Transcript for:
Endurance Training Strategies in CrossFit

go through the Open Line man I was really bad at that you know endurance test the same thing in quarterfinals a shuttle run exactly right yeah that's the problem that's holding them back is not necessarily it is endurance but that's not the first thing that needs to be fit you've got your heart and your lungs that's your cardiovascular system your cardio respiratory whatever you want to call it and then you have muscular endurance what about my execution what if I'm Mr goes out hot guy does that impact the results it's interesting good question let's let's flesh this out a little bit yeah and what I'm saying is you can do that for 10 years right and it's still not going to get any better you might get a little bit faster but it's still not going to get better and then there's a group of people that are like oh yeah I've got great endurance but then you run some testing and you're like wait you have great endurance and what you know people say yeah I love dude I knew uh or or the they say I'm like who's they you know people say they really miss and really have enjoyed are very educational style episodes who says that Lobby double dog I'm asking who says that well let me be double dog Dern first I'll be double dog durned if this isn't one of those I'll clip this in at the front of this podcast too so if you're hearing it there this is also at the end but let's do something different and for this episode as you listen to it come up with some questions put them down in the comments and let's come back and do an answer everyone's questions about this episode specifically episode I love that I like that idea we have Mr Kyle Ruth on he's the head of our education here at training Think Tank and we're talking about why you're not enduring and what to do about it I think most people get through a season this season in particular you go through the open like man I was really bad at that you know endurance test the same thing in quarterfinals a shuttle run yeah right yeah yeah if you're not enduring you got done with the shuttle run test kind of like I was what is going on yeah I thought I was fit but apparently no here's a question Leonard the flow hey when you get your individual clients right not the people in compete when you get your individual clients you're doing your consult when they're talking to you about their Fitness do most people are they tuned into this do they most people say hey I'm not very enduring is that something you hear a lot they so it's it's just a good question let's let's flesh this out a little bit yeah it's interesting so there are definitely people who know that they are or are not enduring relative to CrossFit so they know like you know when it's simple movements like double unders and burpees and box jumps and Rowing and shuttle runs and things like that I crush the workout or those absolutely demolish me like there are a subset of people who know that and then there's a group of people that are like oh yeah I've got great endurance but then you run some testing and you're like wait you have great endurance and what shots fired what was it because people I mean that begs the question what's endurance and how are you defining it that's a good question yeah I think that is crushing it today Chris on fire okay so I look at endurance as a two-part system all right you've got your heart and your lungs that's your cardiovascular system or your cardio respiratory whatever you want to call it and then you have muscular endurance so like if I'm gonna go out and run as an example my heart and lungs are going to pick up ox they're going to push it into my muscles my muscles are doing the actual work so I could be someone who has really good cardio respiratory endurance but really bad what we call local muscular endurance CrossFit calls it stamina so what happens to that person on a run so they start running and let's say they hit a hill and they hit the hill and they're breathing fine their heart rate's fine but their legs become absolute bricks and they basically people know people are listening and like that's me they come to a grinding halt in the middle of the run now I'm not saying they're stopping but their legs blow up right okay so that is a good example of someone who would have high cardio respiratory cardiovascular endurance and low stamina or low muscular endurance the flip side of that where I think a lot of you know a lot of crossfitters fall in and people you know people that are bodybuilders and things like that they tend to have good stamina because the way that they train they build up a lot of local muscular endurance but haven't spent a lot of time building that cardiorespiratory that cardiovascular system yeah and so when they're running Everything feels like they're basically either suffocating and they can't breathe or their heart rate just jacks through the roof and you know they're running up the hill and they're like doubled over holding onto their chest basically having that like yeah it feels like they're running an elevation when they're at sea level what are you Brandon at this point now you know I actually don't know I was thinking about that when you're talking like my training Has Changed by the way for everyone that's that's listening like I just am not training at a high level anymore you know three kids at home focused on coaching everyone listening to them not maybe at just like a basically and you can run still too yeah but I'm I'm finding limitations that I didn't used to find and I think it's just because I'm under trained so that definitely is the case I always have been limited by you're not going to believe this but by the local endurance I have always felt really confident going into certain workouts but then always limited by a certain bottleneck grip endurance you know maybe it's lat endurance or leg Endurance on a bike workout those kind of things so I think I have the exact opposite problem or at least had as I've gotten deeper into Crossroad become more balanced where now it's test dependent what I'm going to feel right but for the longest time everything just felt like I was suffocating like every workout that I would do I'd be like oh man a coach whether it was Max or Adam whoever's coaching me at the time would be like well what was the bottleneck for you what was the limiter I was like my breathing I couldn't breathe every you know I got five minutes in the workout I felt like I couldn't breathe so for me it really was most likely like a cardio respiratory so what so what percentage of beginners to intermediates that y'all have coached throughout y'all's 10 12 years are cardiovascular versus local stamina or muscular endurance yeah it's it's got to be pretty close to 50 50 and I think most of it has to do with your training background so if you're someone who you know your your CrossFit Journey was you started out you know you ran in high school you did you know cross-country and track uh maybe you played soccer and then you went and maybe you played even a little bit of college soccer and then afterward you did you dabbled in some 5Ks and maybe a half marathon here or there so you have a you know pretty extensive endurance background you've done long slow endurance work you've spent time running intervals on you know the soccer field and things like that those type of people tend to have amazing cardio respiratory cardiovascular systems but they often aren't strong enough or have the local muscular endurance to be able to move you know 95 pound overhead squats or 135 pound over head squats for men and women so that's where they tend to struggle but then you have the people who played college football or a Sprint swimmer or you know they come from from the other side and they have done a lot of muscular endurance work they've done a lot of strength work and and just by the nature of the sports that they've played have done a lot of that but have done hardly any cardiovascular training like real sustained longer endurance work and as a result they definitely tend to fall on the high stamina low cardiorespiratory endurance totally now I want to kind of um have a third way here because this is what I've seen happen in the sport people come in and the first conversation I have is that they're not enduring but the problem that's holding them back is not necessarily it is endurance but that's not the first thing that needs to be fixed it's actually the skills in the sport that are holding them back so order of operation the order of operation yeah so I just want to have that as like a caveat with everything that we talk about today yes it would be wonderful if you could crush all the skills you're great at you know you have great movement efficiency with muscle ups and Toes the bar and chest of bar and all those things and then you just need to work on your endurance but a lot of these it's more complicated than just building your endurance if someone doesn't have good ring muscle ups or good handstand push-ups and so they get into workouts and they're breathing really hard yes but that's because they're holding their breath the entire time they're doing handstand push-ups because they have bad shoulder positions you know there's an easy way to think about this uh using rowing as an example okay right so if you think about the guy who's on the rower who he has the most atrocious rowing mechanics that you've ever seen right the rounded back at the front they're basically just using all arms their legs are barely doing anything like this of a workout yes but everyone so if if you're at your gym you know there's got to be some person there that like you watch the road yeah Ricky the rower you're watching them you're like man I think I could help them and you know you have limited experience on the rower so like that person may be able to to they may actually have amazing endurance but they can't express it on the road because their technique is so bad that person might be like close to world class 5K Runner but you put them on a rower and because their mechanics are so atrocious they can barely get the rower under two minutes for a 5k right so it's like they have this massive engine what we would call an engine but they have no ability to express it and that is the the foundation of performance of using your engine in a sport and Crossfit just happens to have like and so there is this this underlying base of technical proficiency that's absolutely required for you to be good at expressing your engine in the sport regardless of what your physiological limiter is whether it's your stamina limiting or your endurance limiting that's the most basic yeah and I think that that's also the way you have to look at this is we're going to talk about endurance today but if you're like the person oh I can't do muscle ups well or I