Barbell Shrugged - Cardio For Strength Athletes w/ Doug Larson, Dr. Mike Lane and Coach Travis Mash #848

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

In this episode, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, and Dr. Mike Lane break down cardio for strength athletes, especially lifters who have spent years chasing numbers in the gym but have not deliberately trained their heart, lungs, and work capacity. The big idea is simple: the less time you have, the more intensity matters; the more time you have, the more room you have for lower-intensity zone 2 work. Doug explains why strength athletes in their 40s, 50s, and beyond need to consciously program cardio instead of assuming it will happen naturally, while Travis shares how adding consistent conditioning helped him feel better, get leaner, and maintain a higher level of performance without giving up strength training. The conversation gets practical fast. Dr. Mike Lane explains how different forms of cardio create different adaptations, from left ventricle size and stroke volume to capillary density, mitochondrial improvements, blood pressure, cholesterol, and overall longevity. The team covers why sled pushes, assault bike sprints, rowing, hill sprints, carries, and high-resistance cycling can be great options for strength athletes because they drive the heart rate up without beating up the joints. They also lay out simple programming options: one day per week of hard 10-second intervals, two days with an added zone 3 or tempo-style session, and three days with more steady zone 2 work layered in. Whether you are a powerlifter, weightlifter, former athlete, jiu-jitsu player, or just a strong person who does not want to gas out walking up a hill, this episode gives you a simple framework for adding cardio without losing what you built in the gym. Links: Doug Larson on InstagramCoach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, Doug Larson here, and this week on Barbell Strug, we're talking cardio for strength athletes, including everything you need to know about conditioning types, heart health, and building sports specific work capacity. We get into the many reasons why high intensity intervals are complementary to weightlifting, when to focus on zone two, and how to build your overall capacity while still going easy on your joints. Dr. Mike also breaks down the science of exactly how and why your heart gets stronger as an adaptation to training, including the physiology behind improvements in stroke volume and left ventricle hypertrophy. So if you love to lift, but you also want to make some improvements to your cardio,

this episode is for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Barbell Strug. I'm Doug Larson here with Coach Travis Mash and Dr. Mike Lane. Today we're talking cardio for strength athletes. Actually, I didn't say this on the first round of this show that we got about 20 minutes into and then I lost Wi-Fi and empowered my neighborhood. And so we're on round two here.

But on the first round, I kind of kicked it to Mike first, which I'm definitely going to do here in a second to talk kind of the science and the physiology behind, you know, the different types of cardio, kind of low intensity cardio and high intensity cardio, et cetera. We'll get in the more detail of that and here in just a moment. But I posted something on Instagram a week or two ago and kind of the big picture, like super basic concept that I was getting at was as a strength athlete, the less time you have to train, the more you should focus on intensity and the more time you have to train the more you can focus on zone two cardio and what have you if you only have like 20 minutes per week to do cardio then you pretty much have to do high intensity

cardio or you're not going to get anything out of it but if you have five hours per week then of course a ton of zone two cardio makes a lot of sense i still think that you should also layer in at least one high intensity session per week and touch max heart rate at least once per week and then i started talking about video two max and a bunch of stuff too so anyway that's kind of the genesis of this show we're going to get into all the details of the science as well as a lot of practical application mash before we dig into the science again a little bit of repeat from the first show here but you've focused on cardio a lot more in recent years you're super lean now you're shredded you're you're you're leaner than the many of the guys you train that are much younger and

kind of in their peak years here how is your your cardiovascular training trained over the year now over the years now that you're not a competitive strength athlete i know like i still post i still post mostly my strength work but the truth is it dominates my train and i do more work with cardio than i do strength training now and like like like like i said before we got interrupted yesterday uh it all started when we went to see that trip to walmart we're mountain biking and i was so out of shape and i was like embarrassingly out of shape and i'm like man i can't can't be hanging around these young dudes and being like that, you know, like, and obviously showing my age. Anytime we work out together, no problem.

We can, but man, that really embarrass me. Plus, I have a younger wife, you know, she's your age. You know, she's 13 years younger. And I'm like, I can't be just being the true old dude. So I went, it started there, but then really, because of school, three years ago is when I, like, put my foot down. It started working. And man, it was like a little out of time. At first, it was just walking.

It was walking. Then downstairs, I got into this routine of like, you know, I would do, I hate, I couldn't do a whole lot of sprinting because I wasn't, you know, my technique with running wasn't as good as I was when I was younger. And as Andy will say, you know, that's a good way to get hurt. So I would do a lot of sled pulling, carries, like even like reverse hypers, I would do that. I do those like three times a week within the circuit. you know, and just I would add different types of movements. And that's why I would really get my heart rate up back then. But now, you know, I'm to the point where I can do,

well, I do a lot of air dine work. Even the rower, I really like the rower. But I don't necessarily do my maximum effort sprinting. I do most of it either air dine or a rower. And so that tends to work really well. I can go all out and not worry about injury. Yeah, dude, 100%. Like, I mean, for a lot of our long time, you know,

CrossFit fans and the guys that still do Jiu-Jitsu and MMA and whatnot. This show might not be quite as relevant for them. They're already doing some cardiovascular training. But for a lot of guys that are more like you, that are like pure strength athletes and they're getting older. They're not competing anymore. I feel like you're a good example to reference here at the beginning of the show. Like you weren't doing a lot of cardio.

