Transcript for:
Enhancing Human Performance for Sport and Life with Dr. Andy Galpin

the science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport play and life Welcome to perform Hello friends I'm Dr Andy Galpin I'm a professor of Kinesiology in the center for sport performance at Cal State Fullerton in today's episode we're going to be talking about specifically how to improve your V2 Max in previous episodes we talked about the heart we went over what it is how it works why you should care about it we also spent some time going over the three eyes so how to investigate or ESS your overall cardiovascular function how to interpret that to know whether it's good bad terrible or potentially a world record then how to intervene so what to do about it and how to improve its function if you missed that previous episode we did on the heart please go back and check that out but I'd be remissed to not remind you or tell you for the first time about how important V2 Max is if you want all the studies direct links specific details on the statistics and values you can see that in the previous episode as well as the show notes for that episode but really quickly your V2 Max is one of the most significant predictors of all cause mortality that we know of in fact if you compare it to more traditional markers like blood pressure smoking history cholesterol levels while those are all very important V2 Max can be two to three to even up to fourfold higher predictor of survival and mortality than those other traditional markers so it's insanely important and in fact many folks would argue it is the most most important metric to pay attention to if you want to know how long you're going to live now I apologize for being overly dramatic about that but really it is that astounding about how important that number is to determining how long you're going to live the other important point about this is there is no upper limit such that the higher your V2 Max the higher your chance of survival continues to go it really doesn't seem to get to any point of diminishing returns and so it's a metric that is within your control it is arguably one of if not the most important metric for how long you're going to live and the higher the better and so focusing on this whether you want to run a marathon or want to play sports it really doesn't matter if you want to live longer and better V2 Max should be one of your top priorities but in today's discussion I wanted to do something a little bit different and that is really spend our entire time going over practical applications I want to walk you through exact programs and protocols uh giving you both the concepts as well as specific methodologies as samples to help you get guided in either developing your own program or helping others with theirs in order to do that I need to start with a very quick overview of what we're trying to actually accomplish when we're improving our endurance or V2 Max so that you understand the different components that tend to be pretty similar amongst all different styles and training approaches I promise we'll keep that very brief after that we're going to jump right into a very specific protocol for improving your V2 Max and then after that I'm going to share with you a specific protocol a friend of mine used to complete his first ever Marathon now before we go too much further I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors because they make this show possible not only are they on this list because they offer great products and services but because I actually personally love them and use them myself today's episode is brought to you by element element is an electrolite drink mix that has an ideal ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium but has no sugar elect ites are critical to proper hydration which I've been harping on for years but you can't do that by only drinking water in fact many of you will probably remember that I featured element in my YouTube series on optimizing hydration all the way back in 2020 which is obviously long before this 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supplementation plans based upon your unique physiology and goals experience the world's most premium performance blood work by going to Vitality blueprint.com perform I know exactly how dope this thing is because Dan Garner and I built it ourselves based upon that system we've used in thousands of athletes over the last decade or so so we're stoked that something that's previously only been accessible to the world's most decorated athletes musicians and so on is now open to everyone let's finally get you looking feeling and performing at your absolute best and that starts by going to Vitality blueprint.com perform let's go so to get us started I really do think it's important that we zoom out just a little bit when we say improve our V2 Max we have to acknowledge that that is only one component of endurance so do you truly mean V2 Max or do you mean your ability to have more energy throughout the day to feel less fatigued those are really different conversations all important but in this particular example I want to focus on really improving just the V2 Max okay so then thinking through that I like to use a method called first principles which says let's Zoom all the way out let's think about everything that would have to happen for me to have a high VO2 max and then number one analyze my own self to figure out where in that program am I fatiguing or lacking and then how do I solve it all right if you don't know then you would actually just do a program that addresses all potential areas of failure if you do know your area of failure then you would probably hedge a little bit more towards that what do I mean well we could come up with any number of examples here but let's say you are feeling like you're just not running as fast fast as you used to well that may not be a view to Max issue it may be a speed issue maybe a mechanics issue let's say you're having a different issue where you're feeling fatigued in games if you're an athlete well this may actually have to do with your warm-up it could be nutrition related it could be sports psychology you are upregulated or down regulated or something like that and so when we really go into solving problems for high performers I would encourage you to not just grab a program like this put it in place and assume it's going to work for everyone it may work for many obviously I'm going to present to you programs I think are very effective but I really would encourage you to think through the performance of you and your individual situation uh in my experience it's not always a physiological issue there could be other lower hanging fruit that improves your performance in a way that you care about that's not necessarily just physiology all that aside let's go ahead and dive into V2 Max remember what we're talking about here is a central and peripheral issue meaning Central as in your cardiovascular system specifically really your heart and peripheral as in your musculature so there's two sides of this equation V2 Max the equation I like to use the modified fi equation which we talked about and described in the previous cardiac episode is your V2 Max is equivalent to your heart rate multiplied by your stroke volume that's also heart rate times stroke volume is known as your cardiac output multiplied by your av2 difference and so it's how much blood you can get out of your heart per pump how how many pumps you can get away with that's the Q that's the cardiac output multiplied by your avo2 difference which tells you how much oxygen you can extract from your blood into your working tissue all right so I'm going to stop right there with the details that's really what we have to think about and so how long the way then we start thinking all right where is my point of failure if I'm limited in my stroke volume why is it because my heart's too small okay well solving that problem is a different style of training than if my issue is extracting oxygen into tissue there's a different training solution for that maybe your issue is mechanics of your lungs so maybe you're not breathing properly or maybe your intercostals or diaphragm fatigue maybe it's posture related and so there's various components we want to get into to really addresses so high endurance athlete or endurance performance solutions are individuals who can dive into that stuff and figure out hey your most your biggest hole here your biggest problem is this particular area and so we're going to design your protocols to solve that problem right nonetheless though let's assume you don't have any of that information and we'll just move through with one quality example I will reiterate just one more time there are many many many ways to improve V2 Max I've talked to and know a bunch of high level endurance coaches there's a ton of research in this as well and so you could pull up just endless amounts of protocols my goal is to not tell you that the protocol I'm about to present to you is the best or better than anything else but it is just a sample of one protocol that I know works very well and so depending on your goals and situation you may want to make many changes or use an entirely different setup all those caveats is say now let's finally jump into the protocol remember when we say V2 I'm assuming you mean V2 Max which is that maximal capacity or ability maximum heart rate maximum oxygen extraction maximum stroke volume Etc you may actually be more interested in something like a submaximal performance perance so how can I cover more distance at a given heart rate or how can I run my race faster or how can I perform better without getting so tired in my given event in my pickle ball or canoeing or volleyball or whatever I'm playing those are different conversations we're really going to talk about how to maximize the V2 right now we'll cover the things like performing better in your Marathon a little bit later all right so V2 Max training then per se says all right we've got three major components to discuss the very first one is What is your modality in other words what's your exercise if you are exercise agnostic then you really you can pick anything you want you can push a sled you can Sprint you can uh swim you can bike you can use an assault bike you can use whatever you would like if you're trying to improve performance and again a given race or your V2 Max for a fight or a competition then