How Not to Hate Cardio with World-Renowned Coach Joel Jamieson
Today, we speak to world-renowned coach Joel Jamieson about all things cardio. We love to talk about resistance training on this show, but it’s finally time to show cardio some love. Joel tells us all about why cardio is one of the most important activities we should be doing for our health. We go through what the different heart rate zones are, how cardiovascular training is different from resistance training, how you can balance the two, and how cardiovascular training changes your mitochondria.
Check out Joel’s Morpheus training system here.
The paper Joel mentioned can be found here.
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Juna: Okay, Eddie, I know you are a pro runner.
Eddie: If that's measured by finishing in the top 99% of the New York City Marathon, folks. And yes, I'm a pro runner at 99. Wait, really? There were a few people behind me.
Juna: I didn't know that.
Eddie: No no, no.
Juna: Oh, no. Oh my gosh.
Eddie: Not top ten.
Juna: Top 99 I got it, I got it. You're too clever for me. I wasn't there.
Eddie: There were a few people behind me.
Juna: There was a few people behind you. Right? Well, listen, you did a marathon. I think that's better than 99% of the population, right? So I feel like you're far ahead. You're far ahead. Well, after a couple of guests have been telling us about how important cardiovascular fitness is. I've been actually trying to improve my cardiovascular health. Okay. So I've been, like, doing a few things in the gym, you know? Oh, well, I've basically realized, Eddie, I'm getting very old.
Eddie: Or old or.
Juna: Older. I guess I'm getting older.
Eddie: So you're not old.
Juna: You're older. Okay, well, I guess I'm getting older, so I'm like, cardio is important. I feel like I should do it more, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, I've been basically going to the gym and I go to the treadmill and I put it up to six, which I think is six miles per hour. Yeah. And then they're like, run for ten minutes. And I like, pray to the dear Lord Jesus, please let this be over. Please let this be over. I can't stand.
Eddie: The religious experience.
Juna: It's basically yes. And I've been doing that. And like nothing's even happening. I don't feel like I'm getting better. I don't feel like I'm getting like, what is it? I don't even know a stronger heart. How do you measure these things? I have no idea.
Eddie: Well, that's a good thing that we should ask our guest.
Juna: Right. Okay, so I thought we should do an episode all about this. Because I know strength training is something we focus on, but that's like an easy thing to measure. So, like, let's do an episode all about cardio.
Eddie: So, you know, it turns out that some of the listeners think that the show is for them. But this episode, this episode is Project Stop. You it from feeling like she's dying on the treadmill, right?
Juna: Right. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about how to improve your cardiovascular capacity in the most painless way possible. What on earth are the heart rate zones? Which ones should you be in? How can you improve your cardio? If you hate running? How can you be a healthier human overall? Guys, I have to say, I feel like I was called out in this episode over and over and over again. So if you want to hear me get roasted, this is the episode for you. I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie: I'm Doctor Eddie Phillips, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Juna: And you're listening to Food We Need to Talk, the only health podcast that has been scientifically proven to get you through even the most grueling of treadmill workouts, just by listening. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Today we are joined by Joel Jamison and I will let you introduce yourself as what profession you like to introduce yourself as, because I know you have many titles. So you can go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience.
Speaker 3: Sure. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think at the end of the day, I consider myself a coach above all else. I've done a lot of different things in this space as far as education and developing technology and speaking all that sort of stuff. But I just consider myself a coach that's tried to take what I have learned as a coach and share that information with other people.
Juna: Okay, great. As I have kind of mentioned to you off mic, this podcast definitely skews a lot towards strength training. And I will say guilty as charged. It's because I am very into strength training and I feel like because unfortunately, I get a lot more sway in choosing the episode topics. I'm sorry I have the said cardio, so I wanted to do some more episodes on cardio because I definitely have a making more of an effort to build my cardiovascular capacity. And the first question I had was, what are the most significant differences between the strategy for building your cardiovascular capacity and the strategy for building your strength?
Speaker 3: Sure. I mean, they're they're very different end of the spectrum, realistically speaking, if we're talking about building muscle mass, building bone density, we're talking about processes. They're essentially adding more mass to ourselves. Right. Or, and or adding strength where we're developing our central nervous systems capacity to fire muscle or to building technique or doing all these things in an effort to build muscle mass. And that's a really good thing. Muscle mass is important and strength important, particularly as we age. And muscle is a metabolic organ that contributes tremendously to metabolic health. And the other side of the equation is cardiovascular. So as you mentioned, that's really about delivering oxygen and building the aerobic system, which the muscles and all the other tissues across your body rely on for the vast majority of your life. So on that end, we're talking about not building a whole bunch more tissue per se, but making our body more effective at developing and delivering the energy that we need to the working muscles, to our brain, to our heart, to all these different tissues again, that make up our metabolism and our overall biological system. So both are hugely important because without the cardiovascular system delivering oxygen and building that aerobics system, the muscles are going to have to be reliant on the anaerobic system, which is a big part of lifting weights. But you can't produce very much anaerobic energy in the grand scheme of things. You need the aerobic system to fuel your muscles across your lifetime. When you're walking around, you get up and down the couch and you're just going about your daily life. That's an aerobic processor. It's very little. Yeah, that aerobics energy that's necessary. And so the more effectively you can build that aerobic system through cardiovascular training and different methodologies, the more you're going to have the energy you need for your muscles to do the job you need to do. And the more you are going to be healthy in the long run, because your metabolism primarily runs on the aerobic system and cardiovascular fitness drives metabolism across the vast majority of what you need to do. So that's kind of a long winded answer. But because they are different things, they're connected. There are very different training strategies. We don't lift weights to terrible cardio, generally speaking, that I would say and we talked about that and we generally don't use cardio to build strength because these are different things that need to be developed differently.