don't have good technique you know this is even a better example you talk about the rower but maybe they have really good technique running so if they were to do a VO2 test on just running versus rowing versus biking there may be different limitations that come up someone that gets on an Echo Bike for the first time their legs are burning really bad because they have bad technique on it or they're using their arms more than their legs vice versa whatever skier you can't put the same amount of power depends on what their weight is all of those things there's so many variables here so we're talking about this overarching theme of endurance but just keep in mind when you're in a sport like this where there are so many different movements that you have to be good at you got to kind of make sure that you're touching all of these pieces so what's our starting point right so we have someone who comes to us and they you know we test them and it's very clear that they're cardiovascularly limited what's the starting point for someone for you when you get to that point yeah well let's I think let's talk about the problem album first like how does someone identify that without a coach because again good point the person comes to us and they may say that they aren't enduring or they are enduring and over the last three years what they've done is they've gone into class and just keep hitting hardback con after hard metcon after hard metcon and there is a point where you probably can get better at that particular movement or the the combination of movements that is uh a crossfit workout they got better at all the benchmarks but they still feel like they're missing something there's a there's a limiting factor when it's just doing hard CrossFit all the time in other words your ceiling can only go so high so maybe you're down here and you slowly kind of reach up to your ceiling and then you get there but you're still going to hit that ceiling at some point and then that's when they usually come to us so that's the first thing I think people always rush into God that's the truth that's usually when they come to us and that's a good thing right because now we can actually raise that ceiling like oh you're you're not finished like this isn't the end of the road for you you haven't tapped your potential yeah the story is someone gets to you know they've they've improved in the open every single year to the point that now they're just outside the cut line qualifying for whether it's quarters or qualifying for semi-finals or whatever it might be they're like man I've tried everything that I know to get here right so that's usually where people start with us so really the the easiest way for you to assess you know where you might be what your limiter might be would be to test a variety of Crossfit workouts right and and just take note isn't that black and white by the way so we presented these two options but is there so is there a lot of gray area there or it's absolutely test dependent right so when you when you come down to testing this is why I say you have to test a variety of Crossfit workouts right you can't just get on the rower and test a 5K row and be like oh well all I felt was my heart rate Spike and I felt limited by my breathing so I'm cardiovascularly limited right right but what happens when you're doing say a 15 minute amp rap of row Thruster now are you entirely limited by your heart rate and breathing or someone like you might have been more limited by like local fatigue in the legs from the Thruster or pressing out the Thruster so in this case we're looking more often than not I'm cardio or more often than not I'm yes across across the board do I tend to be more cardiovascular limited or do I tend to be more locally limited and it's going to be test dependent and that's why it requires you to test a variety of different things rather than just one now if you're someone who has you know six or seven years of experience in the sport you probably are going to start to have a pretty good sense of what your your you know where you might need to focus your attention because at this point you know you've done seven opens you know which ones you tend to perform well in it's like well if it's got squatting my legs are going to blow up for sure well that tells you right there you got to work on your your leg stamina no matter what right but then you're like but also when I was in the shuttle workout my you know cardio my cardiovascular system was blowing up okay cool well we also have to work on you know building some cardiovascular endurance on the other side so I think that's kind of where where my starting process is starts with a conversation then some varied testing or at least looking at results from the past year or past years and asking people about what do you feel you know you can ask yourself that right now when you think back to all the open and quarters workouts that you've done what did you feel what did you feel like held you back well whatever that thing that really sticks out to you the most is that's probably a good starting Place yeah I also like to actually have them send me videos so that I can watch them in the workout um this is not necessarily scientific but it allows me to be able to see how they're moving which is you know the eye test is actually pretty powerful in that if you could see right away if someone has really bad let's say Thruster technique they're doing a workout with throwing in thrusters which Kyle alluded to if someone has really bad positions an easy fix it's not going to improve their endurance right but I can improve their positions to allow them to express endurance better when we start training it by cleaning up a front rack position or their squatting position wow they have really tight ankles or hips so in that process that's why I said like I'm thinking about a lot of things I'm thinking about movement efficiency I'm thinking about local endurance and that's kind of like overarching concept of engine all in the same way when I'm assessing someone because I want to make sure that we're covering all those bases for First Once I see if let's say someone comes to me they have really good movement with everything they are maybe strong enough but they still feel like I can't breathe or I feel like my heart rate is just through the roof on everything that I do that's when we start having the conversation of like okay what exactly you're feeling with each of these workouts and so let's take the open workouts let's say quarterfinal workouts and break it down that way but I like to kind of combine both the movement patterns and the way that they're doing those with the concept that they may not be able to breathe or they can't control their heart rate and workouts and then that the second phase of that this is more performance bias but I also like to see what the time is when they're doing those workouts so in other words if they're doing let's just say rowing and thrusters because that's an easy one all time the speed of the thrusters time the speed of the row what their average pace is and compare it to those that are in the sport this again does not address the endurance limitation but it allows me to see how far away they are from the best in the sport and then it allows me to figure out how much time I have in the year to address a specific endurance limitation versus like oh we just need to learn how to move thrusters a little bit faster in a specific workout like this yeah I tend to think about that as that you said specific endurance limitation right that to me is their ceiling right so sure you test them on and you're checking all right your Thruster speed is just a little bit too slow like let's let's use you know Thruster row you're holding 155 pace and you need to be holding 151 pace for this 15 minute taste this 50 minute test and you know your your thrusters to do 10 thrusters it's taking you 30 seconds and we need that closer to 25 seconds and we do some intervals of that and we can get them a little bit closer say they're 27 seconds they're holding 130 153 not 135 that would be really impressive um okay so now we've got them a little closer but there's not really any more room to clean up their mechanics or to clean up their Road technique or clean up their Thruster now we're starting to say all right let's look at building some capacity 100 let's look at building some cardio cardio respiratory endurance or building some stamina and I think for those athletes when once you've gotten to that point the next step is taking on some lower intensity aerobic work to actually build their ceiling to actually start to raise that level yeah before we do that real quick just so we can put a bow on that last part is so is there any kind of like easy thing that they can go do and try to test at home for themselves or is that a little more complicated where it's you can't just give them a hey go try this is there anything like you get what I'm asking to test to see if there's anywhere which Camp you're in yeah that's that's actually really tough I think one of the a test that would that comes to mind for me would be the row wall ball test from the open you remember which one was 19.191 which was was it 19 calories Road 15 minute amrap uh 19 Cal row 19 wobble yeah well let's just caveat it we would say I'm guessing you guys would say something like yeah doing this one test is not going to be enough and if you had me as a coach I'd walk you through a variety of tests but if we were only going to do 19-1 how can I figure out where I might be do the test and pay close attention to number one you need to to have a score because you need to figure out your score is even relevant right because if it's not then there may be other factors at play like for example you need to have a score so you need to go through the test and compare your score to the leaderboard in 19.1 and if you need to be competitive with the level of athlete you're trying to compete with like if you want to be a games athlete well you better be in the top you know 100 in the world at the end of that that 10 plus rounds yeah and if you're not then the first thing you should probably we look at is technique your wall ball technique your row mechanics right like Brandon said that's like our first layer but then you've done the test now and then you can get an assessment of how did it feel what did you feel limited by when in the workout did you feel like you hit the wall if you did hit the wall if you didn't and you got the top score in the world well you probably don't need to listen to this podcast yeah you move on go focus on your strength because that's probably your limiter then yeah um but yeah I think that would be a really good way to test it and you're going to know like okay every time I was on the rower I just felt like I was blowing