you're going to want to pick the mode specific to that okay again if you are simply after the V2 Max then you are mode agnos IC in fact you could probably use a combination and probably should use a combination of different modalities what you want to do is pick something that accomplishes two things one allows you to execute sufficient effort so you can do this a bunch at a high effort high intensity or long duration or high focus or whatever we're going to want to do there and then secondly one that's not limiting your technical proficiency so if you're not good at running I wouldn't recommend doing this one of the common and largest mistakes folks make when trying to improve their V to Max or in general is they hop into things like running and then they just start adding volume so they do one mile today and two miles the next week and three Etc or intensity so they do you know 30 seconds of hard work and then they do three rounds of that and then next week they do four rounds then five rounds and we start building this intensity and volume on top of either truly dysfunctional or suboptimal movement patterns and that results in a lot of injury and a lot of excessive fatigue okay so you want to be really careful pick something you are technically proficient in if you are modality agnostic and something you're not going to be um broken down or injured with the next thing then is the intensity and the volume we're going to want to play with every coach defines these things differently uh they think you should spend a different amount of time in different zones you can kind of think of this though almost all coaches acknowledge there's at least three potentially four areas that you should train in the bottom easiest level if you like to call this Zone one or zone two you can I don't honestly candidly don't use that stuff much um You can call these gear one or Gear 2 if you're Brian McKenzie or someone like that you could call these things just more like Blue Zone um you could call them RP or relative perceived exertion how hard does this feel on a scale of 1 to 10 and call this you know something like 2 to four on a scale again of 1 to 10 so lots of different ways people shake this up just to give you very rough examples this is probably something like 60 to 65% of your heart rate again some folks will define those numbers a little bit differently um this could be exercise you could do while maintaining a conversational pace so lots of different ways uh to go about it um you could make an argument for many of them being better than others but this is just getting you the basic idea of lower intensity exercises after that you move up to your next zone or area again could be a combination of Zone 2 or Zone 3 maybe gear three on that system maybe others call this a green color uh this is probably something like an RP of five to six maybe up to seven you're kind of in this moderate uh intensity Zone heart rates are going to range here between that you know 65 all the way up to like 85% plus or minus you know something in that neighborhood and then finally all the way at the top you're now at 85% Plus of your heart rate typically um you're know into gear four uh in that way of defining it and others would call this red okay so you're really moving really really hard you're definitely not at conversation pace you're almost surely not going to be able to breathe through your nose Alone um you're going to have to open up your mouth and you're moving here now depending on how trained you are those three zones kind of blue green and red might be enough if you are highly trained um and you're comfortable or even moderately trained you might add fourth one on top of that I like to call this one infrared and this is kind of your 95% plus so there's a difference and most folks would know this that training at 80 to 85 or even 90% of your heart rate is challenging but manageable when you cross that threshold of 95 96 97 it is really honestly a different thing 97% is not the same as 87% and so I I kind of call that last 5% the infrared zone so with all of these things that are pros and cons okay the global General benefit of the really high-intensity stuff is it creates a tremendous amount of physiological adaptation and a short amount of time right so you're talking minutes to seconds of work this could be things like uh high-intensity intervals this could be maximum allout efforts lots of different stuff there typically 20 seconds to maybe you know like a couple of minutes at most and then you're going to repeat that effort time and and and time in and time again the moderate stuff is a little bit different it requires uh not as much effort not as much pain not as much suffering it's going to be a little more time demanding but it's not quite as as intimidating or hard or mentally difficult to get into for a lot of folks as the red stuff the bottom stuff is the opposite also effective U easier to do you you don't necessarily have to have as diligent uh of a warmup your injury risk is pretty low but you're going to have to go for a longer period of time I think you're going to have a difficult time making a cogent argument that you could stick in any one of those zones for all of your training and optimize your V2 I'm not really sure I know of any research or high level coaches that pick one zone and stay in it entirely in fact I think you're going to run into a lot of problems with that and so most are going to use a combination of these you know three to four areas in various pieces and ideally you're going to find you can maximize the benefits of one of the areas while minimizing consequences and that's how you blend your programed together really quickly as an example the downside of lower intensity stuff is it doesn't create a lot of stimulus for adaptation so it requires a long amount of time okay the more time you spend in a movement pattern the more likely you are to have tissue injuries um you're just simply creating more contact time or more um overall exertion and the biggest reason people don't exercise number one by far is adherence and the number one driver of adherence is time okay so down sides there but if you go to the other end and you go to that infrared stuff well that's great the total workout can be you know under 20 minutes but it really really Taps into your recovery reserves it is way harder to recover from 95% than it is even 90% And so it's not a linear increase in recovery with an increase in intensity it's exponential and so you really have to be concerned with dosing that stuff too much because it it really takes away your ability to recover which means it's going to eliminate your other training so that's really the game we're playing with trying to improve our VO2 max we also have specificity we need to pay attention to so if you want to get better at your V2 Max in a given modality say this is on a rower then you're going to get faster at that by rowing okay we see that very clearly there's excellent research on if you take people and train them on a rower and then have them do a VO2 max test on a bike or running for that matter and you compare that to their V2 Max on the rower they're going to have greater percentage increases in their V2 Max on the rower than they will on the bike or on the treadmill simply because they became more efficient they became more relaxed their motor patterns were better etc etc so specificity is a way to get an extra you know small but important percentage increasing your V2 Max by simply working on that modality so that all being said let's go ahead and dive into this sample program I've got prepared for you now candidly it is a little challenging to follow just hearing my voice or watching this on the video and so please go to the show notes you're going to be able to download this program there's a lot of graphics and explanations and stuff that's going to really help you use these things better but it would be pretty challenging for me to just explain this entire thing to you step by step rep by rep for the entire eight weeks um just verbally here so you have more resources there if you're having a hard time or maybe it's not as crystal clear as you would like it I'm going to do my best though to walk you through it so that you can get some usable information just simply listening or watching the video just for a little bit of context the program I'm about to explain to you was developed to improve V2 Max over an 8-week training phase I'm going to get into the details here in one second but it's important to recognize this is probably best for people who are of a fairly low training age or physical fitness to up to kind of moderate it can absolutely be used for high level and Elite endurance athletes but it's not optimized and designed for that cause to give you an example the program starts off pretty conservative and works your way up if you're highly trained you may want to be a little more aggressive than that as a really easy example if you've listened to the previous episode we did on the heart and cardiac tissue you may remember uh the story of the Norwegian cyclist Oscar senson his PR training program was something like 75% of his time he worked in the 60 to 82% heart rate Peak range right this program is is not going to get you that high that fast so Oscar spent 75% of his time kind of 60 to 82% 20% of his time between 83 to 87% so again that's a differentiation that we're not even going to make in this program that kind of like mid upper range and then only 5% of his time in that 88% plus all right so um we're going to have a similar theme and again I think you will see most programs will do that you're going to use a combination of this low moderate and high intensity stuff you're not going to spend that much time at high intensity you're going to dose it appropriately and you'll probably spend the bulk of your time in lower intensities but the percentages here are really going to be different than the percentages I'm about to explain to you so that's the point I really wanted to make um you may want to start if you're moderately or just new to training at a little bit lower intensity and there's a lot of reasons for that but we'll get into those at another point so let's dive right into it this program is called metamorphosis and it was developed by Joel Jameson Joel has been around for a very long time a legend in the field of conditioning if you will he's got a fantastic book on conditioning you're