Episode 327: Flexible Meathead Cardio: Barbell Shrugged Rebroadcast with Dr Mike T Nelson

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Dr Mike T Nelson: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Mike T Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase performance, add muscle, improve body composition, and do all of it without destroying your health. And today we’ve got a re-broadcast of a show I did with my good buddies over at Barbell Shrugged.

And I wanted to post this one up here in case, some people in my audience might have missed it. And I have the entire, show in its entirety just right after this. And we’re talking about the flexible meathead cardio approach. I worked with Anders over there on his cardiovascular capacity, so I’ll let him tell you about how all of that went and how you can do more.

Old school aerobic training and all of the benefits, uh, to doing it. And if you’re listening to this on the day that this [00:01:00] episode came out, which is going to be Monday, June 2nd, you can still eek into the Flexible Meathead Cardio Course. Closes tonight, June 2nd at midnight. Just hop onto the newsletter and send me a note As long as a note is timestamped, before midnight, I’ll make sure that you are enrolled.

If you are interested in it in the future, it’ll open up again in the future. We’ll have the level two coming out in July also, and hop onto the newsletter below, get all the details. Just hit reply with any questions I can help answer for you there. So enjoy this podcast with my good buddies over at Barbell Shrugged.

And full disclosure, I do work with those guys over at Rapid Health Optimization also, looking at sleep analysis using Aura and some other things in the background. So enjoy this [00:02:00] rebroadcast of the podcast I did with them all about flexible aerobic training. Thank you.

Anders: Shrug family this week on Barbara Shrug, Dr. Michael Teton, sson coming back on the show. This is like the 11000000000th time he’s been on, and every time I get so stoked, not only has he been my coach in the past, but today we’re talking about how people that don’t like cardio should build cardio programs into their training.

And a lot of this stuff goes back to when he was training me. To run a six minute mile. And the benefits that I felt in the gym as far as like strength training go, as well as the long-term impact that it has had by building a really solid cardiovascular system. And I think that this is a very important show.

’cause there’s this weird stigma for people that like lifting weights, like cardio’s gonna kill you. And the truth is, the better of an engine you build, the better everything gets, including how you feel, how strong you are, your recovery in every aspect. It is going to help you perform [00:03:00] and Dr. Nelson breaks that down today.

As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapid health report.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galban are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can access that over@rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let’s get into the show. Welcome tomorrow. Roll Strike. Banders Garner Varner.

Doug Larson, Dr. Michael T. Nelson, my man. Yo, yesterday or not yesterday, last week we interviewed. Uh. Mark Sissen. Yeah. Which means the last time we got to see him or hang out with him was down in Paleo fx. That’s right. Dude, do you know that, that it’s been like eight years since we were all down there?

Dr Mike T Nelson: That’s, that seems so weird. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago On the big elevated stage and stuff,

Anders: you wanna, you wanna like know how you turn like 90 years old exactly like that. Where you go, holy crap. Paleo FX was eight years ago. That’s, that’s a. Uh, today on Barbell Shrug, [00:04:00] we’re gonna be talking about flexible cardiovascular training for meat heads.

I feel like if there was like a bullet point for all things barbell shrug, we just hit all of them. Yeah, flexible. Like, you don’t have to do it all the time. This is a really good way to do it. Cardio people go, ah, I don’t know if I wanna do that for meatheads. Now we’re all engaged, now we know we’re targeting the right people.

Um. Let’s talk about it, man. Where, uh, where do people go wrong when they love lifting weights? I feel like this is about to be a, don’t do CrossFit, but go ahead. Um, for all the people that love lifting weights and hate the cardio, uh, where do they, where do they get this wrong?

Dr Mike T Nelson: Usually the progression you see is people get into lifting, like, oh, I love lifting.

It’s great. And they keep doing the thing, and the people I end up working with. And then you guys see too at Rapid Health is. They do better at the lifting, and then all of a sudden they kind of hit this plateau where the stuff they were doing before wasn’t working. And then they do [00:05:00] maybe some better nutrition.

They do some sleep, they do some other stuff, and they’re still at this plateau. And then you ask ’em like, well, what is the issue? Like, oh man, I just can’t seem to recover. My energy levels are low. I can’t do the training volume I used to do. I can’t do the intensity. And then I ask someone like, well, you know, that’s cool.

You love lifting. Me too. It’s awesome. What do you do for cardio? And they look at you like cardio, like, what are you talking about? Like I, I wanna lift more weights. I don’t wanna do cardio. Yeah. And then you try to explain to ’em that your aerobic metabolism, like the metabolism that you need to recover between maybe heavy sets of squats or deadlifts, or one heavy session to the next session, or just your day-to-day energy are governed primarily by aerobic metabolism, your body’s ability to use oxygen.

Primarily fat. You can use carbohydrates, um, to create energy and then you do an assessment like you guys do it, you know, rapid health and doing VO two max assessments there since you guys started. And you realize, [00:06:00] oh wow, it’s dog crap. Like it’s, I’ve seen not just bad, I’ve seen wow, you’re still functional, bad.

And on one hand you go, oh, this is great because we found like this major rate limiter. And on the other hand, it’s then it’s a little bit easier sell to them of, yeah. You know, I know you don’t really like doing cardio, but trust me, like just give us, you know, six to eight weeks a minimum. I guarantee you’re gonna start to feel a lot better because you’ve kind of found the, I.

The massive like parking brake they’ve had on the whole time.

Doug: So if you’re a lifter and you’ve been, you’ve been training for a long time, you’ve gotten stronger, you built some muscle mass, et cetera, like what, what are the physiological benefits to adding more cardiovascular, uh, training and improving your cardiovascular system for recovery?

