okay, so here you cannot talk in full sentences. You maybe just get a few words out. The RPE is more like a seven or an eight. This is where we get tempo and threshold efforts. If you've heard those terms as they relate to aerobic endurance training, this is where those higher intensity intervals tend to land. Okay, so in short, moderate is zone one or two. Heart rate is 50 to 70% of your maximum.
01:34:08
Speaker
RPE is somewhere in the five, six range. You can speak in full sentences. You probably can't sing. Vigorous is zone three and four. Heart rate is 70 to 85%. RPE seven or eight. Speaking other than just a few words at a time is difficult.
01:34:28
Speaker
I want to say a couple of things. One is that we've been learning about strength training on this podcast a lot. And we know that when you just randomly show up and randomly pick up weights and randomly do whatever number of reps and then don't record it and then come back like the next week and do something totally different, you're probably not going to make very good improvements to your strength. The same goes with cardio-respiratory fitness, which is that if you're showing up randomly and just efforting on a machine or going for a fast walk or run or getting on your bike and just pushing it with no target, with no purpose for the workouts,
01:35:02
Speaker
A couple things might happen. One is that you might struggle to recover from those efforts. It might feel really hard while you're doing it, like you want to stop. And you might decide that you just dislike cardio because it just makes your heart spike and you feel so awful.
01:35:17
Speaker
I think what's happening there is we don't know even know that we can target a moderate intensity. We don't know that we can, perhaps, once we do feel our heart rate spiking, if maybe we set off to do a little light jog, that it's okay to start walking, right? To let the heart rate come down.
01:35:33
Speaker
but It's in those recovery bouts within a workout that you're moving toward aerobic energy systems and enhancing your cardio respiratory fitness. Like during the recovery of intense bouts, you could also just set out and do more of a steady state, moderate intensity, brisk walk or very slow jog and let it feel kind of boring and and light and like conversational. And when I say boring, I mean like physiologically nothing too extreme is happening, right? You're not fighting for your life and therefore it might be a little boring. But if you listen to a podcast, listen to some good music or talk to a friend who's doing it with you, it's less boring, obviously.
01:36:13
Speaker
This is In fact, what maybe 80 to even 90 to even 100% of your cardio efforts should probably live in this moderate range.
01:36:25
Speaker
And I'll also say you might be the type of person who really likes higher intensity cardio, and that's going to be what you want to do the majority of the time you head out there. That's fine too, because it counts as double, right? And if you're recovering well from it, you're good to go.
01:36:40
Speaker
But I think for a lot of people, it's that they're not ever targeting moderate because they don't know they can. And then they don't know how to. And here's the other thing I'll say is that when your cardiorespiratory fitness is lower, it's actually harder to stay that moderate range.
01:36:57
Speaker
You're going to exit it sooner than when you have a higher level of cardiorespiratory fitness. You've got a bigger window of what it means to be working moderate when your cardiorespiratory fitness is higher because a wider variety of paces or a wider range of efforts still land you in that moderate intensity. So when you're brand new to doing cardio exercise, you might have to go a lot slower than you think.
01:37:24
Speaker
It's frustrating. You might have to spend a lot of your cardio recovering with walking. But the thing that will happen, because this is what exercise does, is that it's going to get better.
01:37:37
Speaker
you're going to find that over the course of weeks or months that you're able to sustain little bit harder efforts or paces and still have it feel moderate. But you do have to be patient. And I think a mistake a lot of people make is that they just go out a little too hard and suffer some setbacks because of that, because the fatigue cost of that is too high or they just hate how they feel while it's happening and then decide, you know what, I'm just going to stick to walking.
01:38:07
Speaker
at levels of effort that really don't actually constitute a meaningful enough dose to make changes to cardio-restriory fitness. So all of this to say that I think that we'd have a healthier population if people understood like education-wise what moderate intensity is intimately and were able to use some of these tools. Okay, so we named the talk test.
01:38:33
Speaker
That's a really good one, especially if you're new to cardio. We named RPE, subjective one to 10, right? Try to hit a five or a six. And then heart rate. Of the three, heart rate seems like it's the most objective and the best one to use. But because heart rate percentages rely on you knowing what your max heart rate is, and because that equation can be pretty inaccurate, and yeah and because devices that measure your heart rate can also be somewhat inaccurate, I think watches have a 3% error. It's not terrible, but
01:39:05
Speaker
heart rate monitor around your chest is better. yeah Heart rate can not be the best one to use, actually. I think using all three, triangulating them together can be the most helpful.
01:39:16
Speaker
Keep your eye on all three. But at the end of the day, I think I'm going to go ahead and put my vote on RPE. If you can just get a sense of what one is, what 10 is, and then try to hit something that's moderate, that's not easy and not hard,
01:39:35
Speaker
You're going to be in the right ballpark. And can you stay there? And in staying there, you may have to adjust your pace downward periodically or for the entire workout.
01:39:46
Speaker
Be patient because the change is inevitable. If you're at that correct level of moderate intensity, it should not feel easy. But it should also not feel hard, right? It's moderate.
01:39:57
Speaker
It's a hard concept for... Like grass, like moderate. What the fuck? We're so extreme, right? We're always like being buffeted between extremes. Yeah, but I think part of the reluctance to feel like moderate exercise is enough is...