And then just in the last three years, as you said, you started layering in more and more and more cardio and you feel radically better as a result. And it's only going to become more important to keep that up as you get older. So for all the guys out there that have not done cardio, like, it doesn't take that long to get your belt and to feel much better, to get leaner, et cetera. Still do all your strength work. Still stay super strong. But as we're all getting older, and I'm on my 40s, you're in your 50s.

Like, you got to start doing conscious, like consciously doing cardio. When I was doing jihitsu five days, we can buy MMA and whatever else and doing more cross-the-style met cons, et cetera. Like, I didn't have to think about doing cardio because I was doing cardio as a part. of just doing bag work and sparring and wrestling, et cetera. And now I really do have to like make a conscious effort to go, I get on my mountain bike and go for a, you know, 45 minute ride a couple days a week or whatever it is,

you know, running hill sprints. Like I have to push it into my, into my program rather than just kind of naturally happening. So, yeah, oh yeah. If you don't write it down, like you'll skip it. You'll make any excuse to that. So it actually a planned conscious thing. And you really do need to like map out,

this is what I'm doing this day. This is what I'm doing this day. or you'll just keep going on walks. And like, nothing's wrong with walking. We even, you know, that one guy we had on our show, like, you know, if you want to rock, it's a great thing. Like, if you, you know, otherwise, it only takes you so far because, like, shit, we're going to be walking for 10 years.

I mean, like, so you have to plan in those high-intensity interval trains on, like, it's an air dine. I definitely don't recommend anybody listening to our show, just go out there and start sprinting. It's a great, it's the fastest way to an injury. A couple things I disagree with. One, I recommend that to all of my enemies. Immediately sprint full speed on concrete on a slight decline. Exactly.

Yeah, a little over speed, sure. 10 miles worth of volume for your first workout. Right. That would be great. And then after that, I want you to do jump squats with 120% of your squat max. Now, you know, you've got some solid points, which is at the end of the day, if you're really strapped for time, you do need to do something that's going to be super high intensity, so you're at least getting some stimulus. And it's as we have more and more time

availability, that's where you want to build that general work capacity, so the zone two. And the research shows that once you get to a certain point of that zone five point, it's a legit hermetic stressor. Like you've gone from getting a tan to a sunburn. We're not talking about accruing over 100 or over 60 minutes of zone five stuff a week, unless that is your freaking sport. And we're optimizing a lot of things for your recovery. But in Arizona, too, you're right. You can walk for pretty much ever. You know, go do the Appalachian Trail.

Go do crazy long distances. But you run out of time. And so, you know, and I guess I'll kind of pop in when it comes to the energy systems as well. Every time you're going into those max efforts, you're tapping every single energy system and you're tapping every single fiber. So I do the same thing. I like the assault bike and, or, you know, Airdine, whatever, six one, a half thousand in the other or heavy sled pulls, heavy sled push. I love that, yes.

You're tapping those big powerful fibers. You're creating a lot of force, but you don't have a lot of impact, so it's easy for us to recover from it. But metabolically, it's awful because you deplete that ATP PCR. It's great when you stop on it. You know, assault bike's not too bad. And then you hit like second five, and you're like, now I remember why I hate this stuff.

Yes. And if you grind it for a legit, I mean, I'm not doing Norwegian four-by-fours, but I am going in there and trying to do some legit three-minute. rounds of like critical power testing myself and it's brutal because that max effort for three for three total minutes yep that burn in your leg in your lungs because you've exhausted those biggest most powerful fibers and their ability to use anaerobic glycolysis so you're left with whatever is essentially your aerobic max capacity and this is the critical power so it's like what can you maintain just off of aerobic ability but the nice thing is if you've gasped all those fibers

you've created the metabolic stimulus in them so hopefully they're going to have positive of mitochondrial density, increasing enzymes related to erode metabolism. But the nice thing is, whether we're doing the assault bike, whether we're hula hooping for max effort, the key thing is our heart still has to work as hard as it can. And that throws in the craziest analogies. Dude, I got a good friend. I was in his basement. And he had his wife's workouts and his workouts.

And her cardio was hula hooping. I'm like, seriously? He's like, yeah, she loves a freaking hula hoop. and she will like do maximum efforts. I'm like, you know what? This doesn't know what you're doing. You know what you're doing. That's the local effects.

And so it's like, oh, no, the sled dragging is not as effective for my sprinting technique, but it's very similar. So for some reason, the universe requires me to sprint, I'll be ready to go. But more importantly, if anybody's car breaks down, I got you. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garland and I,

have learned over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. Artae is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre-imposed pictures. Arte is something completely different. Arate is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature, find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person, but rather a full team of elite professionals, each with their own special expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization

plan. Arte isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best, physically and mentally when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit areteelab.com. That's A-R-E-E-E-Lab.com. Now, back to the show. I know I can lean on that sucker and gun hard. So, but when we're thinking about that aerobic glycolysis,

obviously that's a much higher work rate than beta oxidation of just the fat metabolism, but that's when we're talking about aerobic capacity, increasing mitochondrial density, which is just going to make those fibers even better for work capacity. Are you familiar with like Mark McLaughlin and some of us like high resistance cycling cardio? I've heard this Utah. I think you actually mentioned it once when we were talking to one of our clients.

Yeah, years ago, and I came across his work and I'm like, it's genius, you get on a spin bike and you just crank max resistance. Yeah, yeah, I remember, yeah. Pedaling, slow cadence, like we're talking 20 to 30 RPM's. And so you're doing essentially single leg concentric only leg press. That sounds absolutely horrible. It's awesome. You should try it.

