Barbell Shrugged - Flexible Cardio for People that Hate Cardio w/ Dr. Michael T. Nelson, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #797

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Dr. Mike T. Nelson has spent 18 years of his life learning how the human body works, specifically focusing on how to properly condition it to burn fat and become stronger, more flexible, and healthier. He’s been called in to share his techniques with top government agencies, universities and colleges, fitness organizations and fanatics. The techniques he’s developed, and the results Mike gets for his clients have been featured in international magazines, in scientific publications, and on websites across the globe. Work With Us: Arétē by RAPID Health Optimization Links: Cardio for Meatheads Course Dr. Nelson Website Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrugged Family this week on Barbell Shrugged, Dr. Michael T. Nelson coming back on the show. This is like the 11 billionth time he's been on and every time I get so stoked. Not only has he been my coach in the past, but today we're talking about how people that don't like cardio should build cardio programs into their training.

And a lot of this stuff goes back to when he was training me to run a six minute mile and the benefits that I felt in the gym as far as like strength training go, as well as the long term impact that it has had by building a really solid cardiovascular system. And I think that this is a very important show because there's this weird stigma for people

that like lifting weights are like cardio is gonna kill you. And the truth is the better of an engine you build, the better everything gets, including how you feel, how strong you are, your recovery, and every aspect it is going to help you perform. And Dr. Nelson breaks that down today. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com.

That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Alviner do a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can access that over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Marvelous Shrugged, I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Dr. Michael T. Nelson. My man, yo, yesterday or not yesterday, last week we interviewed Mark Sisson.

Yeah. Which means the last time we got to see him or hang out with him was down in Paleo FX. That's right. Dude, do you know that it's been like eight years since we were all down there? That seems so weird. It doesn't seem like it was that long ago on the big elevated stage and stuff. You want to like know how you turn like 90 years old exactly like that where you go, holy crap, Paleo FX was eight years ago. That's standard. Today on Barbell Shrug, we're going to be talking about flexible cardiovascular

training for meatheads. I feel like if there was like a bullet point for all things Barbell Shrug, we just hit all of them. Flexible. Like you don't have to do it all the time. This is a really good way to do it. Cardio, people go, ah, I don't know if I want to do that for meatheads. Now we're all engaged. Now we know we're targeting the right people.

Let's talk about it, man. Where do people go wrong when they love lifting weights? I feel like this is about to be a don't do crossfit, but go ahead. For all the people that love lifting weights, I feel like this is about to be a don't do crossfit, but go ahead For all the people that love lifting weights and hate the cardio Where do they where do they get this wrong? Usually the progression you see is people get into lifting like oh, I love lifting it's great and They keep doing the thing and the people I end up working with and I'm you guys see too at rapid health is They do better at the lifting and

then all of a sudden they kind of hit this plateau where the stuff they were doing before wasn't working and then they do maybe some better nutrition, they do some sleep, they do some other stuff and they're still at this plateau and then you ask them like, well, what is the issue? Like, I just can't seem to recover, my energy levels are low, I can't do the training volume I used to do, I can't do the intensity. And then I asked them like, well, you know, that's cool, you love lifting, me too, it's awesome.

What do you do for cardio? And they look at you like, cardio, like what are you talking about? Like I want to lift more weights, I don't want to do cardio. And then you tried to explain to them that your aerobic metabolism, like the metabolism that you need to recover between maybe heavy sets of squats or deadlifts or one heavy session to the next session or just your day-to-day energy are governed primarily by aerobic metabolism. Your body's ability to use oxygen, primarily fat, you can use carbohydrates to create energy. And then you do an assessment like you guys do at Rapid Health

and doing VO2 max assessments there since you guys started. And you realize, oh wow, it's dog crap. Like it's, I've seen not just bad, I've seen, wow, you're still functional bad. And on one hand you go, oh, this is great because we found like this major rate limiter and on the other hand It's then it's a little bit easier sell to them of yeah You know, I know you don't really like doing cardio, but trust me like just give us, you know

Six to eight weeks of minimum I guarantee you're gonna start to feel a lot better because you've kind of found the the massive like parking brake They've had on the whole time. So if you're a lifter, you've been training for a long time, you've gotten stronger, built some muscle mass, etc. Like what are the physiological benefits to adding more cardiovascular training and improving your cardiovascular system for recovery? Like recovery is kind of a broad general term, but what really physiologically is happening there? Yeah, so usually people just throw around the term recovery, which is great. You'd have to define it.

