What's up guys, happy Monday or Tuesday or I mean, realistically any day of the week that you are listening to this, I hope it is a very happy day. Welcome back to another episode of Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode 168 and Brian and I are going to dive into a little bit of the new hype, which is hybrid training. So I'm sure that you have seen run clubs popping up. You have probably seen. Maybe some of your influencers if you follow that kind of crowd or even friends family members getting into a more hybrid approach to training and Brian and I thought we could have some interesting conversation around it. So we are going to do so so With that said Brian, can you kick us off with some updates for this week, please? Yeah, of course, you guys know I've been doing this hybrid training thing for a few years now. And so not so new to me, but definitely the hype around it has been palpable in that it seems like everybody's trying to do it. And so we'll get into that as we get through the episode. But I think it's important to remember that hybrid training in its base form literally just means the combination of some kind of cardio with some weightlifting, at least for the definition that we're gonna use today. And so that can be almost anybody, like, especially as we get older and look to pursue health along with performance. I think there's an inevitable intersection between those two things. So I think it's an important episode and one that I know I look forward to doing here with Aaron. So before we jump in, I have an update on my hybrid training. And so one thing I noticed is yesterday, the day before maybe, when I was looking at my Strava stats is that the total amount of mileage that I've been doing per week on my bike or total amount of time commitment to cardio, if you want to want to state it that way is about 20 % less, maybe even 30 % less this year than it was last year. And so I was looking at some of my biggest days last year and I had a number of weeks that were between 150 and 160 miles, which is crazy because that means that I was biking an average of like 23 miles a day or something along those lines if it's extrapolated out over seven days. And this year I've only been doing cardio for maybe five days a week. And so my biggest week of the year just happened this past week and I did 130 miles. My biggest weeks prior to that were like 120. And that's because I just am not doing it as often. And I've talked in prior episodes about how I've also decreased my lifting volume. And so when we look at the predominance of research in the area of the impact of volume on adaptation, especially as it relates to cardio, but also as it relates to lifting, which we talked about in the last episode, you see this trend that more is better. But what I've realized this year through my journey, my third year now in hybrid training is that Maybe it's better to do more if you're singularly focused, but when you're duly focused on both cardio and weights, at least for me, it seems that less is more in both endeavors. Less weight training is more and less cardio is more. And so that's been really eye -opening and insightful for me because in prior years, I think I was influenced by the literature showing that cardio is so dependent upon volume that I just thought the more and more and more. did, the better I would get. But this year, I'm actually performing better. So I'm going faster. And I am performing better in the weight room. So both things are improved from doing less, which I just think is super interesting. And one aspect of that that's been interesting and unique is that my zone two rides, which in prior years were generally between 45 and 75 minutes, are now just like extending out and it's not getting harder. Like last week, my zone two rides were all just under two hours or around two hours. So they were somewhere between 90 and 130 minutes for my zone two rides. And this is at the same pace and effort and heart rate and all that stuff that I was doing for like 45 to 75 minutes last year. So it's been kind of cool to be able to see my capacity extend and duration increase. without an increased RPE. And so I think part of that goes into the fact that I'm doing lower volumes, I have better recovery capacity, and the adaptations are occurring more rapidly. And so anyway, I don't want to give away too much from the whole episode, but I have found that really interesting for myself, that I'm doing less gaining more and increasing in duration of the rides that I do, do, do, do. and just really getting a lot more out of the whole season of combining this hybrid model this last year. So hopefully some lessons that I can transfer to you guys here in the bulk of the episode. And then I have an episode on an update on some training in the gym stuff too, but let's kick it over to Aaron and see what's going on there. I have a question for you. What are you doing with your new found time that you are training less in both cardio and weights? I mean, to a pretty meaningful capacity, right? Because you said your cardio sessions are not 30 minutes. Like you said, they are decently lengthy. What are you feeling your new time that was previously dedicated to cardio or weights? Yeah, I love that question. So before I answer it, the the main difference this year is that I'm not really doing double days. So that was one thing I did last year a lot is I would lift and bike in the same day. So there was a much larger time commitment. Whereas now I'm like, okay, today is a bike day. And like I have a two hour ride, but then I have the rest of the day free, or it's a lift day. So I have a 60 minute lift, and then I have, you know, walks plus the rest of the day free. So it has been really nice to be more singularly focused on a day to day basis. As far as what I'm going to fill my time with. I love that question because I've kind of, I think I talked to you maybe six months ago about how I was thinking about starting a second podcast. And I've been further investigating that and actually begun kind of laying the groundwork for what I want that to look like. And the podcast that I want to start is focusing, I guess you would say more on the Prosper side of Eat, Train, Prosper. But I really want just a platform to be able to delve into things that interest me outside of the fitness space. So that could be self -development, philosophy, parenting. It can also touch on the topic of fitness on kind of a tangential way because it's such a large part of our life and it's a large part of self -development and things like that in general. And so that's actually my goal for this winter as kind of cardio begins to die down a little bit. And then I continue training potentially to maybe three days a week in the gym lifting. I really want to... of get this podcast going. And I don't know what it's going to look like or how committed I'm going to be to it. But I do find myself kind of craving this additional release that's outside of the fitness industry. And I've been feeling this for a while in this poll to kind of have some sort of passion and focus that isn't directly related to the fitness industry. And so this, think, will potentially be fulfilling for me and something I look forward to spending my time on. I'm glad I asked that is a very cool development and I look forward to when that time comes Yeah, what's going on with you? So I thought in a very timely manner, I had my first three structured cardio sessions in my renewed quote unquote off season build. And now that I am officially out of the woods for my hernia repair, it was supposed to be four sessions, but I just couldn't fit them all in with figuring out my schedule. So I have two zone two sessions and then two kind of hit sessions. And this past week was honestly the first time I took like a true zone to ride. I ran the very back of the napkin calculations and was like, okay, 45 minutes sitting in this heart rate. It's kind of lovely to be completely honest. It's very, it's incredibly achievable and you're not dying. You're pretty much chilling, moving and like watching a show at the same time. Like the only. kind of downside is my balls go numb and that it gets uncomfortable. But other than that, like once I have a solution for that, it's, it's almost like a time to yourself where I can be like, I'm just watching like this TV series or anime series is really what I'm watching. But it's like a nice chunk of time you're doing that. But I, and I don't feel like I'm dying, which is, it feels wonderful. So I was like, man, this is great. And it is, like I said, it's, it's very, very approachable and achievable, which is kind of nice. I've had this conversation with Jordan Lips before and we've gone back and forth on whether we prefer zone two or like intensity intervals. And I've always been on the side of preferring zone two for a lot of those reasons that you state where it's, it's almost cathartic. It's like this very chill, like mental reset in a way. And I love that I don't have to work hard that I can kind of multitask. I can look around, I can take in the surroundings if I'm outside or watch a show if I'm indoors, whatever it is. And so I love zone two and he's like, it's so boring and monotonous. And like, I just prefer the intervals because you know, there's actually like a purpose to them and I'm working hard and whatever. So that's cool to hear that insight. And I'm excited that