And you do that because it builds the work capacity in your type two fibers. But since you contract, relax, contract, relax, you can go ahead and remove some of the metabolic byproduct and you build a work capacity in your type two fibers. So when you come back to your workouts, you can do more work sets on things like the squat before you just zonked. And obviously for alignment, they got to have some reporting. repeatability. And so you're building that more sport-specific fitness without having them do the collisions. Not that you couldn't also have them just train pushing a heavy sled. But it's a tool in the toolbox.

Because again, your heart does not know what you're doing for cardio. It just knows we got a metabolic demand. We got to match it. Your blood is just, you know, it's a long for the ride. And you'll increase your red blood cell count. Plasma stuff comes first. But your capillars, that's the only thing that's specific. So you're actually doing a better job of sending the blood flow where you want it to be. And of course, if you're going maximum effort, the demands become larger, which in turn is going to give you a bigger overall effect. Well, when you're talking about like adaptations, so you got like capillary density, you have like, you know, the metabolic improvements, you know, like mitochondrial density or even like, I mean, what are all the adaptations and what cause them? Like at what, you know, like at what point does like, you know, low intensity, steady state? What does it do? versus like intervals versus like, you know, the, you know, Andy's like red zone work.

Like, what does what? Okay. So there's a lot of pieces. And so I kind of take a mechanics view of thinking about each part of the system. So whatever fibers you're using, those are the ones that are having metabolic demand. So zone two, you're using pretty much mostly type one fiber, maybe tapping it a little bit of two A's. if you're something that has like a lot of gifts, a lot of like 2A fiber just genetically.

But your biggest, your type 2Xs, they're just chill. They're not doing a damn thing. They're not needed. And your bigger, more powerful 2A's, same thing. They're not being used.

So your heart is doing the work to cycle more blood around your body. So it's getting a positive effect. And when you're pushing blood through your body faster, a lot of people think of it like a lazy river. Instead, you should think of it more like an aggressive log flu. And as it's ping ponging through, there with a decent amount of speed, that shearing force and otherwise going into the wall

plus metabolic byproducts, that's helping create things like VEGF. That is literally helping cause both branching and interception, which is where you either take the capillary and you branch it or through interception is essentially starts as one, and then it starts to kind of almost go through a mitosis where it creates two. And the more capillaries you have going around muscle fiber, the better the metabolic metabolic turnover you're going to have of delirium, removing waste products. Right.

So all of that extra blood flow, that's where your vaso dilating, and that's where it's more metabolically active. So hence, cardio is cardio on your heart, period. But for the local effects, hence why you can look at the old school studies of, like rowers are a really great example of it, where their VO2 max, if you put them on a treadmill, might be like only 80% of their rowing max. because the way they use their muscles for rowing

allows them to use the full ability of their hearts capacity to pump. Oh, that's crazy. Like, I didn't realize there was that big of a difference. Like, so like... Sophicity. Yeah. So if somebody's really doing a lot of their work on a bike

or say the, or a rower, they really should do their testing on a bike or a rower. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yes. And then within that, it's important to keep in mind, you know, yes, the heart does it, whatever it needs to do.

But again, it's those fibers you're tapping into. So this touches on intervals. Because if, and that's where I like, you know, every 30 seconds, Sprint 10, recover 20. Because steady state is cool if I'm like in the woods, like rucking because I just like hiking. Like that's fun. But like steady state on a treadmill, like that is literally, if I remember correctly, British prisoner torture.

The treads that turn the mill to grind the grain. Like yeah, no. But at the same time, when you go high and low, metabolically you're obviously super active in those muscles and you're not. But because you created that oxygen deficit, your heart's still paying that off

during the recovery periods. Your heart rate might not come down that much, which is cool because you still have that greater oxygen demand that you used anaerobically. So hence, this is still doing cardio, even though you might be sprinting down the football field, walking a small distance and sprinting back for tempo work. Because as long as this stays elevated within whatever zone you're trying to look to do, that's the actual morphological changes you're making to your heart.

So hence, there's nothing wrong with whatever form of cardio you like, as long as you get the heart rate high enough and keep it up there long enough that has an effect. And so, and this is where I wanted to disagree with you guys earlier, which is with resistance training, if you push it, if you're doing like set of pullups, set of pushups, set a pull up, you know, doing a legit push pull on limited rest, you throw a heart rate monitor on you, you might be zone two during that workout. And anyway that's ever done like a max set of 10 to 20 on the back squat that's pretty much that gets in his own four work real fast oh yeah totally oh sure so but at the same time if you're going like true olympic lifting you're doing

triples you're not you don't have a attention and your rest you're not in weight lifting you know like you do set your rest but sure i can i can definitely get a great metabunk effect in the gym like sometimes i'll do a row or like so uh 250 meters as hard as I can then I'll go do some like pull-ups then I'll go do it's just some less boring than sitting on a darn treadmill like in the winter time like it was too cold to be outside I'll go do that you know I'll just do a little circuit and just keep going you know get a little pump going it's awesome too cold to be outside grow your beard longer wear more clothes good point I'm 53 taught of you in your maze you know what I mean

talking that much when we get to that age. The one other piece I'd want to point out is this is where like sauna and heat exposure is cool because you're cool tasking your heart. You're sending more blood flow to your skin so you don't overheat while you still the same metabolic demands to your muscle. So like now that we are getting the summertime based upon the time we're recording this, you might notice for those folks that like to rock like doing cardio, it's like, damn, I can't keep up the same work pace.