I think of recovery as your ability to get back to baseline, right? This could be baseline in heart rate, baseline in breathing, baseline in metabolism. And the faster you can get back to baseline, I would say your recovery is better. So if we think about what happens after a super heavy set of maybe 10 reps on the squat, right, your heart rate's going to be elevated and you have someone who has a really good VO2 max or aerobic metabolism, they can probably get their heart rate down and be able to do that next heavy set within a relatively short period of time. You have someone, especially as the sets get, and you know, a little bit longer,

you're in set three or four, now it's taking them a much longer time for that heart rate to get back to baseline. So you have the, I'd say the performance in the training session itself, then you have the recovery from one training session to the next. So when you do, you know, lifting, you've obviously, you know, potentially done some damage to the

muscle, these other things that are also moving you off another baseline. How fast can you repair that, which is going to take energy? So the analogy I've used with clients is, you guys are old enough to remember like the old little three-cylinder, like, Yugo cars they had for a while we had a almost like a complacent squirrel on a roller skate Versus a v12 engine like you want a much bigger engine because you don't have to exert much power of the engine to Do what you need to so if you have a much bigger aerobic metabolism, which is generally defined by your vo2 max Which will get into in lifting terms think of that as like your 1RM.

If you wanna do the NFL combine test, which is 225 for max number reps, I would much rather train someone who has a very high one rep max of say 365 in the bench press versus someone who has a max bench press of 245. Like your big 365, you're just gonna be able to do more reps because it's all sub max. If you have a much higher vo2 max even though you're training, you're doing other things

they're all going to be much more sub max and that bigger engine is going to allow you to create more energy faster which you can then use into your recovery, which is gonna get you back down to baseline faster. So people generally then report that, oh wow, I could even eventually in time add another whole lifting session and still recover. I could compress or I could do more density of work. I've only got an hour at lunch. I can get more work done now during this period of time

because within that session I can get back to baseline, I can keep the quality of work high, and I can actually do more of the thing that I love and it generally feels a little bit easier also. So you're giving them this the better capacity to get back to baseline faster and then they can use that and kind of point that in whatever direction they want to go in. I have some data to report to you actually about me and the continuation that I think applies really well to what we did for the better part of the last year. And the kind of the end of the story being that I think, and this is just me personally,

that you actually are going to get much stronger and maintain that strength by maintaining a really high level cardiovascular base. With the data being, when we started, I set kind of like a strength goal. Well, the big goal was let's go run a six minute mile. We got down to a six, six seventeen was the best one that I ran, which is phenomenal. The other kind of sub goals were we still wanted to get really jacked, which is the most fun thing to be doing.

And I was doing, it took us about six, seven months, maybe, maybe even eight months to get to doing flat dumbbell bench hundreds for three sets of eight. It took us, it took me like seven or call it seven or eight months to get there, which was fantastic. Like that's, that's really solid. All while being also able to do like kind of at the same, same points in time, the six, 17 mile. Then we moved into like an inclined dumbbell bench phase, which I got to like the eighties for three sets of 12. And then once I hit that goal, which was kind of like the second goal that we set in the periodization schedule, I went back to

the dumbbell bench to see how long it would take to redo three sets of eight with the hundreds on the flat bench, seven weeks. Nice. And all keeping my conditions, the strength training sessions to two a week and about 40 minutes a piece, but also keeping much of the same conditioning work that we were doing. So not only did I, at 41 years old, massively improve my strength,

like I don't know if I was even 22 and able to do like hundreds for three sets of eight, but it initially took me a good seven to eight months to be able to hit that goal, transitioned out of it for three, four months, and then come back to it, to be able to go back to that same level of strength inside an

eight week period is really bad ass. I think a lot of it has to do with maintaining that cardio system and just always feeling good going into training, which I think has a lot to do with just the increased blood flow, the efficiency of recovery. And I really attribute a lot of it to the conditioning parts that you put together for the last year. Yeah, that's super cool and super interesting. And that kind of matches what I've seen with people also. And I don't know the exact mechanism like you said,

I think it might be blood flow, might be higher energy levels, who knows? But it just seems like when your cardiovascular level is higher, your ability to maintain capacity is also higher. And even the things that you didn't directly work on, you can get back to in short order. Now, maybe that's your ability to do a little bit more density when you do start training on that thing again. Maybe it's just a little bit better overall energy level Maybe it's increased capitalization. So you're getting more blood flow and things like that to the muscle

But yeah, that's just something I've noticed especially as I get older. I mean, I'll be 51 this August I just the more cardiovascular stuff I do I just feel. And I feel like I've been able to do things more consistently at a higher level because of it also. Where before, yeah, I could still get to those things, but the ramp up to it was much longer. While now it feels like the ramp up to it is less and the downside is also a little bit less, as long as I can, you know,

kind of stay with that type of training. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the Arte program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garner 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. Arate is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation or pre and post pictures.