you're getting into the zone two thing. Cause it's been like you're, you've been doing cardio, but you've been doing it in much more of like a moderate to high intensity. So this is sweet. And then as far as your balls, you need a chamois. Like you just need a pair of those padded like diaper shorts that bikers wear and that'll change the game for you. Yeah, I was looking for one of those kind of seat things that I can put over top of the seat. No. get a shammy, just buy a $60 shammy, just the shorts. You don't need the full bib with the things that go over your shoulder and stuff, but just buy a pair of shorts that have like the padded little bike diaper thing in the bottom. so I think I bought mine from wing winks, W INX maybe. But there's a number of them out there. They're like, you know, between 40 and $80, depending on how high quality you want to go. And it's just like a padded butt for your for your pants. All right, easy. I'll probably need a few of those. Yeah, so was great. And then I had my hit session, which was horrendous. And I what I found was interesting is I often find when I'm in the heat of the moment doing things, I'm having a lot of like internal dialogue with myself and I am dying. I think I hit my max heart rate. I think like I actually touched it or I was one beat per minute. I mean, I just did the basic 180 or 220 minus age, and I think that puts me at I'm 36. So to 184 and I hit a 183 on it, which I was. Surprised at. But in between, I would be like, OK, Aaron, it's our first day back, like we're not doing OK. I was like kind of like like spinning and dizzy, like my body's kind of giving me these like warning lights and I'm like just. I know we said we would commit to X, but just push it out like 80%. It's the first session will be okay. And the second that timer went off again, it was like, I could not go at 80%. I would come out like full sprint again. And then I just like, was just digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper. I think I messaged you on Instagram about it. Jenny and I had like a coffee afterwards and my heart rate didn't come under a hundred for like an hour. and my watch was sending me multiple things like, you're not, you're not okay. So yeah, that one was not fun. But other than that, I'm happy to have the structure in. And the main reason is, is now that my body weight is going to be climbing, I just want to be doing everything that I can to stack the cards in my favor of health within the confines of something that I understand is inherently unhealthy in and of itself. So those are my reasons. for doing so. Yeah, I love that. As we get into the bulk of the episode, we can talk a little bit about programming those intensity sessions. And I'm curious to kind of get into the nitty gritty of kind of what you did, but we don't need to kind of do that right now. Cool. Do you have anything else before I do my last update here? All right, cool. So my last update is just that I am now two sessions in on my new full body, low volume, low frequency program. As I discussed in the updates last episode, the program is essentially four full body sessions over the course of 12 calendar days. So basically one every three days. That's kind of the way that looks. And I only have eight working sets in each workout. So there's two for a leg move or leg or hip movement, two for a push, two for a pull, and two for either delts or arms, depending on what day it is. So literally eight total working sets. All the workouts have taken me between 45 and 50 minutes for the most part. And I cannot believe how sore I've been from these two workouts. Like it is such less volume than what I've been doing. And yet I have been like crippled sore in almost every muscle group from two working sets. And the only thing that I can really attribute this to is that at some level, I must be working harder and putting better focus into my sets because I have less to do. Whereas maybe just subconsciously without even realizing it, I was somehow sandbagging when I was like, have six sets of back to do today. Maybe I was just not, like, even though I was at failure, like I was watching the videos and I did partials and I was at failure, somehow I just wasn't creating the same stimulus that I was able to do when I was just given two sets and being like, that is what you have today. And so the soreness has been palpable. It's been really nice and motivating to have two or three days completely off in between every single lifting session. I've come in really excited to get after each one. And today is my third session. So today is my third of four. It's my only session that's all machines. All my other sessions are kind of a mix of machines and free weights and stuff like that. This session is like leg curls, pull downs, cable chest press and cable lateral raises, I think. So everything's either cables or machines. So I actually don't expect to get quite as sore in this session as maybe I have in the prior sessions just because of the equipment choice. it's been really cool. I'm excited about it. think it reminds me of those feelings of kind of nostalgia I used to have towards this type of training when I first started. It's really nice to be so excited to train every day. And it's not that I would be dreading sessions or having anxiety about sessions or anything. It would just kind of be like, eh, this is what I do. Like I lift four days a week. Today's lifting day. I don't really want to do it, but hey, I got to do it. I go in, I do my session. Everything's cool. know, performance is great. Now to be able to be like, man, I'm itching to go to the gym. Like I haven't been there for two or three days. I cannot wait to go to the gym and throw some weights around. And that has been really nice and something that I hope kind of continues over the course of the next few months with this programming. So that's the update there. Cool. So any anything more or are we good to jump into today? OK, wonderful. So I think the one of the reasons we want to talk about is obviously Brian is in. I believe this is year three, right of the higher priority of hybrid training. And something that, you when we kind of talked about it, it's often the, the, the, the end that people dive into with hybrid training is, is typically running, right? Running and lifting weights. and what I thought would be, or Brian actually thought would be a really wonderful way to talk about this is it does not have to be running. For example, like I have four cardio sessions per weekend. Not a single one of them is, is running in. we can get into, you know, goal specific and why, and that's some of the reasons that we have here. But what we want to say is it's more around the movement or sorry, not necessarily the modality, but the zones, purpose behind it, and then fitting that into, your greater kind of scheme of what your goals are as an individual. So I think what makes the most sense, Brian, to start off with is like defining specific goals. I always love starting the conversation around this, especially when I'm like onboarding, you know, new clients and those sorts of things and getting really, really specific. Because if we don't have specifics one, where we're prone to be, subject to our, our, waning, motivation at times, but then too, it's hard to quantify if we're actually making progress. If we don't have a contextual goal to apply the progress too. So, with this kind of. Discussion around the hybrid training. How do you like to have the conversation around goals in terms of bringing this into maybe someone who has just been lifting? Mm -hmm. Yeah. I think at the first really important overriding thing that needs to be determined is whether you're looking to integrate hybrid training for health, as in like, I just want my heart to be healthy. I want mitochondrial function and all of these things, versus it being performance based, such as I want to crush this 5k or this 10 K or this half marathon or whatever it is, because how you go about segregating, how much effort and time you put into the lifting bucket versus the cardio bucket, and then how you go ahead programming your cardio are all going to be impacted by what that goal actually is. And it's gonna look completely different if somebody comes to me and says, I wanna get into this hybrid thing for health reasons to be the best 40, 50, 60, 70 year old that I can be versus somebody that comes to me and says, I have this bike race or this running race or this thing that I wanna prepare for. Yeah, a wonderful answer there. And let's say this individual for this example purposes, this example purpose is more of the health based and they're currently doing zero cardio. How do you like, well, yes, they're walking, but they don't have any kind of structured form of something that's going to get them sweaty. Let's call it a cardio at a sweaty level pace. Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think that that probably is the avatar of a lot of the people in our listenership, or at least was before we got onto this cardio train and maybe they've begun doing some of the same. It was definitely me before I began the cardio journey, you know, three years ago. So I think that the first step to do in beginning to do cardio is to just start really slow. especially if you're running. But I think across any modality, starting slow is key because the thing with these adaptations is that they're just gonna occur by you just doing it. Like imagine if you go from not even walking to walking. When you first start walking, walking is kinda hard. Like you're like, walking, like my legs are getting tired. I'm actually kinda breathing. This is weird. But then over time, walking gets really easy and you never had to do any intensity. You just got better at walking. The same thing can really apply to cardio as well. So before you go out and worry about trying to crush your 5K, you probably need to worry about just like, let's run a mile and see if we can even run a mile straight and do it with a relatively low heart rate or not even with a relatively low heart rate, but trying not to die out to the point where you can't even complete a mile. So it's almost like by elimination, you have to be at a lower heart rate. because that mile would be so daunting for you if you were at a higher heart rate throughout that whole thing. So I think initially right off the bat, it's just starting to move. And I don't even think you need to put any qualifications or specifications on, know, we're gonna do one long zone two and one moderate intensity and one hit intervals or anything like that. I think that's for future. That's kind of like months in the future because I really think you could probably just continue to adapt. just by introducing cardio and not even worrying about zones or intensities or anything like that. And just going out and being like, Hey, two or three days a week, I'm going to go move at a higher intensity than walking for between 15 and 45 minutes or something along those lines. And if I was going to be pressed to give someone guidance, I would say, yeah, do like one longer, slower session. Do one kind of moderate effort intensity session that's shorter than your long session. and then do one like higher intensity session that has some like hard work with some rest in there. And so I think a prescription is as very vague as that is gonna be more than enough to get someone started on their journey for the first few months. Cool. And then one of the things that that often I'll get this, conversation from client or this question from clients is around like the modality. How much do you think is, is how much importance do you think is in varying your modality and by modality, mean, for example, like swimming, stationary bike, stair master, skier. What else do we have? Like a rowing machine, like Yeah, like what are your thoughts around that, the importance there? Yeah. I mean, I think for health, it's probably less important that you vary it, but more important than if you're going for performance, because if you're going for performance, you want it to be specific to the event that you're training for. So if you're going for a row, you have to practice on the rower. If you're running, you need to practice running. If you're doing triathlon, you need to do swim, bike and run. So it really depends for performance, what you, what your goal is and what you're training for. For health, like The health is about the adaptation that occurs inside of you. And so the modality that you choose is just a tool to elicit an adaptation. And it isn't super important which one you choose. In fact, you could choose multiple of them because the goal is just to get your heart rate elevated and sit in that kind of semi -uncomfortable zone for X amount of time. So I think varying it is fine if that keeps you interested and engaged. It's not like lifting where it's like, if you're constantly program hopping and changing things, then you're going to get no results. It's kind of like, Hey, the purpose of cardio is to create the adaptation for your health. And so the modality is not quite as important as it would be if performance was the goal there. With that said though, there is important factors and impact that result from the modality that you choose. such that running is going to be significantly more damaging than doing a bike or a rower or an elliptical just due to the impact on the ground. So it's twofold. It's the impact on the ground causing stress on the joints. And then it's also the eccentric loading. So in a bike or a rower, you don't really have that lowering phase that the negative would be is what we would refer to it in lifting, which is where most of the muscle damage occurs. And so in rowing, biking, elliptical, you don't have any of that. Everything is concentric. So you get almost no muscle soreness and no muscle damage. When you run, you get a lot of eccentric loading. You're having to stop yourself every step. So it's almost like you're doing like a mini box jump descent. And we remember from the CrossFit days how fatiguing that can be to descend down from box jumps over and over and over again. When you're running, it's just doing like this mini box jump descent every single step that you take. So there's a lot of impact, a lot of muscle damage. And on top of that, durations are usually much shorter when you run. So something like a 20 to 30 minute steady state run could be sufficient for your zone two. But if you're going out biking, 20 to 30 minutes barely even gets you into the beginning of the adaptations that are going to occur in zone two. So you just, have to go longer. with these, like biking modalities. Rowing is kind of somewhere in the middle because rowing is very demanding and it's full body much like running is, but there isn't eccentric loading. So I think rowing is a little bit more, favorable to longer distances, even though it is hard like running is. but for, for sir, biking and elliptical and things like that are going to need longer durations to elicit the same effect on those kinds of steady state endurance workouts. I want to talk about zone two, and in more depth and kind of the hype around it and the reasons behind that. what I wanted to do quickly extrapolate to something you talked about certain modalities would lend themselves a little bit better to the zone really, or the type of cardio that you're doing. For example, the, the, kind of memory that comes to mind is I remember trying to do a hit workout on a rower. that was terribly difficult because of the kind of where there's no resistance or anything on that eccentric portion. So it was really hard to get my heart rate high enough that I wanted to. But my muscles were on fire because of that kind of little bit of downtime. But for example, like the assault bike or air or fan bike, air bike, whatever you want to call it, which is a modality that we forgot to mention. Is I would say is the best way to do hit because of how easy it is to get your heart rate up into range. Yeah, it's a good point. Certainly modalities have variances in that aspect. So the issue you stated with the rower is actually something that's super common amongst anaerobic athletes because you and me, before I hired coach Mike T. Nelson to coach me on rowing and Anders, I've talked to Anders about this too, we all tend to row at a low stroke rate. So I remember from the CrossFit days when I would row, I'd be rowing at 18 to 20 strokes per minute, which is about one stroke every three seconds or so. So like you're saying, you pull really, really hard. You use a ton of muscular anaerobic power to pull, and then you take a breath. You have that slow descent, and you're really only working for one second out of each three seconds of that stroke, because you pull, then you rest, then you descend. So you're not getting a ton of aerobic work. Like you're almost turning this aerobic thing, which is rowing into an anaerobic workout, which is why you're feeling your muscles burn and all of these things occur. So Mike noted that when I first started working with him and he's like, dude, you're rowing at like 18 to 20 strokes a minute. And I was like, yeah, that's where I feel most powerful. And he goes, yeah, you're not, this isn't aerobic. this isn't, you know, if you're going to row aerobically, you need to row at a higher stroke rate. You need to lower your damper setting. Cause what did we always do in CrossFit? Slam that damper up to 10 and crank on it as if it was like a one rep max clean on every single rep. So, so he was like, dude, you got to get your stroke rate up closer to 30. He was like, top rowers are going to be like more like 35, 36 strokes a minute, which is about double the speed that I was rowing at as far as strokes per minute. So it took a lot of work over the course of the months that I was working with Mike. But when I would did my two K row test at the very end, I got my stroke rate up almost to 30. It was like 29 or something like that. And that was necessary because what it did is it made my limiter, my cardiovascular ability, my ability to breathe and take in oxygen and utilize it versus when the stroke rate is lower, the limitation is my muscular output and power. So, so yes, to your point, like absolutely, if you're going to row, it helps to be a good rower. and actually know how to make it a cardiovascular exercise. Something like an assault bike is great and really hard to mess up. If you're somebody just getting into the cardio thing, like the assault bike, it doesn't allow you that moment of reprieve like you get with the rower. So you have to find a steady pace. If you try to go super hard, then you're going to have to pull back and go super slow. It's not like you can just decrease stroke rate, but pull harder like you can with the rower. You have to keep a higher stroke