Like, recovery is kinda a broad general term, but what, what really physiologically is happening there?

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, so usually people just throw around the term recovery, which is great. You’d have to define it. I think of recovery as your ability to get back [00:07:00] to baseline, right? This could be baseline and heart rate, baseline in in breathing, baseline and metabolism.

And the faster you can get back to baseline, I would say your recovery is better. So if we think about what happens after a super heavy set of maybe 10 reps on the squat right, your heart rate’s gonna be elevated. And you have someone who has a really good VO, O2 max, or aerobic metabolism, they can probably get their heart rate down and be able to do that next heavy set within a relatively short period of time.

You have someone, especially as the sets get, you know, a little bit longer, you’re in set three or four. Now it’s taking them a much longer time for that heart rate to get back to baseline. So you have the, I’d say the performance in the training session itself. Then you have the recovery from one training session to the next.

So when you do, you know, lifting, you’ve obviously, you know, potentially done some damage to the muscle. These other things that are also moving you off [00:08:00] another baseline, how fast can you repair that, which is gonna take energy? I. So the analogy I’ve used with clients is you guys are old enough to remember like the old little three cylinder, like Hugo cars they had for a while where you had a, almost like a complacent squirrel on a roller skate versus a a V 12 engine.

Like you want a much bigger engine because you don’t have to exert much power of the engine to do what you need to. So if you have a much bigger aerobic metabolism, which is generally defined by your VO two max, which we’ll get into. Uh, in lifting terms, think of that as like your one rm. If you wanna do the NFL combine test, which is 2 25 for max number of reps, I would much rather train someone who has a very high one rep max of say, 365 in the bench rest versus someone who has a max bench rest of 2 45, like your big 365.

You’re just gonna be able to do more reps because it’s all sub max if you have a much higher VO two max. Even though you’re, you’re [00:09:00] training, you’re doing other things, they’re all gonna be much more sub max. And that bigger engine is gonna allow you to create more energy faster, which you can then use into your recovery, which is gonna get you back down to baseline faster.

So people generally then report that. Oh wow. I could even eventually in time add another whole lifting session and still recover. I could compress or I could do more density of work. I’ve only got an hour at lunch. I can get more work done now during this period of time, because within that session I can get back to baseline.

I. I can keep the quality of work high and I can actually do more of the thing that I love, and it generally feels a little bit easier also. So you’re giving them the better capacity to get back to baseline faster, and then they can use that and kind of point that in whatever direction they want to go in.

Mm-hmm.

Anders: Uh, I have, uh, some data to report to you actually about me and oh yeah, the continuation, [00:10:00] uh, that I think applies really well to what, uh, we did for, uh, the better part of the last year. Um, when, and, and the kind of the end of the story being that I think, and this is just me personally, that you actually are going to get much stronger.

Maintain that strength by maintaining a really high level cardiovascular base, um, with the data being, um. When we started, I set kind of like a strength goal. Well, the, the, the big goal was let’s go run a six minute mile. Mm-hmm. We got down to 6, 6 17 was the, the best one that I ran, which is phenomenal.

The other kind of sub goals were, we still wanted to get really jacked, which is the most fun thing to be doing, and I was doing. It took us about six, seven months, maybe, maybe even eight months to get to doing flat dumbbell bench hundreds for three sets of eight. It took us, it took me like seven, or call it seven or eight months to get [00:11:00] there, which was fantastic.

Like that’s, that’s really that solid that, um. All while being also able to do like, kind of at the same, same points in time, the six 17 mile. Then we moved into like an incline dumbbell bench phase phase, which, uh, I got to like the eighties for three sets of 12. And then once I hit that goal, which was kind of like the second goal that we set in, in the, uh, periodization schedule, um, I went back to the dumbbell bench to see how long it would take to redo three sets of eight with the hundreds on the flat bench.

Seven weeks. Nice and all, keeping my conditions, the, the strength training sessions to two a week and about 40 minutes a piece. Um, but also keeping much of the same conditioning work that we were doing. So not only did I at 41 years old. Massively improved my strength. Like I don’t know if I was even 22 and able to do like, and hundreds for [00:12:00] three sets of eight.

Um, but it initially took me a good seven to eight months to be able to hit that goal, transitioned out of it for three, four months and then come back to it. To be able to go back to that same level of strength inside an eight week period is really badass and I think a lot of it has to do with.

Maintaining that cardio system, um, and just always feeling good going into training, which I think has a lot to do with just the, the increased blood flow, the efficiency of recovery. Um, and I, I really attribute a lot of it to the conditioning parts that you put together for the last year.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, that’s, that’s super cool and super interesting and that kind of matches what I’ve seen with people also, and I don’t know the exact.

Mechanism, like you said, I think it might be blood flow, might be higher energy levels, who knows? But it just seems like when your cardiovascular level is higher, your ability to maintain capacity [00:13:00] is also higher. And even the things that you didn’t directly work on, you can get back to in short order. Now, maybe that’s your ability to.

Do a little bit more density when you do start training on that thing. Again, maybe it’s just a little bit better overall energy level. Maybe it’s increased capitalization so you’re getting more blood flow and things like that to the muscle. Um, but yeah, that’s just something I’ve noticed, especially as I get older.

I mean, I, I’ll be 51 this August. I just, the more cardiovascular I have, stuff I do, I just feel better and I feel like I’ve been able to. Do things more consistently at a higher level because of it also, where before, yeah, I could still get to those things, but it, the, the ramp up to it was much longer. I.