Arate 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 aratelab.com. That's A-R-E-T-E lab.com. Now, back to the show. You're having the increase in recovery, especially when you're weight training makes weight training much more enjoyable. Oh, yeah.

Like yesterday I was doing back squats for sets of eight. If I'm doing back squats for sets of eight, presumably when I get done with a heavy set of eight or especially if you go higher up on squats, you're going to be breathing very heavy at the end of that set. And if you're squatting with a two, three minute break in between, if you're still like, you still have a pump in your legs and like, you still have like some, some acidity still in there burning, like, and you've got to go back into that next set. You're kind of like, ah, fuck, here we go. Okay. But if, if after that first minute,

you're basically fine and you're like, okay, now you're kind of checking your watch. Like God, I really need to wait that, that next minute. I feel like I'm good to go. It just makes training feel much more enjoyable because it's easier, because it's not as physically taxing, it's not as physically painful. Granted, you can continue to ramp up the intensity and make it as difficult as you want to,

but if you can layer more cardiovascular training on top of your strength training and that improves your recovery capacity, it just makes all of your training feel better which makes it much more sustainable especially people who aren't pro athletes that are just there because they're they're trying to be healthy they're also just trying to have a good time they're trying to enjoy their training they're not they're not trying to go to the Olympics and not trying to kill themselves go on the

CrossFit Games or anything like that being in better shape just makes it more fun yeah it doesn't take as much, I'd say, gnatal fortitude to make it to the gym either, because you're like, oh, okay, I am gonna go do this thing. And the thing I can do at a high level still, but I don't have as much cost associated with it. So one of the things I got from, you know, Coach Caldits, the University of Minnesota was, he's just writing all this stuff on this whiteboard

for like 40 minutes, and I'm sitting in the room trying to think like, crap, like how the hell am I gonna explain any of this in a book? And so I looked at him and I'm like, oh, so you're saying do the highest level quality of work first and then just repeat that thing. He's like, yeah, that's kind of it. So like you were saying, Doug,

like you can go back and repeat that at a high level of work, the three by eight, and keep that output higher for longer, and it also feels better. So not only are you making it, literally you're making it easier, your output can be sustained at a higher level. And that's the main thing that's going to determine obviously, muscle mass and strength and everything else. I think people forget that you can actually do both at the same time. They're not necessarily given that it's a trade-off every single time. Yeah. That was like the, if you wanted to get strong, don't go run.

And then all of a sudden, now we're saying, in order to get stronger faster, you could probably go run. Yeah, the whole interference thing has been kind of blown out of proportion and it's hard because you know as you guys know that there really is an interference effect like it is a real thing like you don't see bodybuilders winning marathons or you know marathon runners triathletes winning bodybuilding things or power lifting meets, right? And if you look at the muscle, you go all the way down to the muscle fiber level, your aerobic fibers, your smaller fibers, they can only get so big because they're running aerobically. They literally need oxygen to run.

Oxygen gets into the fiber via passive diffusion, something called the Krogh cylinder model. So if your fiber gets too big, you can't passively diffuse oxygen into it. So those fibers are going to stay smaller by definition of them being more, I hear quotes, more purely oxidative. Your bigger fast-twitch anaerobic fibers, not necessarily directly using oxygen, so they don't have a limit on how big they can get because there's no limit of oxygen diffusing into it. If you take that all the way back out and you look now for most people who are lifters, there is an interference effect but it's more on kind of the speed and power. So if you do, let's say, a session dedicated to speed and power, this study was done in females,

and you do just moderate level aerobic training for 40 minutes after, or you don't do anything, those are the two groups. The group that did the moderate level aerobic training after their vertical jump and peak power did go down. But you sandwich those two opposing things like right next to each other, and those athletes were already at a pretty high level of development.

However, most strength metrics won't really change that much. Metrics of hypertrophy don't change that much either. And what you find is that if your aerobic system is very poorly developed, that again becomes like kind of your rate limiter. And you know, hybrid athletes, other athletes, CrossFit athletes, like we've all seen that if you would have asked me, even with the CrossFit as an example, 10 years ago, the level that CrossFit athletes would get to, even for just pure max strength by doing CrossFit stuff, if we look at the games, I would have like, nah, they'll never hit those kind of levels and sustain that over three days.