Eddie: So people often ask or questions that I get when I talk about some of this is they go, well, yeah, but I'm running and it feels like it's taxing my muscles. Sure, my not doing some resistance training every time I land. So where where do you draw the line there. Yeah.
Joel: I mean of course you're working your muscles just do everything right. Like I get up off the couch, I do a squat. You know, that's just movement. The question is, what are we trying to develop with that, that particular action or exercise or movement. So yeah, when I'm running, if I'm running in slow speed, sure I'm getting some some force in there. The muscles are having to produce some force to run, but just we can look at how much force is actually being produced and how much strength is going to be generated. We don't see marathon runners with huge muscles, so obviously running longer distances is not a huge stimulus to build bigger muscles, and we don't see them being able to go out and squat like powerlifters. So obviously that level of stimulus in a run may be enough to develop some general strength, and certainly your ladies can develop some strength from that, but it's not going to be enough to really go beyond a fairly moderate level. You're not going to run, you know, four miles an hour or six miles an hour and then go have a heavy squat. You're not gonna be able to squat heavier because you can run at four miles an hour. So there's there's always some carry over. Right? Just because you're always working your muscles. But I would say again running is developed cardiovascular fitness. And it can be aerobic fitness depending on what you're doing. But it's not the best tool for strength. Just like strength, it's really not the best tool for cardiovascular work because they're just they're working in two different parts of the system.
Juna: So I've heard you talk about this before, but you've said that strength training and cardiovascular training are pretty different in that you can strength train once or twice a week, and you'll be able to build strength week to week, especially if you're a beginner. But cardio doesn't work that way. And this is my big problem. Is that like, because I don't like it, I'm like, I'll do it once a week and then I see no progress. And I'm like. This sucks. I'm not gonna do this anymore. This is the worst. So can you talk about the differences? Like how do you build a cardio training program? How is it different in strength training?
Joel: Yeah, the biggest thing is one of the main drivers of cardiovascular fitness outside of the heart itself is, is mitochondria. And the mitochondria, as most people have heard about them, creates the energy that your body runs on the vast majority of, at least by taking the nutrients that you use and turning them into ATP, which is the body's currency. But they actually do a whole lot more than that. They are the site of a lot of different hormone synthesis. They coordinate with the nucleus of the cell to, coordinate all around cellular function. And they work with the immune system to make sure it's doing what it needs to do. It has, the cells, it needs to function in the energy to function. So the mitochondria are essentially this, this quarterback of the stress response system and how your body responds the world around you. And they are hugely important for health. If you just take up like mitochondrial dysfunction you will fight a huge range of diseases and disorders that are related to mitochondrial dysfunction. Mankind. You're related to almost everything because again, everything in our body depends on energy. And if they are not just producing energy but quarterback and how that energy is used and working with the nucleus of cells to make sure your metabolism doing what it's supposed to do. If those things don't do their job well, they don't function well. Well, your health is going to be compromised. You're gonna have a lot harder time being healthy and living a longer life. And one of the things that we see in elder populations that are really healthy is they have much better mitochondria than the people that are at that same age and unhealthy. And it's a big, big part of what fitness does. Now, the problem is mitochondria have a fairly short half life, meaning they turn over quite a bit. They're constantly recycling, they're costly adapting, and people don't notice. But mitochondria actually move within cells. They're not static organelles. They can actually move within ourselves to different parts of the cells that need more or less energy. They can multiply a number. They can change a function, they merge together and create. These mitochondrial networks are hugely more efficient. They're fascinating, fascinating, parts of our biology. And they're really what make life possible because before mitochondria in our cells, we really there really wasn't life as we know it. And it was a pro bacteria. And when mitochondria became part of our cellular structure, life as we know it was essentially born. And they are the only parts of our body that have DNA outside of the nucleus of the cells. So long story short, mitochondria are one of the main keys to cardiovascular fitness, to metabolism, to stress the health to all of this. And the problem is they need somewhat constant stimulus to be continually improved. And if you do once a week, you're stimulating these mitochondrial proteins, you're increasing myocardial biogenesis and you're telling them, hey, we need to function better. But then if they're not used in the same way for a week, like, oh, maybe not, maybe they have to adapt and they kind of go back to normal fairly quickly. So we see that protein in much of our mitochondrial protein synthesis. And these changes are really only 24 hours. And they start to decrease or can be back to baseline sometimes even quicker than that. So if they're not constantly stimulated, if the system doesn't constantly get used, it decreases fairly quickly, unfortunately. And muscle mass and strength and those sorts of things, they just don't have the same rate of turnover. They're not so fragile that they will change as rapidly. Without use, you can build a bunch of strength and maintain it pretty easily for years, you know, on a couple days, a week of lifting, maybe three days a week, depending on where you're at and your genetics. But the cardiovascular system just doesn't change in the same way. It's, it's it's much more susceptible to decay and decline. If you take 2 or 3 weeks of cardio, you'll notice a huge difference. If you take 2 or 3 weeks off lifting, sometimes you come back and be stronger if you ever need something. So unfortunately, there's just no way of getting around the fact that our mitochondria and our metabolism or our rugby fitness need to be trained much more frequently then the strength side of things. But honestly, that presents an opportunity because you don't actually have to train strength as frequently to make progress and maintain. And that leads you to have more time if you're trying to develop cardiovascular side. So you might not like it. But the reality is that's just how the body works. If you use it, it gets a lot better. If you don't use it, unfortunately, you lose a lot quicker.