While now it feels like the ramp up to it is less and the downside is also a little bit less. As long as I can, you know, kind of stay with that type of training.

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Doug: back to the show. You’re having the, the increase in recovery, especially when your weight training makes weight training much more enjoyable.

Oh, yeah. Like, you know, yesterday I was doing back squats for sets of eight, like if I’m doing back squats, sets of eight, presumably when I get done with a heavy set of eight, or especially if you go higher up on squats, like you’re gonna be breathing very heavy at the end of that set. And if you’re, if you’re squatting, you know, with a two, three minute break in between, if you’re still like.

And you still have a pump in your legs and like, you still have like some, some acidity still in there burning, like, and you’ve gotta go back into that next set. You’re kinda like, ah, fuck, here we go. Okay. But if, if after that first minute you’re basically fine and you’re like, okay, now you’re kind of checking your watch, like, God do, do I really need to wait that that next minute.

I feel like I’m good to go. It just makes training feel much more enjoyable. ’cause it’s easier ’cause it’s not, it’s not as physically toxic, it’s not as physically [00:16:00] painful. Granted, you can continue to ramp up the intensity and, and make it as as difficult as you want to. But, uh, if you can layer more cardiovascular training on top of your.

Strength training, and that improves your recovery capacity. It just makes all of your training feel better, which makes it much more sustainable, especially for people who aren’t pro athletes that are just there because they’re, they’re trying to be healthy. They’re also just trying to have a good time.

They’re trying to enjoy their training. They’re not, they’re not trying to go to the Olympics and not, not trying to kill themselves, going on the CrossFit games or anything like that. Um, being in better shape just makes it more fun.

Dr Mike T Nelson: It doesn’t take as much, I’d say Al fortitude to make it to the gym easy either because you’re like, oh, okay, I am gonna go do the thing, and the thing I can do at a high level still, but I don’t have as much cost associated with it.

So one of the things I got from, you know, coach Caldis, university of Minnesota, was he is writing all this stuff on this whiteboard for like 40 minutes. And I’m sitting in the room trying to think like, oh crap. Like, how the hell am I gonna explain any of this in a book? And so I looked at him and I’m like, [00:17:00] oh, so you’re saying dude, the highest level quality of work first, and then just repeat that thing.

He is like, uh, yeah, that’s kind of it. So like you were saying, Doug, like you can. We go back and repeat that at a high level of work, the three by eight, and keep that output higher for longer. And it also feels better. So not only are you making it literally, you’re making it easier, your output can be sustained at a higher level.

And that’s the main thing that’s gonna determine obviously muscle mass and strength and everything else. I think people forget that you can, you can actually do both at the same time. They’re not necessarily, uh, given that it’s a trade off every single time.

Anders: Yeah, that was like the, uh, if, if you wanted to get strong, don’t go run.

And then all of a sudden, uh, now we’re saying in order to get stronger, faster, you could probably go run.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. The whole interference thing has been kind of blown out of proportion. And it’s hard because, [00:18:00] you know, as you guys know that there really is an interference effect, like it is a real thing. Like you don’t see bodybuilders winning marathons or, you know, marathon runners triathletes, winning bodybuilding things or power lifting meets.

Right? Um, and if you look at the mus, you go all the way down to the muscle fiber level, your aerobic fibers, your smaller fibers, they can only get so big because they’re running aerobically. They literally need oxygen to run. Oxygen gets into the fiber via passive diffusion. So something called the RO cylinder model.

So if your fiber gets too big, you can’t passively diffuse oxygen into it. So those fibers are gonna stay smaller by definition of them being more, my air quotes more purely oxidative, your bigger fast twitch and aerobic fibers not necessarily directly using oxygen, so they don’t have a limit on how big they can get because there’s no limit of oxygen diffusing into it.

If you take that all the way back out. And you look now, for most people who are lifters, there is an [00:19:00] interference effect, but it’s more on kind of the speed and power. So if you do, let’s say a, a session dedicated to speed and power, unless the study was done in females and you do just moderate level aerobic training for 40 minutes after, or you don’t do anything, those are the two groups.

The group that did the moderate level aerobic training after their vertical jump and peak power did go down. But you sandwich those two opposing things like right next to each other, and those athletes were already at a pretty high level of development. However, most strength metrics won’t really change that much.

Metrics of hypertrophy don’t change that much either. And what you find is that if your aerobic system is very poorly developed, that again becomes like kind of your rate limiter. And you know, hybrid athletes, other athletes, CrossFit athletes, like we’ve all seen that. If you would’ve asked me, even with the CrossFit as an example, 10 years ago, like the level that CrossFit athletes would get to, even for just pure max strength by doing CrossFit stuff.

If we look at the [00:20:00] games, I would’ve like, nah, they’ll, they’ll never hit those kind of levels and sustain that over three days and, and they have, you know, so I think. Interference definitely is a thing there. It’s a physiologic thing, but most people are not remotely close to getting to an advanced enough level that they really need to worry about it and that their rate limb a lot of times is actually doing the aerobic component of it.

Anders: Yeah. I can actually remember this almost like the specific period of time where people started taking actual aerobic conditioning seriously. In CrossFit? Yeah. It wasn’t until they started going to like. Um, like nobody would’ve ever thought like, go do 45 minutes of sustained zone two breathing on a rower, and then they started showing up to, uh, frons Gym, and he’d be like, yeah, like three times a day I just sit on this thing for an hour and just [00:21:00] practice.