welcome to pick that up we'll have links to all these things as well as Joel's website he has excellent education and courses and a whole bunch of other training programs he is probably one of the people most relevant in bringing HRV which we've talked about in other episodes to America and making it a big part of it so a Monumental figure in um the world of conditioning and endurance has trained many professional athletes and world champions along the way so I know the program works I've used it plenty of times and I've used a lot of the concepts and I've red Joel's work extensively for many years so I reached out to him and I asked him if he was okay with me sharing this entire program with you and of course Joel's such a great guy he said absolutely so this is Joel Jameson's metamorphosis program and his eight weeks designed to improve your V2 Max it's going to start off with the assumption that for the first month or so we're going to build a foundation the second month we're going to start picking up the pace a little bit uh he's got it developed and designed to be 5 days a week initially and then moving to 6 days a week after that of course if that doesn't work for you feel free to make the modifications that you need whether you can do four days a week or three or anything else so I'm going to give you the specifics in details but please I don't want you thinking that if you can't follow this to a t that you can't use a program at all think about the concepts and adjust accordingly uh for your circumstance so initially what he's going to do for the first month is say all right we're going to alternate between what he calls kind of easy and moderate right so day one is easy day two is moderate day three is easy day four is moderate then day five is easy he's really again leaning heavily on this lower intensity stuff trying to work on cardiac output building stroke volume building the heart's capacity getting you more efficient developing capillaries in your tissue and then honestly getting you efficient in your movement patterns you can use you know again it's movement pattern agnostic so you can cycle with this you can do kettle bells with it you can do whatever you would like to do um to continuously move it's also designed and developed so that people can pretty much jump right into it and get going so again high level thing here everything starts off with a specific warmup you want to make sure that your tissue is getting ready to go so there's a sneaky important thing that Joel does in this initial part of the program you'll see him use a lot of things like very low-level what he calls aerobic petrics okay what that means is you're not jumping up and down on a box you could be doing something like a rudimentary hop a Pogo hop some very lowlevel um jump rope and he's not doing that for the aerobic fitness portion of it he's kind of building into the warmup to save you time but he's really working on what's called tissue tolerance so if you want to be able to put a lot of volume in say running your ankles and foot need to become tolerant to the load of your body weight smashing into the ground the ground reaction forces that happen every time you take a stride or something like four to 5x your own body weight and if you're going to be doing that miles and miles and miles every day or multiple days a week when you previously have done none of it that's going to build up on your tissue and you're going to have lots of soft tissue issues um potentially even joints going Upstream to your knees and hip and back and things like that that kind of develop it's one of the reasons why I say don't just jump in and start adding miles so Joel is sneakily saying hey we're going to have a warm-up here but we're going to start building the tolerance of these joints so that's a component to all of it he'll also use a lot of breath work to get going and to get the nervous system activated or or or ready to go prior to movement so that's really consistent across all the days I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors today's episode is brought to you by eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling heating sleep tracking and more I've had one for years and it is glorious I even put one on the bed in my guest bedroom because as you'll hear me talk about endlessly here on the perform podcast there really is nothing you can do that makes a larger impact on your health and performance than getting tremendous sleep the eight sleep is a GameChanger because I run hot or as my wife calls it I'm a furnace and that's particularly driven by the fact that I often have to do my exercise training in the evenings which is honestly not always great for sleep but this is also the case of many of the athletes that I work with who don't have a choice when they compete and so being able to cool down immediately in bed does wonders for both sleep latency and Sleep Quality eight sleep recently launched 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that's liv.com perform to get 20% off your order so from a big picture perspective here's how the weeks line up you're going to start off with an easier day and then the second day is going to be a moderate day and then you're going to flip flop so day one is easy day two is moderate easy moderate easy right as the weeks go on you're going to slowly start to build time and a little bit of intensity within each one so say on the easy day day one of week one you'll have a 15 to 20 minute workout then maybe the week two that moves up to 22 minutes week three that moves up to 24 minutes maybe you're going to do on your moderate day a tempo run with 10 rounds and then maybe by week two you've gone up to 12 rounds so very small increases as time goes on once you get to week five there'll be a different insert where we'll actually have our hard day or a red day built in there but overall you're seeing that the progression is very slow and conservative and that's how we can make sure we're still challenging adaptations while minimizing our risk of injury and overuse so what I'd like to do is walk you through a couple of the days I'll start off with week one just to give you a sample every day in the week is going to have the same Three core components you'll start off with a highquality warm-up you'll do some sort of conditioning and then some sort of strength piece I'm going to go through a couple of sample days to help you understand but please check out the show notes for the full program as that will be a little bit easier for you to digest so again just to keep this big picture the warm-ups are going to be the same on the easy days and then the same on the modern days for the conditioning piece the easy days are going to be more steady state lower intensity and the moderate days are be going to be what we call Tempo stuff I'll explain all this to you in give you samples in just one second for the strength component the easy days are going to be split up so that day one you'll do some sort of upper body press and pull day two you'll do some sort of lower body press and Pull and then day three will be more hinging and then a combination of upper press and pull for your two moderate days so days two and four your strength work is going to be more core and accessory based okay so that's the big structure of how the week is laid out let me walk you through a couple of days here in detail so you can start seeing what this stuff actually looks like so let's go over day one of week one remember there's three components to every single day warm up endurance and then strength now since this is an endurance-based program you notice we're doing the strength work after the endurance if this was a program designed to optimize strength or muscle growth you might see the inverse order but it's not because we keep the thing that we are the have the most priority on our biggest goal first right so in this case the strength training is really there just to supplement and keep you healthy conditioning is the goal so that's why we're going to do it first so going through this very first day of warm-up we'll start off with 5 minutes of low intensity aerobic movement so you can do whatever you like here jog whatever you want here and then there's three specific warm-up activities the first one are ankle rolls so you're going to do two or three sets of 8 to 10 most likely here we're doing this because we're assuming people are going to run and we're going to want to make sure that those joints are warmed up and activated so that we can move well and not put ourselves into bad positions the second exercise is going to be windshield wipers um this is Imagine standing and Swinging your feet out in front of you left to right if you will um warming up your adductors and um your hips and low back and things like that again two to three sets here of 8 to 10 repetitions and then finally a goblet squat so this is now full range of motion of our hips knee and Ankle I'm holding a kettle bell in front of you in front of your chest you just squatting up and down for the same thing in total here we've invested maybe five minutes we've gone through a full range of motion in most of our joints and we should be activated and ready to go the working conditioning sets here um are going to start off with with calls aerobic pentrix now this is very important here because we're trying to develop tissue tolerance right so this is very lowlevel easy jumps we're not jumping up and down on a box um we're doing Pogo hops we're doing rudimentary hops maybe some jump rope some very light activities for two to three minutes this is not going to be building much conditioning in our cardiovascular system that's not the point it's really to give the joints in this case the ankles the ability to start learning how to develop tolerance to load over time remember earlier when I talked about one major mistake folks make is they just start to hop into volume specifically with running you want to give your tissue the ability to get ready for that you know you've probably heard and seen and been aware of the Achilles snapping epidemic that's happening right now a lot of reasons that that's actually going on but one way to make sure you hedge your bets against that is just to make sure your Achilles is being loaded often so spending two to three minutes hopping up and down prior to activity is a pretty good way to build long-term resilience throughout that joint so that's in large part