Eddie: So it's interesting when they when we quote frequently the physical activity guidelines, which is of the 150 minutes per week of like a brisk walk that is per week. And that's because that's the data that was available to the committees. But clinically. And kind of the advice that we like to give is that people should be exercising cardiovascular really much more frequently. And it's a great explanation in terms of mitochondrial health. And it also helps with your mood and your stress and everything else that like, you really want to kind of do it on a more regular basis because it makes you feel better. Just so I love that explanation of the mitochondria.
Joel: The human body at the end of the day, is designed to move. That's where it comes down to it. We need to move the circulation when it moves for lymphatic drainage and back tissues, where we're basically like this closed pneumatic pump. And we walk, we pump fluids throughout our body, and we facilitate all sorts of different fluid exchanges that are really important to health. And the biggest thing I can tell you, I there's a long. A story about my. My mom, unfortunately suffered a stroke. She had a dense point of heart and cardiovascular disease. She had, something called pulmonary sarcoidosis, which is inflammatory disease of the lung. She had breast cancer. She had all these different conditions, and all of them limited her movement in a very negative way. She got to the point where she was 90 pounds and she unfortunately wasted away. And their quality of life was terrible the last ten years or so because she couldn't move. And you see this when you go in an older population, you go in the community, the retirement communities, the people that move and are active, they are much healthier. They're much happier. The quiet life is much, much higher. She had a friend named Peggy who was 93 or 94, I want to say, and she was going on field trips with the community until the days the day before she passed away. She was always walking around. She was happy and constantly moving. And you just see that across all populations, the people that move consistently every day as much as possible and in old age, they're healthier, they're happier, they're fitter, their quiet life is better. There's just no getting around that. And that's why cardiovascular exercise plays such a huge role, because it allows you to continue to do that as you age. And we combine that with strength training. That's why we see such huge benefits. And people that lift weights to get the strength, the muscle mass and bone density to sustain themselves. And then they have the cardiovascular capacity to deliver the energy they need to be able to move. It's really those two things are the fountain of youth in a lot of ways, because that would allow us to live our lives in ways that make us healthy.
Juna: Yeah, that makes total sense. And I've seen the same thing with my grandmother. She got a knee replacement. And then after that, like her movement was so limited in all her other health metrics also just declined so quickly just because of that movement piece. And just for our listeners, we're actually going to be talking about aging athletes in our bonus episode with Joel. So make sure to head over to food when you target comp membership if you want to hear more about that. So for somebody who wants to build their cardiovascular capacity asking for a friend, obviously, but they really love strength training. What is like the recommended like how many times should I be doing cardio if like my cardiovascular passages is not very good? So I'm a beginner in cardio. So how many times a week should I be training it? And then I guess we'll talk about her own soon. So we'll kind of explain what they are and like which zones we should be in. But first of all, can we just address like the time piece? How often should you be doing it in a week?
Joel: Yeah, I mean the reality is more is generally better within reason. But there's a difference between what's optimal versus what's sustainable for somebody. And this is where you need to understand what is your lifestyle allow I mean, in a perfect world you do an hour a day, 4 or 5, six days a week of some form of cardiovascular exercise. It doesn't have to be strenuous. It doesn't have to be structured necessarily. But you need to be outside walking, jogging, writing, cycling, just doing something cardiovascular, really demanding enough to cause the body to get better. That said, almost anything is better than nothing. So starting with 20 or 30 minutes a day, whenever you can fit that in is going to be a good starting point, and you're going to see progress in that, particularly if you're starting at the lower end of the spectrum. So the answer is just whatever amount you need to do to see improvements. And that's very dependent on where you're starting from your genetics, like what type of training you're doing. But I would make it a general rule of thumb to get in some form of cardiovascular exercise, even if that's just a dedicated brisk walk at a reasonably high pace, or it's going out for a hike, or it's going down the pickleball court or whatever it is that you find sustainable and fun and enjoyable to do, in that you have 4 or 5 sick days a week if you possibly can. If you can't, 2 or 3 days is still better than zero. So get in as much as you possibly can and then let yourself, you know, build that over time. Don't. Don't be afraid of starting because you don't have six hours a week. If you can only do 30 minutes twice a week, start there and then build up. The biggest thing I'll say is, if you hate doing it, you're probably not going to do it. So find a way to do it that you don't hate. That's where again, I see pickleball courts everywhere, people out there playing pickleball. The good thing if you like biking but you hate running, then don't bike. If you like doing some class in the gym, do the class, the gym. Just find ways to move that you enjoy doing, and you'll be far more likely to be doing it for months and years rather than just, you know, once a week because you have to.