rate to keep output up. And so I do think in many ways, the assault bike is a great option, whether you're doing intervals or even zone two, it's a great option because it uses your whole body and it forces you to keep consistent revolutions per minute. Yeah, it's almost like the. in many things in the gym, especially, you know, in the conversations we've had numerous times about lifting weights, like your form and proficiency in the movement matters. And for me, like I would be a very, very novice rower. My proficiency is very poor. The beauty in the the in the assault bike is you almost anyone can be proficient pretty quickly because of the simplicity in its design, perhaps. which is nice there. So we talked about the modalities for a bit. Now, in terms of the zone two, we always hear so much about zone two and can you extrapolate as to why we always hear so much about it? And then especially from the person coming in from a pure health standpoint, maybe it's the lady in her late 40s, early 50s, who's now on the back half of menopause and estrogen's lower, so we don't have that cardio protective. estrogen at a certain level or the dad male who's entering the heart attack years. Maybe he's had a friend or something like that go down. unfortunately, why, why is zone two so important in, in, the health standpoint? Yeah, zone two is a low enough intensity that it's not non fatiguing, but it's such low fatigue that there's going to be very little negative impact on your weightlifting or on kind of the aspects of your life that could be infiltrated by having too much intensity. things like, you know, impacts on sleep, impacts on hunger, just... the stress of being in that super sympathetic state that you would be in during intervals. Zone two is really the opposite of all of that. it's almost parasympathetic. Like it's not, cause you're still working and it's still a stress on the body, but it's such a low stress. Like just to get a little nitty gritty into the science of the zones and lactate real quick. And I know this is going to be above the head of some people. So I'll try to simplify it. But if you think of the zones as essentially having three zones instead of five. This is really what the physiological basis is when you look at the production of these different stress hormones in the body like lactate. So if you think of this as three zones where you have a green zone, a yellow zone, and a red zone, the green zone is essentially everything below your first lactate turn point or your ventilatory turn. This is basically a point where things are still relatively easy and to put it in scientific terms, your lactate doesn't take off. So when we're at rest doing nothing like we are right now talking on this podcast, our lactate is likely somewhere around one millimole. When we begin to exercise in zone two or slightly lower than zone two, our lactate will start to creep up, but then it will level off somewhere under two millimoles. So at rest, at 1 millimol. At zone 2, we're still under 2 millimol. That makes it very sustainable. As soon as we get above 2 millimol of lactate, what happens is there's a more exponential increase in lactate. So under 2 millimol, it's pretty steady. Above 2 millimol, we're approaching a point where at some point we're going to have to stop. And depending on how high above two it is will determine how long you can go till you have to stop. If you're at 2 .5, you might be able to make it three or four hours before you have to stop. As soon as that millimol hits about four, so we're at two, below two we're in zone two. Above four, we're now in the red zone. So everything in that yellow zone in the middle is somewhere between two millimol and four millimol of lactate. So it's sustainable, but not. forever sustainable. It's just sustainable for a while. Once you get above four millimole and you're in the red zone, that's our intervals. That's our stuff where you're like, I can do this for one to four minutes and then I'm gonna need to rest because I will be dying otherwise. And so essentially when you look at that three zone model and you look at the millimole of lactate that's accumulating by staying under two, you really are. almost forever sustainable. Like it's not forever sustainable because fatigue does accumulate, but you can go hours and hours and hours staying under two millimole. It's like walking. Like if you just went out for a walk for like eight hours, like you'd be somewhere between one and two millimole. It'd probably be on the lower end, like 1 .2, something like that. But you can kind of see how that makes sense as we go through this journey. So the nice thing about zone two is that it is relatively low fatiguing. It has incredible impact on our mitochondrial function. So things like our ability to be in energy flux where we can switch between using carbohydrates or using fat for fuel. Things like that are all trained really well through zone two or slightly below zone two. And when people are doing zone two, I often cue them to stay lower versus higher because if you're going higher in zone two, it's likely that at some point you're gonna pass that two millimole mark. You might not even feel it, cause you're like, it's 2 .2 millimole, it's 2 .4, like I still feel very sustainable, I could do this for a couple hours and you don't really realize it, but as soon as it gets above two, you are on this inevitable ramp of decline and at some point you're gonna have to stop. The adaptations that you seek from zone two occur just as well. at a slightly lower intensity than they do if you're pushing the boundary between the green zone and the yellow zone. So generally you just want to err on the side of being lower, which then still gives you all the positive impacts you're looking for, but has very few of the negative impacts that are gonna increase stress and fatigue and stuff. Very interesting. So let's say we took an average of our zone two lower threshold. Let's just call it that 60 % for a very simple purpose. And we took that 70%, right? And we averaged them to get us a 65%, right? Right in the middle. What you're kind of suggesting is we, it may be for someone who's hybrid training, where we want the positive adaptations of the zone two, it would make sense for us to stay at you know, between the 60 to 65 % range and not really push above that 65 into the 65 to 70 range, because we can get all the positive adaptations from zone two in that 60 to 65. We keep the lactate under that two millimole threshold. And we're also not, we are reducing the likelihood that we are into some of the negatives. I could say that that may interfere with our lifting. later in the day, the next day, those sorts of things. so relative to or specific to the conversation we're having right now, that would be rather beneficial. Yeah, I think that that's a really, really good way of framing it. I do think the specifics of saying 60 to 65 % is very individual. For example, my zone two starts at 65%, like the bottom of it is 65, and then the top of it's around 75. And I know that from doing lactate testing during a VO2 max test, from the different subjective assessments that go into assessing whether you are in zone two, such as like my favorite one is. to say a 12 to 15 word sentence while you think you're in zone two. And if saying that 12 to 15 word sentence is just you talking and there's no impact or ramification from it. Like for example, you don't need to take like a, after you say that sentence. So it doesn't put you into a breathing deficit. You don't breathe heavier just because you said that sentence. Then you're likely in zone two. So the sentence I would use when I first started doing my zone two, just to kind of assess was, When I first saw that girl, I could not believe what my eyes were seeing. And it was just like this silly little sentence that came into my head, but I counted it I was like, that's like exactly the amount of words I want. And so I would repeat that sentence and I'd be like, if I think I'm too high, like my heart rate's at 140, I'm like, say it. And I'm like, and I'm like, okay, that was too high. Like I need to be more like 132. So then I'd go to like heart rate 132, I'd say the sentence and I'd be like, okay, that was cool. Like it felt conversational and pretty low key. So I do think your point was really, really good. I just think that there is certain individual differences based on how cardiovascularly trained. Great point. When would you suggest is maybe a time to start reevaluating the more basic recommendations for calculating something like zone two. I think you just do it along the way as you go. So you say that sentence and you take in your subjective feedback of how does that sentence make me feel after I say it or while I'm saying it. And you know, maybe when you first start, you might be at 60 % heart rate and be like, yep, that feels about right. That's my zone too. And as you get going and become more cardiovascularly fit three to six months later, you might be able to say that same sentence with the same subjective physiological response. but your heart rate is now five to 10 beats higher. Okay. And please correct me I'm wrong. Did you mention that you did some VO2 max testing and they were also able to test your actual lactate level and that could be more objectively definable? Yeah, yes, absolutely. So anytime you do a VO2 max test, they do test lactate with it. They're