what that stuff is in there for so then really we get into our work and this particular stuff this is going to be steady state lower intensity stuff you're probably looking at 70% maybe less probably less of whatever exercise you would like again if you are exercise specific you want to get better at cycling get on a bike uh push a sled go up a hill it doesn't really matter as long as you're moving consistently at this intensity and you're going to do this for simply 15 to 20 minutes typically we're looking at heart rates you know 120 beats per minute or lower maybe a little bit higher for some folks maybe a little bit less but it is lower intensity stuff me personally I'm going to be doing this and recommending this entirely nasal only breathing this is going to also then help you work on your respiratory muscle control breathing mechanics as well as it kind of de facto keeps you at a little bit of a lower intensity for most of us from there you'd finish that and go into your strength work so again if you're counting here we've got a 5 minute warm-up we've are now at most 20 22 to 23 minutes in uh to our conditioning so we're you know under 30 minutes total investment at this point and then from there that strength piece is going to be remember it's going to be upper body press pull what's that mean often times and I like to program this way as well rather than picking a specific exercise then you just program Concepts so upper body press this could be a bench press this could be a pushup this could be any number of things if I know a lot about you and I'm privately coaching you we're absolutely going to select exercises with lot of intent but if we're just giving Global recommendations then an upper body you know quote unquote press and pull is great in this example a barbell bench press um for two to three sets of 8 to 10 repetitions remember we're not trying to drive hypertrophy or strength here we're trying to just keep the joints healthy develop a little bit of mitochondria start getting blood flow and getting the tissue able to handle some tolerance of load eventually so we're going to go you know reasonably under control in terms of our tempo maybe 4 seconds up 4 seconds down and then rest you know 60 seconds or so in between repetitions so maybe you would pair that upper body pressing movement with a pull in this case say a lat pull down or a bent row same repetitions same tempo same sets so those would be your two exercises you pair there um if you wanted to do those by themsel or you wanted to suet them meaning you would say do one set of bench press and then one set of lap pull that would save you some time there and you could absolutely do that no problem second two exercises then one of them is going to be a rotational movement so this is a a cable rotation or 9090 trunk rotation something where we're moving in that you know rotational field same thing 8 to 10 reps or so we're not trying to maximize strength we're trying to just get a good feel here and move on to the next one and then finally um again an additional repetition method here for you know pushing and pressing maybe something like a push-up where you do one sets for as many reps as possible that entire thing those four exercises you again should not take you more than 10 or or so minutes and so really we're out of the gym in under 45 minutes which is not that bad ideally before leaving you would finish with some sort of aerobic cool down and then really really ideally and we've I've talked about this plenty of times in my guest series with Dr Andrew huberman on the huberman Lab podcast and many other places but doing some sort of down regulation breathing a box breathing maybe a 4 second inhale 4 second hold 4 second exhale and a 4 second hold or really just any extended exhale hold would be fine as well but investing you know 3 to 6 minutes in that before you walk out the gym would be again the ideal scenario so that would be day one of week one moving on to day two your more moderate day since we want a little bit higher intensity here but remember we're still not in red this is moderate at most we're going to use something more like tempos rather than steady state here's what I mean when I say Tempo various coaches Define this differently so in this particular protocol what he's referring to is still something that is you know easy this is an RP of five or six maybe a heart rate of 70% something like that maybe a little bit lower but instead of just saying hey go jog for 20 minutes straight we're going to play with intensity variations a little bit you may also know this as flick training that's an old Swedish term that's been around since 1930s I think in fact I think flick stands for like fast play or something it's effectively saying all we're going to pick a time let's just say 20 minutes to make it easy and we're going to continuously move for 20 minutes this this is not interval training you're not resting you're not recovering um you're in terms of like taking time off you're going to continually move the whole time but you're going to play with intensities throughout that duration so we're going to go 20 minutes and instead of going uh one pace it it actually kind of think about this like anytime you've gone into a hotel and you've hopped on an elliptical or something like that and they have those various workouts you can play with and you pick the ones that's kind of like the Rolling Hills so you're going to do 20 minutes you're going to kind of go up and down on intensities but you're never going to go totally off that's kind of what a fart lick is all right again very different than a high-intensity interval training where you're going to go say 30 seconds or 90 seconds as hard as you can then you're going to rest entirely or walk you're going to maybe like active rest but you're basically you know at zero and then you're going to repeat that high intensity intervals farli is not that it is continuous movement but a rolling intensity Tempo training is is kind of like that as well at least according to Joel here so in this example he's going to say do something like 10 10 to 15 20 seconds of higher intensity this is not high intensity just higher we're still at an RP of five or six so we're going to pick it up a little bit maybe we shifted into gear two um nasal breathing as fast as we can or as much as we need to but it's not even close to 85% of our heart rate we're not way up there it's just a little bit higher we'll do that for 10 15 maybe 20 seconds and then we're going to back off and go kind of all the way down to active movement the lower intensity still moving for 60 seconds and so what again we really working on here is not just jogging straight or swimming straight it is kind of moving up and down the intensity this is a little bit different than steady state that's why he differentiates the two um we're going to be asking for different physiological demands we're going to go up we're going to come down and we're going to build up a little bit of waste and then recover build up a little bit of waste and then recover uh we're going to get to a touch higher intensity and start dosing that in small portions but not jumping all the way up to really Max intent or Max effort types of things so when we say Tempo that's really what we're talking about so in this particular day you'll do somewhere between 8 to 10 repetitions of a Tempo which would be something like 10 to 15 seconds of higher intensity work again not all the way up coupled with you know 45 to 60 seconds of lower intensity so we're going to be continually moving for something like 8 to 10 minutes but we're just going to kind of play and roll with the intensity a little bit in terms of heart rate zones or perceived exertion for those 10 to 15 seconds of additional work you're probably looking at 70% heart rate maybe an RP of 5 to six so again it's just a little bit higher but it's still a moderate intensity at best protocol our strength work for that day is going to be core and accessory so this could be something as simple as some front and side planks for however long you can hold them maybe two to three rounds each of those and that'll be a wrap and again as always ideally some sort of down regulation breath work before we walk out of the gym in this example Joel likes to use what's called be breathing you can imagine a bear in the wilderness kind of doing the kind of thing so bear breathing is like a 3se second inhale 3se second exhale but you really want to put yourself in that super downregulated mentality that's really the point of be breathing moving on then to day three it's going to be similar to day one still an easy day but just as some sample here instead of doing our conditioning for 15 to 20 minutes we maybe Notch it up to 20 to 25 minutes same basic idea could be the exact same modality that you chose for day one our strength work now is going to be a little bit complimentary so instead of doing our upper body press and pull it's our lower body so now we're looking at exercises like a barbell squat lunges box step UPS cable exercises and things like that so same concept we did before but now we're just exchanging it for the lower body moving on then to day four you'll see that's actually very similar to day two so it's a little bit more of a moderate day with the tempo and the same core and accessory exercises day five then our final day is back and basically a repeat of day one so that's really as complicated as it needs to be as I said we're going to progress all of these things over time as the weeks go on we start adding a small amount of minutes we start adding a few more repetitions per set not much though be very conservative in your approach until you get to week five where we finally start adding in that red day let's Zoom ahead now and see what would actually look like when we integrate some of these harder higher intensity days into it so here we're looking at week five same structure as before we've added an additional day of training so we're going easy day one moderate day two hard day three moderate day four easy day five and then moderate day six so we're still doing two easy days we're doing three moderate days and we've actually sandwiched the hard one with two moderate ones the day-to-day structure is identical though still have the same three components always a high quality warm-up always some conditioning piece and then always some sort of strength piece it looks a little bit