And they were like, what? What is that? And he is like, that’s how I win every year. Like I just am. And then Matt Frazier used to sit in his mom’s basement. It’s like the most cliche thing, just on the airine, on the rower. Like, what are you doing? Oh, I’m just in my mom’s basement, just rowing away, trying to win this fitness event.

Um, but that’s like how they did it. Like they were, they had a massive engine and their recovery was so much better than everyone else’s that by the time Sunday rolled around. They were still the strongest and still the fastest. Um,

Dr Mike T Nelson: yeah, he was with Fron, who got consistently better at running. You know, running was, uh, not the best thing for him.

So what did you do? He, it feels

Anders: the same. I remember when we interviewed Khalifa and he was, uh, yeah, same thing. The running coach, uh, Hinshaw. Chris Hinshaw. Yeah. Yeah. He was like, that guy changed my life. And all of a sudden, uh, I think that year, Khalifa finished second. ’cause he actually just went and focused on not just being this big, burly dude.

It was also like a [00:22:00] thing. Um, I remember in the, and you know, now that I. Have hung out with you and had you coach me and all this stuff like that. I still would probably believe a lot of this stuff of like having, like having that much muscle, uh, like as somebody like Jason Khalifa and, and not like bodybuilder level muscle.

That’s the Yeah. But he’s a big dude. Yeah. I mean, my business partner that you also coach Brian bte. Yeah. He’s, he has more muscle stacked on his body than freaking everybody that I’ve ever been friends with combined, like the guy is so jacked. Oh yeah. I used to always look at him and be like, dude, I’m gonna beat you by like four reps all the time, just because I’m a much smaller than you man.

Like, you just got all this muscle that needs all this oxygen and there’s just not enough air in the world to keep you going. Like, I, it is just, he’s so giant, but it’s really, uh, I think it comes down to like structuring that, that cardio and that aerobic capacity in a, in a specific way, like. How do you kind of start to [00:23:00] build the programs to get somebody that carries a lot of muscle, probably loves lifting and then adding in an aerobic base to all of it?

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, I think it related to structure. It’s a good, good point. Like I’m a huge fan of using the bike, the air bike, or the rower, because on both of those, your structure is literally unloaded. Now, if you have to run and like, you know, sometimes we’ve had running the CrossFit games and depending on what you’re doing.

Yeah, you, you might have to run, if you’re a bigger mammal, you can kind of get away with it. But most of the bigger mammals that I coach, like if they send me video of them running, I wanna throw battery acid in my eyes. I’m like, just God’s sake. Just don’t. Either we fix that or just don’t do it. Right. If you don’t need to, let’s put you on a rower.

Let’s put you on a bike. We can get a lot of the aerobic benefits we want, and both of those are concentric only. There’s not a big eccentric component. They’re relatively full body. The bike’s obviously a little bit more lower body if you’re not using an air bike. Um, so that’s the big thing. So I’d say mode is gonna make a big [00:24:00] difference.

And then two, I’m a big fan of doing some type of assessment, like just like lifting, like where would you start? So you can do a VO two max assessment, uh, concept two rower, get on warm up, uh, appropriately for quite a while rest, and then you’re gonna do a 2000 meter. It’s a gold standard on the erg. As fast as you can, you can take that, type it in the concept two website, VO two max concept two, type in your time and your weight, and boom, it’ll give you a VO two max and you have your score.

Now it’s a little bit trickier for the airbike. There’s some different methods, uh, for that. Again, if you can run, you can do the Cooper uh, run test. So 12 minutes, run as fast as you can. But either way, even if you do five minutes all out on an airbike, right, you’ve got a baseline assessment. You can look to see, are you like really pissed for?

Are you okay? Are you pretty good? I would say pretty good. Maybe don’t need to work on a lot of aerobic stuff if you’re hitting, you know, 50 milliliters per kg per minute. I know Dr. Mani Galpin has talked about that [00:25:00] before. I would agree. I think that’s probably pretty good. If you’re below that, probably have, you know, some work to do if you’re really low.

The good part is almost anything will work, right? It is just like if you’re new to weight training, if you’re new to weight training, like any form of program will, will make progress for you. Um, but the key thing for most programs, if you want to get the most efficacy to increase your VO O2 max, at some point you’re gonna need to do high output work.

You know, intensity right around what your VO two max is and accumulate. You know, intervals of the, the two to eight minute range is somewhere around in there. You can go even shorter than that. You want, probably gonna work up to you over many months, many weeks, 16 to 20 minutes total time, not at once.

All of that higher intensity work. So for example, if someone is not really the best of VO O2 max, I may just have him, you know, get on the rower and do two minutes at a high output and then rest completely. Uh, let’s just do two rounds of [00:26:00] that. So you’re literally doing two rounds of two minutes, and then we’re gonna add a round each week for maybe five weeks.

Test you again. And then next week we’re gonna maybe bump that to two and a half minutes. The caveat is on a, you’re using a bike or a rower, you’re gonna get that average watts, and we wanna see that that’s at a moderate to high level, but it’s not a ski slope. It’s not dropping really hard. I wanna see you hold that output for that period of time.

And again, back to high quality outputs. That’s the biggest mistake I see people make is, oh, I heard the internet said the Norwegian four by four is like the greatest program ever. And so I’m like, cool, send me your output from it. Now, some high level people can handle that. Most people, like they barely make it through the first four minutes.

The second one is horrible. By the time they make it to round four, it’s like at a 50% of the output of what they’ve started. Uh, and again, you don’t need to go that aggressive ’cause it’s hard to make progress from there. Um, but, you know, two day, you know, minutes [00:27:00] intervals, kind of just build on that, make sure it’s at a relatively high output.