01:40:12
Speaker
Frankly, it takes longer, right? It's long, the right amount of minutes. And we live in a world, in the United States at least, where time is money. And you got it. That's why yoga got so like bananas, right? And then it's suddenly like core power yoga because people are like, this is my 45 minutes I have today to dedicate to exercise. So this exercise better cover all of my needs.
01:40:33
Speaker
I think that's part of it as well. Why people are more reluctant to do more of that kind of steady state yeah moderate work is unless they are... a runner training for a race, an aerobic activity like that, they're hard-pressed to see what the benefit is in taking twice as long to cover the same amount of aerobic capacity needs.
01:40:53
Speaker
Can I offer something that I do to justify that? is I try to multitask. I know we always hear like, that multitasking is terrible, but in the case of getting your long-duration, boring or high frequency, it doesn't necessarily have to be long duration because again, remember any amount counts toward the minutes.
01:41:11
Speaker
So if you did like 150 could mean that you're doing 23 minutes per day of moderate intensity cardio, but every day and you'd get 150 or it could mean that you're doing three 50 minute bouts.
01:41:26
Speaker
You can split it up any way you want. It literally can be accumulated in any um amount of chunk of time. Using the time that you are doing that moderate intensity cardio to also do other things. So for me and Sarah and I were talking about this before the episode started, like Sarah's now working from home. We don't get out much now. One of my biggest actual motivations that got me into running was wanting to be social and go running.
01:41:52
Speaker
Meet up with a group of people every Sunday to run the trails and get to know the trails around Huntsville because they're gorgeous, but mostly to meet other people who I figured would be a lot like me. Trail runners tend to align with me politically. They tend to align with me in terms of my values. Even though I wasn't a trail runner, I had that sense. I was like, I'm going to go make friends.
01:42:10
Speaker
And I have made friends, which is great. Another thing I do is listen to podcasts. And i try sometimes try to use the run as a way to really learn something. There'll be some meaty, juicy podcast topic that I'm like, i want to learn more about. I'm really going to listen to it on this very slow run where my heart rate is going to stay 60% of max. Or i will use the run to process something that I'm having a hard time processing. Like I'm going to use this run to really think about my life choices or whatever. So anyway, I feel like it's time...
01:42:42
Speaker
Also that we could be spending outside and just being outside, i guess. I don't have any research to produce for this, but apparently being outside is good for us.
01:42:53
Speaker
If you have a cardio mode that you can safely do outside, then that's just also multitasking being outside. And I can think of a number of other things too that you could maybe simultaneously be doing while doing cardio, but I guess that's another way to know if you're going slow enough is can you multitask? Because when I'm going too hard,
01:43:12
Speaker
I have to listen to music. I cannot follow ah complex podcast episode. All right. I can't process my life choices. I'm just trying survive the run because I'm trying to cozy up to lactate threshold to not figure out what I'm doing with my future.
01:43:28
Speaker
I'm not probably having a very deep conversation with my running partner. Like we're both listening to each other. Breathe hard is probably mostly what's happening on that faster run. But if I slow down, i can multitask.
01:43:43
Speaker
right? Maybe that's the other thing we can use is would I be able to multitask? Am I hearing the words of this podcast right now? Or am I just like trying to survive this workout?
01:43:53
Speaker
Okay, that would be a good indication that you need to slow down. If you're not processing what you're hearing, slow down so that you can. And you're getting more benefit potentially by doing that because you will be recovering faster from that workout and will be able to accumulate more time. And remember, more is better.
01:44:11
Speaker
More is better if you're recovering. Okay, i want to talk a little bit about the best exercises or best exercise formats for improving aerobic endurance. Okay, there's no best, obviously, because it really depends. But maybe some terms that will help us understand the differences are cyclical versus non-cyclical cardio.
01:44:31
Speaker
So cyclical cardio is anything where you're just repeatedly doing the same movement again and again, running, cycling, swimming, rowing. These are all cyclical. Walking, hiking uphill, right? Non-cyclical.
01:44:43
Speaker
includes things like what we would call HIIT, although I'll preface that by saying most people doing HIIT are not actually working at a high intensity, they're working probably at a um higher end of moderate moving into high because we'll talk about it, but CrossFit definitely would constitute non-cyclical cardio. Kettlebell training in many cases does.
01:45:06
Speaker
Plyometrics can as well. There's a ton of variation with regards to what's happening, the activities that you're doing while your heart rate is elevated, while you're challenging your energy delivery systems.
01:45:17
Speaker
And it can very rapidly toggle between like low, intense, moderate, low, intense, moderate. Remember that whenever you're doing, I like to call these cardio with weights, okay? When you're doing cardio with weights, which is a non-cyclical form of cardio, it can be, it can improve your VO2 max for sure.
01:45:36
Speaker
Your heart rate is also potentially some of the time being elevated in that more kind of false sense because of muscle contraction. So that that might give you the perception that your heart worked a little harder than it actually did to deliver energy during the workout.
01:45:51
Speaker
But without a doubt, when I started doing CrossFit, and I did it for a year and a half without really doing any other type of cardio, I was doing yoga and CrossFit basically.
01:46:02
Speaker
My VO2 max, according to my phone, and remember, it's not like the most accurate it definitely trended upward a lot. I think I went from average to above average according to the iPhone, okay?