linked. You always will do both together. So what they would do is as part of this ramp test, they start you at about 50 % of your... Basically, they start you at like an RPE3. And you'll do that for four minutes and they prick your ear. And then you increase the intensity from an RPE3 to like an RPE4 to five, do that for four minutes, they prick your ear. And basically you just ramp up adding 25 watts or so each time, increase the RPE by about one every four minutes. And each time during that four minute period, they'll prick your ear and you'll get this cool computer image of what your lactate is doing, where it's steady, where it begins to increase, and then where it begins to exponentially increase. And you can see that over the course of these 20 to 30 minutes of intervals that you do. That's very cool. think I was just taking some notes that I think I might get. I haven't had my VO to max tested since I believe it was freshman year of university. All I remember is it went very poorly. So that might be something I may look into here just to I feel like it could be cool to get done, especially once I get into maybe in a month, month or two when I'm pushing 230 pounds. Might be cool to see. one, how poor it still be or if it's improved or not. Well, it's based on milliliters per kilogram. So your outright VO2 max might actually be kind high and impressive. But when you look at the VO2 max per kilogram of body weight, it will appear significantly less impressive. I'm just gonna take whatever number looks best for Instagram. Exactly. Yeah. Because at 230 pounds, like just existing, I bet your VO2 is like even right now doing nothing but talking on the podcast, it's probably higher than like a 97 pound person that doesn't do cardio or, because you have to fuel, you have to oxygenate this entire 230 pound body. so yeah, I mean, that's kind of irrelevant, but definitely when you do it, make sure that you check with them and make sure they're going to do lactate as well. Because now that I think about it, I wonder if lactate is always perpetually linked with VO2 max, or if that's just because I did it at a specific place where performance for athletes is relevant and people are trying to find their zones and stuff. Yep. Yep. Understood. It has to be somewhere here. There's all sorts of bespoke health boutique type shit here. It's got to be here somewhere. Okay. So we covered zone two pretty well, which I thought was, interesting. Now something that you mentioned for the person who's in it for, for the, the hybrid, right? They, they still want to be training. They still want to be lifting body composition is still important. Do we think that those kind of mitochondrial efficiency improvements. Do you have any, let's call it potential carryover to an improved body composition outside of just pure increased caloric expenditure at a baseline nutritional intake? Like removing that aside, do we think those improvements could have any positive carryover to what we care about most, obviously, body composition? No, mean, directly, like doing cardio isn't going to make you appear more aesthetic, aside from just the change that it has on your caloric intake and things along those lines. However, I do think this is a good place to discuss some of the ways in which being cardiovascularly fit can be beneficial to your weight training. And so there's actually a few benefits of this. One is acutely within your session. So as you're more cardiovascularly fit, you can achieve the same performance set to set without having to rest as long. So what might've taken you five minutes to rest between sets of pendulum squat close to failure in the past. Now you can do the same number of sets of pendulum with three minutes of rest in between or something along those lines. Or you could potentially even add an additional set now if you feel like volume is something that you covet that you're going for. Instead of three sets with five minutes rest, maybe you can do four sets with three minute rest. And so you're actually getting more sets in less time in that, in that way. So acutely, it can impact your training by resting less between sets, being able to recover faster between those sets. Looking more zooming in from like a larger angle, you actually can see improved recovery session to session when you're more cardiovascularly fit. And so I brought this up on a podcast, maybe six months ago, and the guy wrote me afterwards and was like, hey, do you have any studies to support that? And I knew I had seen one. It took me a minute to find it. But basically what the study found was that parasympathetic drive was increased from those with higher cardiovascular output. Meaning that as soon as you finish your weight training session, A lot of people sit in this really sympathetic zone after their weight training session, where they can't seem to calm down and get into the parasympathetic kind of rest and digest sense. And this is actually going back to what you said about your interval session the other day, where you did intervals and then you're sitting there at heart rate at a hundred beats and your watch is telling you that you're going to die because you're still in this really high sympathetic drive. Even an hour after you finished your session, whereas as your cardiovascular ability, and output increases, you're going to find that that heart rate decreases faster and you're able to get out of that sympathetic state sooner, which has downstream impacts such as increased digestion and utilization of the food that you intake, potentially better sleep, and just a better sense of calm throughout the day, which creates this milieu of better recovery. So I think, you know, two very good benefits of increasing cardiovascular. endurance as it relates specifically to your ability to improve performance in the gym. Yeah, you can you can effectively spend more time parasympathetic, which is how we're resting, digesting and recovering effectively. That's a wonderful point to bring up. I would love to kind of transition the conversation a little bit. So we've covered a lot of the basis around, you know, why we may want to put cardio in some of the types. Now, in terms of. And I think this is really the golden question here is how do we structure it? You know. Let's say, where do we choose what trade -offs, if I use the right term there in terms of volume from lifting, how do we make it all fit without having, let's call it unnecessary sacrifices in either direction and being really realistic with our time and commitments? Yeah, that is the golden question, right? And it's very, it's gotta be individually based. I mean, you have to have a conversation with your client or with yourself and kind of determine what your time allocation is. So the way that I usually approach this with clients is that the first question I ask is how much time and or frequency can you commit over the course of a week to the whole bucket of training? And so let's hypothetically say that that person says they have seven hours with one hour every day. I don't know. That seems relatively reasonable. Or maybe we even say six hours. So there's a day off in there or something along those lines. But basically they're like, I have an hour, six days a week. You think that's pretty reasonable as an avatar? Yeah. Okay. So if we have an hour, six days a week, I think at that point, you decide which one's a priority and you probably put a few more of your your ducks into that bucket. I don't know. And so it puts ducks in a bucket. I think if you want to be split even between them, a three and three is a great approach. Three allows you to, you can hit three full body sessions. You could do an upper lower and a full. That's actually the way that I tend to organize my group programs for three days a week is we do a lower than an upper than a full body. And then you can easily fit your, your cardio work on those in between days. There's certainly an opportunity where you could do double days. For example, a really popular way of bucketing is to put your higher intensity cardiovascular work, like your intervals on the same day as you're lifting, because then you're bucketing intensity into one day. So like imagine if, if you're lifting three days a week and you have a high intensity cardio day. Now you have four kind of like really hard days and you have the two zone two days. But if you were to put your intensity work on the same day as a lift, now you have one less day of intensity, which can facilitate kind of improved recovery across the course of the week. so I'm, I'm a pretty big fan of that. If people can facilitate that, you know, maybe we do a 40 minute lift session and then a 20 minute higher intensity cardio and that kind of fills your hour for that day. There's just so many different ways to go about it. It's kind of hard to conjecture and try and determine which would be like the best way. So I think the best way is just determining how many days for each you can do and then kind of determining based on how many days you have, how much intensity, how many intensity days and how many longer endurance days you want. And then keeping in mind that, you know, the longer endurance zone two days like we discussed are going to be significantly less fatiguing. which is going to allow us to do those and not facilitate recovery, but not create like these deeper inroads into keeping you from recovering. It's kind of almost