Most people probably only need to do that once a week. You know, I’d rather see a, you know, good high quality session once a week, then two sessions that are just kind of crappy. R

Doug: regarding output, given that rowers, assault bikes, dynes, et cetera. They have a, a, a display in front of you, telling you your, your watts and or your, your RPMs or whatever you’re looking at.

Um, an interval that I, that I’ve enjoyed doing, uh, in the past is that. Especially on the salt bikes, I will, I’ll go a hundred percent, find my, my top RPMs, you know, say just for ease, for ease of conversation. Say it’s a hundred, and then I’ll just stay above 90% for as long as I can, or above 80% for as long as I can.

So by definition, I’m, I’m only at. 80% or above of my, my peak output. And then I’ll just do, do the interval for as long as I possibly can, and then I’ll, I’ll mark my time and then, you know, over the course of 2, 3, 4, 5 intervals, I can, I can see how my times change, but my [00:28:00] output, uh, is always above that, whatever threshold I’ve set.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, I think that’s fine. I like using output, I like using Watts off of that, but it’s the same idea, right? Mm-hmm. So what you’re doing is you’re keeping the output high and then you’re due to fatigue, you’re just adjusting the time down. Which again, I think is fine. And then you’re gonna look over time and see, okay, cool.

If I keep that output high, can I accumulate total time a little bit more from, from week to week? Right. So, yeah, I like that. I mean, there’s many different ways you can, you can slice and dice it, but for VO O2 max work, you need to be at a relatively high output. And at some point you have to sustain that for, you know, two to eight minutes.

Again, accumulating up to maybe 16 minutes, uh, because some lifters are like. Oh man, I went and I just did 30 seconds of Wingate all out. I was done for the day. I walked outta the gym. Then it’s like, that’s good for anaerobic conditioning. There’s some benefits to doing that, but unless you’re gonna repeat that a lot, you’re not gonna see a big bump in [00:29:00] your aerobic max just from doing that.

Or VO two max.

Doug: Mm-hmm. So, so should you be getting full recovery on intervals like this? Are you, are you setting a a time or, or a heart rate, or how do you typically like to handle recovery?

Dr Mike T Nelson: I like using like a biofeedback method, and I’ve talked about this from from Cal Dietz, that the hardest part to know at first, even if you have a VO two max from new client, is how long do they need to rest?

I don’t know. One minute, two minute, three minutes, four minutes. I don’t freaking know. And how does that change after those intervals, right? Because I may tell you two minutes, that may not be nearly enough time, or you might be twiddling your thumbs for like half of it. So I like going off of heart rate because heart rate is a pretty good proxy for the cost that it took you to do that.

So I’m gonna look at the output of the interval that you did. So you’re on a assault bike, you do 250 watts, right? I’m just making up numbers. You do that for two minutes and your heart rate hits 1 75, right? Cool. So I’m gonna probably wait until your heart [00:30:00] rate gets at least below a hundred and when that happens, okay, now I want you to do your next output again.

And what you’ll find is as you add more intervals to that, that time, that’s gonna take you to get back to baseline. So say below an arbitrary of a hundred is gonna be longer. ’cause the thing I never understood, and this happens with uh, programming in the gym too, is let’s say you’re doing, you know, five sets of something of squats.

Do you really need to rest four minutes between set one and set two? Probably not. Is that four and five? Maybe? Like it’s probably gonna be closer to the three minutes unless you’re in like really high aerobic shape. So I like having that be variable. The thing that we’re clamping or capping is that output has to be that high output.

Again, I’d much rather let you rest more on the complete side so you can hit that high output again. And then over time, yeah, we might know about how much time it takes to complete a block of three. And then we’re gonna try to compress that time a little bit, but I still wanna see you hit those [00:31:00] outputs.

So we’ll do like a density method where now we’ll try to chip away a little bit of time. But we still want to hit those, that 250 watts as our marker.

Doug: So why do these high intensity intervals, um, move the needle on improving Max VO two compared to, uh, doing longer sustained 45 minutes, hour and a half longer runs?

Dr Mike T Nelson: It’s probably literally just as simple as a said principle. Right. So specific adaptation to impose demand. If you’re doing, uh, you know, zone three or zone two, let’s say 40 minutes, there are definitely some huge benefits to that. I think some people who are more untrained could see some transfer for that, but in general, it’s just not at a high enough intensity to be specific to the thing you’re doing.

So when you have someone do a VO two max test, very simply you want a test long enough. So that they’ll reach, uh, if you’re looking at what’s called indirect calorimetry, so you’ve got the little mask on. We’re measuring all the air that goes in and out. We’re looking at oxygen and CO2 and flow rates and all this [00:32:00] stuff.

But if you look at that raw data, all I’m really looking at to see if it’s a legit VO two max test is, it’s probably gonna be longer than five minutes, maybe eight minutes, somewhere in the, you know, eight to 12 ish minutes range. And I’m gonna look to see that O2, right? So we’re measuring that O2, that’s going in and out.

That O2 is coming up and it’s hitting the plateau and despite them going as hard as they can and potentially the output even going up a little bit more, the oxygen use rate hasn’t changed at all. If that’s true by definition, you can sustain that for an arbitrary period of time, near 30 to 60 seconds.

There’s different debates on that. You have literally hit a a VO two max. And the cool part is if we have that test, we know about what wattage that is. Now, if I want to get better at that thing, I probably have to get close to that intensity again and do it for a long enough period of time. The hard part is if I’m really kind of untrained, I’m not gonna be able to hold that for like eight minutes.