01:46:14
Speaker
And then stopped doing CrossFit and went full on into running. And I went from above average to like really good, like whatever the highest level is, right?
01:46:26
Speaker
And that's because cyclical cardio, and this is the take home, cyclical cardio is much more effective at improving your cardio respiratory fitness. mostly because it directly challenges energy delivery systems as opposed to weights, which are potentially creating this reduced rate of deoxygenated blood return to the heart, which is amping up your heart rate in a sort of unrelated way, but also because the fatigue cost, okay, the fatigue cost of HIIT workouts, bootcamp workouts, CrossFit, Orange Theory, Orange Theory is basically cardio with weights, in my opinion, kettlebell training, plyometrics,
01:47:05
Speaker
is so high. When we think about the fact that it's dose-dependent and linear, we want to be able to get more in to have higher levels of cardiorespiratory fitness, which equates to better longevity.
01:47:20
Speaker
We want to choose probably the majority of our cardiorespiratory fitness to be enhanced by exercise that's easily recovered from, okay, because then we can just accumulate more. So that's why moderate intensity, running, cycling, swimming, rowing, hiking, however you're getting it in, right? Walking up and down your stairs in your house even. I have a client who does that for her cardio a lot.
01:47:44
Speaker
That's going to be your better bet because you will then be able to do it again the next day. Okay, that's another way you worked at moderate. Could you wake up the next day and do exactly what you just did?
01:47:55
Speaker
Or were you going to feel so wrecked that the next day you're like, I to take a day off? That's another way to know if you actually hit moderate. You should feel like you could get up and do it all over again the next day.
01:48:06
Speaker
The fatigue cost of non-cyclical exercise stuff like cardio with weights. This big drawback. And then we've got steady state versus intervals. so Okay, steady state cardio implies cyclical cardio.
01:48:19
Speaker
But you can work in a non-steady state with cyclical cardio. You could do intervals, right? So you would break up work bouts with rest bouts. And typically when we're working with intervals in a steady state cardio format, we're working on probably raising the intensity and then lowering the intensity, possibly to push closer to that lactate threshold to improve our waste product clearance efficiency, but not necessarily.
01:48:49
Speaker
ah good ratio for how much of your cardio should be vigorous and how much should be moderate is even 90-10. or even ninety ten so Throughout the week, if 80% of your cardio minutes, we'll just call them cardio minutes, could be moderate and only 20% vigorous, that's probably going to mean you'll be able to recover fairly well.
01:49:12
Speaker
You'll be less at risk of injury overdoing it. but you might even have to work more at 90-10. And when I say 10%, 10% of the time that you're feeling like the exercise is vigorous within a workout or all the workouts combined. So if I'm doing an interval workout for an hour, a lot of times only like 18 minutes of that workout are truly vigorous and the other 42 moderate. Anyway,
01:49:39
Speaker
are moderate anyway All of this to say, you want to make sure that your vigorous intensity, whether that's happening through interval training or steady state, is somewhere in that 10 to 20% of your total cardio volume to make sure you're able to recover well and accumulate enough volume to meet the minimums.
01:49:58
Speaker
All right. Combining strength and aerobic endurance training. So let's say you're trying to balance out your strength training and your cardio. throughout the weeks that you're getting both, but you're recovering well from both, this is potentially something that you would hire somebody to help you do. But I would recommend that you look at intensity of your cardio and try to keep the higher intensity cardio away from strength training that particularly challenges the muscles that you work with the higher intensity cardio. So let me give you an example.
01:50:34
Speaker
I strength train, I try to strength train two to three times a week. Right. a lot of times it's just two times a week lately because my running volume is ramping up for this marathon. But running taxes my lower body, not really my upper body that much at all.
01:50:48
Speaker
So if I'm going to do a higher intensity run, like maybe it's intervals and I'm working on that lactate threshold to really feeling the burn in the run, I'm probably not going to strength train before that run. going to put that run on its own day. Right.
01:51:05
Speaker
Maybe the day before, I'm not going to train my lower body. And maybe the day after, I'm also not going to train my lower body. Because running is a lower body cardio mode.
01:51:15
Speaker
Swimming is more upper body, I would say. So the same would go if you're a swimmer and you do an intense swim workout. Maybe you're not putting upper body before same day or even the day after an intense swim effort.
01:51:27
Speaker
But with the moderate intensity efforts, if they're truly moderate, It's possible to do moderate cardio and strength training on the same day. I would recommend starting with strength training because it's higher intensity, right?
01:51:44
Speaker
Moderate intensity is not high intensity. So do the strength first, then finish up with some moderate slash easy cardio and For longer cardio efforts, those are also gonna have a higher fatigue cost, right? So longer cardio efforts and or higher intensity cardio efforts, keep them away from strength training.
01:52:04
Speaker
and What that means is put a day of rest between or don't put them on the same day. i think if you do that, okay, you'll be good to go. Now let's say you work in like upper body strength training, lower body strength training, that's called a split.
01:52:18
Speaker
And you have a lower body cardio format like running. For me personally, I don't really see too much of a detriment to performance in either one if I put upper body split close to an intense running session or even a longer bout of running.
01:52:34
Speaker
Because even though the fatigue will spill over to the whole body for both, it's much more localized, to the upper body with upper body strength training and to the lower body with running to the point where I feel I can still get a lot out of an upper body strength workout, even though I taxed my lower body heavily with an intense run the day before.