different though now right now on the easy day day one we're going to be using a combination of our steady state and our tempos so those are really in the same day and then our strength work is still that upper body press and pull day two the moderate day we're going to be now adding in a little bit more of repeat works we'll talk about what those are in a second and our core and accessories for our strength piece our red day now is still some steady state stuff but we're going to go really into some harder intervals after that and then we'll finish with our strength work which will be our lower body uh press and polar Squat and lunch however you like to think about it the fourth day so again we're back to moderate now just similar to day two here almost identical approach and then the following day is going to be an easier day where we're really in a low intensity steady state stuff followed by some hinging and our upper body press and pull so we're getting a combination there this allows us in if you're paying attention we'll have two days for strength work for lower body two days for upper body and two days for our core and accessory that's why it's all buil together the way it is there the sixth day which again feels new here is really just another moderate day where we're using some tempos we're not doing the strength piece at all there because we've already gotten you know each area of our body twice and a short work just an additional kind of flush and Recovery uh and get us moving final day so let's break some of these days down individually starting off with day one going to feel really similar to what day one of week one was remember this is an easy day we're going to do you know that 20 to 25 minutes of our lower intensity movement and then we're going to add in some tempos on top of that so basically you can say the tempos we talked about earlier that used to be on day two is now just added to day one so it's low 20 25 minutes of our steady state stuff combined with 10 to 12 repetitions of the temple work so we've added a lot of work to this day the strength work is very similar but now we're up to three to four sets so we've added probably an additional set for every exercise and we've moved our repetition range up to maybe sets of 10 to 12 right so small subtle increases here they're going to pay a lot of magnitude over time the exercise selection can stay the same for this entire day that you've been doing the previous four weeks day two our moderate day instead of using tempos we're going to switch and use what are called repeats okay so again these are not high-intensity intervals it's not 30 seconds as hard as you can with rest it's a little bit different Joel calls them repeats so what you're looking at here is RP of you know 6 to 7 or so um heart rates probably closer to that 80 maybe 85% but not completely crazy we're looking for bouts of 30 to 60 seconds of elevated intensity this is certainly Gear 2 in that system maybe even touching into gear three though still probably gear two so nasal only but as fast as you need to ventilate and you're going to do you know 10 or so repetitions of this so 30 to 60 seconds of harder work brought back down still moving though 30 to 60 seconds elevated but what you're seeing happen is rather than just jumping into again Max effort high-intensity interval thing we're slowly getting prepared for that so let's get a little bit higher intensity for a while come back down a little bit higher intensity for a while come back down first week we kept this stuff at you know five to six RP now we're five weeks in so now that is up to 6 to 7 RP so we're just gradually building this stuff over time in this case over the course of a month so all in there we're talking about 15 to 20 minutes total for our conditioning of kind of repeating those 30 to 60c moderate intensity intervals our strength piece very similar the one we talked about in week one but now we're going to add Maybe more complicated core exercises we'll add in some you know trunk rotation stuff we'll do some more advanced movements rather than just sort of planking all the time and we're probably looking at you know two to three sets of 8 to 10 repetitions plus or minus so again slowly building up competency adding more difficult movements um adding in whatever you have available whether you have medicine balls or bands or ropes or weights or whatever you have access to and feel comfortable and confident doing this leaves us to day three which is our first installment of a harder higher intensity workout but please note we're not trying to completely Max ourselves out here we're just starting to get closer to that top end intensity we start off with our highquality warmup and then we move into 15 or 20 minutes or so of a very low intensity steady state so we don't want to leave that component out we're continuing to get those adaptation and and de facto it works as a higher quality warmup and now we're ready to go into what are called Power intervals and so this is going to look something like RP of s to8 I know most of you are probably going to pick eight you're you're going to get all the way up there um heart rates are probably you know 85% or so now uh in that ball park you're definitely going to have to be using your mouth to breathe at some point you might be nasal in mouth out or the opposite but we shouldn't be just mouth only or at that maximum intensity yet we're going to do 5 to 10 seconds of work here and this work is going to be high effort right we're really trying to get after it um at the hardest way we possi can now what keeps this from being like a you know infrared level is the fact that we're doing this for 5 to 10 seconds and so this is your ability to repeat Peak power a bunch of different times I love this style of training I've done it for forever it's always blown my mind why Nobody Does it it's so effective so impactful um especially if you're an athlete or you compete in anything your ability to repeat power outputs over time uh it's just so lost people want to get to conditioning they want to get to fatigue so they either keep their rest was way too short or they do way too many repetitions of this where it ends up just being kind of like moderate effort like kind of hard but not truly hard um it's just a huge mistake so make sure you're going really hard in these short short short bouts keep those bouts very short so you can really get to Bak power recover and then do it again that recovery is going to be 40 to 60 seconds so a really good example that I use all the time is the airault bike and we'll go five to 7 Seconds as hard as we possibly can and then rest for a minute that's what we're talking about here maximal effort for 5 to 7 Seconds it feels like nothing resting all the way upwards of a minute if you want to you know press it a little bit higher to like 10 seconds of work and 40 seconds of rest that's fine but we want to be anywhere between like a 1 to 4 to up to 1 to 12 work to rest ratio so what that means is for every 1 second of work we have up anywhere between five to 12 times the amount of rest so a 5-second work out with 60 seconds of rest you can do the math there on that ratio 10 seconds of work 40 seconds of rest that's a one to four ratio right but we want to go all the way up there one: one like 30 seconds on 30 seconds off are fine but they're just fundamentally training something different than what we're trying to get after here and that is your again repeated Peak power so in this first day of the truly High effort stuff we're just going to repeat that for 8 to 10 repetitions so again to really be clear here say you do 5 Seconds of allout work on the assault bike you rest for a minute you do 10 rounds of that and you're good as you build up your abilities over time you will increase that number and so instead of 10 repetitions you'll go to 15 repetitions eventually or all the way up to 20 or even more if you'd like you could start extending the work time so go from 5 Seconds to 10 seconds you could start reducing the the rest so going from 60 to 40 but please please please please keep in mind simply reducing rest and and making it feel harder is not always making it better if we're compromising our ability to produce power in this case we've undercut what we're attempting value there but it's a different thing right so just adding weight just making things harder just reducing rest is not necessarily always the best approach for progression so you may be thinking to yourself well that's not a hard day well a couple things we haven't done our strength work yet and remember it's just our first touch at this here right we're going to have more stuff built in later so our strength work in this day is just three exercises in this case a squat a lunge and something for our core you could do a super set with all these if you'd like and you're really going to be trying to keep your resting lels fairly low 60 seconds at most three to four sets or an 8 to 12 repetitions or so per set and as always always always we finish that up with some sort of down regulation work in this case probably worth it to do some sort of phys physical unwinding so some sort of stretching or Mobility that could be combined with your breath work and down regulation but you want to bring the pieces back out that you've sort of condensed with the higher intensity work I also need to remind some of you while you're just raring to go here you had a moderate day before that you're about to have another moderate day right after this and so hard is really the context of the entire week we're working out six days that week we're doing a decent amount of work every single day this is going to accumulate over time another another major mistake that uh we've seen in in the athletes we've worked with as well as younger coaches that I've mentored is really not appreciating what's going to happen over the course of the week and then over the course of those weeks stacking up it's not necessarily just about the individual workout it is really the thought and progression over the next week to months that matters and so in this particular case we've added an extra day we've added repetitions we've added sets and now we're adding a whole bunch of higher intensity stuff that we haven't done yet this is a big difference than week four and it's even a big difference than week three and so keep our eye on the prize of total volume number we'll always stick