[00:33:00] Right? I’m gonna see my output start and then it’s gonna drop. Yeah. So I wanna shorten that time period to keep that intensity high, allow recovery, and then to hit that intensity again. So that I can increase the amount of exposure to that thing. It’s just like lifting. If you really want to get better at a one RM in your squat, if you’re new shit, you could probably do reps of 5, 8, 10.

Like you’re probably just gonna get better at A one RM. Yeah. If you’re Travis Mash, you’re probably gonna do a lot of singles, doubles and triples, right? You need a certain amount of volume and exposure at that intensity for it to transfer, to increase it.

Doug: Yeah. Uh, again, we, we do these types of testing, the VO two max testing for, with all of our clients.

And, uh, we’ve gotten the comment many times from people who don’t quite understand what VO O2 max testing really is, where they’re, they’re on the treadmill or bike or whatever it is, and, uh, they’re, they’re going hard. They’re sweating, they’re, they’re working, and then the person facilitating the test say, [00:34:00] okay, you’re done.

And they’re like, no, I’m not done. I, I can keep going. Like, I, I’m, I. I haven’t reached failure, so to speak. Like, I’m not, I’m not all the way fatigued. And they’re like, no, no, no, that test is over. Go ahead and step off. And they’re like, they’re like kind of bummed and they don’t really get it. And they come to us and they’re like, no, no, no.

My, my, my score is better than that. They, they made me get off, they made me stop. Um, they’re not truly understanding what’s being tested and how that, how that test works. Can you dig into the, the details of what exactly the VO O2 max, um, test is testing and why? They were told to get off before they were actually, before they felt like they were done.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, so different software, and this is using what’s called indirect telemetry. So you have the little mask on, we’re measuring all the air that goes in and out and everything. And so when you’re doing these, and I’ve done hundreds of these, I have my own frigging, you know, metabolic card of my house and Moxy set up and all this fun stuff to do.

Um, most of the time they’re looking at the actual, um, O2 level. At least this is what I would look at. Um, there’s a couple indicators. So one of ’em is RPE. Um, how hard did you feel like the test [00:35:00] was? Again, I’ve been that as more of a, a qualitative marker. There’s another one called RER, which is respiratory exchange ratio.

If you hit 1.0, you are 100% use of carbohydrates. If you’re at 0.7, you are a hundred percent use of fats and we all know that high, high intensity stuff is gonna be pretty much 100% carbohydrates. So we wanna make sure that the RER goes well over one. It will actually go a little bit beyond that because your respiratory rate will increase really high, which can drive it over one.

So I wanna see a very high RER. I wanna see that plateau. And O2 most new systems. You will be able to measure that and see that live depending on what averaging you’re using. And for some clients like it may not feel like they’re true Max, right? Because they could still get a little bit more output from it.

Usually the more trained people, it’ll be pretty darn close to what their, their RPE is at the top. So I would say it probably depends on just their [00:36:00] experience level. Um, and you could very well hit a VO two max and have it not air quotes feel like a max. But if they’ve hit the, the indications and the qualifiers, then it is a VO two max.

’cause remember. VO O2 max is the volume of air that you’re taking in using aerobically. You can still eke out a little bit more performance. My air quotes anaerobically, those are not clean delineations, but for the sake of argument, it works well personally, when I do tests, I just drive ’em all the way to a freaking max till they hit the button and they can’t go anymore because what I wanna see is one, I don’t want him to complain at me, honestly.

Sure. Uh, two. I wanna see what that output is of their true max, even though it, it may be above their VO O2 max. And what I really wanna see to know that I have a valid test, this is just my preference, is when I graph those lines, I’m gonna graph output against the VO two and I wanna see VO two plateauing, and I want see outputs starting to trend up a little bit more.

If I see that. By [00:37:00] definition, I know I’ve hit their VO two max, where despite them doing a little bit better on the output on the test, they are not pulling in more oxygen to use that. So by definition, I know that they’ve hit a plateau at that point.

Doug: Yeah. I always wonder why people facilitating those tests.

And again, but we’re a hundred percent virtual. Our clients live all over the place, so Right. It’s, it’s a different center for almost every single person depending on what city they live in and whatnot. So it’s, it’s hard to direct traffic and all on all these third party, um, you know, hospitals or wherever they’re going.

But I, I always wonder why people don’t just let them go until they’re done.

Dr Mike T Nelson: I, I don’t know either. You know, my other pet peeve is I always ask for the raw data. And we’ve had this happen a few times. Andy and I have talked about this, where some new programs on the machine, depending on how the algorithm is set up.

It may be scanning that O2 for just a one-off number. That’s a high number, right? Because we’ve had just a, a few cases where, you know, one of ’em was a person’s vo. O2 max came back to be like 63, and they’re like, there’s no way mine’s that high. [00:38:00] And so Andy and I got the raw data and looked at it and it was probably closer to like 51.

And what it was, was there was an error in one measurement where they were going breath by breath. And so there was one measurement at 63, but that wasn’t a plateau, it was just an outlier. So if they have an algorithm that’s just scanning that column for the biggest number, not looking at the average, you can get, you know, some errors once in a while on that.

It doesn’t happen that often. Um, and last thing too, I wanna look at. I like graphene their respiratory rate versus their output. Also, because you can see where they become very uncoordinated. So a lot of times if their output is kinda linearly going up and they have this huge spike up in their respiratory rate like before it, that’s telling me that they just need more coordination in addition to training at that point.

So I might do a specific breathing cadence or change their stroke right on the rower or something like that. Just to try to make them a little bit more coordinated at that point, um, which will be harder at [00:39:00] first, but it’ll make that higher intensity exercise over time. Feel a little bit better.