01:52:56
Speaker
Or i might even do an intense run if I'm really pressed for time And then that that same day do upper body strength training. But I probably wouldn't dream of that same day doing lower body strength training.
01:53:08
Speaker
It just didn't go well. Like it would not be good probably. I'd be pushing into injury potentially. So think of higher intensity or longer bouts of cardio.
01:53:21
Speaker
If it's lower body focused, keep them away from lower body strength training exercises. If it's upper body focused, keep them away from upper body strength training and try to put some days between.
01:53:34
Speaker
Moderate cardio, I feel like can fit in a lot of different places, but it should probably come after strength training because it's moderate intensity. And you want to be most energy rich for higher intensity efforts, which is strength training is high intensity. It's anaerobic.
01:53:50
Speaker
All right. That's all i have to say about that. I know it was a lot, but I get a lot of questions about that. so Hopefully it was valuable. So, Why is it that cardiorespiratory fitness has been shoved in a corner at this point, despite how much it matters for aging, let alone for aging well? Because, you know, we hear so much, and and Laurel and I emphasize this as well, about how important strength training is for people in our age group, right? Women entering, dealing with menopause or past menopause.
01:54:22
Speaker
Why don't we hear as much about aerobic capacity for this age group? I think it's because this group, we've seen a sudden surge in attention for this age group of women in relation to bone density and osteoporosis, and also in relation to things like muscle atrophy. There's a lot of messaging going about, about how women in their 40s and up need to be lifting weights. And sometimes I think, oh, well, that's just my you know ah echo chamber, right?
01:54:51
Speaker
But Amy Poehler, Not and famously, not a fitness influencer on her own podcast recently said, and this is a quote, as a woman, you go through being a sex object and then maybe a mother and then maybe menopause.
01:55:05
Speaker
And then they're like, on your way out, you need to eat 45 grams of protein a day and lift very heavy weights or all your bones will break. And you're like, this can't be true. I have to go to the gym. Right. So that is a lot of what the messaging is at the moment for our age group. And so it's actually like they're now they're saying like eat 200 grams of protein a day. Yeah, I was going to that's not enough protein. The protein recommendations have gotten so out of hand. Anyway, 45 grams would be like extremely low, according to most people pushing protein, like extremely low.
01:55:36
Speaker
um So there's also a lot more attention now for this age group on using hormone replacement therapy, right, to combat a lot of the symptoms of menopause, including genitourinary symptoms of meno menopause, also known as GSM.
01:55:50
Speaker
which includes tissue atrophy, vaginal pain or dryness, and then other hormone related changes like decreased libido, joint pain, irritability, irregular sleep, hot flashes, and on and on, all of which I have experienced.
01:56:02
Speaker
So the trend at the moment is to, apart from telling women to eat just massive, just fucking shove meat in your face at all times of day.
01:56:13
Speaker
Apart from that, the trend is also to, if you're not a medical professional, to create supplements for these symptoms, right? Supplements that may or may not have do anything at all, um right?
01:56:24
Speaker
But it still remains with all of this that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death globally, and it remains the primary killer of women, particularly women after menopause.
01:56:36
Speaker
Yeah. And men typically experience heart disease earlier in life or cardiovascular disease earlier in life. um And the theory, according to my limited understanding, so caveat here, is that women's risk ends up increasing significantly with age later in their life, partly due to these hormonal changes, particularly that decline in estrogen after menopause.
01:56:58
Speaker
Although more and more authorities on women's health that I'm listening to are talking about the lifestyle factors that might also be playing ah ah significant or even much bigger role in women's health decline.
01:57:12
Speaker
um So insufficient exercise being one of those sedentariness that I guess becomes more habituated as women as women age. ah So adverse changes due to estrogen um might play a smaller role. And also I've I've heard research suggesting that that the symptoms of perimenopause um can be reduced with with sufficient exercise.
01:57:37
Speaker
um We talked about this in our power episode as well, and it's really complex, and it's, of course, individual, and it's not a matter of, like, broad prescriptive statements, but more about each woman individually.
01:57:49
Speaker
But generally speaking, women do tend to become more sedentary as they age. I mean, everybody does actually, but women more so. And women are much less um likely to have engaged in exercise throughout their lifespan as men.
01:58:03
Speaker
Certainly muscle strengthening exercise, but actually all forms of exercise. And that that could make up a large part or explain a large part of why there's a health decline specifically around cardiovascular disease for women as they age in addition in addition to the hormonal changes that are taking place.
01:58:21
Speaker
Okay. All right. So back to cardiovascular disease in women, it's a risk later in life Women also tend to experience symptoms of cardiovascular disease and heart attack differently than men.
01:58:38
Speaker
And because of that, they are often misdiagnosed or receive delayed diagnoses, which can be fatal. So women will be experiencing heart attack, go to the doctor. The doctor will have no idea that they're having a heart attack because the symptoms the woman is describing are so different than what's largely been researched because lot of research is done on men.
01:58:59
Speaker
So for example, while chest pain is is one of the more common heart attack symptoms in both sexes, women are much more likely to report atypical symptoms like jaw pain, neck pain, back pain, profound fatigue, nausea even, indigestion, and just generally feeling bad, um rather than crushing chest pressure. Okay? Okay.