up my my legs never recovered from you know 10 minutes on on the wall ball probably a stamina issue okay vice versa you know you're 12 minutes in and you're like I literally could not breathe I was having to break the wall ball because I felt like I was suffocating right those are two very different limiters and anybody who tests this you know if we had 10 different people test it five are going to say one thing and five are going to say another and that does allow you to kind of differentiate between the two potential limiters sorry I got another question and sorry if this is annoying but I'm guessing that people at home will have similar questions so if I'm doing that test I'm going to go out there and try it I'm going to figure out which Camp I'm in and I I know my caveats that this isn't the end I'll be all and y'all probably have me do other stuff to say for sure but if I'm doing that now my next question is well what about my execution what if I'm Mr goes out hot guy does that impact the results like uh how does that affect that's a good question because it can impact a test [Music] there are people that don't warm up well and just jump into maybe a workout that's that high powered even more high power that just experience local fatigue immediately but they may not necessarily just be a stamina limited athlete so in other words if I just go out there right now and I do you know 21-15 nine biker or let's say Echo Bike and Thruster it's just going to be my legs that blow up if I don't do any warm-ups sure right like yes I'm going to be breathing hard but the first thing I'm going to report is my legs you are yes for me it's going to be that I'm suffocating yeah but well that's true some people may just automatically report legs when it's not just a stamina limitation yeah so yes warm up well yes make sure that you have a good pacing plan don't just kill yourself but in most cases I think that you know people are going to warm up for a workout like that and then you're going to be able to report what's actually going on yeah I think a test like that would be something that would allow you to to Really determine what camp you're in and from there and like you said all those caveats remember that you're not entirely in one camp or the other unless you were like a marathoner or a power lifter like those would be the only ways that I could imagine someone would be entirely in one in one camp or the other and before you jump into the the next part um when people find out which camp they're in um and they come to you and they already know or say you determine which Camp they end is there one where you're like I'd way rather see that than the other Brandon like please just be this yeah and and this again is it all to me I think what's more important is how well they move and what their strength numbers are just because like the sport you can get away with not being as enduring as other people you can get away with not having as much stamina as Kyle's using that turn I always say just like local Endurance by being better at certain skills or just being really strong especially with the bias in the sport with the bias and that we've seen in the sport now yeah I totally agree yeah I think if you were aligned two years ago I maybe wouldn't agree with that yeah um I I just think that it's it comes down to movement economy more so than just someone's in dirt because here's how about it to be clear I don't disagree with that statement I mean here's the thing is that the the the endurance tests that happen in the open and in quarterfinals and even semifinals aren't legit endurance tests if we're thinking about like a long Triathlon or a half marathon like we're not doing actual endurance tests and most people are still limited by the specific bottlenecklets in the workout so we've seen a couple of like a couple of caveats that are a couple of things that that go against that just this year so I think in the open the the shuttle run Burpee pull-up there is yes the Burpee pull-up is potentially a skill and efficiency bottleneck but it's a very serious 2023 if you're listening to this in the future yeah it's a very small bottleneck relative to you know like Thruster mechanics so here's a here's a better example to it though if we did the first open workout uh 23.1 yes you have to have a base level of endurance but I can get away with just being really good on the row just as far as technique goes and get a little bit slower than other people really good at toe to bar and not be as endurance this is the way that I get away with being doing well in Crossfit workouts still because I still have the skills of those movements now that is not going to take me from where I'm at to a games level but I'm just talking about the person that's listening to this podcast that wants to be a little bit better at the sport go do some local competition for sure you you need to be good at the skills to me first and foremost and then you just layer in the endurance work now if you want to be a high level performer which I think is kind of where you're thinking then we'll talk about what to do for endurance yeah I think the the other so the other place that I think we saw a true endurance test was in age group semi-finals with the road now granted you had to have really good skills just to get to age group semi-finals but once you got there we had this row double under uh shuttle run test and it really is just a test now granted there's mechanics the shuttle Runners it's just shuttle runs and mechanics of double enters and Rowing and all that but really that's the the closest to a true endurance test that we've seen in sort of the CrossFit qualifying and strange that they only put that in the age group which is a completely different topic but yes I agree with you would have been a great test in semifinals I agree I agree um Chris did I answer your question I don't even remember what your question was do you remember what your question was Chris Christmas changing cameras um well I think this is a good topic though because Kyle and I would disagree on on kind of that maybe well the reason I'm asking if he he agreed was because I was about to say wow look at these two coaches they're over emphasizing that part of the order of operations let's say so that if you clicked on this episode and you were like man my endurance it would be a kind of a reality check that like yeah you might need to shore it up but it sounds like that's probably not the low-hanging fruit the most important thing to being a successful crossfitter at any level of the sport is movement economy period that's like the the most basic someone who's I want to stop this and do a movement of confidence all right let's let's go back to now we've found which one we are right and now we have to actually start building our ceiling because with the best movement economy if you have two athletes with the same level of Fitness same level of endurance than the one with better endurance wins and so we're talking about people who are competing at the quarterfinals level or the semi-finals level whether that's age group or or Beyond or even potentially up at the games level this is where your engine really does start to matter because across the board everyone has a the same movement economy but relatively more similar movement economy it definitely gets more dialed in especially with those that are just experienced and they understand like well they test squatting a lot they test overhead you know snatches and gymnastics and handstand walking so I need to be good at overhead um so I agree there you talked about this before we got on the podcast this is something that you had to do this past year and you kind of experimented with some different concepts of how to build your endurance I actually think we should start there and kind of talk about some ways that athletes that maybe come from an enduring background versus like a power based background can approach their endurance training is it that he had to do build endurance oh sorry yes he wanted to build his endurance as crazy as this is with you know a 20-year endurance you would consider swimming an endurance sport that that I came you know I came up through that into CrossFit you'd think like man he's he's got all this cardiorespiratory endurance or all this cardiovascular endurance and I I was a Sprint swimmer I swam for between 19 and 40 some seconds in most of my races so like I did not build a lot of cardiovascular endurance I built a lot of stamina power speed all of those things which they definitely help in CrossFit but also at the same time every workout that fell between nine minutes and 24 minutes which it turns out is most of the best in the qualifiers right I'd be fine when I get to a live event but all the qualifiers man I would just get my ass kicked and I've been in this for 12 30 12 or 13 years at this point and what did it feel like doing the workouts was it just like I can't breathe always it's always I can't breathe like I would never be like Oh my legs are so blown up from these wall balls you could do another rep you just can't breathe good enough to continue my my legs could do another rep my arms could do another rep I literally just couldn't breathe right that was that was it and so so when that happens what happens you just stop working or slow down more than you want you have to stop until your heart rate comes down your breathing comes down to the point where you can start working again and it's not like I you know it's it's never you're doing thrusters and like your my legs are blowing up it's like I'm doing thrusters and I feel like I'm suffocating like that's the best I've said that a bunch of times but like people who have a cardiovascular limitation will know exactly what I'm talking about here's a question for you when you describe covered that and you're like man this sucks I keep getting stuck up by this did you ever have a hard-headedness where you're like all right screw it I'm going to just push through the pain because I'm tough and what happened when you did yeah of course I did because or else I wouldn't have been doing it for like 10 plus years trying to get better at it like my thought was okay I need to figure out how to replicate that feeling over and over and over and just push through it and learn to push through it okay I did that for 10 years and it didn't work at some point like the light bulbs got to go off that what I'm doing is not working yeah so this goes back to that kind of that first example this is a problem right the person comes in the sport and they test let's just say let's go back to Road Thruster 30 2010 Road cows and thrusters would be gross right you do it and you get halfway through and you are feeling that Suffocation so you're like I need to get better at this test I'm going to run intervals