Eddie: So for many people, exercising means I'm going all out and they are huffing and puffing and sweating. And if they're not out of breath and they don't need to change their shirt, then they have an exercise. And for other people, it's more like, you know, give me some credit. I got off my desk chair and I went for a walk lunchtime. And as you're saying, and it's absolutely 100% that is better than continuing to sit there, but take us through the zones because, it used to just be, you know, measure your heart rate. Maybe we could talk about perceived exertion, but take us through the zones and how you might prescribe an exercise program for. Oh, I don't know, a friend of mine. Her name is Yuna. She thinks she's getting old.
Juna: Oh, are you getting old, you guys, I'm getting so.
Joel: I mean, it's 28, so all. I'm in trouble, but, hurry. Zone training has been around for a long time. I'd say, realistically, Poehler probably put it on the map back in the late 70s, early 80s and started coming out with recommendations. But at the end of the day, we have to understand what are heart rate zones, because we've just kind of created the structure, right. But really what it is, is just a way to gauge intensity. It's a it's a way to gauge how much demand replacing on our body. And it's a way to gauge, in some sense, how much energy is being produced and where the energy's likely coming from. And, you know, traditionally heart rate zones just been this kind of percentage of max heart rate. It's kind of the the original methodologies. You take a max heart rate and you take some percentage, you say, okay, 90 to 100% zone five and 8,090%, zone four, and so on and so forth, all the way down to zone one. And that's these are just the heart rate zones. Now that certainly does give you a gauge of intensity. The higher up you go, the heart toward your max heart rate, the more intense your training and all that sort of stuff. But the biggest thing you see when you really dig into this is everyone is very different in intensity, is not necessarily linear. So working at 90% of your max heart rate is, is not just like a straight line from working at 80% or there's as we go up this intensity, what we're really talking about is recruiting more and more muscle fibers and more and more muscle mass to do whatever it is we're doing. So if we go from a walk to a jog to a sprint to like an all out meals fast, I could possibly go. We're sequentially recruiting stronger and stronger, more powerful muscle fibers, and going until we can max out and cook his main muscle fibers. We can. In that process, we're just placing the body under more stress and replacing those different muscle fibers under more stress. So there are a lot of different ways to quantify that. And certainly using static heart rate zones is a starting point. But if we want to make things really simple, I think we can use some gauge of low intensity, which is fairly easy in some senses. We're not straining ourselves significantly. We're not getting fatigued as we do it. We could do a lot of it, I would say. Then we have like a moderate intensity level where we're working reasonably hard, but we're not dripping with sweat. By the end of it, we're feeling like we're putting in a good amount of work, but we're not going to store the next day. And then we have our high intensity, which is why it sounds like that high intensity is going to be very demanding. We're going to be extremely tired by the end of it. We're potentially going to be tired the following day and have some fatigue. And I like to just break up kind of training those three areas for most people low intensity, moderate intensity and high intensity, right. That's kind of the easiest way to separate this out. And the reality is that'll be different in terms of percentage heart rate zones for each person. So one person low intensity might go up to 8,485% max heart rate because they're in very good shape. Somebody else low intensity might only be like 70% their max heart rate because they're they're less conditioned. So I would say to start out with, for most people, rather than focusing on trying to hit exact certain numbers of heart rate ranges and get overwhelmed by zones, just kind of categorize it into how much exercise should I do at a low intensity, how much exercise I do to moderate intensity, and how much exercise I do at high intensity. If you kind of think about it that way, it just becomes a bit simpler. And I would say for the most part, about 80% of your time we spend that lower intensity range, and maybe some of that moderate intensity will be all of that. And then 10 to 20% at most per week would be in a high intensity range. Most people need to spend most of their time. Actually, all people you know need to spend most their time in these lower intensity ranges, which is where zone two cardio and all that sort of stuff is cut on, because there are very clear benefits to doing something at lower intensity, where our bodies relying primarily on fat, where most of the work is being done by our slow twitch muscle fibers, and we're able to carry on for a duration that cause our body to become more efficient. And that's what I want to stress, is one of the most important things. We want an efficient metabolism, that coordinated energy well, that creates energy effectively, that has these very healthy mitochondria that have been developed in a way that makes them more efficient. And that means we need some duration, means we need some volume in their bodies and frequency. And so if you're doing a really high intensity, you can't do it for very long. You don't get that much of a duration effect because you can only do it for ten, 20 minutes a few times a week. If you do more than that, you're going to overtrain pretty quickly for the average person. So I would say for most people, just spend about 80% of your time in that lower intensity rate, which we can define more specifically, you want and then spend about 20% of your time, at most, doing some sort of higher intensity, very strenuous work where you are out of breath and you're tired. And that is kind of the golden rule of endurance athletes. And we've seen that translate across multiple populations. And it's just a very easy way for people to think about it. And it's it works. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that for the average person.