with for the most part is you don't want to add more than about 10% volume or intensity per week and so what that really means is a couple of extra sets or a couple of extra even repetitions on every workout multiplied by five days gets that number to 10% really really really quickly right so your fatigue over the week will start to build up this may not seem like a lot of high-intensity or nearly enough that you want from some of you folks out there but appreciate what's happening on the other days of the week and so what you don't want to do is train harder than recommended on this day and have that compromise the next moderate day's workout or even the one following that so appreciate the process there is extensive science behind this and a lot of coaching experience um the program will work you will get enough high-intensity stuff in there and we'll get you everything that you want moving us all the way to the end week8 is the hardest in terms of both duration and intensity so it's the most volume you'll do at the highest heart rate or effort however you're monitoring it and that's the same structure as we just walked through in weeks five but just slightly more advanced and that's because on the fifth day which is traditionally an easy day you're going to actually do your test so how do we know if your program worked well in this case if you have access to a metabolic cart and you've done a vehic to Max tests before and you want to test it after this would be a day to do it if not you can simply do any number of sub maximum tests the great one one we talk about all the time is a Cooper's 12-minute test so you're effectively going to take 12 minutes on a track run as far as you possibly can in that 12 minutes and then you're going to enter that distance in and that will give you a prediction of your VO2 maxus it's an easy way uh to get a pretty good scientifically validated estimate of your vi2 max so if you wanted to do a little bit of pre- and post testing uh you could actually do it that way and and validate whether or not the program worked for you so once again if you want more information about this program you can check out the show notes as well as Joel's website it's called 8weeks out.com and they've got a bunch of different programs on there for all kinds of different scenarios and outcome so check out those resources for more information I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors today's episode is brought to you by ag1 ag1 is a foundational nutrition greens supplement and what's that mean it means that ag1 provides a comprehensive variety of vitamins minerals probiotics prebiotics and adaptogens in an easy to drink greens powder getting your nutritional right is hard for many people I certainly know that I have clients who really struggle for whatever reason to get the proper nutrients from whole food sources now ag1 is not a replacement for eating high quality Whole Foods but it is a great foundational supplement for filling in the gaps or needed I've also personally found that with many of my clients ag1 helps move them just in the right direction for eating more high quality foods because it helps them with Cravings digestion and many other benefits I especially personally like taking ag1 when I'm on vacation or traveling because it helps me just sort of stay on track with my nutrition I know that missing a few days of getting the proper vitamins and minerals and other micronutrients is not a big deal at all that's not really how those things work but for me again I just like knowing that I'm kind of staying somewhat on track when I'm definitely not making the best nutrition and food choices of my life if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 plus K2 again that's drink a1.com perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 plus K2 so let's move on and talk about our training for our first marathon program now a little bit of a backstory here this is called faster in 50 because it was designed to get you to a marathon in 50 days days really important though and actually you could say the same for the previous program just because that was 8 weeks long and this one's 50 days long they don't necessarily have to be that there are two big components of faster and 50 which we'll talk about in a second and they're broken up as phase one is 25 days and phase two is 25 days 50 in total but they could be much longer so if you're not in the same position that this individual was in uh for 25 days and you need longer for that foundational piece make that foundational piece 50 days make it 150 days make the second piece longer it's absolutely fine all these programs are meant to get to a certain place so if you're not there as fast as this individual was or you're starting off in a different spot which almost surely is the case please want to make sure you understand this does not have to be done in just 50 days it also definitely does not have to be done in 50 consecutive days right so we can extend this thing out um to be meeting you where you're at and your needs for improving your Marathon now as we take a quick step back when we look at success in a marathon there's three specific components we just got done talking about a program designed to improve your V2 Max but that's only one of the three major predictives of success in a marathon the other two are your lactate threshold and then your movement efficiency okay now we also have to think about whether you're trying to maximize your performance in a marathon or simply finish it those are also very different goals right many of us in this case this program was designed for somebody running their very first marathon ever it's just trying to accomplish all 26.2 miles without having to fail or stop or try again if you can already do that and you're highly successful say you're already running a three-hour marathon and you're trying to get a faster that really is a different approach okay um so really want to just walk you through this program of faster and 50 again designed to help people go from zero to their first ever marathon in 50 days as we've done before you can have direct access to this full program there'll be links to this in our show notes as well as the actual program and you can go check it out faster and 50 was developed by two individuals Mark Bell and Dan Garner and so the backstory here is Mark Bell if you don't know him is a lifelong powerlifter and bodybuilder he has been training for probably 30 years he's competed in numerous powerlifting events and competitions and bodybuilding events he is outward about his long use of I abolic steroids and many other agents but really what's interesting about this is you have an individual who's you know probably 6 feet tall or so has weighed certainly 300 lb or more and has spent his lifetime either maximizing muscle growth or strength anything in the realm of conditioning was completely off the table M Mark was very anti- running very anti- conditioning for a long part and if he did do it it was higher repetition range lifting no running that I know of really before he started this certainly very minimal um conditioning at all and so for whatever reason Mark decided he wanted to take up running so he had done this for a while I can't remember how long maybe uh four or five months or something like that and then decided because he's Mark Bell that he wanted to go from just running to running a marathon and that first marathon needed to be Boston and so this is the actual program Mark used to run his first ever Marathon at probably 230 lbs so what he did is realized he couldn't handle that himself so he reached out out to a guy named Dan Garner who's a human performance expert and he asked him to build him a comprehensive program to run his first ever Marathon this included his nutrition his supplementation his recovery sleep lifting running and all of that it's all in that free program I'm not going to go into the details of all the supplements and nutrition and everything else right now so we're just going to focus on what the training program looked like for those final 50 days again do want to reiterate he didn't start at zero here he was already running for a while he was somewhat fit this is kind of like their last final push and so if you're literally starting from nothing you may want to take this first phase which for Mark was only 25 days and that itself might need to be 50 days or 60 days or even 150 days for you before you're ready to move on to the second phase so caveat side let's jump into what faster and 50 looks like the first thing to pay attention to here is just like in the previous program there is a dedicated and specific warmup for each day so in this case there's an upper body lift a lower body lift and then of course you're running and so you can see the full details in the program if you choose to check that out but just really quickly the upper body warmup is going to be things like uh cat camel exercises bird dogs push-ups jumping jacks uh yws and things like that same idea usually one to three sets 8 to 10 repetitions per exercise so a full body full joint upper body dedicated warm-up for the lower body it's a similar approach but now you're talking about about things like mountain climbers and fire hydrant and walking lunges and single leg hip thrusts and things like that same kind of repetition ideas um really what we're getting at is a combination of what's called unilateral so this is one of the two joints moving while the other one rests as well as bilateral so both moving at the same time easy example of this a goblet squat is bilateral both legs where a step up is unilateral so somewhere in your warmup you want a combination of these things and you want pressing and pulling and you can want to ask the joint to kind of do everything that it's supposed to do in its normal range of the motion the running warmup is going to be a combination of very low intensity aerobic exercise so skipping jogging cycling stuff like that maybe some full body goblet squats or kak squats some skips and hops some some low-level Plyometrics and really other things that you would consider to just be General basic calisthetics as I mentioned the program is built into two unique phases the very first one is really meant to build your foundation it's it's the tissue tolerance we talked about earlier it's General conditioning it's work capacity and it's getting you physically prepared to handle the training