of it which we do like people need to practice the sport and do interval training of specific movements but if that's the only thing you're doing you you test it again and you get a couple seconds better but the same feeling comes up you're like I feel like I'm hitting my ceiling and I'm reaching to the the highest level of performance that I can get to but I can't get any better yeah and what I'm saying is you can do that for 10 years right and it's still not going to get any better you might get a little bit faster but it's still not going to get better that's not a solution to that problem so the speed the where you're getting faster maybe you get a little bit better at movement speed your transitions improve maybe you figure out how to breathe a little bit better in a Thrust or something like that but you're just saying like that actual ceiling you're not raising it by doing just intervals there's no there's a limit to how much pain you can tolerate like you're not gonna like miraculously double your pain tolerance or double your you know anaerobic capacity like those things don't just miraculously double intent even with 10 years of training yeah right if you're someone who who's experienced in a sport it's not like you're going to miraculously make all this progress instantaneously so like my solution was to go back to the drawing board like to go back and be like all right what have I missed in my CrossFit career what have I missed in my training and like the reality is while I've done some longer endurance tests I've never done longer endurance training so I had done you know why do you think that was because I was a sprinter I was fast and so when you're well I mean people who are sick because you didn't enjoy it yeah you overlooked it because you were too cool for it Brandon gets it because he was you know he was a high level football player he's a football player and at high level in college and like he was explosive and fast and when you're fast it feels good to go fast it does not feel good to run at this slow slogging price for a long time when you know you can go fast it also makes you feel like you're not doing a lot of work which is a huge misconception right I used to I had this struggle when I got out of college because I did want to do all the explosive stuff and thankfully I slowed myself down but I would go on like these easy jogs and I was trying to follow this program I was like this I'm not doing anything yeah I felt like I wasn't getting any better and then I went back to the I'm just going to do hard intervals of this and beat myself down all the time and what it finally took was me going back and starting from scratch going back to zone two work basic like low intensity zone two words and give us an example of here hold on here's what's so frustrating about this is that I've known this and prescribed this to my athletes yeah for sure forever we're coaches yeah we've heard you talk about it for years yeah I do the same thing but I just I didn't do it myself because well I wanted to do I I wanted to get tougher so that's that's the overarching message right there the message within the message people is like hey it's going to take you 10 years of beating your head into a wallet exactly or you're gonna listen this podcast but just you know come back to it what's the old saying do as I say not as I do yeah or you can listen to what I'm the sage advice that I'm about to provide to you which is go back to the basics spend time doing low intensity work and I thought about it like this hold on Define zone two real quick okay I will yeah I will I'll get there all right so I I was like all right first off I need to go and do stuff that I can do for a really long time because I have to build some cardiovascular endurance that lasts longer than you know the nine minutes that I can make it in a metcon so what I did is I was like I'm going to do zone two and zone two is a very low intensity heart rate it's based on a five Zone heart rate model all right so Zone one for most of us is like you're doing a brisk walk right your heart rate for for me my heart rate goes up to about 110 beats per minute and where do they base those zones on they base it off your heart rate your age your max heart rate so it's not based on age so you can do an age predicted Max but all of us that are crossfitters that have you know a whoop or a heart rate monitor or anything like that we have a max heart subscription yep you have a max heart rate right and so everything's going to be based on your Mac sorry mine's like 191. it's the highest I've I've seen since I've been you know older it's been way higher when I was younger but your max heart rate does decrease with age so that's why they do the age predicted right but anyway and it's relatively accurate for those that don't have a max heart rate but it'd be better to do a test or have a monitor that you can actually figure that out so zone two for me it's anywhere between about 1 5 15 to about 132 beats per minute so it's pretty low like you can't do a metcon and stay in zone two unless it's like a super bottlenecked right you know strict handstand you would still Spike up and but average you would stay in there exactly and then so I started to think about it and I was like between all the ergs I can hold that heart rate Forever on a concept two bike that's not a big deal so I probably shouldn't spend that much time on a concept two bike that's also pretty easy to do on a rower but I'm not even sure that I could run for more than a minute or two slow enough or relaxed enough to stay within that zone so that was my zone two that was my thought process can you now oh I can now but you can run at zone two dude I'm not kidding you I started this what does it look like I started this in December with running 60 seconds and then walking for 30 seconds and doing that for 30 minutes and my goal was to keep my heart rate in zone two and I built that up from 60 seconds 30 seconds all the way up to four minutes and 30 seconds and that took me all the way so you would then do four minutes of running and you would actually still only be in zone two never spilling into three yeah how the hell what does that look like zero miles an hour it took me no I at the end of the progression right before age group semi which is the last time I really ran um which I shouldn't have taken all that time off but I did um yeah I'll build it back eventually uh I was running 7 30 Pace on the the assault Runner the fast assault Runner 730 Pace keeping my heart rate around one it would Peak around 136. yeah going four minutes on 30 seconds walk so this kind of brings up the topic that I started with and that the the way you have to think about endurance 2 is going to be machine and movement dependent there may be one that's like a huge limitation for most people that probably is running because we're just inefficient at it we're kind of like Claude hopping our way through and run we haven't we don't know how to breathe properly we don't have good arm swing mechanics all those things can kind of play with where your heart rate goes and so learning how to be efficient there is obviously a benefit in case a run comes up but it can also just help you overall with everything else kind of bleeds down into all these other movements that you'll do in the sport so the other reason I chose running is because last year I say traditionally but we've only had the shuttle runs for a year but in the shuttle run events from 2022 I just got my ass handed to me like those were hard for me and then in the open it highlighted it even more like that workout was that open shuttle run was horrible for me and so I had a feeling that we were going to see more shuttles we did we got a mile of shuttles in age group semi-final or age group quarters and then half mile in Egypt semi-finals and given how bad my performance was because this was right at the beginning of me starting this progression back in you know in February when we did the open I was expecting that my age group quarter shuttle workout was going to be one of my worst ones it was my best finish and I was like huh so I just in that span of time what is it two and a half months or three months I was able to go from this being my worst finish ever in the open in an open workout to this is my best finish in age group quarters and it was a mile of shuttle runs all because I've made one decision which was to start accumulating a lot of zone two running volume yeah let's dive back into that so what did that look like so real quick before you start I pulled this up um that's why I was on my phone for those that are watching this but this is one of the cool charts that everyone what you if you can even see it in the camera got one of those stupid screens that blocks oh that's true yeah you won't even be able to see it well anyhow we do have an rpe chart that we give to all of our athletes and we do this intentionally because we want them to be able to know exactly where their Zone should be and there's also an rpe chart for strength training which we do a lot of for our individual clients and in compete but this gives the the client the opportunity to be able to kind of learn where each of those zones should be as opposed to like you just you hear zone two and everyone's like oh I'm gonna do zone two and then they just jump on a bike and they think it's just like ride easy and then misconception happens where they think they're writing easy but they're at 150 beats per minute sometimes that feels easy for athletes so yeah all that to say if you're incompete then you have this or if you're an individual client your coach can send this out to you I think it's a really easy it's a nice resource to have for for an athlete so to your point Chris uh I started one point you were asking where did I where did I start so I started with the 60 on 30 off and my goal was to go for 30 minutes and do that three times a week and so I just added that on top of what I was already doing like I was already pretty deep into like a sport specific CrossFit prep cycle so I was just getting up early in the morning fasted and doing those I later learned that I probably shouldn't do them fastly because I was a lot faster when I was not fasted but that's beside the point so I did that for a week then the next week I went to 90 seconds 30 seconds and the in week two I was going like straight out of zone two by 15 or 20 minutes in and so I had to dial back the pace and buy the third set in that week of 90 on 30 off I was able to bring the pace back down and stay in zone two so like clearly the people out there you're watching that via your your app or whatever yeah yeah and not the to be clear the whoop does a horrible job of tracking heart rate when you're running it would be like you're at 160. now you're at 110. um I use