Juna: Okay. So I feel like I'm being personally called out because let me tell you, I'll tell you what I've been doing and please tell me, like what I can do better because I hear you 80% in the lower intensity. I feel like when I'm doing the lower intensity, I'm like, I'm not like accomplishing anything. Like, what is this? It's like two, two chill, which I guess I've been wrong about. So basically what I've been doing is I train upper, lower, upper, lower, which means for the listeners, like I alternate upper body, lower body on my gym days and I lift about six days a week. And so basically I run on my upper body days since I know. I'm not going to use my legs and I just lift my lower body days and I go to the treadmill, put the treadmill on six like six miles per hour. So it's a ten minute mile, put the incline up to 1.5 and I run for ten minutes. And then I look at my average heart rate. Afterwards I have a chest strap and I just do that three times a week and I'm like, why is nothing happening? Like, I'm not getting better. I'm not getting faster. I feel like just as bad. So I'm like, clearly I'm doing something wrong.
Joel: So two things okay. One, remember that lifting weights and building muscle tissue is about creating more power, more strength, more force. And it's building up those things, right? Which is which is valuable. But cardiovascular fitness is about efficiency. It's about miles per gallon. It's not about more power and more strength and more muscle and more force. It's about the opposite, actually. In some regards, it's about being as efficient as you possibly can with energy production, being efficient with your kidneys, with oxygenation of different tissues. And so when you're spending six times a week and you said you didn't lift six days, yes, you're sending basically a lot of genetic signals to your body that says build more mass, build more strength, build more force, build more tissue. I want strength, and that's a fairly conflicting signal to like, I wanted to develop really good cardiovascular system that's incredibly efficient. I want more mitochondria that are really efficient. I want to be economical. And you're trying to ask the body that you can have two different things. One is produce more horsepower, which is muscle and strength, and two is be way more economical, which is cardiovascular fitness and metabolic rate. Those are very kind of opposing signals. So you're kind of asking your body do two things on very opposite end the spectrum that are not easy for it to do it simultaneously. And then two, just three, ten minute sessions a week of cardiovascular fitness, as I mentioned, really isn't enough. And in particular, the ratio there, if you're doing 30 minutes of of cardiovascular work and six days a week of probably our workout lifting, that's the volume disparity between the two. Is is pretty obvious, and you're just not going to improve much at that level. And with that focus.
Eddie: You know, that's not the answer.
Juna: You guys know. You know, because here's the thing. The mental strength it takes me to do those 30 minutes is like a thousand times what it takes me to do those weights. So are you saying like, should I? Do you think that people should, like, have a phase where they just build their cardiovascular capacity and focus on that instead of trying to do both? Like how do you split your time between the two?
Joel: I would say to the average person who just says, I want to be really healthy, they should spend at least as much time or realistically, probably more time on the cardiovascular side than lifting. Not because listening is not important, it is, but because, like I said, it takes less time lifting to get the maximum gains that it does on your side. And this is there's a study I can tell you guys are references to, but they essentially looked at self-reported amounts of strength training per week across a lot of people that simply said how much time they spent lifting weights or strength training in some capacity. And they looked all kinds of mortality metrics and cardiovascular disease and cancer and blah, blah, blah. What they found is that the benefits again, this is a correlation. This is not a causation per se that people that actually that lifted weights between 30 and 60 minutes per week maxed out the longevity benefits. In other words, they didn't see any higher levels of longevity on average, and people lifted 2 hours or 3 hours per week as they did in people that did 30 60 minutes. Again, this is correlation. This is not causation. But what you basically see is that like lifting six hours a week is probably not going to significantly increase your longevity, likely at least above 30, 60 minutes. It doesn't mean you can't do it if you enjoy the right benefits, but it means that from a cost benefit analysis, you're spending six hours or whatever lifting weights. You probably, from a longevity health standpoint, would be much better off shifting your focus towards a lower level of strength training and a higher amount of cardiovascular work. So I would just tell somebody when you're first starting, like anything like I mentioned, is better than nothing. Find the balance between the two and find ways to do it that you enjoy. But the further up you go, the more VO2 max and cardiovascular health becomes a hugely important variable that you want enough muscle mass and strength to maintain your movement. But the cardiovascular system really becomes a huge piece of longevity the further up you go.