It's like, yeah, because you dual tasking it. So that's a cool thing is like, if it's, it's an effing hot day and you're going for a decent walk. You might see your, what was normally zone two heart rate work is now in zone three. Because the cool thing is you're getting that work on your heart. But yeah, your muscular system isn't actually getting any more demand. So kind of again, specificity. And at this point, often talking about cardio in the couching of longevity, not so much performance.

Why is it so important? Like, you know, Andy always talks about why is it so important to do that math? max that, you know, like the zone, the red zone or the zone five, you know, where you absolutely push in your max heart rate. Like, and why are the adaptation so much greater? At least that's what he's, you know, he would talk about. Well, an easy analogy there is like we can do with the hypertrophy stuff. Yeah, we can, as long as we take the set close to failure, you know, you're going to get

a good effect. But if we think about strength and we talk about real transference, until you get over 80%, like you're not really doing legit inter and intramuscular coordination level that's giving you as good of carryover is doing true max work something is better than nothing i'm not trying to do that in the sense right but if you want to get good at a legit one rm you need to be doing at least 90% somewhere in your training cycle right that's the equivalent of that like if we're really trying to see you know to get you to that peak value we got to push you near the peak and let's be honest it's when you take and redline anything, that's when you figure out where the fault in the system is.

You know, and that's one of the things that, and this will be something that a lot of people listening run into. Like, you're going to go do some hard cardio and like, cool, man, that's awesome. And you might be like, my heart rate never really got that high, but damn, my calves locked up. Like, I couldn't go any faster. I'm like, that's cool. You are metabolically limited because your calves are just not good at cardio. And if you keep going, like the rower thing that we referred to earlier, eventually you're going to be able to fully express your ability. And some people, it's really weird, it's either super high level, like super really like world level aerobic athletes and super sedentary people. Their limiting factors meet the respiratory system because like their secondary breathing muscles and primary are literally not conditioned enough to either keep up the work rate or they are literally so damn aerobically optimized, including muscular, that the limit is literally how fast we can get air in and out of this damn thing.

That's crazy. Yeah. That's not me. Oh, yeah. No, 100%. And so, like, one of those three things is the reason why you hit a V-O-2 Macs. And that's like whenever my students finish it up or somebody I'm working with, I'm like, what did you feel like held you back?

And, you know, dollars of donuts when I'm working with undergrads, oh, my calves. My calves locked up because there are guys and gals like us that lift weights, but they don't run very often. So eventually, once you get them with those max speeds, they're just like, my calves locked up and I couldn't go any faster without falling off the treadmill. It's like, yeah, that'll do it, man. It just doesn't do it. Right.

Yo, I find that most kind of normal people don't think about the heart being a muscle specifically, let alone that the heart can just like any other muscle can hypertrophy. So like, how does left ventricle specific strength and our hypertrophy factor into stroke volume and how much blood you can pump per beat, et cetera? Okay. So now we're going to be incredibly mature as we're going to use, talk about stroking over and over again. and how it's a bigger stroke than a smaller stroke is what you're really looking for.

And what a perfect professor he is. I would love to go to his college. I mean, like, I would laugh the whole time. So be in front of your class and was like, can we talk about stroke volume? And you're going, gotta try not to laugh. You know what?

I'm sure, Professor, Professor Mike. They're younger than we are. So, you know, their frequency is higher. So at the end of the day, what we're really talking about is the left ventricle is one that pumps it to the entire body. Not that your right ventricle isn't important, but we assume normal, healthy people. The left ventricle is really what matters,

because that's, again, going everywhere. Right ventricle just feeds to these and back. So it's real short distance, doesn't have to be as thick. Now, there's two major variables that we really focus on, and that is the thickness of the myocardium, so the musculature on the left ventricle, and then the other is the chamber size. And that's the actual amount of blood we pump per beat.

that is your stroke volume. Now, you never squeeze the last drop of the blood out of the ventricle. And so it's how much it fills and how much you remove, that's the stroke volume. The percentage that we eject is the ejection fraction. And that's the thing that as that number goes down, like percentages becomes worse. That's a great example of some type of legitimate cardiovascular disease. So ejection fraction goes down as you get older. and or because of like certain chemotherapies,

they need to stay on top of their heart because the heart also is taking those chemo drugs and it's damaging the myocardium there as well. So normal healthy hearts, when you exercise, you increase the size of the chamber and you increase the thickness of the myocardium. This is where, unfortunately, there's folks that have a genetic error

that gives them what's on was concentric hypertrophy of the heart, and that's where literally the myocardium thickens, but the chamber size gets smaller. And that's where you hear about student athlete like death. So like the baseball player runs out on the field and thunk. Like that's game. And so it's rare. But, you know,

when you talk about millions of Americans, there's going to be like one or two kids every year that unfortunately succumbs in this. Back to training. When we think about you doing cardio, you're asking your heart to pump more blood, so volume and then possibly against more pressure. And that would be like lifting weights. So like the Val Salva,

your heart literally has to drive harder just to get the blood to, to open up the aortic valve to get it to go around the body. So if we were to look at your heart compared to a legit long distance athlete's heart or somehow like we clone us, one does cardio, the other just sits on the couch and plays video games, the one sitting on the couch is going to have a smaller chamber size and then a thinner myocardium than us. The guy that does only cardio, he's going to have actually a bigger chamber size. and his myocardium might actually be a little bit thinner than ours

because our hearts often have to go against higher pressure. So we'll get a little bit of that bigger volume, but not as much as the, but we'll get more of the thicker musculature. Now, why does it matter? Because when you're getting these positive changes of heart, you're also getting changes to the blood supply of the heart. So we're making sure that stays healthier in general.