And they have. So I think interference definitely is a thing. It's a physiologic thing, but most people are not remotely close to getting to an advanced enough level that they really need to worry about it and that their rate limber a lot of times is actually doing the aerobic component of it. Yeah, I can actually remember this almost like the specific period of time where people started taking actual aerobic conditioning seriously in CrossFit. It wasn't until they started going to like, nobody would have ever thought like go do

45 minutes of sustained zone two breathing on a rower and then they started showing up to breathing on a rower and then they started showing up to uh Froning's gym and he's like yeah like three times a day I just sit on this thing for an hour and just practice and they were like what what is that uh and he's like that's how I win every year like I just am on and then Matt Frazier used to sit in his mom's basement it's like the most cliche thing Just yeah on the air dine on the rower. Like what are you doing? I'm still my mom's basement just rowing away trying to win this fitness event But that's like how they did it like they were they had a massive engine and Their recovery was so much better than everyone else is that by the time Sunday rolled around They were still the strongest and still the fastest.

Yeah, he was Rich Ronin who got significantly better at running. Running was not the best thing for him. So what did he do? Kalipa was the same. I remember when we interviewed Kalipa and he was... Yeah, same thing. What was the running coach Hinshaw? Chris Hinshaw.

Yeah, he was like, that guy changed my life. And all of a sudden, I think that year, Kalipa finished second, because he actually just went and focused on not just being this big burly dude. It was also like a thing. I remember in the end, you know, now that I have hung out with you and had you coach me and all this stuff, like I still would probably believe a lot of the stuff of like having, like having that much muscle

Like as somebody like Jason Kaliba and not like bodybuilder level muscle. That's the he's a big dude Yeah, I mean my business partner that you also coach Brian Boorstee. Yes. Yes more muscle stacked on his body than Freaking everybody that I've ever been friends with combined like the guy is so jacked Oh, yeah, I used to always look at him and be like, dude, I'm gonna beat you by like four reps all the time just because I'm much smaller than you, man. Like you just got all this muscle that needs all this oxygen

and there's just not enough air in the world to keep you going. Like it's just, he's so giant, but it's really, I think it comes down to like structuring that cardio and that aerobic capacity in a specific way. Like how do you kind of start to build the programs to get somebody that carries a lot of muscle, probably loves lifting, and then adding in an aerobic base to all of it?

Yeah, I think related to structure, it's a good point. Like I'm a huge fan of using the bike, the air bike, or the rower, because on both of those, your structure is literally unloaded. Now, if you have to run, and sometimes we've had running the CrossFit games, and depending on what you're doing, yeah, you might have to run. If you're a bigger mammal, you can kind of get away with it. But most of the bigger mammals that I coach, like if they send me video of them running, I want to throw battery acid in my eyes. I'm like, just God's sake, just don't either we fix that or just don't do it.

Right. If you don't need to, let's put you on a rover. Let's put you on a bike. We can get a lot of the aerobic benefits we want. And both of those are concentric only. There's not a big eccentric component. They're relatively full body. The bike's obviously a little bit more lower body if you're not using an air bike.

So that's the big thing. So I'd say mode is gonna make a big difference. And then two, I'm a big fan of doing some type of assessment. Like just like lifting, like where would you start? So you can do a VO2 max assessment, a concept two rower, get on warmup appropriately for quite a while rest and then you're gonna do a 2,000 meter it's a gold standard on the erg as fast as you can you can take that type it in the concept to website VO2

max concept to type in your time and your weight and boom it'll give you a VO2 max and you have your score that's a little bit trickier for the airbike there's some different methods for that again if you can run you can do the Cooper run test so 12 minutes run as fast as you can but either way even if you do five minutes all out on the air bike right you've got a baseline assessment you can look to see are you like really pissed for are you okay are you pretty good. I would say pretty good maybe don't need to work on a lot of aerobic stuff if you're hitting, you know, 50 milliliters per kg per minute I know dr. Annie Galpin's talked about that before I would agree