Eddie: And now that unit has completed her ten minute run, we're going to take a brief break. And we're back with Joel Jamison and Joel. I am so enjoying this conversation and learning about the balance between cardiovascular and strength training. You have trained the world's best athletes from everyone from mixed martial artists to folks in the basketball and football. And I think about what they say is the world's greatest athlete, which is the dude or the woman that wins the decathlon. I guess the women do a heptathlon or something, but they have to be strong, and they also have to be fast, and they also have to be powerful. I mean, these are the folks that are doing a shotput and then doing a sprint. How do you train them?
Joel: Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I would say anytime you're talking about things that are kind of, like I said, not, let's say all the way opposite spectrum, but different parts of the spectrum from endurance all the way to speed. It's very challenging because you can make trade offs. If you spend all your efforts trying to develop maximum speed and power. So let's say that the Catholic you spend all your time developing home, your sprint in the shotput, your other endurance sports would take a hit because you spent so much time working that in the spectrum. So really what it comes down to, and this is the challenge to combat athletes, which I've worked with for, you know, 20 years now. Combat athletes have to be fast, explosive, but they also have the last three, five minute rounds or five five minute rounds. So they have to be skilled across all these different areas of combat. And when it comes down to it, you have to find the limiting factor for that individual athlete and spend time prioritizing that. It's a constant juggling act of, okay, what is this athlete really good at? What is this athlete not so good at? And how can we build programs and program and skill development around the areas that need improve the most while we work to maintain the other areas? Because you can't improve everything all at once and you definitely can't improve everything. All went to a very high level athlete who's already highly developed in different areas. So this is where really where individualization and specialization and very good assessments of what the athlete needs and programing around that and knowledge of all that becomes a hugely important factor. But really what it comes down to is just, you know, understanding what that athlete needs to do to get better. And that's a different answer for every single person, regardless of the sport. It's the same thing on this, what we're talking about. I mean, if you hate doing cardiovascular work, you're going to avoid it and you're going to spend all your time doing something you enjoy, which is lifting weights that are pretty obvious. Assessment is, well, you're not lifting or you're not doing enough cardiovascular work. Let's figure out how do we plug that hole and figure out a way to get it a little more balance. And so that's really what all of this comes down to. It's what do you need to improve as a human being, whether that's developing cardiovascular fitness, whether that's developing strength, whether that's developing mobility, whether that's working on your sleep well, that's working on your stress management, figuring out what you personally need to do to improve whatever it is you need to improve. And then focusing on that area is the key to all of this. If you just sit there and constantly reinforce things are really good at and you can't avoid the things you don't like doing, you're just going to keep being good at what you're good at, and that's what you're bad at, and nothing's ever going to change. So you just kind of have to have that mindset of being a fair evaluator of your own levels of different things, or having the coach or somebody guide you in that process. But finding out what your weak spot, what is your limiting factor, what is holding you back, and then focusing on that is the right approach, you know, continuing to just do what you like doing and being good at what you're good at and avoiding everything else is, is, you know, a recipe for staying the same. It's just kind to how it works.
Juna: Joel has been talking to my therapist. Go see this man. Joel. Why are you calling me out and all? I'm just getting. I'm just getting. I always say the thing that will cause the most improvement is probably the thing you're not doing. Because I think we all just do the things that we like to do and we're good at.
Joel: Yeah. And I'll tell you my story because it's pretty relevant. I was a high school football player and shot discus thrower. I hated running. I hated the condition aspect of football. I just liked playing football. I started losing weight when I was 13. Still like that older brother. I was bench pressing. 315 high school, 450 in college, and was an avid strength athlete my entire life. I started a mentorship or internship at University of Washington with a guy, Gillespie. He was a competitive powerlifter. I think he bench press 600 pounds when I was there. Since then, 800 pounds with 860. And so I was lifting with him on a daily basis. My whole world was lifting weights far, far more than six hours a week. I was lifting weights. That was my whole game was 240 pounds. And I hated the conditioning side of things. It was really the thing that I liked the least by far, and the thing that I figured you kind of had to do to play football, but as little as possible was my goal. Then I opened a gym in 2003 and quickies. I worked with combat athletes because they were next to me. Now, the funny thing is, I started to evaluate in the same way I would do, you know, else as a football player, and I started putting them through once a strength assessments and I was like, man, these guys are really weak. You know, they could barely do a couple pull ups. They could barely, squad their body weight like they were just they were weak. And I literally thought, like, all I have to do is get this athlete to lift weights or weights, and he or she is going to be significantly better fighter. They're gonna be a much better com athlete because they're just not very strong. And then I decided, well, I need to understand kind of sport a little bit more. So I'm gonna go train with them. And I remember this distinctly. There was a guy named Ivan Solidary, and he was a fighter in UFC. In K-1 back then he was about 180 pounds or he 4185. So somewhere that range and I was like 225, 230, you know, I mean, I would absolutely murder that guy in any measure of strength possible and magical. And I went over and I started trying to train and grapple with them. And I legitimately thought that because I was so much stronger than I ever, and that I was going to overpower him and be able to have some success. 