And as much as it pains me to admit it, I have to say that there was a cross-country coach. I worked with it slow that said it best. The heart is the most important muscle in the body. We've all been around athletes that have torn a quad, biceps, triceps, peck, blah, blah, blah. It sucks, but you're still around. You might be in a wheelchair.

You might be in a sling. There you are. You're a rat. Yeah. Yep. Only live as long as your first organ failure for the most part. So by making sure that heart is in better morphological shape, which is cool because it adapts

to training. It is one of the like, I'm going to sound like I'm doing like a bunch of Molly at Burning Man, follow that with weed, be like, bro, the heart repairs itself, but like it never stops. Because when we think about it,

like we go and we lift heavy and then we lay still for eight hours a night, hopefully, and do all these other things to like let those muscles repair. The heart at most it's a full second to just chill. And then do your job again, do your job again, do your job again. It's repairing the car when it's either driving on the freeway at 120 miles an hour or just idling along at 20 miles an hour, but it's never

at a dead stop. It's constantly moving. You're freaking out. I'm definitely doing cardio after the show. I told you. I told you. Go on a vision quest and then think about heart morphology and hopefully you have that moment of Zen. But it's, again, you increase not just the heart function, which is great for performance, a natural byproduct to that is it improves its own blood supply. And hence, it's not going to completely stop your chances

of getting a heart attack, but it's going to decrease your all-cause risk of heart attacks and strokes by extension as well because we're making sure our heart and our vascular is in better overall condition. Oh, which is important. There's so many adaptations. So you've got the ventricle left phase,

intricable size and the good size you know also we should mention anyone listening you know one one big risk of taking like this steroids if you're a way of that's the big one of the biggest risk is that is is that it hyperchemy in the wrong way which is you know thickening of the walls now you can't get as much blood in there it's no good I lost the French so early I mean I think he only know that he made it to 50 the poor guy like he literally had to pull off the side of the road and die. And you kept doing it even though the, you know, the doctor is saying, look, you,

you know, your heart is so thick, you only heard he was only had to maybe 40% capacity. It was, it was, it was, anyway, but like, and then you have the extent of the, of the contraction, right? And then you have the capillary, this D. Then obviously, the amount of red blood, red blood cells. Those are all things that you can improve, correct? So help us.

Real quick, before we move on to blood real quick, and can I just give the audience an analogy here? Some people might not be able to picture exactly what we're talking about here. So the left ventricle of your heart is a container that has blood, heart pumps, and it squeezes out to the rest of the body. It's a super easy way to think about. There's four chambers in the heart. But this chamber, this area, this balloon, so to speak,

is full of blood, heart squeezes, and it pushes the blood out to the rest of the body. So picture of a basketball. You know a basketball, say, is a quarter of an, inch thick or whatever. What if the walls of the basketball went from being a quarter inch thick to an inch thick to two inches thick to three inches thick to four inches thick? Eventually there's going to be no air in the in the basketball at all. There's no space inside the basketball for the air. That's kind of what's happening with your heart. As the walls thicken around that chamber, there's just less and less space for blood to to fill and then there's less blood to be pumped

out to the rest of the body. So that's what we're talking about. At some point, there's a turning point where that where it becomes an issue where the strength of the heart has in many ways got it's gotten stronger but now we're despite the musculature of the heart being stronger and it's it's not able to do its job because it's not actually able to push as much buzz it needs to after the rest of the body it causes a bunch of like legit medical problems yes so a couple things I want to touch on is when people are using exogenous testosterone in a true performance enhancing dosages. One is it is normal from exercise to increase the amount of red blood cells, but you increase

the amount of plasma more so. So your blood actually has a lower hematic rate. That's the percentage of it that is formed elements that is red blood cells. The more viscous our blood is, meaning the highest that, higher that hematicrit is, the more it's like instead of your blood, your heart pumping water, it's pumping, you know, molasses. It's pumping syrup. So that already increases your bloods. Yeah.

Bingo. High lows of testosterone, tank your HDL, rip up your LDL, you know, it's bad stuff for that other piece of cholesterol or heart disease risk. And then you're right. It also hypertrophize, hypertrophies every single muscle in your body. And that one of those is your heart. And of course, you're right. We're getting it bigger, but we're not increasing the capillaries, the blood supplies to it.

And so hence, there's a reason why there's a lot of high-level bodybuilders in more recent days. minute, they also have used diuretics, growth from a film. There's so much, right, yeah. Exactly, an entire suitcase full of drugs. That it's just those systems are not meant to deal with that. And so when we think about cardio, it improves your cholesterol to a certain extent if it was kind of bad in the first place. It improves your blood pressure because of your literal compliance.

Like you get better at vasodilating and vaso-constricting where you do and don't need blood. So it helps normalize blood pressure in a lot of people. So like cardio, if you're thinking about like a simple hedge for increasing quality and quantity of life, and all you got to do is get that heart rate up there. If that's you riding on an excite bike to nowhere, great. You want to go a lift to kill it? I don't care. You know, whatever's going to go and get you there, that's all you need.

And honestly, looking back, you know, there's so many people who would, you know, when I was competing, he would say, oh, don't do cardio, it will make you slow. Like, those were totally misnomer. It was like, if I had it to do over, I would have for sure. or like focused more on work capacity and I would have I would have definitely like added in cardio because then I could like you said earlier I think it was you like is that you can perform more work now you know you're capable of performing more reps with more weight or it or it's sad what I'm about to say is the sad thing in the world he's like even in power

the team you'll see your competitors and it's deadlift time and they're out of gas I'm like, man, we got nine lifts all day long. You can't handle that. But it's true. You'll see in their face. I already knew in the room who I was beating when we get the deadlift because it just were like could barely open their eyes. I'm like, all right, you're done.