01:59:24
Speaker
A large 2016 study of nearly 600,000 heart attack patients in the UK found that women had a 50% higher chance than men of receiving an incorrect initial diagnosis after a heart attack.
01:59:37
Speaker
Oh, it makes me so mad. That's big diagnostic gap. And that's not that long ago. like I remember when they first started talking about how women's symptoms of a heart attack are very different than men's. And it was a while ago. like It was easily 20 years.
01:59:51
Speaker
But the fact that like nine years ago, 50% of them are still getting missed, that fucking sucks. It does. And it matters a lot because women for whom were initially misdiagnosed, whose heart attacks were initially misdiagnosed, they had about a 70% higher risk of dying within 30 days compared to those correctly diagnosed from the start.
02:00:15
Speaker
Okay. So because our wheelhouse is on bone building, right? And and strength strength training is a means by which to do that. We should talk about osteoporosis-related fractures. We talk a lot about that. um It's really what we're specifically trying to help reduce the likelihood of with strength training with bone density cores.
02:00:31
Speaker
and And while, yes, these are significant health concern, particularly for women post-menopause, they do have a very different mortality risk than cardiovascular disease for women. And hint, it's actually much, much smaller, right? You're much more likely to die because of cardiovascular disease than in osteoporosis-related fracture,
02:00:50
Speaker
So while the risk of death following a hip fracture is certainly higher for older adults, women particularly, it's not as high as that for cardiovascular disease. In fact, studies indicate that up to 20% of women who suffer a hip fracture will die within a year.
02:01:05
Speaker
That is terrible. It's still much lower compared to the 40% of women who will die from heart disease. Or I've heard one in three, so that's not quite 40%. But Fractures related to osteoporosis, especially hip fractures, they significantly increase the risk of mortality, yet cardiovascular disease remains a far more probable cause of death for women as they age.
02:01:29
Speaker
And so this all underscores, I think, the importance of maintaining your cardiorespiratory fitness and your cardiovascular health alongside efforts to improve bone density.
02:01:40
Speaker
you know, involving working on your strength and and and also improving your balance in order to reduce fractures.
02:01:48
Speaker
So, yeah, Sarah, you know, do you feel like the pendulum has perhaps swung too far towards, you know, was it yoga is all you need? Now it seems to be a little bit of like strength is all you need.
02:02:02
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think...
02:02:07
Speaker
I think because in when it comes to exercise, fitness, health, we are somewhat conditioned, again, in the United States in particular, to want to find like the one thing that's going to do it. So I remember thinking that yoga was all I needed.
02:02:24
Speaker
And that was the one thing I needed to do. Turned out, not really. And then there was a good... chunk of time for me where I was like, strength training only. And then I was like, wow, i really suck at cardio now. Right. yeah So same, same, same, same. um So, so it's kind of a bit, I'm having sort of like cardio flashbacks to like the eighties when I was alive.
02:02:49
Speaker
ah I mean, Laurel was also alive, but she was younger than me. um And you know so like everything for women was cardio. was Jane Fonda in your leotard and your high like that high cut leotard that like showed your hip bones. And then you're in like nude, but sparkly tights and then thick socks and like ballet slippers or something. like yeah When I think cardio, that's immediately where I flash yeah in my head.
02:03:13
Speaker
Right? Yep. ah Cardio with light, light, light weights. Oh, or if any, mostly body weight, a lot of like sideline leg lifts kind of stuff. And then like jazzercise, you know, like that kind of stuff. Exactly.
02:03:25
Speaker
Yeah. it's it's um I'm going to talk about my experience with cardio later, but but but the way I think about cardio now is very different than how I used to think about it. Yeah.
02:03:36
Speaker
For sure. Yeah. um
02:03:42
Speaker
So but but we get a lot of questions about Stacey Sims. We do. And her claims. And I think Sarah and I ah are both interested in those claims and in digging deeper into them. and And it's something we've been working on kind of in the background for future.
02:03:59
Speaker
Something I've heard her ah suggest is that, you know, women should really stay away from moderate intensity cardio. um I don't want to.
02:04:11
Speaker
you know, misinterpret what she's saying though. But without, you know, putting words in her mouth, the idea I'm getting from Stacey Sims is that we should really focus on high intensity, high intensity, high intensity, high intensity, high intensity, strength training, heavy weights, and then, you know, high power, high speed movements and like short bursts of that.
02:04:32
Speaker
And kind of forget about the zone two cardio. I'm also relating this to a little bit of the backlash that I think zone two cardio experienced from they you know, years of women being told that they need to lose weight, they need to shrink down and that they need to spend hours punishing themselves on, you know, cardio equipment at the gym to like burn off the cupcake they ate or whatever.
02:04:57
Speaker
um So on one hand, like I i like that Stacey Sims is encouraging high intensity, high power, high speed and high load type exercise.
02:05:10
Speaker
But I think suggesting that zone two is not something that women should be doing or need to be engaging in is problematic. If that's what she's implying, which I do think it is. And like, you'll even find influencers online who are talking about how cardio makes you fat.
02:05:27
Speaker
You'll be talking, you know, they'll be talking about like just how bad that moderate intensity cardio is and what a waste of time it is. And there's like no research showing that that's true. In fact,
02:05:38
Speaker
Because it's so recoverable, zone 2 cardio is something that you can accumulate more volume doing. And when you accumulate more volume of moderate intensity cardio, you raise your VO2 max. The biggest driver of VO2 max is volume.