necessary to run the marathon the second phase is really specific Marathon prep so you're going to start getting understanding of your race Pace how do you know if you're going too fast or too slow how is that stuff feeling you're going to work on your fueling and Recovery what should you be eating or drinking at what time what upsets your stomach what makes you feel great and all those other things that go into actually running a marathon that are not just your physical training program so those other components often get forgotten and left about in fact I'll never forget as a doctoral student I I was sitting in my cubicle and another one of the students was getting ready for I think it was his first marathon actually if not his first it was second or something like that and he was talking about and strategizing over what he was going to use for his fuel during the race and he came up with this plan and all these you know young scientists are talking about the research and what should be taken and what amounts and all that stuff and I was like oh that's really cool and he was pretty close I think he was maybe a month out and I asked I'm like well awesome what are you doing training right now and he looked at me blankly he's like wow I just run I was like wait wait so like you're going to spend all this time developing an optimal training and fueling strategy but you're not even going to practice it and just like the look on his face as he stared and realized like oh my gosh like how did I forget that part I'll never forget it was quite amusing so the point I'm getting at here is you want to absolutely try every component uh that you're going to use your warmup your cool down all this stuff should be tried prior to the competition and so this last month is really about practicing the race in all of its components so what's the structure look like of these different phases let's start off with phase one that Foundation it's broken up into seven days seventh day by the way is optional e either recovery run or totally off so very similar to the VO2 max program day one is going to be an upper body lift combined with interval running and this is also where definitions matter they don't necessarily Define intervals and Tempo and things like that the same as the previous one so I'll I'll clarify what they mean by that so again day one is an upper body lift combined with an interval training day two is a lower body lift plus Temple running and then day three is more that classic flick running style day four is the second upper body lift so very similar two days for upper body two days for lower body little bit of a different workout out here so upper body the second one as well as a recovery run day five is lower body lift as well as a cross trainining and I'll explain what that is and then day six is a long slow run now remember this is designed specifically for a marathon it's not for v2 Max and so you'll see some subtle differences there that matter but really conceptually they're doing the same thing a little bit of lifting running in different zones some higher intensity stuff some lower intensity stuff in this case the goal is to run for 26 straight miles so you have to practice running for longer distances at some point that's not a requirement though it can work but it's not a requirement to improving your V2 Max so slight differences here because we're actually after a different Target but a lot of the same Concepts the second phase is a little bit different so day one is now a total body lift plus intervals day two is a longer fart lick strategy day three a total body lift again plus a Temple Run day four is a shorter higher intensity fart lick and then day five and six are longer slower runs and then finally again day seven is off now you notice they've cut the lifting in half and they've extended the long runs they've doubled those in fact and they've actually doubled the farlex and this makes a ton of sense you're trying to run a marathon lifting is important but running is more important and so they' they've doubled down on that and we've said we instead of having upper body days and lower body days will just combine to have total body days so each muscle is still getting two per week but we've deemphasized that because we need to over uh again continue to emphasize actual running we need to practice running long distances slow and we need to practice running distances fast both of those are going to be required to successfully complete your Marathon cool now you got the big picture let's go in and cover a couple of specific samples again you're welcome to download the entire program completely free so I can't go through all of it but I I will give you some examples uh to make sure these things make sense and clarify some of the terminology so let's just go into day one of that first phase remember this is an upper body lift very similar rather than programming the specific exercise it's done by concept and so you're going to have a horizontal press you're going to have a unilateral horizontal press on top of that and so this would be something like a bench press with a then single armed dumbbell press something like that now you're talking three sets or so for five repetitions plus or minus we're trying to go a little bit heavy uh in this case not all the way though what we're trying to work on is strength so we need that we're going to get endurance and muscular endurance along duration endurance from our running and so what we're trying to get with our lifting is the stuff we can't get all right so we're trying to get a little bit more strength development here not maximal strength we're not competing in powerlifting or weightlifting but we are trying to get closer to that end of the spectrum so three sets of five here for your horizontal press and three sets of eight or so per side for your L unilateral press you then follow that up with a Vertical Press so something overhead and then basically do the same thing for the pulling so you do your three pressing exercises horizontal bilateral horizontal unilateral and then vertical and then you combine that with horizontal pulling unilateral horizontal pulling and then the same thing in this case they chose a medial delt so same basic idea here upper body is now taken care of after this we're going to go into our our running exercise now you notice they've chosen to lift first and then run after that but the upper body lift is not going to interfere with our running really whatsoever and so the running here is going to be three one M runs with a 3 minute walk in between also keep in mind you're talking about an individual here who's certainly over 230 PBS I don't remember exactly he was but maybe a little bit more so they're going to have to approach this running and distance stuff a lot differently than if somebody was 160 or 70 PBS that's just a lot more mass on the joints and so if you're wondering as this program evolves why certain things are done this way say you have more experience with running or coaching um this this is the large component of it making sure more get to the race healthy and then of course complete the 26 miles but that's a little bit different from somebody who's you know historically been 270 to over 300 lbs for most of his life even though he's lighter now we're still a pretty large individual here and a typically large for a marathon so nonetheless the endurance training like I said it is three one M runs with a three minute rest in between so you would run a mile rest for 3 minutes and then repeat that so you're going to accumulate three total miles of running um you're not going to do these at Fast Pace at all you're probably nasal breathing or close um but you're not walking either this is a fast Jog and you want to think of this as more of like seven to maybe eight out of 10 in terms of perceived speed so you're moving here you're going to be fatigued you're not going to be having an easy light jog here we're trying to accumulate High work some rest and get a lot of volume in without having to beat up the joints too much so you'll do that those three one mile repeats and then you'll do the same thing but instead of being a mile you'll do a half mile so three half mile repeats with 90 seconds of rest in between still same effort up there so if we do that we've accumulated 4 and a half total miles of running which is actually pretty good so you think about this for somebody um at the first phase here 4 and a half total miles accumulated but you're able to do that at a pretty high Pace um generate a lot of endurance in a lot of different areas while also getting some miles in day two is the lower body lift combined with what's called Tempo now in this case again Tempo is means a different thing than what we talked about earlier the lower body lift follows a very similar structure three sets of five for the most part you're going to do some unilateral stuff and some bilateral stuff some sort of squat variations some sort of lateral lunge or lateral movement variations some sort of hinging and some sort of carry and then this case some sort of anterior rotation of the core so your core tends to rotate and you're going to stop that from happening lots of different examples of that and your endurance work is going to be a 30 minute tempo run so this is going to be like steady jog Pace if you will I think seven out of 10 um and what you're trying to kind of get used to is is what that marathon pace is is actually going to be um so if if you know your half marathon time you can actually use that pace for these temple runs but you're you're kind of just accumulating race Pace volume if you come from an endurance racing background this is probably what you what you associate with temple runs it's kind of like race Pace a lot of time um but for a shorter duration so that would be our endurance piece for day two day three is that flick run I've already explained what that means but as a reminder it's kind of that cyclic variation of intensities that are not true off period so it's going to be 45 consecutive minutes and within that you've got nine opportunities to cycle up for one minute but you can do those whenever you'd like so it doesn't necessarily matter if you go kind of 3 minutes at an easier pace and then one minute higher and time it out it doesn't really matter you can kind of feel this out you just need to accumulate nine of those one minute bursts before that 45 minutes is