So if they would just, you know, even Louis Simmons would tell a lot of people and would tell his own lifters to perform more work capacity sled pulling, like get in shape. And he said he was sometimes. It was embarrassed. It was on athletes because they would get tired, like, walk into the car. But, like, it will make you, it will help you. I promise if you slow, you know, like anything else. Like you got to monitor.

You don't want to go from zero to, like, you know, trying to act like you're a marathon runner. But add it in, slowly increase your dosage and get better. Yeah. So two things in there. One of which is, you know, then it's like what we're trying to. Are we trying to be like the world's strongest? or do we actually care about like meeting our grandkids? Do we care about like other things there in life?

Because at the end of the day, it's like when my students had the conversation, I wanted to be really strong with a lot of caveats. Like I wasn't willing to blast a bunch of gear. I wasn't willing to gain a bunch of weight. I wasn't willing to do all those things that was probably going to shorten my lifespan and health span. And then, well, I mean, just it's, I am someone that some could easily refer to as we will simply say, sissy because i was not willing to do those things where you go to west side during that time that was you know the jem blakley diet that was the like the bigger the dose the bigger the total like you

know that it was as strong as possible no exemptions no asteris like some of the things they said were so absurd though like the jamb blakley diet like i mean just getting fat that never made any sense to me because i'm thinking to myself you know add weight and it gets stronger fat doesn't do anything that doesn't contract Like, it never made any sense. And then I started noticing that all the really, really good power lifters were super lean, but it's heavyweights. But even the heavy weights, you look at the best weight lifter in the world.

Loxa, you know, he's from country of Georgia. He's six, you know, six foot seven, weighs four pounds. But like, moves awesome. Like, you know, he's incredibly strong. I have no doubts if he went to powerlifting, he would probably dominate that too. Yeah. Is the steel man argument there? obviously fat doesn't contract on that they're not trying to get fat specifically but they're trying to just make sure that they get every single piece of hypertrophy absolutely possible and nothing's left on the table like if you're trying to be the strongest in the world as you once were like you have you have to take it to the extreme you by definition are the most extreme person in the world in that category if you're a world record holder and so they're just trying to do every single thing and like to mike's point like like you're fucking strong do you're damn strong compared to most normal people but maybe not maybe not you're not a world record holder and so you're not a world record.

record holder because because you didn't want to take it to that to that point where where you were in the top top top top top top top 0.0.0.0.0.1%. But you're like easily in the top 1%. But you also want to be healthy, you know. Yeah. I mean, yeah, Mike could go into the West Side and he would definitely not be, he would be right in there. He would be the strongest guy here. But he would have been, you know, he would have deadlifted that more than most of this dudes, terrible deadlifters. But, but I think there it lends itself because at the end of day, body composition in the deadlift, that's a lift to be leaner for. Because if you got to round your back, you got to get around your belly to get

straight up, that's going to hurt you. But squat, we've all been around the guy who, like, he could literally sit on his belly in the hole. Like, at a certain point, and the same thing, like, bench press. Like, if I, you know, what is it? I think if you have like nine inches of body fat, you're technically bulletproof to a nine millimeter because like the bullet will stop before it actually goes through your, like, rectus abdominis because it'll go.

and be slowed down by that many inches of fat. But, you know, I'd rather be able to take on and off my body armor if I need it. So, but you've been around the guys that, like, they're 300 and something, and it's, you know, body composition is not optimal. But the simple thing is, is they don't have to move the bar that far because they're literally getting hung up on their own tissue. And you're right. It's not contractile, but it's they have a built-in. Yeah, sure.

But I would argue from 275 and down, still yet, you want to maximize the amount of muscle you have, you know, based on how tall you are. Like, you know, every single one from the, I would say from number one to the 10th in the world at my way in 22ndes, we all could have done, like we all could have done the state bodybuilding competition. Every last one of us, you know, had a six-pack. All of us, you know, were veined out. But like, I mean, look at Ed Cohn. He was even in Iron Man magazine, Sidorian. And they look very similar, you know, or Johnny O. Jackson.

I don't know if you know him, but I got to communicate. Oh, yeah. We went head to head. And, like, you know, he was, you know, it was funny. We had a big argument. But then we got to be friends because he, and there were headlines saying he was going to come dominate power of the team. And so, of course, immediately when I saw him, like, you're not dominating shit, you know,

but like, but anyway, but seeing him was a little scary. I will say that, part of me in my brain said he might. He looked so huge. But the point being is that, is that like, you know, if you want to maximize that you don't, that didn't help anybody. And I would imagine, too, like adding a little, you know, a well thought out cardio plan would have probably helped a lot of those guys. Yeah. And you just, you've got a certain amount of like misattribution error because you the super heavyweight guys. And it's like, you know, just like technical differences based upon anthropometrics.