like a neutral is the way I look at it, the way that I feel at least from doing zone two work, especially as I stay on the lower end of zone two. And then I can feel the impact being more significant if I veer towards that higher end of zone two or maybe accidentally dip into that like yellow zone. So I think that that's an important. a way of looking at it to start. As I put in a Instagram post a few days ago about this topic, I noted that if you're doing cardio three days a week, you probably want like an easy day, a moderate day, and a higher intensity day. And as you have more days of cardio, I think you keep your moderate day, you keep your high intensity day, and then you just add more easy days. So if you're doing cardio five days a week, it's just one moderate. one higher intensity and three kind of lower intensity zone two days. And I think that's a really great framework of looking at it is like your base is always the one moderate day and the one higher intensity day. And then anything that you have to do cardio beyond those two days just becomes these kind of longer endurance, lower intensity days. I love it. Now I feel like we're getting into some really good, really good meat and potatoes here. Now, something that you kind of mentioned around stacking some of the intensity days to kind of stack your intensities in a single day so that you're not impeding recovery in other days. I have a practical example. So I'll try and explain it very, very quickly. I have five training sessions per week, lifting sessions. Apologies. I have four cardio sessions. I have two days, Mondays and Tuesdays where I am very, very busy with client work and I don't want to try and do double sessions there. So that leaves me Wednesday through Sunday to get in for training sessions for cardio sessions. I train legs on Wednesday. My question is I could in theory. just lift weights, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, but then I would need to do four consecutive cardio sessions to roll me into Monday. Or I could stack one of my cardio sessions on my leg day, but then the question becomes which would be least impacting on my leg day as well. What are your thoughts? Yeah, my gut reaction is that leg day might not be the best day to do your interval work for two reasons. One is that your total output on your cardio is going to be lower because your legs are gonna be fatigued. And your impeding recovery of your legs immediately after finishing your session. So like I see a potential negative in like, just crushed this leg session. My legs are completely fried. I need to get parasympathetic and start this recovery process as quickly as possible versus my legs are crushed. can barely walk. Let me go crush them some more with a completely different approach and, then just impede that recovery even further so that, you know, that the adaptations don't occur as rapidly. And, and my assumption would be that given those two reasons, It's probably not best to put that higher intensity day after the leg day immediately, but at the same time, like what if you're doing that higher intensity day the next day or the day after and your legs are like really sore? So my sense is that it's probably better to do it when they're sore because you could flush some of that lactate out, kind of get that process moving. But I think mentally, psychologically, it's almost harder. to get going with that session. Like once you're going, it's fine. But like hobbling over to your bike and being like, my God, my legs. And then beginning to pedal and being like, they feel like lead, you know, it's going to take a little bit longer of a warmup and stuff to really get you kind of integrated into that cardiovascular process in that case. So there's, certainly positives and negatives to both approaches there. Yeah, that was kind of my thoughts as well. I don't think I think if I took the intensity of the leg day and then took the intervals on a single day, like I may die. I mean, my heart may stop on that day. I'm obviously joking, but it would feel that way. advice with that is if you can to put your higher intensity stuff, if you're gonna bucket that, put it on an upper body day. Like you have a specialization cycle going for your back right now and back is a huge muscle group that gets your heart rate jacked up. So you will have created that physiological response of stress on your back day by getting your heart rate up into the one. 60s maybe on like a really hard set to failure or something like that. So you've already created that kind of deficit into your recovery that way, but you haven't trained your legs at all. And so I think being able to go from back day into a hard cardio intervals is probably a pretty good pair. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well. Okay. now we, we, we touched on the, the avatar of kind of three training, three, three lifting sessions per week, three cardio sessions. The cardio sessions are broken up into a, an easier day and a more, a more moderate day and a higher intensity day. Now in terms of the resistance training, you, you gave a couple of really good examples where they're going three full body, or we do an upper lower full body. or potentially even if someone is using a running modality, we might do like an upper lower upper and just do and just accept lower volume. Now in terms of, let's say someone has like an intermediate plus physique in training age and they are willing to kind of put training progressions or the rate of progressions on hold. as they want to kind of take their cardio a little bit more seriously. Maybe this person is early mid thirties, hasn't really played any organized sports since high school years, which are now 12, 13, 14 years in the past. Do you think that it may be more favorable for them to focus on more of a strength emphasis for their resistance training? And we'll talk, you know, more of the compounds, lower rep ranges, maybe four to eight, something like that. Or do you think that following a more You know, I'm using air quotes here, traditional hypertrophy modality and rep ranges and exercise selection would be in their best interest. Great question. I love that. And I do, you kind of led me to the answer, but I do believe that the lower rep work with a more focus on strength is going to be the better approach for this person. In fact, it probably is for like a lot of people just because there's a lower fatigue cost centrally, systemically when you're doing lower reps compared to doing sets of like 12 to 20 reps, less psychological cost as well. And it's different enough from the cardio. So, so I like to have these very different stimuli where the cardio is obviously endurance oriented. You're doing, if you want to look at it from a resistance training perspective, you're doing thousands of reps, whether you're running or you're biking. Like there is resistance there. It's just significantly less resistance than a set of four to eight or even a set of 12 to 20. But when you look at what a set of 12 to 20 is physiologically, it's more similar to endurance work. Whereas the four to eight is going to be less similar. than the endurance work. And especially as this avatar that you mentioned is, know, late intermediate of some sort, has a pretty good physique so far, it's highly unlikely that they're going to lose any muscle mass training in those like four to eight strength rep ranges, but they'll likely be able to keep more of their strength and potentially more muscle mass than they might if they were going up into those higher rep ranges. So I love that. think it's also a great, great from a time commitment perspective to not have to do sets of 12 to 20, which take 60 to 90 seconds when you could knock a set out in 30 to 40 seconds or something. Yeah, those are my kind of thoughts, I think as well. One thing that I hadn't thought of that I'm glad you brought up was around the trying to vary the stimuli where a lower rep range is going to be a significantly, you know, divergent stimuli as someone doing like 12 to 15 reps, which in many cases feels like cardio. And then you're already doing a lot of that cardio. So was a really good point by you. There was a question I had here. What was it? so typically Especially using that same avatar when we were going to be having some days where we split or combine both resistance training and cardio in a given day The way that you had kind of in Led me to believe right? Please correct me if I'm wrong that we would put the cardio or sorry the training session first cardio session You know and what I presume to be very closely after Let's say we have someone who has a lot of time on their hands. Maybe they're willing to invest in a cardio, you know, spin bike and put it in their work office in their basement and like, Hey, is it okay if I get up and do my cardio at 6 30 a And then I go train at 2 p What would be your kind of recommendations to someone like that? Yeah, another great question. I think that if you have that time period between the sessions where you're able to get a couple meals in and kind of get back to parasympathetic, I do think that that's probably better. Like you're just going to have better output on both things if you're able to separate them by a few hours with a couple meals in between. Yeah. Yeah. I think absolutely. Like the one thing you'd want to avoid would be doing the cardio before the weights, assuming that weights