complete during those one minute bursts you're going to go hard this is kind of like nine out of 10 you want to push the pace here and then you're going to slow back down during that recovery it's not walk it's not uh off it is still back to kind of your slow jog your slow movement but you're going to cycle those things up and down uh that kind of recovery Pace think of that is like five or six out of 10 day four is another upper body lift similar to the first lift as well as a 30 minute recovery run this is really as low and slow as you need it to be you're just really trying to build a little more tissue tolerance here as well as some general physiological recovery almost always we're going to want this to be nasal only to keep you you nice and slow we just want to get out and move a little bit day five is our second lower body lift combined with a 30 minutes of what Dan calls cross training this is really just active play it is could be done on multiple different things so a lot of times you'll do five minutes on a rower five minutes on a treadmill five minutes on a bike you may do something like play basketball or do light Jiu-Jitsu drilling or whatever is the case you're not again really trying to stimulate adaptation here it's most used for recovery and pacing and blood flow you want to accumulate 30 total minutes but you just want to be moving at a very light intensity ideally it's not just running you're going to be putting in a lot of miles uh on that specific movement pattern so if you can open up the system a little bit more and choose some other movement patterns is probably a good thing to do in this case day six is when you do your long slow run you want to keep these at an intensity of something like six out of 10 on your rpu scale and you're going to slowly increase the miles over time so you get a sense you might start off with like six miles week one and then week two move up to 8 Miles and then a 10 and then a 12 or something like that by week four so pretty straightforward here you're going to go out go easy but you need to just accumulate the ability to run for that many consecutive miles day seven our final day is optional SL recovery if you want to go do 20 or 30 minutes of very light movement you can you're also welcome to skip that I would though recommend as Dan does here to pick at least what we typically call recovery accelerators I'd like to have at least two or three of these this could be anything from a massage to Thermal so cold or hot treatment um breath work sessions um movement acupuncture something like that that's going to really aid in recovery so typically we'll pick at least again two to three things from that list could be very short but that's going to get you set up for the next day of work and really the following week in general as you cruise through weeks one to 4 you're going to see slight increases of intensity and variation throughout all the days you can see all that detail in the program but really as we get into week five or our second phase things do change I talked a little bit earlier about how the structure changes in general so you can refer back to that or look at the PDF if you're actually looking at it right now um so to walk you through really quickly what we're looking like here so now for example on day one of our new phase our endurance training instead of looking like those three one M repeats like we had in our first phase plus the half mile repeats remember we totaled 4 and a half miles there now our endurance training is something like 10 3/4 of a mile repeats with 3 minutes rest in between right so we're doing these as fast as possible but not all outpaced this is nine out of 10 and so we've done a similar structure but we've really added it instead of going a mile and a half a mile we're really at 3/4 of a mile and we're doing a lot of them 10 of them is going to accumulate a lot of work day two's flick run has gone from 45 5 minutes all the way up to 90 minutes and so we've added a bunch of more work there and so again you can really see the concept as we're just slowly building these things over time we've got our lifts in there we've got our Tempo runs those have now gone up to 45 minutes where they were previously 30 minutes and we're just again slowly accumulating volume over time we've got our now two additional days so in this phase day five and day six are for long runs day five for the first week of this phase is going to be at 8 Miles then the next week we'll progress up to 10 miles and then really we'll kind of back off from there and keep it at that 8 mile range or so we're really trying to move volume here but this is not the biggest day because on day six we're going to be at 14 miles for week one 16 miles for week two 20 miles for week three and then really week four will be all the way up to 24 miles this is basically Marathon practice okay those additional 2.2 miles really do matter on race day trust me anyone who's done a marathon will tell you yeah doesn't sound like a lot those last 2.2 miles are a bunch so it's not a full Marathon but we've walked oursel up this hill slowly enough to where we should be able to handle that you're going to be tired and fatigued but it shouldn't completely break you um smash your toes or put you in really big injury risk or anything like that from running those 24 miles from here we've gotten all the way up to our final week and so let me walk you through what those seven days look like or what we'll call peak week with a little bit of a taper and Marathon prep day one is going to be be that phase two total body lift plus a very short 15 minute or so recovery run day two another total body lift with a short recovery run and really we're not trying to proess adaptation here we're just trying to keep the system activated keep blood flowing keep feeling really good and start tapering and optimizing for performance day three is an easy F mile run um start out at a really easy Pace here and then really only target your race pace for the final 2 miles so you just want to um kind of kind of feel it right this is like a golfer who goes out and just hits a couple of shots to remember what those feel like but you're not going to spend hours on the Range really getting all the way up to maximum speed so five miles in total you're kind of just moving and cruising for the first three feel out that race pace for two miles and then shut her down day four isn't completely off as well as maybe a couple of those recovery strategies as day five is these often tend to be travel days too if you're going to the event and get hotel or something like that but you're really now just maximizing recovery day six or what it was actually the day before the marathon you might want to do like a 15-minute recovery run get loose stretch out a little bit but not excessively and then really really recover because day seven you wake up and you run your first ever Marathon as I said this was the actual program Mark used he did run the Boston Marathon he did complete it in a time of six hours and according to mark it took him six hours to run the marathon and only 6 hours to recover which is sort of funny but if you've actually ever run a marathon you realize that's actually really fast he actually told me personally the next day he felt great wasn't even sore uh and then ran the next day which is also very weird and so 6 hours is not a fast time for a marathon in fact it's like close to the range where they'll cut you off and say you can't go anymore but that wasn't the point here he's not trying to run the fastest marathon he could he just wanted to run one and complete it and so I think the program is clearly a success if that's something you're interested in doing just wanting to accomplish a task like that I have no doubts that the program would work for you as well it's also worth highlighting that while Mark ran the marathon at what some might call a little bit of a slower Pace I think it came out to be about a 14-minute mile or so that doesn't mean you can't use this exact program and run as fast as you want for the most part what's actually going to determine your time is going to come down to in large part what Paces you're able to manage across this entire program particularly the pace you can handle during your Tempo runs so while Mark used it to run his first ever marathon and run at a pace that was effective and economical for him you can use this to run as fast or slow as you'd like to wrap up I know we covered a lot of ground here so please do check out these programs in the show notes if you want to see them or actually follow them yourself please also check out the people Dan Garner Mark Bell and Joel Jameson who are kind enough to let me share with the world for free their full training programs so check out their material as well I also wanted to mention a resource I have found particularly helpful over my career is a book called unbreakable Runner it is a phenomenal place to learn more about training specifically for running andurs without getting hurt I hope you enjoyed this episode it's a little bit different than normal and something we're going to consider doing more often if this is something that you appreciate so please do let us know if this is something You' like us to try again thank you for joining for today's episode our goal is to share exciting scientific Insight that helps you perform at your absolute best if the show resonates with you and you want to help ensure this information remains free and accessible to anyone in the world there are a few ways that you can support first you can subscribe to the show on YouTube Spotify and apple and on Apple and Spotify you can leave up to a five-star review given that we're a new podcast subscribing and leaving a review really does help us a lot second please check out our sponsors the show would not exist without them and they really are exceptional products and services and then finally you can share today's episode with a friend who you think would enjoy it if you have any content questions or suggestions please put those in the comment section on YouTube I really do try to read these and see what you have to say I use my Instagram and Twitter also exclusively for scientific communication so those are great places to follow along for more learning my handle is Dr Andy Galpin on both platforms thank you for listening and never forget in the famous words of Bill Bowerman if you have a body you're an athlete