They're trying to extrapolate and think as big as possible. And I understand that one. Yes, that would be the only one that was, or maybe the 308s, you know, you have that. It's something, I don't know, I don't even know the weight classes in PAPR's anymore, but I can understand having a little extra body fat there because, like, you're not going to put, how many people are going to weigh 300, you know, of lean muscle without doing something life-altering. Like, you know, I guess you'd say Ronnie Coleman, those guys, like, they were all over. even uh who's it j um what's like j color color yeah he was over 3002 so in the

obviously he was still pretty late so i guess you could god it would have been so much to be that big but yeah no those are world class of course uh yeah before we shut it down here from a practical standpoint uh i kick us over to mike like if you currently say you say you train you lift weights rather four days a week but you don't do any cardio at all. Like you know you should, but you haven't ever, you just haven't made it happen. If you have one day a week, two days a week,

or three days a week available, how would you, how would you structure cardio on top of the four days a week of strength training if you wanted to just do one day, a week, two days a week, or three days a week? How are those the same and different? Okay. So if you just got one day a week

and you are something that's already chronically active, like you definitely work out, you just haven't done any deliberate cardio, you're in a really good situation where you could try to do some, like, legit high-intensity interval stuff. So you can really start off with a on-the-minute, pin it as hard as you can for 10 seconds. You're getting into the anaerobic glycolysis, but you're still being the cardio, and it gives you something a little bit different. And then, you know, you can slowly, I wouldn't necessarily

go from 10, 15, 20, and otherwise. Instead, I would have you try to go max for 10 seconds, recover 50, max for 10 seconds, recover for 45 until you're doing like a 10 on, 20 off. And then maybe you can start to work your way towards like a Tabatta, which is 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, and that'll light you up. And you'll be done with that in 10 minutes and be like, I'm good. So like that's one of my conditioning days is it's 10 seconds on, 20 seconds off while using BFR on an airdine on Saturdays. And I'm gleeful when I get to the 12 minute mark to get off that damn thing because I've just been running it hard. Now, the 50 seconds you're still going. You're just going way like, like coasting, just coasting.

Just coasted. Yeah, you just kind of coast. So you're still going up there. And this is where some people refer to it as like the talk test. This is your ventilatory threshold. This is the point where to hold a conversation is not going to happen. You can give like one word replies and maybe like, you know, say something really quickly, but you're not going to want to do what we're doing.

And that's pretty much right when we know you're probably leaving zone two and entering zone three. So that second day and that third day, you at least want to be kind of flirting with that level because you know you're working at yourself hard enough. or be above that if you can only work two days a week. And if we're thinking about Zone 3 work, if you can hold that steady state work rate for a good, you know, 20 to 30 minutes, like, awesome. You just figure, unfortunately, cardio is bigger doses,

but it doesn't have to be again, you're going on the treadmill to nowhere. Go to a football field, start off on the goal line, go 80% max sprint to the far 20, walk to the end of the end zone, walk back to the goal line, go that maximum effort to the far 20. So you're doing essentially an 80-yard sprint

followed by what ends up being 30, well, you know, bringing your speed down, 30-yard walk, 10-yard walk, and go again. So you had a good work-to-rest ratio. You could even do push-ups. You could do sit-ups. You could do some calisthenics in the end zone because you're just keeping that heart rate up

and trying to go at a good enough clip. If you got a heart rate monitor, great. You know, you could... So that one is what? The 80-yard, all-out 80-yard sprint or what? Or 90%, like we don't need to say blow off a hammy, but what we're looking for is to go to create that really big metabolic stimulus. So that heart rate is going to be sitting at, you know, take whatever your age is, subtract the 220. It's lazy.

You can always run your own heart rate max. You want to be over 60% of your max. So if you're, you know, early 40s like I am, you figure that's 180, you go 60% of that. Congratulations. We're talking about I want to get my heart rate at least over like a 112. And, you know, again, can you hold a conversation? If it feels easy, it's too easy. You know, push a bit harder and, you know, not going deep in a pain cave.

Like, if you feel this thing pounding in your chest on a zone four day or zone three day, you're going too hard. But if you feel this thing pounding your chest or you're doing zone five, you are doing zone five, my friend. Yeah. And then everything after that, throwing more zone two and or start thinking like, hey, do I want to maybe do, do you want to do a tough mutter? Do I want to go do a half marathon? Do I want to go to this, that or the other? You've got to build that work capacity. So you should be able to go out there and coast.

You know, yag, it might be a very soft J, but you're keeping that speed up the entire time. Or throw on, you know, 20, whatever pound rucksack, and keep that pace high enough that, again, you can hold the conversation, but it's getting to be a little rough to do because that ventilatory threshold for somebody doesn't have a heart rate monitor

or doesn't have a coach with them, it's going to have you there where, like, the cardio is really counting, so to speak. so just to like to summarize that so one day would be the 10 second on 50 second off working backwards on the rest that's what you you want to go instead of adding the 10 you go 50 40 30 then you work towards the tomata then the next then the next day would be that 80 yard spread is that right like yeah or just something where you think about you're above that talk test. Like, I don't want to have a conversation for somebody

when I'm doing this. Right. Like, legit, at least zone three, and trying to hold that for like 20 odd minutes. Right. And so, so you're doing that 80, 50, the 80 yard 50 rest for 20 minutes, right? Yeah. Right. And then the other one

would be like the steady state, the zone two, like, yeah, got it. And also if you're a listener and you're like, I play pick up basketball X amount of weeks, go buy a simple, a hurry monitor, you know something else and like if your heart rate sitting there

the entire time sweet your cardio is playing sports like that's the easy thing like I'm sure if Doug wore a heart rate monitor when he was doing jiu jutsu I'm sure he's redlining that stuff on occasion depending on who he's up against and he's getting in a solid amount of every damn zone over the course of that training so you know if you're already playing sports you might be now it's okay let's think checking boxes

if you're already doing something hard zone five a week cool like like said once we get over like 60 minutes of it as like an easy way of looking at it, which is not perfect, we probably check the box. So doing more zone too is just going to have better outcome or outcomes for nearly everything. So might as well as do more movement as long as you're enjoying it. How long would you do the two-second on, 50-second off? How many rounds of that? I honestly started 10 minutes.