are your goal. But I think that that gets into a larger conversation of like, you know, if we're talking to somebody whose goal is health and longevity, then it's potentially less important. So I'd probably just put the weights first because you don't want to be, the negative would be of putting the cardio first would be, you know, you're depleting your glycogen, which you need for your weightlifting. Obviously, if you have a few hours in between, that's irrelevant. But for somebody who's chasing performance, like we kind of had that avatar in the beginning where this person is like, I'm training for this 10K race instead of I just want health and longevity. Well, now the 10K race is your goal. You're putting that on a pedestal over the lifting for this period of time. And so in that case, you want to prioritize the cardio. You want that to be the thing you do first. And so on a day where you're really pressed for time and you have to fit both in the same session, if you're that performance -based cardio athlete, you want to put the cardio before the weights so that the cardio receives the most specific adaptation. Whereas if you're just that health and longevity person, or even maybe if the weights are your goal instead of the cardio, then I think putting the weights first makes a lot more sense in that case. And I know from like a nutrition perspective, you can probably validate that too. So I mentioned the glycogen, I'm sure there's some other kind of things that are occurring inside that make it relevant as well. You know, I was gonna kind of ask that question a little bit towards the end, but I think it's a great time to talk about it. The things that come to mind, of course, is the absolute caloric expenditure through increased activity, especially something like cardiovascular training that's going to have a higher sustained heart rate for a longer period of time, which is effectively how we expend more calories. But then also like... perspiration, especially depending on the environment you're training in. If you're someone like Brian, who's going to ride in your bike outside in the sun, it's hot. You're perspiring more like you want to pay more attention to replenishment. The primary one being sodium. There's this. it just kind of became popular. And from at least what I saw on social media, Gatorade released these like patches, these like single use patches that you can put on your arm and it will tell you like the rate in a you know, per whatever inch of your skin, however it works, like what you're losing through your activity, like how much sodium, how much potassium, chloride, those sorts of things. So you can more kind of tailor how you, the ratios of what you put back in, which is, it's cool. I, know, if you were to, if I were to, you know, be a betting man, I would say it's more gimmick than I think actual has like quality practical use. I'm happy to be wrong in that context, but it's a pretty cool idea, you know. Nonetheless, but the things that we see primarily sodium, potassium, magnesium being like the biggest kind of levers to pull there, especially if you like, you know, resistance train in an air conditioned gym where you're not like sweating that much. And now you're doing this modality where you're like, you know, soaking your your clothes over a zone, not like the hit interval or the longer moderate one. Like you're going to be needing some increased electrolyte and mineral intake. than you otherwise normally would. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of element for that. use element when I go out riding for long rides or hard rides or anything like that. You did you did mention biking out in the sun and the warmth. so great point. One interesting caveat that I don't know is super well known is that when you're biking outside, you're actually increasing. You're getting a ton of airflow because you're biking at, I don't know, 15, 20, 22, whatever miles per hour it is your getting a lot more airflow than you are if you're running or walking. And so I actually find that I sweat significantly less biking outside than I do running or even walking just because of the movement that the airflow that's created through the faster movement on the bike. But if you put me like into an indoor setting, an indoor stationary bike or a rower or a treadmill or something like that, I often will sweat even more than I would outside. And I think there's something about that just like still air where you're not getting a lot of airflow in there. And also related, which I think people might find interesting is that if you can find a way to cool your body as you're doing your cardio, such as when I'm on my stationary bike, I have this huge massive fan that I put on on full blast behind me. Your heart rate will actually go down by like 10 beats a minute. from where it would be if you weren't using the fan. And I've tested this with Kim where I've done like 30 to 40 minutes of my bike ride and my heart rate was like 142 and I was like pushing the higher end of zone two. And then she turns the fan on and within five minutes, my heart rate's like 128. And I'm like, my God, I feel like so much more relaxed right now. And so there's a huge factor of not just replacing the electrolytes and the fluids that you're losing, but also making sure that externally you're cooling your skin as you go as well. very interesting. have never heard of that fan experiment. I mean, there's got to be some good research, at least some research on that. I mean, that's significant. 10 beats per minute is significant. Very, very cool. for sure. Okay, so there's one more thing I wanted to touch on. Let me make sure I can find it. so you briefly spoke about this and then we kind of moved on, but the periodizing. So periodizing the hybrid training versus just trying to optimize both at the same time from, you know, my, I could say professional opinions dealing with a lot of clients. People will, they're, often default choice is I want both at the same time now, right? I want to build. muscle and I want to lose fat at the same time right now at optimal rates. So what do you find is is more appropriate in terms of the person who is, let's say, getting into this for the first time. And let's let's kind of use that same avatar where early 30s, 12, 14 years removed from organized sport have been lifting. We have intermediate plus physique in and we're just realizing that. We're not as young, we're not 24 anymore. We're closer to 34, you know, pretty much. And we need to start using it before we lose it. Yeah, you can definitely do both at the same time when the goal is health and longevity. Like there's really no reason you need to bucket those and say, this is my priority or that's my priority. I think the prioritization or periodization of one or the other is more relevant when you have a performance goal because you cannot expect your weightlifting to be at its maximum 100 % output and also have your cardio at its 100 % maximum output. And so to put this into context that maybe our audience can better understand is, you know, this thing, power building used to be really popular five, 10 years ago. It's still kind of is in some circles, but it's this idea that you can do powerlifting and bodybuilding at the same time and maximize both. And in some ways, like that makes more sense because both are resistance training. But even though both are resistance training and both are so similar, you still cannot maximize. your strength and maximize your bodybuilding hypertrophy simultaneously. And so what you've seen is people like Eric Helms, who was for many years trying to do a top single on a back squat and a top single on a bench followed by hypertrophy work. Now he's going all in on bodybuilding and he's no longer doing the top single on the squat and the top single on the bench before doing his hypertrophy work. So that's a microcosm of what is a larger scale problem with cardio. because cardio and weights are more opposite. And they are concurrent in that they can help each other as I discussed, but they also do have competing adaptations as well. And so trying to optimize both at the same time is nearly impossible. One has to take a back seat and we can just look at my journey as a personal example of this where in last year's efforts, I tried to lift five days a week and do cardio five or six days a week. trying to maximize both at the same time. And over the course of a few months, know, my body began to fall apart. I was losing weight. My strength on certain lifts was going down. I was losing motivation to train both. And then this year by dialing back the volumes on both, I've been able to increase both better. However, it's still important to note that these last six months, my goal has been cardio. And that's why I've dropped weightlifting down to two days a week. I've pumped cardio to, kept cardio at about five days a week. If I were to try to prioritize weights, cardio would have to be put on the back burner. And so it's not that I would put cardio to a point where I'm losing adaptations, but the goal would be that you reduce the cardio down to what would be maintenance level, say two or three days a week. Maybe it's that easy session, moderate session, hard session. And then the weights are more at four or five days a week so that those can become the priority. And then obviously vice versa when cardio is the priority. if your goal is performance, you