Doug: I know earlier you said that being, being above 50 is really kind of the, like the big picture goal, but that’s, that’s a very broad thing to say.

Oh, very broad too. Um, can you, can you run through more of a, a more of a nuanced standard for people based on, um, you know, age, gender, um, pro athlete versus, versus not pro athlete, um, you know, endurance athletes versus strength athletes, mixed, mixed, uh, modal athletes, et cetera.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, so it really depends on what your goal is and what sport you’re in, right?

If, if you’re a high level powerlifter, do you really need a VO two max of 50? Probably not, right? The amount of time you’re gonna trade off to get a VO two max of 50 just to move heavy reps for one rep, it’s, it is not gonna be a very good trade off. If you’re a high level endurance athlete. Near VO two max is only 50.

That’s pretty crappy, right? You probably need to be significantly higher than that, and within that VO two max, even in the endurance realm, is [00:40:00] only roughly associative with performance, right? The next thing down is there’s called VT one, VT two. In English is just a VO two max is up here. You’re super high level.

What percentage of that can you use and for how long? Right? And that gets into sub areas of critical power and all this other stuff. Mm-hmm. Um, so I would say for most lifters, easiest thing that I do is VO two max charts are really easy to find on the internet. So once you did like a 2K or a 12 minute Cooper run test, just type in VO two max norms for your age.

And it’ll come up and it’ll give you norms per general population. And what I like people to be compared to general population is my bias is at least 80% of that, maybe even 90%. Because again, general population, these people are generally not really training. Um, that’s kind of like the goal. If you have a platform that accumulates data from people like the concept two rower.

Uh, you can put in [00:41:00] things and it’ll, it’ll list everyone who has the app who’s doing it. You can go in there and spec, you know, 2K row your age, your name and everything, and it’ll give you what the distribution is. Also, I. Now, again, these are people who are nutty enough to do the rower, nutty enough to log all their data.

That’s definitely more of a, a fitness based population, but just purely off your time, you, you’ll see, okay, am I in the bottom 5%, 50%, 75% or 90%? Uh, to me on that area, I like most people to be at least 50% of that population. Like I think you get a lot of benefit. You don’t have to worry about interference.

You don’t have to add a ton of training time. To go from 50% to 75%, you probably need to be a little more dedicated, a little bit less return on your investment. But if it’s something you wanna do, I’d say, yeah, go for it. If not, you’re probably good enough. You know, 75 to 90th percentile. You’re probably not gonna see a lot of transfer.

You know, if you wanna, you know, beat the, the 2K row, then yeah, you’re gonna need a lot of dedicated time. [00:42:00] So, like all things, you’re gonna have this kind of curve that’s gonna go up and it’s definitely gonna plateau. Um, just like lifting, right? If you’re trying to get an elite total, that’s different than just doing your first power lifting meet, right?

So the, the more you get and more advanced you get, you’re gonna need to be more specific. The issue you’re always gonna run into at some point is. How much concentrated specific work can you do? The more you can do and recover from whatever relative rate is to your genetics and run rate, you can do a little bit better, but now you have to trade that off from something else at that point too.

Mm-hmm. And so I think like 80, 90% of the general population, you’re pretty good. Using the concept two thing, you know, 50%. I think that’s very doable without a ton of effort and most people would see a huge return on their investment.

Doug: And how often do you, you suppose someone really needs to do a true VO two max test?

Dr Mike T Nelson: I mean, I like if someone just says, okay, my goal is to really increase it, I [00:43:00] would like them to do it at least once every eight weeks. Now the trade off I have is if anyone’s ever done a true all out max, like at least RP of a nine and a half. It sucks. It’s horrible. I have people I tested at my house who have literally told me to my face four years later, I’m never coming back to your house and I’m never doing that test again.

I don’t care what, so a lot of it is the trade off on the psychological cost also. But if somebody says, Hey, I really wanna improve this thing, at some point you’re gonna have to retest them. I mean, I’m okay even doing it quarterly. If they’re following everything else, you could do some what I call soft tests or sub max tests that will get you somewhere.

I think that is kind of useful. Yeah. Um, the other hard part, people forget too, is as you get better, a max test is always gonna suck because I had one client a couple years ago. I think he started, he was eight minutes on the 2K test and we got him to like, it was like probably a year we got him to 7 23, [00:44:00] I think.

Mm-hmm. Um, so pretty big improvement in a year. Yeah. And he is like, I don’t understand this. I just got 7 23, which was seven seconds better than my last test. Mm-hmm. And it was still horrible. I’m like, yeah, it’s always gonna be horrible because you by definition, are doing a max test. You’re doing a little bit better than what you did before.

You made a lot of progress. Yeah. Um, but it, it’s. It’s still gonna stuck. So other things to look at too are changes in HRV. Usually more cardiovascular training. HRV baseline will tend to go up, rusting heart rate will tend to go down. Uh, respiratory rate may change. Usually it’ll go down, but sometimes you need more dedicated work there.

So there’s other proxy measures you can use. I even use qualitative stuff, like how do you feel your energy is day to day, and if you wanted to go next level. You could do a two minute heart rate recovery test. Get up to a max. You know, hold it there for just a bit. See how long, when you stop, how long, over two minutes your heart rate comes down.

[00:45:00] Again, rough marker there. Two minute heart rate recovery. I like at least 50 beats. So if you hit 180 and two minutes, ideally I’d like you to see 50 beats below that, so one 30 or below. So there’s some other proxy measures you can use along the way. And of course just their day-to-day training. You know, are they making just like lifting progressive overload?