But if you, you know, this is the whole thing like listeners at home, if you get through five minutes of this and you're like, I think I might die. Stop. You know, once you've checked the box, it's equivalent of like, hey, I wouldn't say somebody to go into the gym and like, hey, I want you to do five sets of failure in your first workout. Like, you might do that first sprint. You'd be like, I have bitten off way more than I can chew. Like, I just need to just get on and do Zone 2 stuff until I feel comfortable enough. And then I can work my way up the intensity ladder.

That's cool. Like, no one wins the I die training Olympics. Like, I mean, it's not the goal. Instead, you're trying to build your fitness. And if you've done absolutely no cardio, you're. any cardio is going to be a massive stimulus on your body. And so the nice thing about a bike, the nice thing about elliptical, about a rowing machine, you're not getting that pounding of your joints like you're getting on a run.

Yeah, I definitely recommend staying with that. Yeah, and that's why Westside was like pull a damn sled. Like, it's pretty much concentric only. Yeah, you do got loads going through your body, but these guys were already chronically lifting weight, so it's not really adding anything they're not used to. but it's helping them build that metabolic capacity because they probably never did a set over 10 if they could help it outside of maybe doing like reverse hypers.

Right. Yeah, if you're doing more than 10 sets of something for the truly high intensity day, then you're either in really, really, really good shape, which we're not really talking to you right now or you're just not quite going hard enough. Like you should be able to do 10, 10 second bursts and, you know, every minute on the minute

and feel like at the end of 10 minutes, like you did it. You check the box and you're very tired and it was great workout and you're done. If not, then you probably think about how hard you're truly going or how difficult is the thing that you're actually doing. Because anyone, regardless of fitness, you can be Matt Frazier, CrossFit, World Champion, et cetera. And if he does like hard, truly 100% effort bouts, he's going to get tired just like anybody else. And so it really is about how hard you're going. So level 10 effort will fatigue anybody because everyone has their level 10.

It's going to vary for everybody. But if you're going 100%, then you're going to be tired. I definitely left, last, I would like, you know, all this circuit, make sure the circuits, I always be sure that whatever I was doing, it was more of an isometric say, a carrie, or it was concentric only. Like, I definitely left out anything that would have any type of, like, you know, lifting in the muscle eccentric. You know, there was no, like, squatting in there.

It was just like, and like, even, like, I guess you could say that the, you know, the reverse hypers are, but there's really no, if you're just kind of letting them refurb. fall on the way down unless you slow it down but like i really you know for some reason throwing in those reverse hypers always made my back feel so much better of the day as long as you do it like you know i just wouldn't overextend like louis to do that's the one thing i would add is like i wouldn't you know hyper extend my spine but like letting it swing you know your lower body you see the traction yeah it was great yeah going back to the zone five aside from the bike things, this is where a good steep hill, as long as you're somebody that's somewhat physically active,

it's going to be great. Because you sprint up that sucker, it's going to metabolically eat into you, and then walk down slowly. And that's going to naturally build in your good work-to-rest ratio. Go figure out when kids go sledding, if that's something you get snow where you're listening. And like, those are going to be great hills that, you know, be honest with yourself. If it takes you a minute to sprint up to the top, like maybe you want to build up to that. You don't got to start with a full hill, but you know, you just got to get that heart rate up a little higher. We didn't even get to the whole like force aspects of like hills are easier on you orthopedically going up because you just can't go as fast. So you can't have as high an impulse.

Whereas obviously you run downhill. That's when you get that eccentric because of the landings. And that's when people can get way more sore from the muscle. That's exactly what I was thinking about when I made that recommendation a second ago. Like I have I have a hill here that's about a 30% grade. and it takes me about 10, 12 seconds to get to the top. And after about 10 of those, sprint up, casually walk down. At about 10, I'm like, all right, I did it.

I'm out of here. It just takes the hamstring out of it. You know, like when you're going up, like when your foot strikes the ground, you don't have that lifting the hamstring. When you're upright, your foot strikes under your heel. There's a massive eccentric contraction and that, and isometric, you know, such a bobbing on the ground. And that's where people tend to hamstrings running the 40 all the time with the NFL combine.

But there's a hill. Like, you don't have that. You don't have the, you know, when your foot specs are ground, your quadriceps, is doing a lot of the work. And there's only a little bit of the hamstring, never when it's fully lifted. So it's so safe. So. All right. Travels Bass.

Where do people find you? Maccule.com. There's a lot of new stuff on there. about to drop two new products. Yeah, something about them. It's funny. I wrote a thing just conditioning for old people. So that's going to be the latest e-book coming out.

Yeah. Perfect. Yeah, it is perfect. Didn't realize that when we shot the show, but that's a perfect. I swear to everyone listening. Yeah, they had no idea. Nobody. Yeah.

Very cool. Check it out. Mike Lane. Mike Lane, PhD on Instagram. Feel free to come say hi. I'm Doug Larson. We are barbell shrugged. Doug McLearson for me, Barbell underscore shrug for shrugged. You can also work with the team here at Rapid Health Optimization with Dr. Mike Lane, Travis MASH, Dr. Andy Galpin, and the whole team at

ArteyLab.com. That's A-R-E-T-E-L-A-B.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.