02:05:54
Speaker
So when it's moderate, there can be higher volume. And when there's higher volume, there's more VO2 max. And when there's more VO2 max, there's more longevity. There's lower rates of cardiovascular disease. So it makes my hackles stand up a little bit when I hear any hint of like moderate cardio is not good for you because the opposite is true.
02:06:17
Speaker
More is actually better as long as you're recovering from it. So anyway, I just wanted to mention Stacey Sims here because I do think that cardio has also gotten a bad rap, especially that moderate intensity cardio because people have on one hand come to really not appreciate the amount of body shaming and fat shaming and like unhealthy body image that has been espoused through this idea of like we need to do cardio for weight loss. By the way, exercise in general a poor lever to pull for weight loss.
02:06:53
Speaker
Diet is the much better lever for that. But on the other hand, I feel like we've also swung so far in this direction of being like heavy weightlifting is really where it's at. And then if you're gonna do something more kind of cardiovascular related, it's gotta be high speed and high power. And here's all these reasons why that aren't soundly supported by research from my perspective. And then there's also ton, a fuck ton of research showing that moderate intensity cardio is likely the biggest driver of the O2 max.
02:07:25
Speaker
It just makes me wonder. It just makes me think, you think, Sarah? um I mean, I think that we are going to talk about that a lot more when we get into our episode about Stacey Sims.
02:07:36
Speaker
um And I think we should leave it as a little teaser. Okay. That's what will do then. um All right. And let's talk a little bit about why people hate cardio. Yeah. Sarah, I think you've had like, you have mixed reviews for cardio.
02:07:53
Speaker
Well, yeah, because I was thinking about this, you know, in preparation for this episode, I was like, what has my relationship been to cardio in general. and And it's really gone through a lot of different shifts.
02:08:06
Speaker
When i was, i mean, to begin with, I, for the most part, for for a lot of my younger years, and I'm going to count all the way up to like 30 as my younger years, I didn't really see any need for any weight training at all beyond something like a five or a 10 pound double maybe. Like it just did, I was like, that's not for me, right? that's all of That was all of that kind of conditioning around like women have to train differently than men.
02:08:32
Speaker
So I wasn't, as a young, young, younger person, child even, youth, teenager, um I am not particularly coordinated. So I was not great at sports things that involved like catching, throwing, that kind of stuff.
02:08:48
Speaker
Running didn't feel great on my body, although I did used to do it obsessively as a as an attempt to ah remain anorexic. But, you know, so I wasn't athletic. My friends would go and we'd do like, you know, whatever our track day at school and they'd be like lapping me on the on the track and I'd just be like dying and waiting for it to be over.
02:09:08
Speaker
um I always had an affinity and ah and a basic level of skill with choreography. and movement in dance. I started ballet at age five.
02:09:23
Speaker
And so that was where that was, I didn't think of that as exercise. That was like, that was just the greatest. Right. um And then, yeah, as I got, as I got older, I got into college, I developed a really solid eating disorder that carried through to my mid twenties into my late 20s probably, I mean, honestly, has affected my thinking around food probably my whole life.
02:09:44
Speaker
um ah I would only do cardio because God forbid you had any muscles on your body. Because I was also doing some modeling at the time, right? And so the emphasis was always like, you just got to be skinny. So all of the... Like I remember one time, one of the agents feeling my calf muscles through my pant leg and being like, you need to lay off the Stairmaster.
02:10:03
Speaker
God. Yeah, no, for real. So, so that was my relationship was i to exercise was what it is for a lot of people, which is punishment, right? Or, or um a means to try to make myself look a way that I am supposed to look according to other people. Right.
02:10:20
Speaker
And you know, even in sort of my then, you know, thirties into my early forties, I was still mostly doing cardio kind of classes. Like I might go take like a kettlebell class or something, but you know, a kettlebell class is a lot of like 20 pound kettlebells that you're swinging around.
02:10:37
Speaker
It's sort of like moving intensities, but it's not, I didn't think of it as like weightlifting. Right. um And then Now, well, in the past five years or so is when I've gotten into the more heavy lifting and lifting barbells.
02:10:50
Speaker
There was a period of time when I was just so fixated on that, that I let a lot of my cardio just kind of lapse by the wayside. And then I suddenly discovered like, oh shit, I no longer possess that capacity.
02:11:05
Speaker
so So a lot of, for me, figuring out how to get cardiovascular exercise into my movement diet, let's say, has been about figuring out ways to do, well, figuring out what I enjoy, first of all, and what I don't enjoy, because I think that is obviously, as we know, a big motivator to get people to do something is like they have to enjoy it.
02:11:27
Speaker
So, and it's been a little bit of a process of, of just kind of accidental discovery. Like I, I maybe six months ago saw a video of some people doing a step aerobics class on Instagram. And I was like, that looks like fun. I used to love step aerobics.
