Transcript for: Athlete Training Tips and Techniques
One of your mantras is if you want to look like an
athlete, train like an athlete, and I think that's
something really special that sets aside what you do from what a lot of other very
well qualified people do. And in terms of the use
of weights and resistance, whether or not it's body weight or weights in the gym or
pulleys versus cardio, in terms of overall health,
aesthetics, and athleticism, is there a way that you
could point to the idea that maybe people should be
doing 50% resistance training and 50% cardio, maybe it's 70/30, maybe it's 30/70, and here I'm talking
about the typical person who would like to maintain or maybe even add some muscle mass, probably in particular
areas for most people, as opposed to just overall mass, although we'll talk about
that later, and people who want to maintain a relatively
low body fat percentage and be in good cardiovascular health. What's the sort of
contour of a basic program that anybody could think
about as a starting place? - I think it's like a 60/40 split, which would be leaning
towards weight training, strength, and then the conditioning aspect be about 40%. So if you look at it over a
course of a training week, I mean, five days in a
gym would be a great task. And obviously not in the gym,
it could be done at home. But three days strength training, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, conditioning, Tuesday, Thursday, two days. It's a pretty easy roundabout
way to split that up, of course, depending upon training goals. And as you said, the
aesthetic goals like that will shift dramatically. But if you want to see
the benefits of both, that's probably the effective
dose for strength training and the effective dose for conditioning at the bare minimum level. Again, being a much better
performer conditioning wise, you're going to want to do more than that. - And in terms of the
duration of those workouts, what's your suggestion? I've been weight training
for about 30 years, running for about 30 years, and mainly for health, and have found that if
I work hard in the gym or at resistance training for
more than 60 minutes or so, it's very hard for me to recover. I start getting colds, I start getting weaker
from workout to workout. But amazingly, at least to me, if I keep those workouts to
about 10 minutes of warmup and 50, five zero minutes
or so of really hard work for resistance training, and I keep the cardiovascular work to about 30 to 45 minutes, I feel great. And I seem to make some progress, at least some place in the
workout from workout to workout. - Yeah, I mean, those are good numbers, 'cause those are kind of
numbers that we usually preach. We try to keep our workouts to
an hour or less, if possible. Now, depending upon the
split that you're following, if you're on a total body split, there's just going to be
more that has to be done in a given amount of time. And again, if you're training
primarily for strength, that could prolong the workout, 'cause the longer rest
time is in between sets. But in general, when you're
not focused on that one aspect but the overall health picture, then you can get the job
done in under an hour. And again, I always say, on top of if if you want
to look like an athlete, train like an athlete, is you can either train
long or you can train hard, but you can't do both. And I really believe
that the focus for me, I have a busy life, I have a
lot of other things that I do, believe it or not, and it's like, I want to go hard and I want to get out. And I find that my body
also responds to that, and I think a lot of guys'
bodies respond to that. And particularly, as
you start to get older, I think it's the length of the workout that actually causes more problems than the intensity of what you're doing. Particularly, if you're warmed
up properly, like you said, I've found personally that my warmup has had to become more of an
integral part of my workout than it ever has before. I could get in the gym when I was 20, and I'm going right over, I'm doing the one set, two
sets, and I'm ready to go. And I never do another workout warmup set for any of the other exercise
I do the rest of the day. That's not true anymore. And I found that as long as I'm willing to sort of give myself a
little bit of a warm up, the intensity is not what bothers me. I'm very much in control
of the weights that I use, and it doesn't bother me. But if I start to go pretty long, I start to feel achy, or
I start to have problems. So again, depending upon age, that also plays a factor in the length. But again, I think everybody can achieve on a standard program, can achieve the results that
they want within an hour. [upbeat music]