a Garmin for for tracking heart rate during running and it was have you used uh Andy's app yet no I have not maybe I should give it a try give it a try Okay um so I did that and then I built the two minutes and then two and a half and then three three and a half four and I didn't necessarily go up every week I only went up when I was successfully able to maintain zone two for the Target duration for all three sessions and I didn't hit three sessions and every week I hit three sessions in most weeks so it was like probably an average of like two and a half sessions per week all the way from like late December until age of quarters and in that span of time my Pace also so Not only was I running longer because I actually built this up to 40 minutes by the end when I was at you know three and a half and four minutes I was going for 40 minutes instead of 30. Not only was I able to maintain my heart rate in about 136 ish as a peak I was also able to bring my Pace down from like eight and a half minutes when I was first starting down to about seven and a half minutes for the last that's a big difference in a workout it was huge when I was in the middle of of longer workouts I no longer felt like I was limited by breathing then in age group 70s and quarters I felt like I was limited by muscular endurance which will eventually happen at some point right the more quote-unquote cardio respiratory or cardiovascular endurance you get the more that that local limitation is going to show up for me it was really highlighted in the the GH the wall facing handstand push-up GHC box jump workout well first off like the box jumps my legs didn't really get tired in the way that it normally would because I'd been running right so I had all that repetitive bounding and a year ago we did all these box jumps and age reporters my legs and calves were just absolutely destroyed and here I've been doing all this repetitive bounding from running and my legs were fine and the other thing is I was flying through the workout and I was fine I was like this just feels like I'm doing my zone two running now granted my heart rate was way above zone two I had the heart rate stuff from that uh and I think we actually talked about that on a previous podcast it was like I was probably around 160 or 170 beats per minute but it didn't feel as uncomfortable as it had in the past and so you didn't have that suffocating moment right and so all of this is to kind of go back and say that a lot of times what you most people think they need to suffer more but a lot of it comes down to improving movement economy like you talked about which is going to reduce their suffering in the workout because they're moving more efficiently right and then going back and doing lower intense I mean none of this starting at 60 60 seconds on 30 seconds off it was never hard it was just long and slow and kind of kind of wouldn't have that reason to buy in you would have still felt like why am I doing this I'm not doing any work quote unquote yeah I was I I committed to to doing a test and I've coached so many people through this process and told them it's going to take a while it'll it'll start to feel better you know like week six or eight you're gonna start to feel it in your metcons and you know I was like dude just listen to your own advice listen to what you've told everybody all along was it relieving to know it was true yes hey it works hey it actually worked I've been prescribing crap all these years I want to get into kind of like the actual time domains and what you would prescribe to an athletes so the listeners can kind of have some like application of what they can do but just real quick kind of two things there that I think the way that I think about it if I'm prescribing this for someone number one I'm still focused on movement quality so they are if let's say it was a running progression we're doing drills on how to properly arm swing how to foot strike what they should be doing with their gate making sure that we continue to refine that if it's on the row irk we'll do things for like different pick drills and how to press away with your legs what you do with your back how do you know Strokes per minute Strokes per minute all of those things matter too and I know that this gets into like the nitty-gritty and the details and some people hate that but like again if you want to be a really good athlete you need to figure out all those details so you can be a better athlete to that point I think I'd be remiss to leave this out I was working with Ryan Sullivan our yeah you know TTT coach who's our running specialist and I was sending him a one video of my running every week and he was giving me they were tiny little minute corrections but man they were making a huge difference exactly keeping my heart rate down at faster Paces as I went so it's not just the like physiological training that made an impact I also got better at running exactly the skill of running yeah and I think that that's just something that people Miss like even if they get into it they just kind of go through the motions and feel like they're going to get better but you still need to make sure you're layering in movement economy and the other thing we already talked about this but I get how hard it is when it feels like you're not doing much I I battle this even to this day if I do easy work I just feel like oh I could I'd be better off just doing a 10 minute am wrap where it feels hard and I walk away sweaty and whatever and there look there are days where maybe that's what you need to do just for your emotional well-being but if you're taking a long-term approach the Hard Road is sometimes the easy work because mentally you have to deal with that yeah I was talking to my wife about this I was talking to Haley about it and we said I was like you know the easiest part of this was just going down there and actually doing the the running like the being in there and doing it yeah the hard part was getting myself to do it because it's boring I know especially the first few sessions you say it doesn't feel like you're doing much when you're only running 60 seconds at Zone you know trying to stay around a zone two and you're walking for 30 seconds like it literally feels like you're mostly just walking and those first few sessions felt completely worthless but I it was very clear also that I couldn't run for more than 60 seconds and keep myself in you know that zone two range I think I want to add one more thing to this because I've done this with athletes most people can't run for 60 seconds most people are more like 30 seconds on 45 to 60 seconds off their first probably two or three weeks for zone two for zone two yeah you'd be shocked at how hard it is especially for people that aren't without dipping into zone three correct correct yeah without like their heart rate spiking um so it's even worse than what Kyle's saying because you are basically doing like a really slow jog to a walk but that's just the starting point and then over a couple of weeks you'll see like Kyle said that you get a little bit better you can add some time maybe your pace drops a little bit and that's when it's more rewarding but you have to kind of plan that long game of like it's going to be three to four weeks before you really see some changes here I also think there's something to be said for choosing your modality wisely like I chose running for a very specific reason because I knew it was going to be the hardest one for me to maintain so two I knew I wanted to get better at shuttle running and I am a heavier athlete and so I'm wanted to make sure that I was working against my body weight if you think about running versus rowing or echo or skier like your body weight helps you on those ergs but in running your body weight is your enemy and so as a heavier athlete I mean around the time I started I was like 208 like I needed to be working against my body weight but if you're someone who's a lighter athlete who struggles with you know external loads like maybe the rower would be a better option for you because then your you know light body weight is working against you essentially it's like your disadvantage and so choose the modality that's going to provide the biggest Advantage for you in focusing on it versus choosing the one that you're best at most people or easiest which is the concept two bike like I people who are going to listen to this and they're like I'm just gonna go do zone two work on the concept too but I promise you you're not going to get out of it what I just described yes but also let me ask this then is that in the mindset with the uh what's the word we keep saying with the caveat being that you're in that upper echelon of I'm trying to go from up here to just the next step now if we were to reduce that down to a beginner to intermediate where are they going to make significant gains no matter which device they choose probably I think I would say probably but I don't get lost in the weeds just yet I pick one that you could do I would also say if you're a beginner really think about what you struggle with more are you someone who struggles more with body weight movements like burpees and you know double Enders and box jumps if that's the case running is probably your choice if you're someone who struggles more with moving external loads barbells dumbbells etc etc then maybe a row or a ski might be a better option for you yeah I agree with that and then the last thing you'd have to think about is how important is the movement that you're practicing so in other words like if you just care about the open and you know it's going to be shuttle runs and Rowing those are the two things that have been tested like you're not going to see a skierg maybe then you either pick just a row or a run as opposed to doing it on a skier but for most athletes I think it's just better be well-rounded and then kind of identify the different machines you could rotate through them do three months of run three months a row three months of ski and do it that way too I think that's a good way to just be well-rounded feel healthy feel fit one thing to keep in mind as well is that a lot of the adaptations the stamina adaptations are movement specific so like with running it's going to have some carryover to body weight movements like burpees it's gonna have because you're jumping right it's gonna carry over to box jumps because you're jumping it's going to carry over to double enters because the bounding obviously shuttles because it's running sort of we talked about a shuffle yeah it's a shuffle so it's gonna have good care carry over to those but it the stamina is you know the stamina that you build local muscular endurance is not necessarily going to help carry over to like your muscle ups or your rope clamps and things like that whereas maybe a ski