Are you able to do a little bit more? You’re able to keep that at the intensity you want. If you are, by definition, we, we know you’re getting better. How much better? Eh, it’s hard to know without a, an actual test, again,

Anders: as adding kind of the, the meathead element back into this, um, balancing the two, how do you kind of feel like structuring a week looks on in, in your mind?

Yeah, for lifting, I really like, I feel like I’m on the way low end of the meathead side. Like when we were only training like two days a week. Really? Yeah. That’s like a low number.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. I mean, some people can, again, a lot of it is by their constraints. How much time do they have? What is their schedule?

All that kinda stuff. [00:46:00] But if we say middle of the road, like what are most people doing? I like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday lifting at least, uh, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, some type of cardio. Sunday’s, an off day unload, take a walk, do all your food prep, all that kind of stuff. Um, so I like it if you’re trying to make progress on it.

If I can even get one more cardiovascular session from you at some point. I do find cardiovascular appears to respond better to frequency. Um, the good part is it’s very easy to change intensity, and you can shorten it or make it easier. Um, from a lifting and thing, that’s what I like. You have your heavier sympathetic days, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, uh, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.

A little bit easier, more kind of parasympathetic. Um, within that, if they are doing like the vo two max intervals, they can either do that on a separate day or they might pair it on like an upper body lifting day. Not ideal, but you could still, you know, get it done. Um, and if they really [00:47:00] want to go crazy, I do like a split where they would do some cardiovascular training in the morning and they would lift in the afternoon.

Uh, some people that’s not always possible, but a lot of people have a bike, they have a rower, it’s at their home. You know, I’ve gotten really good progress with what I call just six minute progressives. Get on the rower, not necessarily don’t have to warm up much, just give me six minutes total time. And I wanna see at the end, your heart rate’s going to just barely hit 80, probably about 90% of your max, but it’s gonna look like this slow increase, and it’s not gonna be hard for long just doing that five or six days a week.

Uh, people can make some, some pretty good progress with that without a whole lot of time, without a whole lot of changing to their schedule either. Yeah.

Anders: One of the, the giant side benefits is when you start, it totally sucks. Oh yeah. And like 10 days into it, or like week two, maybe three of training. And you go, did I [00:48:00] feel really good right now?

And that’s the, uh, that’s the sign that you’re doing it right. And you just wanna keep going. Like it becomes a part of, um. Really like balancing out the meathead part is having a really good conditioning system that just like really actually makes you feel fantastic.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. I’m in the middle of doing a little experiment to see how many days in a row I could do cardiovascular training with, you know, presenting in Massachusetts, being in Mexico, being down here in South Padre, travel, everything else.

And uh, so right now I’m actually on day 60 and. In a row. And like some of ’em are just a short run for one mile. Like some of ’em are just 20 minutes of zone two at night. Some of ’em are just, you know, a couple intervals at 30 seconds, you know, super, super hard at the end of lifting, you know, so it, you can modify it to ways to fit in.

And again, I just like that violent consistency over time. Just like lifting, you know, same principles apply.

Anders: Cardio is like a sign of maturity. I just want everybody to know that [00:49:00] too. It kind of is on Twitter. It’s like, yeah. You know, like, uh, every time I get on Twitter these days, I go and kick it with my buddy Mike Boyle.

Yeah. He’s sit there talking about how, how great it feels to sit on an airdyne and he like all these old meathead all again, just find an airdyne in a rower and sit there and start breathing and feeling good. And all of a sudden you’re like, oh yeah, this cardio thing, it’s fan. I don’t know why you’re not doing zone two training.

It’s like, well, ’cause now you’re old and now cardio’s cool. It’s a sign of maturity. Uh, yeah, agree. Where can the people find you, sir?

Dr Mike T Nelson: Uh, best Place is probably the website, which is mike t nelson.com. Uh, most of the information I have is on the newsletter, so it’ll be a little tab on the top to go to newsletter.

Uh, just hit reply there and we’ll, we’ll send you a cool free gift. And then we’ve got the website, and then we’ve got Instagram, Dr. Mike T. Nelson, and then the Flex Diet Podcast Also.

Doug: There you go. I love [00:50:00] it. Douglas E. Larson. Yes, sir. On, on Instagram. Douglas E. Larson. Mr. Michael T. Nelson. Appreciate you coming on the show, brother.

I’m not sure what, thank you guys what episode this is, but maybe, maybe your 10th time on the show. It’s been, yeah, it’s been a while. Yeah. You’re like double digits, man. Yeah, you, you gotta be setting records over here. Uh, but yeah, love, love having you on the show. It’s always fun. And then of course, love having you on the team here at Rapid Health.

Yeah. We didn’t say this at the beginning of the call, but, um, one of the many things that you do, I, I, I call you internally like our Swiss Army knife. ’cause you can kind of do it all. So. Uh, if I ever need something, I know who to call. Uh, but on a, on a more consistent daily basis, uh, Mike oversees all of the aura data within the company, looking over, uh, sleep scores and, um, just looking, making sure that people are getting high quality sleep and whatever, um, whatever metrics that they need to optimize.

Uh, specifically related to sleep. Uh, Mike oversees all of that, so, uh, appreciate you being on the team and thanks for coming on the show. Thank you guys. Appreciate it.

Anders: I’m Anders Varner at Anders Varner and we are barbell shrugged to Barbell Shrugged. To make sure you get over to rapid health report.com, that’s where Dan Garner and Dr.

Andy Galban are doing a free lab [00:51:00] lifestyle and performance analysis. You can access that free report over@rapidhealthreport.com team. We’ll see you guys next week.