20s into this, I was on the ground crying, getting tapped out and choked out and just being beat to a pulp like a little baby because I was so exhausted at just, you know, what was a toy for him? It was a game for him. He was barely doing anything for his level of exertion. He was just playing around and I was using every ounce strength I had. It was gone so quickly that I was basically helpless, and it was a massive realization that all the strength in the world does, you know, good if you're too fatigued to do anything with it. And the more muscle you have, the more energy you have to produce, the faster ultimate goal fatigue. There's a reason we see bigger people fatigue faster than smaller people. So it was really the kind of the starting point of a huge turning point in my career of recognizing that muscle is the means to produce force and power, but the cardiovascular fitness and metabolic fitness is the only way you can actually produce it, because if you don't have the energy you need and you have so much muscle that it takes huge amounts and you can move, move around, you're going to fatigue very, very quickly. You're not gonna be a very effective athlete. And, you know, developing all the strength the world is not the answer for all of those guys. And you see, the biggest, most heavy muscle fighters often have the worst conditioning and often lose fights. The guys who are smaller and weaker and less explosive, but they're just better fighters because they can last from the beginning to the end. So once, once I kind of had that realization, I dug full into this side of the equation of cardiovascular fitness and how the aerobic side works and how metabolic systems work. And I started experimenting myself and learning how this this all comes together. And I also have a very bad family history. My my dad passed away as early 60s. My mom had the disease. I mentioned my grandpa on both sides passed away in like late 50s, often cardiovascular disease and stroke. So I've got a terrible genetic history on the cardiovascular side. And so the older I've gotten, the more I've personally had to focus on those sort of stuff. And the more you start to see the benefits when you do it, you feel better, you recover faster, you move better. You you see health benefits in a wide variety range, have more energy. You know, all these things translate. But I had to find ways I enjoyed doing it. I'm not particularly fond of running long distances, but I don't mind biking and I'd much prefer biking outside that. I prefer staying on the bike in the gym. So I live in Vegas, or I've lived in Hawaii before in the winter so I can stay outside. I'm home in Washington State. I can be outside cycling and hiking and doing things. I enjoy my high intensity work. I play racquetball because it's a great high intensity workout. I can do that a couple times a week. You know, I've just had to find ways to incorporate the sort of stuff that I can enjoy and like doing. And my my strength training has gone from six days a week when I was younger to, you know, 3 to 4 now, and my body weights like 210, not 240 or 250 as, as it's been. And I'm far healthier than I've been in the past when I was much. Here. All my metabolic numbers, all my everything. Tests that I get come back at the highest levels. And I'm far healthier since I started taking this approach. And again, it's. You don't realize it until you start getting your 30s and 40s and probably older, but the more you invest in the metabolic side, the more you're going to start seeing those benefits as you as you age and you just there's no way around it. And then my advice is just find ways again that you enjoy doing whatever that means to you. If you enjoy it, you're going to do it if you hate it or not. That's what it comes down to.
Eddie: I love how you're taking your own medicine. And this the story of your evolution. Starting with, would you say lying on the ground crying like a baby?
Joel: Yeah. I mean, it's a very humbling feeling when you're literally so fatigued that you can barely lift your arms. There's you've a grown man on top of you're doing whatever they want. And as part of combat sports and, you know, finding words, like I said, I thought I thought I was overpowering. I literally thought like, oh, I'm going to manhandle them, at least for a little while. With a little while, I was like, 20s. And that was game over. And you just realize really quickly it takes a lot more than just lifting weights in the gym to have real strength.
Juna: Thank you. I love that story as well. Also very inspiring that you had more strength is background. So I'm like, I can change. We had a question from one of our listeners that basically says, if my heart rate is getting up to between 140 and 1 60s while I'm lifting, can't I count that as cardio? And I want to add that me and my best friend David always joke that leg day is cardio because we're so out of shape that when we do squats, we're like, yeah, it's basically cardio because like our heart rate does 60s. So
Joel: Yeah. Yeah, that's that's a good question. It's when I get on time and let me put it this way, if you're if you're so out of shape that you feel like squats or cardio, then clearly the lifting weights is not build your cardio, otherwise you wouldn't feel so at shape. But the answer is no. Lifting weights, particularly heavyweights, is predominantly anaerobic, meaning it's relying on energy production outside of the mitochondria to produce that force. And the actual oxygen that your body is receiving at a particular heart rate is significantly lower than it would be if you were just doing cardiovascular work. And this mostly has to do with blood pressure and how the body is producing the force. And the higher, the faster increased muscle fibers. So if I'm doing cardiovascular exercise, my blood pressure is reasonably low. My heart is stretching kind of like a balloon as it fills with blood. And we're getting very clear benefits from that. Now if I'm lifting heavy weights, it's a very different thing because I am producing lots of force and power. My blood pressure is through the roof in certain exercises, particularly squats. And my heart, rather than being like a balloon, is having to contract very forcefully to resist that blood pressure. And we see very different changes in the hearts of people who do endurance work versus people who do just lots of strength training. And we measure the actual oxygen, the VO2, the amount of oxygen going through your body. When you're lifting weights at a given heart rate, it can be 70% of what it would be if you were doing cardiovascular work. And so that causes very different changes throughout the body. And if you want to just kind of zoom out, look, anecdotally, ask a bodybuilder to run a mile and watch what happens. So no, if lifting weights created cardiovascular fitness, we'd see people that lift weights for entire life powerlifters, Olympic lifters, bodybuilders. They'd have been aerobic fitness, but they don't. And so there's a reason for that.