or a row could help that would likely have some carryover you know the ski really taxes the lats and grip and then the row really touches the grip and and the pullers That's Mike pulling muscles the pullers really taxes a lot of the pulling muscle so it might have some carry over to those things some like ski I've used Zone 2 ski to improve people's strict handstand push-up capacity as weird as that sounds yeah no it makes sense you you and anyone that's been on a skier knows that their triceps could blow up uh and even just like in general going from you know an upper body piece to another upper body piece I think you're getting a lot of like local occlusion that can happen and that can help you long term with those things in a performance setting so we've talked a ton about building like my story about building cardiovascular endurance but you know there's this whole other realm of building local muscular endurance or stamina that we haven't even touched on at this point yeah um what's been as someone who has been you know kind of stamina or muscular endurance limited what's been your experience there yeah I still think the first step is looking at or addressing the movement limitations um a perfect example of this is a handstand push-up if someone comes to us and they say they really struggle with handstand push-ups the first thing we need to look at is okay what is the overhead position look like you know if they don't have good shoulder flexion good thoracic extension or rotation the ability to be able to kind of move around with their thoracic spine it's probably going to be very hard to do a handstand push-up well the other thing is the strength limitation this is kind of you know if you don't raise the strength ceiling it's going to be hard to be enduring with something that requires some level of strength it's the same concept as building an engine right so like if you don't raise the endurance ceiling quilting an engine is always going to butt up against the top of your capacity just like the local muscular endurance or stamina limitations are going to always butt up against your strength or strength endurance right yeah I mean a perfect example of this is let's say there are 135 pound front squats in a workout but your max is 155 pounds the 135 is going to be really hard to move for 21-15 nine of front squats and Rowing but if your front squat Max is you know 315 pounds it's going to be a little bit easier even if you're not necessarily enduring right like it's just a different percentage of your strength so you need to address those two things first you need to continue to get stronger and you need to make sure that your movement quality is good and we see people all the time that come into the sport especially with the overhead position I I honestly think that it's more important to have a better overhead position than a squat position you can almost manipulate or get away with a bad squat position but like if your ankles are tight open up your hips a little bit widen your stance whatever you can wear some Versa lifts exactly but if your shoulder flexion is bad or you you know you uh you can't get into a good front rack it just takes a long time to develop good positions there yeah and it's hard to get dumbbells where they're supposed to be if you're push pressing them are doing thrusters with them and even worse if you have to hold them overhead to do walking lunges and things like that but I think there's once you've you've addressed some of the movement limitations once you've addressed the strength limitations there's definitely things that you can do to it to build stamina like a real simple example is a lot of people in the sport are like man push-ups push-ups are really hard because we don't you know in competitive CrossFit we don't do a lot of push-ups because they're not specifically tested right but like you can see massive gains in push-ups by just doing some Max rep sets of push-ups you know accumulate 100 in fewest sets as possible every time you break jump on a concept two bike for a minute an easy spin right very simple very structured and you know the next week you do 110 then you do 120 130 you can build a massive level of stamina like that but one thing to keep in mind is that those muscular endurance adaptations that you make are very specific to the movement so that's not necessarily going to carry over to your handstand push-ups because well a push-up is more Peck and tricep and anterior shoulder and a handstand push-up is more anterior shoulder middle you know right middle delt and triceps dependent if someone is tricep limited versus maybe you know shoulder versus PEC uh depending on the movement but for sure yeah dang the loud sneeze over there I moved the microphone y'all heard it oh yeah we picked it up I think there are a couple different ways that you look at uh local endurance too based on performance limitations or that's probably not the right way to say it I I'm looking at someone in a workout and I want to address the combinations that may come up just as much as the just the Sim just the movement is right you know what I mean so if I'm looking at a workout where it is skier into strict handstand push-ups and someone gets crushed by it well what's going on there versus if it's handstand push-ups and double unders and they feel more confident with that so there are a lot of different things you have to look at as an athlete but from the basic level we want to make sure that when someone can get in the positions someone has the strength to do it you know before they do butterfly pull-ups I want to make sure they can do strict pull-ups on and so forth so that was kind of like the base level once we kind of layer on top of that I I kind of think about it in a couple different ways one I like to layer in a lot of of what I'll call that structural strength and endurance work first so in if you're in compete you've seen a lot of this over our kind of No Limit cycle this is the time where we are addressing the limitations the most common limitations that have come up in the sport and one of those is handstand push-ups or muscle ups so like for for muscle ups we don't just want to do muscle ups we want to work on the support hold we want to work on the bottom of ring dip hold we want to work on a false grip position to make sure that you are strong in all of these different positions that may come up in the muscle up and then in another day of the week or maybe in another you know a subsequent cycle then we'll start adding in the movement by itself so we want to address a muscle up or handstand push-up and you will do those big sets you would rest and go on the bike and until you can do another big set and like maybe it's 50 for time in sets of 10 Unbroken and then eventually we would add in some respiratory fatigue or some local some additional local fatigue that may be the ski org now mixed in with the handstand push-up or a bike into a handstand push-up and then we added in the chaos eventually towards the sport specific time of the year which is the double under into dumbbell snatch into handstand push-up yeah I think to that point like if you think about each of the different phases so this is obviously very different than zone two zone two it's like here here's your linear progression you're just going to add a little bit of time as you go maybe start with you know start easy and work your way up with these it's different because you know you're really trying to start by addressing like you said the structural strength so in in my mind you want to improve someone's handstand push-ups it might be a cycle where you start with a wall facing handstand hold for Max duration kick down rest 30 seconds then you go you know a 75 pound bar behind the next snatch grip press because that's a pretty similar grip width and and movement pattern to a strict handstand push-up but the weight is way lower and then finishing with overhead tricep extensions and do you know a couple rounds of that circuit so your build building structural strength you're strengthening all the muscles that are going to help you perform a handstand push-up and then you go into that second phase where you are starting to add you know handstand push-ups under some volume in isolation then you're adding in some pre-fatigue before and then you're adding them into Diane right yeah so it's basically this very foundational base kind of concept so we want to make sure that you're good and you have we talked about this in a previous podcast but we want to make sure that you're safe when you're doing the movements like this is one of my biggest pet peeves with Crossfit is that people jump in right into muscle ups like they've never done a you know maybe any support work for a ring muscle up but they jump in they do a muscle up and that's awesome yeah you got a PR they're also the risk of injury there is much higher than it otherwise would be if you built kind of like the the the structural strength that's needed to be able to do that well um and then the the next thing is I think people jump into metcons right away without building it into kind of that pre-fatigue setting uh so in other words you're just hitting your ceiling like I can do 20 handstand push-ups and I just I'm completely blown out well if there's 35 in a metcon you get to 20 and you're just bottlenecked whereas we could build you up to that volume by doing 35 or 40 and then get you to 45 and then 50 where it's just handstand push-ups first and that'll eventually allow you to be able to kind of do a metcon without that bottleneck yeah I think a lot of people miss the bridge there where they are you know they do the the isolation work you know the structural strength work then they do handstand push-ups in isolation then they put them in metcons and what they miss is like you know the 10 minute Imam where your odd minutes are Max handstand push-ups in 30 seconds and your even minutes are 15 or 12 calories ski right right which is tough but it's creating that kind of mixed pre-fatigue but it's also in a controlled setting like you're only doing 30 seconds of handstand push-ups you're doing as many as you can in that 30 seconds I feel like that Chunk in the middle gets missed so much especially when people are trying to kind of create their own training program and and even analyzing some other training programs out there I think that component which does allow you to take all this stuff that you built all this local muscular endurance that you built and put it in a metcon that's the bridge piece that people seem to miss all the time yeah I agree the it just made me think what do you think changes though with the way that programming happened this year so you still need endurance like local endurance because they saw in quarterfinals a handstand push-ups but it's almost like