Pavel Tsatsouline: Building Endurance the Right Way

Let's talk about endurance. So there are different aspects to endurance and so there's cardio and there is the peripheral endurance in the muscles, muscular endurance. So first let's discuss how do we develop cardio. Let's discuss how we develop endurance in the muscle. The best, the healthiest way to develop your cardio is just steady state exercise like running at a particular speed that's not too fast. That's very simple. That's the best way to develop cardio. For most people it is. For most people it is and so here's what's happening. What's happening is the heart is stretching. When you increase your heart rate up to a certain point the heart starts stretching more and it stretches more and more so that increases the stroke volume. So pretty much you get a bigger heart and that's good. That works up to not quite 90% of heart rate. When you start redlining your heart rate, when you start getting to 90% and higher, the heart does not have time to relax fully. So it really pretty much is twitching. So you're no longer really stretching that heart. So you want to be training at the metabolic intensity that's much lower, something we can pretty much sustain a conversation. So like say you're running and talking to your body. That's what you want to stay to develop endurance. That will develop to stretch your heart. That's the basic method. So that's one method. So the second method is interval training. So and the interval training for the heart was developed by Germans decades ago and these guidelines still stand. So here's what they figured out. They figured out that your, well we know that this various systems in your body have inertia. So for instance notice that when you're running hard and you stopped your heart's still beating hard and then maybe 10 seconds after there's a sudden drop right there. So is that inertia. So the Germans figured out if you get your heart rate up to about 85-90% which is it's hard but it's still not maximum. And then you switch to walking or jogging so the heart is still beating and so is this extra volume of blood is moving and it stretches the heart. So it works really well. So you can use the interval method as well but it's it was found it's used best after after a period of steady-state training. It's very demanding on the body and it's not it's just it's too easy to have problems with the heart if you start using it prematurely. Then there's also such a thing as high heart rate under heavy loads. So in this particular case we're talking about dynamic exercises. So what's dynamic exercise? Running, bicycling, skiing, even light kettlebell swings. That's dynamic exercise. When you start doing static exercise let's say you're trying to do squats heavy squats for you know to get your cardio so to say. That's not the best idea because that interferes with the blood flow that something called afterload versus preload the heart gets thicker instead of the heart gets you know gets stretched and bigger. So it's not the optimal way to train the heart. You can again this simple way you can use dynamic exercise and interval type training or repeat training in this case to train your heart is to do an exercise that's dynamic in nature to raise your heart rate to about let's say 80 90 percent which would be 80 90 percent it would be where you can say maybe a couple words you know you're not you're not dying yet you can still answer a question and then you just walk around and you do it again. So that's a simple way of how much time walking around that depends that totally depends on who you are depends on how fast your heart rate drops back down and what do you want to like is there a number do you want to keep it in the 140s the 150s is dependent upon your age. Okay in this particular case you would do you would drop it down the original guidelines were done for young people those 120 130 beats so you're talking about 60 65 percent and pretty much if you're just looking at being able to pass the talk test which means you can talk you know short sentences mm-hmm I can speak in short something like that right so for example you do a set of tense wings really powerful the kettlebell walk around a little bit when you feel that you can speak again you do it again do it again so that's a simple way of doing that but the heart is only a very small part of endurance so we definitely need to do some cardio for our health and athletes definitely need to do for their performance but what we really need to focus on is you need mitochondria so mitochondria in the in the muscle cell so that's where energy is being converted to aerobically which means efficiently so if you look at the way your muscle uses energy so you will get this energy with food converted it goes down eventually the final currency so to say is something called ATP but it's only you know you only have it for a few seconds so it has to be reloaded so we have three main energy systems so have the creating a phosphate system it's very powerful but it's only can do you know go for just some seconds and it's clean burning we have a aerobic system that's not powerful at all but it's longer lasting and we have the glycolytic system that's kind of in between that dumps a lot of acid and other fatigue metabolites in there so if we want to do as we want to develop this mitochondria in our muscles it's easy to do a slow fibers and it's a little more involved in fast fibers I'll tell you how we can do that but it can be done so what we're looking for instead of trying to trash the muscle with acid we are trying to train in a way that to produce less acid and then only before the competition right before the competition couple weeks out you do a couple of kind of a smokers like that to get you so if you do that that's saying so the way we develop mitochondria which means make your muscle oxidative make your muscle enduring and not polluting in slow fibers it's simply moving right below an aerobic threshold so an aerobic threshold it's that intensity at which you you know acid is accumulating just up to a certain point it stays at that steady state and you can keep disposing of that for a while for quite a while as soon as you go above it very rapidly you crash so running right below the anaerobic threshold is the primary training method for endurance athletes and how do you know that you ran the threshold when you fail in the talk test that's a simple way to do that and it's very interesting that endurance athletes even though who are not necessarily well educated they can attend to gravitate through that intensity and so what happens is we are producing just small amounts of acid and the body finally is able to you know produce less and less so that's how we train aerobic I'm sorry that's how we train mitochondria in slow fibers for a fast fibers it becomes something more interesting so the conditions the conditions for making the mitochondria be able to handle more traffic without producing as much acid is push them just to the edge of acidosis just just to the edge and do it over and over and over so professor Verkhachansky back in the 80s figure that that's the guy who invented plymetrics and so on so he figured out so here's what we do imagine that you are sprinting let's say you're sprinting for five seven seconds and then you're just walking and you're sprinting again and you're just walking but you're doing that you measuring your blood lactate and it still keeps below the threshold and you sustain that for let's say 40 minutes so think of this for a second to sprinting very intensely but you do you stop before you start burning you get to the point of just light muscular fatigue and you do it over and over and over so if we talk about the coaching terminology it's repeat training versus interval training so what is interval training parvage you'll have to take a step to the side so the three types of rest periods between your sets whether you're running lifting whatever so there's a stress period that means that you will have a harder time to do the same thing or you will not be able to repeat it right that's in training there is the super compensation period which means if you wait extra long time you'll perform even better like for example if you do a set of pull-ups wait for 15 minutes you might be able to do more 15 minutes later and there is the ordinary period which is just you'll be able to repeat it over and over so that's in coaching speakers called repeat training repeat versus interval so we're trying to sustain that same level of performance for 40 minutes let's say so that's an example of how we develop mitochondria and fast-reach fibers and the same thing we can do with kettlebell swings the same thing you can do working in a heavy bag and so on and so forth you