Juna: Perfect. And then the last question I had just before we go over to the membership is, how do you know whether or not you're improving your cardio? Because the way I was always gauging it was whether my heart rate numbers improve for me doing the same. I guess running at the same speed or running the same distance, can I improve how high my heart rate is going? Like? Can I get it to be lower and lower? So how do I gauge whether or not my cardio is improving?
Joel: You still want to use heart rate and metric. And yeah, there's a few ways. Number one, you know, if your heart rate is decreasing at the same speed like you just said, or you can run a faster speed, the same heart rate, that means you're generating more energy and more power output for a given level of oxygenation. That's a really good sign. Your probably rather obvious, probably. Number two, your morning resting heart rate is a good gauge overall aerobic fitness because as your robot fitness increases, your resting heart rate decreases, which is probably why I mentioned economical, right? The more economical you can become, the less the fewer times the heart rate has to be to deliver the same amount of oxygen. We see decreases in resting heart rate. So if you're tracking resting heart rate, it's going to be variable. But you should see a trend going down over time. And somebody who's got a resting heart rate in the low 50s, it's really going to be much more cardiovascular fit than somebody in the 70s, for example. And so you can just keep an eye on that, or heart rate variability if you're using that metric, you want to look at the average of that going up over time. But I would say resting heart rate is probably the easier, more accurate metric in that regard. And then thirdly, like there is value, I would say in doing some sort of assessment, whether you go get a VO2 max test or whether you just pick an exercise and say, hey, I'm going to do 12 minutes on a bike. The old Cooper's test is a 12 minute run, but I'd say you can just do 12 minutes on a bike or 12 minutes on some sort of modality and cover as much ground as you can and periodically test that. See how much further you can go. That's a really good way to just have a benchmark that you want to compete against over time. And then the other one that I use all the time is heart rate recovery, which means how quickly can I drop my heart rate after some particular exercise and usually use like 60s heart rate recovery? The faster your heart rate comes down after an exercise, the more aerobically driven it was to begin with, the more aerobic B fit you are. So if you do, let's say a sprint for 60s or you do some hard, high intensity thing. We want our heart rate to drop as fast as possible after that, and that indicates aerobic fitness is as high. And it starts out maybe only dropping ten beats per minute. And we continue to improve. And now it's dropping 20 or 30 or 40 beats a minute. That's a really good indication that fitness is improving. So you just can look for all these different metrics and all these different things, how you feel when you're doing the activity, all those sorts of things, you know, to gauge whether or not you're improving. And it should be pretty obvious you're paying attention. You're either getting faster at the same heart rate, or you're seeing your heart rate come down at the same speed, your resting heart rate either going down or it's not. You know, you see these things if you're if you're looking for and it's a motivation when you see improve that you want to keep improving. But if you're not paying any attention, you're not tracking anything, you know, it becomes much more subjective then it's not as easy to stay motivated because you don't know if you're getting better or not.
Juna: Well, that makes total sense. And we're going to end this portion of the interview here. Thank you so much for coming on. This was so educational. Very sad in certain parts but very educational. And I will definitely implement a lot of the stuff that we talked.
Eddie: About so much. Joel.
Joel: No problem. I'm happy to be on.
Juna: Thank you so much to Joel for joining us on today's episode. It was so fun. Even though I got called out a million times.
Eddie: Did you feel roasted?
Juna: I feel a little bit roasted, but in a good way. In a way that's like, okay, I need to improve. If you want to hear more of our conversation, head over to our membership. Food. We need to talk.com/membership or click the link in our show notes. We talked all about aging athletes and how to find the motivation later in life, and how much time to be spending in each of these heart rate zones that we kind of talked about in today's show. We will also link to Joel's training system, the Morpheus Training System, on our website and in our show notes, as well as the paper that he shared with us. Which guys? There's like a bombshell in this paper that we didn't get to talk to you, which is basically that like if you live for a super long time in the week, then it actually decreases your life expectancy. But anyways, let's not talk about that. Let's just move on. You can find us at food. We need to talk on Instagram. You can find me at the official unit on Instagram and Juniata. On YouTube and TikTok. You can find Eddie.
Eddie: Exercising his mitochondria in the best way possible.
Juna: Incredible Food We Need to Talk is produced by me and is distributed by PR.
Eddie: Our mix engineer is Rebecca Seidel.
Juna: We were co-created by Carey Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Philips and me.
Eddie: For any personal health questions, please consult your health provider. To find out more, go to food. We need to talk.com. Thanks for.
Together: Listening.