02:11:42
Speaker
I went out and I bought a step. Now I'll, I'll do like a YouTube video, you know, once or twice a week, maybe of that. I got a rowing machine because I find that as a steady state to be much more tolerable than running. I am hypermobile. So running to me feels similar to our friend, Nikki, who says it's just like flying a bunch of popsicle sticks flying through the air. Like ah kind of what it feels like to me as well. Like could twist my ankle on this next step. Who knows? You know, doesn't feel coordinated, but because the rowing machine is um
02:12:13
Speaker
What's it called? and not no it's It's closed chain, right? Your hands and your feet are touching something at all times. So it feels much more contained in that way to my body. And so that way I can get into that kind of cyclical.
02:12:24
Speaker
But I get bored. So I typically stick my laptop on a chair at the end of the at the end of the rowing machine and I watch an episode of Daredevil or whatever I'm watching, whatever you know silly show I'm watching at the moment.
02:12:37
Speaker
so Or I'll go on a hike, but like I said, now part of part of the canyon where I hike normally is still closed because of the fires, like the harder part. so I'm on the easier part, plus I'm with Henry. So I got a weight vest, not because I think it's going to like give me bigger muscles, but because it truly does increase my, the cardiovascular effort for that. So, yeah so then I'm like, okay, I, I, maybe this hike took an hour, but I actually got like 75 cardio moderate intensity minutes out of it.
02:13:04
Speaker
That's cool. And I also have gotten more, and I think because of tracking my weightlifting, I've gotten more into, like i never used to track the cardio I was doing. It's just like kind of what I did sometimes.
02:13:15
Speaker
And now i'm much more into tracking the minutes using a using a Fitbit just so I have a good sense of like, when I am, like how, how much am I actually getting? Cause it's, it's hard for me to sort of tell roughly.
02:13:28
Speaker
And also I don't, I don't do it. I mean, my, my, you're like a cardio maximalist at this point. I'm kind of a cardio minimalist in the sense of like, I am aiming for that one 50.
02:13:39
Speaker
And honestly, there's a lot of weeks when like, as soon as I hit it, even if the week is far from over, I'm like, no more cardio this week. I just don't feel like it. you know So that's not my... But I would gladly go lift weights in any sort of scenario, like seven... I mean, I can't because you need recovery, but I would gladly go lift something super heavy and fling around some weights far more than I would gladly do some cardio. But I just sort sort of figured out ways to make cardio palatable to myself. Yeah. And a lot of that, I wonder if it also just has to do with your your like genetic inclinations.
02:14:12
Speaker
You know, i mean, like, sure, like, you might have more type two fibers, right? Like, yeah you might be more fast twitch and like, you just enjoy the feeling of working that, you know, talent, more so like, I strongly suspect I'm more type one.
02:14:27
Speaker
And I did I didn't I the only reason is because I just picked up running my performance in running increased so much more rapidly than my strength. Like my strength is always just going to be like, you know, like I'm, I don't know. I've seen you pick up a pretty hard heavy barbell. but if you look at like what women my age are doing in like powerlifting competitions, it's like,
02:14:48
Speaker
Oh my God, not everybody is powerlifting competition. I know, but if you want to talk about relative like relative strength, powerlifting- But what about just relative strength to like relative average people? No, i'm sorry i'm so but I'm talking about genetic inclination and like what gotcha got to like what we might actually literally be more talented at. And so I'm i'm i'm talking about like the fact that I feel like the cardio just has developed so much more rapidly and more easily for me.
02:15:14
Speaker
to the point where i I'm actually like lift winning races in my age group in this largest city in Alabama. Right. So I think that that might like, cause you say like I would go strength train every day and like, I wouldn't like, I don't, I mean, i teach strength and I believe in, and I love it And I'm really passionate about it.
02:15:34
Speaker
I don't love it as much as running that could change, but I don't love it as much as running. um I like the way my body feels running more so than strength training. I like the way I feel after both a lot, but I would say I prefer the way I feel after running.
02:15:47
Speaker
I experienced mood enhancements from both, but much bigger mood enhancements from running. So it's interesting. i I wonder how much of that is really genetic and how much of it is yeah what we're made of really. ah I've never not liked cardio.
02:16:01
Speaker
I grew up doing basketball. um I grew up running track. I grew up running around my neighborhood, right? And have dabbled in running on and off, but have become more serious about And I have to say, like, I understand why people don't like the way their body feels while doing cardio, because I understand what, I don't know intimately what everyone's experienced, but I know what the suck feels like. I know what cardio is hardio means. Like, it hurts.
02:16:29
Speaker
My relationship to that discomfort is is one in which I don't think I suffer while I'm experiencing it. Like I would suffer when I have to get into a cold pool.
02:16:40
Speaker
Some people have no problem just jumping into a freezing cold pool. i can't do a cra I can't get into a pool unless it's close to 90 degrees. I find the process so painful. And I, not only that, I suffer.
02:16:56
Speaker
So there's a difference between pain and suffering, right? Like, Racing, running hard, running at LT2, it is painful, not in the injury-provoking way necessarily, but it's painful.
02:17:09
Speaker
It's really uncomfortable. I don't find that I'm suffering as opposed to other other things in my life where ah people have no problem doing it. And meanwhile, I'm suffering profoundly. Yeah.
02:17:23
Speaker
I was listening to, I cannot remember, this might've been on E3 Rehab. I was listening to some podcast talking about how people experience pain, meaning like pain from an injury, but I feel like this applies here in yeah a way where it's like they are, endures, there's a hard word to say, they endure their pain or they avoid it.