very severe bottlenecks with the real crimes or does that change the way you think about programming for those the stamina based it has so so you and I were talking about some of the little circuits that I've been doing um and and they've really just been since uh age group semi-finals but like individual semifinals reinforce this for me even more where I'm trying to build like concentrate pressing endurance into one thing because if you look like pressing endurance was just absolutely annihilated in quarterfinals test one with those strict handstand push-ups after all of that handstand walk-in same thing you do all that pulling work the deadlift and the bar muscle ups on the final test into all those rope climbs then you saw the same thing at semifinals so like clearly there is this bias towards as as you put it really dense local muscular endurance it's severe and like a more complex movement with the wall facing or the at semifinals the seated rope climbs like it's almost adding a layer of complexity that makes it even harder to do the movement so an example of that would be I just did this circuit yesterday where it was um I think I did three rounds so that no four rounds of this and it was you know 15 double dumbbell bench press 50 pounds into 10 push press at 155 right into max rep tricep press Downs because I wanted to do ring dips but I was so fatigued at that point I was like I'm gonna tear a peck so I I chose to do tricep press downs but if you think about what that is it's taking all of the pressing movements all the major pressing movements in the sport and just kind of packing them into one thing with the goal of building muscular endurance and stamina in all those patterns and like that could be progressed in so many different ways you can increase the volume of each of the movements moving your way up to 20 you know dumbbell bench press and 15 push press and then just keep increasing your max rep set of tricep press Downs or you can make it more sport specific adding you know push-ups at the end instead of tricep press Downs or you can increase the load like that gives you so much flexibility and I think you know those I I actually saw some of that stuff in the compete RX program over the last month and I was like I know where they're going with this and I need to be stealing some of this to because that's what's being tested now yeah to give the listeners an example that we were doing a handstand push-up progression right now and it's three round three to five sets depending on the level so like we have different paths right intermediate maybe is doing a few less sets the elite athletes maybe are doing five total sets we sell a ton of volume so step into this carefully but uh it would be five bench press at a specific load uh rest 30 seconds into a 50-foot handstand Walk For Speed you're trying to go as fast as you possibly can rest 30 seconds and then one minute and wrap restrict handstand push-ups to progress that or if you want to add more volume to it you obviously can but to make it more complex it'd be wall facing the next week the for the elite athletes maybe it's a one-inch deficit wall facing the privilege or parallette yeah they're all these different ways but the nice thing about those training progressions because it's an amrap at the end is we can regulate the volume for the type of athlete so instead of saying 25 strict handstand push-ups at the end which we will eventually everyone's going to have to do a set number like we saw in quarterfinals we can give someone an amrap at the end or just like a one minute clock or am wrapping time remaining that allows the best athletes to still Express themselves and get a lot of volume because in Elite we saw numbers at like 35 handstand push-ups in a minute after all that work but then the athletes that aren't as good maybe hit their number of 8 to 10 which is still great like we're still improving their ability to do handstand push-ups under fatigue and again there's so many different ways you can progress that but that's just like one simple example of what we're doing in compete well I think that really highlights how different the types of endurance in the sport are you know we've talked about two completely separate things someone who's good at what you just mentioned right bench press into handstand walk into handstand push-up that is endurance right that's pressing endurance and it's it's just as important in this or as the cardiovascular endurance but at the highest level is do people lean one way or the other no they're balanced at the highest level the people are [ __ ] great at both period like they have developed both ends of them there will be people that get into the games that may have a bottleneck but that just gets exposed over 15 tests yeah I think the the person who wins the CrossFit games has built both pieces of this plus strength plus a little bit of speed they're not usually the fastest right out there speak relative to the people yeah speed relative to CrossFit and they've built all of it and that takes time it's just part of the reason I kicked my like I'm still kicking myself for not having started these zone two progressions earlier in my career because it was like you know damn 12 years in I should have been doing this because I've been doing the stamina and handstand push-up you and I were coming up with these protocols in like 2014. here's a question for zone two work if you're trying to improve sometimes in training when you put things in you got to take other things out for zone two work is that true like what what it's a good question damn Chris you're on it crushing it today yeah you I did not take anything out I just layered on that so I got up earlier and layered zone two on I was like it's gonna be 45 minutes I don't have to warm up I walk my first interval every time so like there's no warm-up for it you just get into it and get it done um a lot of that's going to be time dependent you know if someone has the time in the day to add zone two training in it it shouldn't detract from anything the only thing I will say is that by doing it in the morning I did notice that my met cons in the middle of the day were they definitely suffered like I was fatigued noticeably fatigued in them but I also I understood that and so I just accepted that that was going to take a hit and that when I took away the zone 2 volume during my taper that the metcons were going to come back and they did yeah and also keep in mind people listening that Kyle while he is a father of two and he definitely doesn't have the easy life you're not at a nine-to-five job all the time no so you're not squeezing this in at the end of your day or at the beginning and then being you can make his own schedule yeah yeah uh yeah for me I have cut other things out but that's just because of the nature of where I'm at right now we just had a newborn so I I usually will do just like one day of zone two and it has been running actually most of mine is still walk I mean that's just like that's what I do uh and that's fine but do you remember Scott hagness yeah yeah so I I actually reached out to him a little bit about zone two because he's really really into uh using zone two for for improving CrossFit and I talked to him a bit about this and one of the things he said is that most people most crossfitters he's worked with need to start with like loaded walking rocks weight vest yeah and just walking because they're not going to be able to even run for 30 seconds or 60 seconds at zone two but by adding some load you can get their heart rate a little bit closer to that zone too or even into zone two while walking do that for a couple weeks then you can take the vest off and they can start yeah join my cat backpack Club yeah and Rick go on walks all the time well we actually are starting a rock club I'm being that serious we're gonna get a cat I kind of like that no not a cat what we talked about yesterday we're going to do a 12 Mile in under three hour that which is the um the military uses that right yeah I think that would be a great way and that's I agree with you that's something that I wish exactly let's all go kitty kitty bags a Cat-Back yeah no come on SO 35 pound Ruck yeah 12 miles in under three hours but we'll train for it so you know I don't think many people could do that easily yeah it's very very I mean 35 pounds in a Ruck is way heavier correct than most people think I actually so I I did something for the classroom a while back that was um on on loaded running and rucking and man some of the the the potential value for cross training like doing zone two work in in CrossFit running if you can get to the point you can run zone two with a 20 pound vest I'd be willing to bet some of the top level crossfitters are doing that here's a question get to the point where you can run zone two with the weight of vest what is it about that that's hard so let me assume the answer here because my guess is being able to slow down or what goes yeah why is that hard because to me I would say I would always just quickly spill into zone three so what what is my heart adapting or am I learning how to regulate my speed better to stay and so what's happening well a little bit of all of the above but when you throw a Ruck or a vest on it compresses the chest wall so less blood comes back to the heart and when less blood comes back to the heart your heart rate automatically goes up right so like you have to keep oh this is going to get real complex but you have to keep cardiac cardiac output stable in order to so how do you do that of exercise your body adapts so you gotta but you got is by paying attention to it and pulling back and yep and staying staying within the zone and you can give yourself a little bit of leeway like you don't have to be like I'm gonna stay directly in zone two okay I dipped into zone three for a couple seconds now I'm back you're fine right you're fine you're five beats per minute over your zone two you're fine you're you're not ruining you're mainly looking at accumulated time in said Zone that you're targeting yeah I think the problem is most people think they're in zone two but they're well above that for sustained periods of time that's what I meant earlier when I was like Hey most people think that this is too easy so they go a little bit harder and then it's not the same it's your intention is there but it's not actually working out the way that you think it is I think also another thing we should very quickly discuss since we're back on the topic of of zone two and and that is targets like weekly total volume targets and I think I meant to ask you that um this is actually something I talked to Scott hagness about and he was suggesting two and a half hours for what he said Elite level CrossFit over a week yes over a week two and a half hours accumulated