probably should try to bucket them and have one be the focus and one be the back burner. If your goal is health and longevity, then absolutely you can keep both together and that should be totally fun. Yeah, I love that answer. And part of the beauty of maintenance of a performance aspect, having a lower volume is you can kind of like scale up your performance at either one and then you reduce the volume to a level that's necessary for maintaining, you know, the pretty much the majority of what you had previously achieved. And then you can kind of use that stepwise to improve in either facet. So I think that's all that I wanted to cover. All the questions I had here, Brian, is there anything else that you want to add on to this one before we wrap it up? think it was an awesome episode. would say one last thing maybe to touch on would be monitoring progress in your cardiovascular training. so, yeah, there's a few ways to go about this. The typical way that you assess your progress in zone two is your watts per kilo. And that can be a challenging one for people that are using a modality of cardio that doesn't have Watts. But luckily, if you're using a machine, like most of them have Watts now. So treadmills often have Watts, but if they don't, you have speed. So speed is a very good metric to use in that case because you don't have airflow. So you're not being like, I had hills and I'm blocked by the wind and like all these things. Like if you're on a treadmill, you don't really need Watts. You just have speed. That's good enough. When you're on biking or rowing or elliptical, most of those machines will have or a salt bike. Any of those will have your watts. And so when you look at your watts per kilo, when you're in zone two, that's kind of like a really good metric to look at because it takes into account your output as far as the power you're creating along with where your body weight is. And what we know is that if you are a larger individual, you can create more power strictly because you have a larger base, you have more muscle mass, but your Watts per kilo might not be higher. And that's, it's similar to VO2 max in that way, where if you're a bigger individual, your outright VO2 max is probably quite high. But when you look at that number, which is the way it's portrayed to us, which is your milliliters per kilogram, your VO2 max is dependent upon your body weight. And so, Zone two progress being framed as Watts per kilo is a pretty cool way of going about it. If you don't have that, then you can increase duration at the same heart rate. Your heart rate can increase with the subjective variables remaining the same. So I mentioned that like 12 to 15 word sentence that you can say where maybe when you first start your zone two, you're at 60 % of your max heart rate. And by six months in, you're able to say that same sentence with the same subjective response at 65 % of your max heart rate or 68 % of your max heart rate or something along those lines. And then as far as your progress on like the zone four, zone five, or call it like the red zone of the three zone model. Yeah, I mean, just the total amount of output that you're able to create over the course of an interval. And this is actually, reminds me, I wanted to ask you in your updates, and then I haven't, I forgot to, but what was your modality that you did for that like really high intensity cardiovascular session that you did the other day where your heart rate was at a hundred beats per minute for like an hour afterwards? I mean, I'm not modality, interval. what, was it like a four minute on, four minute off or like? 30 seconds on, 90 seconds off. for how many rounds. I got to six. I was supposed to do eight. I only got to six. Yeah. So that actually brings up like a completely another topic that we could probably spend another 20 minutes on, so I won't, but the intervals that you're doing are more anaerobic. So anytime that you have an interval where the rest period is longer than the work period, then we're an anaerobic state. And so it's not to say that there isn't cardiovascular adaptation occurring, but it's not going to be occurring aerobically. So it's not actually having that same impact on the mitochondrial and the different aspects of, of heart cardiovascular function and all that sort of stuff as it would if you're doing what's more typically a VO two max interval and in typical VO two max intervals, it's a one to one. and so that could be as, like there's, there's kind of two extremes and then obviously anywhere in the middle, but the two extremes of VO two max work would be, five minutes on five minutes off would be like kind of a higher end of work to rest. you do that four to five times. So they call that a five by five, which we have in weightlifting as well, but this would be a five by five for cardio. and then another one that I really like on the other end of the extreme is 30 thirties. So you do 30 seconds on 30 seconds off. And obviously when you're doing a one -to -one, your output can't be as high as it is when you're doing a one to three, like you were doing, like you're almost getting like a full, not a full recovery, but you're getting significantly more recovery between each interval. So you can push that much harder on each work period versus when you're doing a 30 -30, you kind of have to inherently pace just a little bit because you know that that 30 -second rest isn't going to get you back to good again. So when you're doing the 30 -30s, the goal is to generally get to five minutes of work, just like you had the five minutes on, five minutes off, five minutes on, five minutes off thing that I mentioned a second ago. In the 30 -30s, it's the same idea. So you do 30 on, 30 off until you've accumulated five minutes of work, which is 10 minutes of total time. and then you rest five minutes. And then you do it again, 30, 30 for 10 minutes, rest five minutes. So you do that multiple times to accumulate the same amount of time in zone that you would have gotten doing the five by five. So anyway, two extremes, two different ways you can go about that. But when you're doing that kind of VO2 max work, you really do want to stay in that like one to one work to rest ratio. Otherwise the interval kind of becomes anaerobic, which isn't bad. In any way, it's just more similar to your weight training and it's less cardiovascular or aerobic. So kind of some just different ways of framing it and looking at it. Very good way to bring that up that 30 30 for 10 to accumulate like that sounds horrid. That sounds somehow like four times worse than what I did, which was already very bad. So. you're pacing though. mean, because it's 30 -30 and it's a one -to -one work to rest, you know that every one of those 30 -second intervals is not, you're not putting the same output that you were when you're doing the 30 -90s. So like, I know your assault bike has watts on it. Did you happen to notice where your watts were during each 30 -second interval? I mean, they would, on some of the bad sets towards the end, they were dropping into like the upper 500s or to like lower 600s. But like when I was starting, they'd be in like 800s and stuff. But they would drop off by a solid 25 % easily. So when I do 30 30s, I'm usually at about 340 watts. And so I just keep 340 for all of those intervals and there's 30 seconds rest in between. And the first 340 obviously doesn't feel terrible. And I'm like, that wasn't bad. But by like the 10th one, I'm like, thank God I have a five minute rest coming up. So anyway, just different ways to skin the cat. If aerobic adaptation is the goal, then you do want to keep that one to one for your intensity work. If you're just trying to. get your heart rate up and you don't mind that there's an anaerobic component to it, then I think what you're doing is fine too. And honestly, that's what I used to love doing because I, an anaerobic athlete, it was my inclination to rest longer than I was working. I remember my favorite one used to always be 20 seconds on and a minute 40 off, which is just slightly even less aerobic than what you were doing. Cause you were doing 30 90s. I was doing 2100s. So anyways, I love that interval. I think it's great because you can push so hard, but it just isn't going to have those aerobic adaptations. Understood. There was, man, there was something you said a while back that I wanted to follow up on, but I'm not going to remember now. Okay, no, that's fine. I think this was a really thorough episode. covered, I think we covered a lot of really good important stuff to either get people started, to kind of keep them optimizing their journey as they go along the way, et cetera, et cetera. Yep. So Brian, thank you so much for dropping plenty of knowledge bombs on this one. Guys listening, if you have questions from anything in the episode, just drop them in the comments on YouTube. And if you're listening on one of the other platforms, head over to our YouTube channel. Subscribe. I would really think it would be cool if we could get to a thousand. I think we're sitting in like the six hundred something like that and drop a question there. It's pretty cool that we're organically picking up steam on YouTube, which is it's fun. It's fun. It's it's a it's nice interesting slow build from just producing quality content over the weeks, which is good So as always guys, thank you for listening Brian and I will talk to you next week