02:17:43
Speaker
Right. And so it sounds like for you, running is in you have the ability to endure it. Yeah. Getting into a cold pool, I completely avoid it. No. Yeah. Which is sad because my daughter wants to play with me in the pool. And I'm like, I'm sorry, sweetie, but I just can't do it. It's just I can't do it. It's too cold. And she's like, got no problem. You know, she's in there like right away. So I want talk a little bit about why I think people hate cardio and what they could do about it.
02:18:13
Speaker
i I guess we know why people hate cardio. iss like It's hard. Hardio. It's hard. Right. And and I think that what we can do about it is we can go at a slower, easier pace and we can use a tools, RPE, e talk test and yeah, heart rate to know if we're in a moderate range from more subjective to more objective means, heart rate being maybe the most objective, talk test kind of in the middle, and then purely subjective RPE.
02:18:47
Speaker
And then when we find using one or all of those tools that were not within that moderate range, we slow down. And we decide that based on evidence, based on the research Sarah and Laurel shared with us, based on the science-based information share with us,
02:19:02
Speaker
I'm getting benefit from going slower. I'm getting benefit from backing off. Another question to ask, could I get up tomorrow and do this again? Wait until tomorrow and then ask yourself. If the answer is no, fuck that.
02:19:17
Speaker
because Because I'm sore, because I'm so fatigued or I just am wiped out. The next time you go to do your, take the day, you know, take the day and rest, right? But then the next time you go to do that cardio, that same maybe cardio workout, go a little easier pace.
02:19:30
Speaker
Slow it down. Be willing to feel a little bored with the amount to which you're being physically challenged, you know, while still getting your heart rate up, maybe still breaking a sweat a little bit.
02:19:43
Speaker
See what that's like. Try to ride that moderate that moderate level and consider it like the center of a bullseye so that your workout has this very specific purpose, which is this moderate bullseye.
02:20:01
Speaker
in the middle of a huge target, right? You could be way too low walking Henry. You could be way too high and being like, this fucking sucks.
02:20:13
Speaker
You have to aim your arrow ah little bit more straight and true at moderate. And it's going to take practice because just like selecting the right load to put on the bar takes practice, right?
02:20:26
Speaker
Getting to know what RPE7 and weight training takes a lot of practice. right? How many reps do I have in reserve? That's going to take a few months. Hitting moderate is going to take practice, but be willing to adjust when you miss the mark.
02:20:40
Speaker
Be willing to adjust down the intensity and rest assured, or maybe exercise assured, that that moderate intensity is hugely beneficial even though it might feel a little underwhelming.
02:20:56
Speaker
That's kind of what you're going for. Not easy, but not overwhelming. Maybe a little underwhelming, but still feels like something. Okay.
02:21:09
Speaker
It's been two hours and 42 minutes since we started recording. This was supposed to be short. I know. You were like, it's just to be like an hour. I always like i say that and i doubt I immediately know that I'm flying. Yes.
02:21:25
Speaker
I did as well. Yeah. but Based on both of us, not just based on you. You still you still hold the record though for the longest episode. Yes, that's true. But I mean, you're closing in. The Grifters. Yeah.
02:21:36
Speaker
The Grifters episode, which Nathan listened to and was like, that did not feel like almost three hours. Which is a huge compliment. awesome. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I hope that you enjoyed this episode on the capacity of cardio respiratory fitness that we need. We should definitely work on for longevity.
02:21:53
Speaker
to help us live longer, to help us live with more energy, right? And to help us continue to engage in the activities that give our lives joy and meaning. We hope that you have some tips and ideas for how to start to work on your cardiorespiratory fitness if you have have not been doing that as much.
02:22:14
Speaker
And as well, how to bring it into your existing exercise routines that might also hopefully include strength training. A reminder that the cart is closing on Saturday, May 10th for Bone Density Course Lift for Longevity.
02:22:28
Speaker
We really hope you decide to join us this time around. We won't be teaching the course for another six months. Finally, if you do like what Sarah and I are putting out there for you and you want to give us some support in the form of a rating, a review, or subscribe or tell a friend, we would very much appreciate your support.
02:22:49
Speaker
Your help, your engagement, yeah your praise. you We love praise. Your five stars. Yeah, all of those things. This is our last episode.
02:23:00
Speaker
What? What? Sarah, this- Not forever, not forever. This is our last episode, Sarah, of the season. Just of the season, not of the podcast. Just for the season, just for the season. ok So we can't say see you next week.
02:23:15
Speaker
Nope. We're going to say see you in the next Inbetweeny. Yes, which is probably going to be in two weeks. Yeah. And are we going to um um gonna sing it all for this episode? Because we have been singing.
02:23:27
Speaker
We have been singing. Oh, total eclipse of the heart. Turn around. Every now and then I get a little bit lonely and you're never coming round.
02:23:39
Speaker
Turn around. and We won't see you next week, but we will see you the week after with an in-betweeny episode. Turn around. Every now and then I get a little bit nervous that the best of all the episodes have gone by.
02:23:56
Speaker
Turn around. Don't forget to sign up for the bone density course. Cart closes on May 10th and you want to do it. Turn around bright eyes.
02:24:09
Speaker
Every now and then I fall up. Turn around bright eyes. We gotta go because this is getting really bad. Oh, Lord.