over a week so if you really think about it's only five days of of 30 minutes that's not that bad but for the average person so for me I I'm training 30 minutes a day like that's my we talked about this but I'm for those that are listening like I'm not going to stick to this forever but for the next couple of months we just had a newborn like I said I get in get out I base in my training session is actually 20 minutes five minute warm-up five minute cooldown and I'm out I can't do that unless all of it was zone two so for someone like me is it okay if I'm doing you know one or two sessions a week so one of the things one of the questions I asked Scott and I I think this is important for people to understand is that it can be chunked into three 10 minute like you have 10 minutes after we get done with this podcast you could go throw a rock on and walk for 10 minutes and you could get yourself into zone two and that's going to count towards your accumulated time and so it just it really depends on what people's schedule is like you know that might mean you wake up you know 20 minutes early and do 20 minutes in the morning 20 minutes after you get the kids to bed it just depends on what's you know what's available to you and and for your priorities free advice for someone out there you know you got like the uh knees over toes guy yeah we need a female out there to become the zone two boo what about the athlete that trains twice a day what if they started with 15 minutes and 15 minutes each day you already know the answer to this Brandon answer the question yeah um that's actually one of the strategies I've used for years giving zone two to people while not doing it myself um is for especially like gym owners gym managers people that that are coaches man chunk 10 minutes at the beginning of your workout 10 minutes at the end of your workout if you're doing two sessions you're getting 40 minutes of one two in per day do it you know one of them on the assault bike one of them on the runner one of them on the skier one of them on the rower you'll be good at all the ergs yeah now to wrap all of this up I think it is important to note that based on our experience we have seen many athletes that start the sport that have a huge strength deficit that they also need to address and so if that's you make sure that you're working with a coach to help that because that has become a huge bias in the sport yeah if you want to sabotage your strength progress the most effective way to do that is to do zone two running so take everything I hope people listen this far into this yeah they cut it off here's the answer what'd you just say run it back okay if you have a big strength deficit in the sport it's a large majority of athletes yes it's half the field yeah right it's got to be half the field um if you have a big strength deficit probably the best way to sabotage your strength adaptation is by doing lots of zone two running so everything that I just told you about how it got me so much better um if you're not already like you know pretty high on the strength into the Spectrum then you probably shouldn't do that and right biking is probably your best option so earlier we mentioned order of operations uh and I know I'm putting you on the spot so feel free to shoot this down but is there do you all have what though that order of operations for the competitive crossfitter is oh well we were yeah we can but just real quick we were assuming that we were just talking about the person that has the endurance limitation so when we said like when we're addressing endurance we're assuming that that personality is strong like Kyle and just needed to build their their engine yeah to be clear the reason I chose to do that is because I tend to finish in you know the top yeah towel is already really really strong super powerful he's fast so the big limitation the big hole is that the endurance suffocation no breathing I hope people get to the end of the episode no right um but the hierarchy all right movement quality once your movement quality is is taken care of then I would say depending on your limiter it's either you build your base strength or you build your base endurance right if you're building your base endurance you probably already have enough strength so now you're going to start doing sport specific strength work yeah uh if you have if you don't have strength and you already have a an endurance bias you're going to focus on strength but you're going to do sport specific endurance work so that you're maintaining your endurance if you're already strong or you're maintaining your strength if you're already enduring yeah I mean so like a map Fraser that comes in who's a great weight lifter I assume you probably did a lot of endurance like some very basic just building his aerobic base you want to talk about someone who has said that they've been doing zone two forever like go back and listen to his podcast how come none of us listen to him you know what I mean like he did he had something something I did listen to him as a coach just not as he did that because he was already snatching 315 pounds he had a huge squat so on and so forth for the athlete on the other side um Jordan troyan is a great example of this I mean I don't know what he's doing now but he was an excellent endurance athlete he's going to come back and compete in a 40 plus Masters next year oh really so okay that's awesome I mean he's he was obviously a great swimmer all the endurance events at the games he would crush but his strength metrics were a little bit lower than everyone else he's an athlete probably would focus more on strength so you need to still identify like what that limitation is for you and an easy way to do that is to start on the leaderboard just look you know if you can't do the 275 pound cleaning jerks or the 185 pound cleaning drugs and quarterfinals like you got five Barbie box jumps and that was it then that may be something you need to work on look at where your thrusts are finished that's that's such a encapsulating strength test right it gets pressing it gets squatting and pulling from the floor all captured into one go look at where you finished on that and if you were really low well prioritize strength if you're pretty high or if it was your highest finish well prioritize endurance now what happens Kyle for the athlete that did really bad in both portions of that test they couldn't do the shuttle run in Burpee and they also only had you know whatever 150 pound Thruster that's a male join TTT compete get I'm dead serious join to GT compete get in the correct level of the program whether that's intermediate so you can learn skills you know RX or RX plus depending on on where you're at but if you're that person who didn't finish well on either one probably starting the intermediate path and follow a well-balanced program for years right we're talking I I'm telling this story as someone who had been in this for 12 years with an additional 20-year training history right or 15-year training history prior to that like it's not going to have none of it is going to happen overnight and there's so many skills that you have to learn that you have to build economy in in the sport that all of this stuff is going to take a long time but you need to focus on economy first which is why I would recommend for that person to probably start in the intermediate path learn the economy learn all the skills Master those skills and then worry about your engine and your strength because that stuff can be great yeah I agree and that's a cool thing we have so many options if you want an individual coach your coach will give you an assessment and then obviously take you down the right path and compete we have all those paths so intermediate is for those that need to work on the skills we have a strength bias path for the athlete that's been in the sport but maybe it's just a little weak like they have all the skills but it's like look my Thruster was 185 and I need to get it to 245 or 55 to be competitive I want to follow that path yeah we want to you'd be good at it and we also have endurance options in there as well for those that need to build their endurance so I think that that's kind of the key is you need to First identify where your weaknesses are and then make sure that you're following the right program for you Paul said I'll clip this in at the front of this podcast too so if you're hearing it there this is also at the end but let's do something different and for this episode as you listen to it come up with some questions put them down in the comments and let's come back and do an answer everyone's questions about this episode specifically episode I love that I like that idea that'd give us more structure too we sat down and just started because we gave you a lot to chew on now what other questions did you have from it cool cool ask away what color is your cat backpack Chris uh Cat backpack I'm wanting to say it's like a navy-ish blue maybe a black no it's black do you put a cat in your backpack or is it just a cat do you have a cat named Rick Ricky Miyazaki yeah he's in there and he's fat too so he's like a good little is he 35 pounds does he meet the weight requirements chance a cat is 35 pounds why not you don't think so can we just there's such things all he does is eat all day there's no such thing we just put one of our kids in the back in like a backpack not like a suffocating well so here's the thing is to get under three hours you have to average 15 minutes which means you're not walking yeah 15 minutes per mile yes you are essentially you want to run the downhills walk the uphills and in any flat train you're doing like oh you're talking about this challenge yeah the challenge stay tuned what's the date like when are we finishing this uh we're gonna ask who wants to do it and then come up with a training plan me me too I would love that that would be like my long day each week so I could definitely I'm gonna train for it I gotta start getting my spray until you made it through the heat it's about to use an AC cat yeah we're gonna do it over the summer too so it's gonna be hot with a rock hold on I have to you know how I was telling you that my ears are getting bigger I think yeah isn't that a true thing as you guess this left ear is hurting me I'm in I'm in deep trouble world's largest cat well it's like a Bengal tiger or something oh so beautiful no no I mean like a domestic cat domestic cat someone has a domesticated Siberian tiger so it's the domesticated Siberian tiger cat has to be 20 pounds this is the Maine [ __ ] is a friendly fluff monster that's what Max has it's a Maine [ __ ] right oh is that 11 to 25 pounds that's a huge range ones that's the huge range well that's also human beings but we're talking about like one all right folks thanks for listening