I think that's probably pretty good if you're below that probably have you know some work to do if you're really low The good part is almost anything will work, right? It's like if you're new to weight training. If you're new to weight training, like any form of program will make progress for you. But the key thing for most programs, if you wanna get the most efficacy to increase your VO2 max, at some point you're gonna need to do high output work,

you know, intensity right around what your VO2 max is, and accumulate, you know, intervals of the two your VO2 max is and accumulate, you know, intervals of the two to eight minute range is somewhere around in there. You can go even shorter than that if you want. Probably going to work up to you over many months, many weeks, 16 to 20 minutes total time, not at once, all of that higher intensity work. So, for example, if someone is not really the best of VO2 max I may just have them, you know get on a rower and do two minutes at a high output and then rest completely Let's just do two rounds of that. So you're literally doing two rounds of two minutes and then we're gonna add

Around each week for maybe five weeks Test you again. And then next week we're gonna maybe bump that to two and a half minutes The caveat is on a using a bike or a rower, you're gonna get that average watts and we want to see that that's at a moderate to high level but it's not a ski slope, it's not dropping really hard. I want to see you hold that output for that period of time and again back to high quality outputs. That's the biggest mistake I see people make is, oh, I heard the internet said the Norwegian four by four is like the greatest program ever. And so I'm like, cool,

send me your output from it. Now some high level people can handle that. Most people like they barely make it through the first four minutes. The second one is horrible. By the time they make it to round four, it's like at a 50% of the output what they started. And again, you don't need to go that aggressive because it's hard to make progress from there. But two day minutes, intervals, kind of just build on that, make sure it's at a relatively high output. Most people probably only need to do that once a week.

I'd rather see a good high quality session once a week than two sessions that are just kind of crappy. Regarding output, given that rowers, assault bikes, aerodines, et cetera, they have a display in front of you telling you your watts or your RPMs or whatever you're looking at. An interval that I've enjoyed doing in the past is that, especially on assault bikes, I will go 100%,

find my top RPMs, say just for ease of conversation, say it's 100, and then I'll just stay above 90% for as long as I can, or above 80% for as long as I can. So by definition, I'm only at 80% or above of my peak output, and then I'll just do the interval for as long as I possibly can and then I'll mark my time and then over the course of two, three, four, five intervals I can see how

my times change but my output is always above that whatever threshold I've set. Yeah, I think that's fine. I like using output. I like using watts off of that but it's the same idea, right? So what you're doing is you're keeping the output high and then you're due to fatigue You're just adjusting the time down which again, I think is fine And then you're gonna look over time and see okay cool if I keep that output high can I? Accumulate total time a little bit more from from week to week right so yeah, I like that

I mean there's many different ways you can you can slice and dice it but I mean there's many different ways you can slice and dice it, but for VO2 max work you need to be at a relatively high output and at some point you have to sustain that for you know two to eight minutes again accumulating up to maybe 16 minutes. Because some lifters are like, oh man I went and I just did 30 seconds of wing gate all out. I was done for the day, I walked out of the gym then. It's like that's's good for anaerobic conditioning. There's some benefits to doing that. But unless you're going to repeat that a lot, you're not going to see a big bump in your aerobic max just from doing that or VO2 max. So should you be getting full recovery on intervals like this? Are you setting a time or a heart rate or how do you typically like to handle recovery? I like using like a biofeedback method.

I've talked about this from Caldits that the hardest part to know at first, even if you have a VO2 max from a new client, is how long do they need to rest? I don't know, one minute, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes. I don't freaking know. And how does that change after those intervals, right? Because I may tell you two minutes That may not be nearly enough time or you might be twiddling your thumbs for like half of it So I like going off a heart rate because heart rate is a pretty good proxy for the cost that it took you to do that

So I'm gonna look at the output of the interval that you did so you're on a salt bike you do 250 watts, right? I'm just making up numbers you do that for two minutes and your heart rate hits 175, right, cool. So I'm gonna probably wait until your heart rate gets at least below 100 and when that happens, okay, now I want you to do your next output again. And what you'll find is as you add more intervals to that, that time that's gonna take you to get back to baseline,

so say below an arbitrary of 100 is gonna be longer. Because the thing I never understood, and this happens with programming in the gym too, is let's say you're doing five sets of something, no squats, do you really need to rest four minutes between set one and set two? Probably not. Set four and five?

Eh, maybe. It's probably gonna be closer to three minutes unless you're in like really high aerobic shape. So I like having that be variable. The thing that we're clamping or capping is that output has to be that high output again. I'd much rather let you rest more on the complete side so you can hit that high output again.

And then over time, yeah, we might know about how much time it takes to complete a block of three. And then we're gonna try to compress that time a little bit, but I still wanna see you hit those outputs. So we'll do like a density method. Well, now we'll try to chip away a little bit of time, but we still wanna hit those, that 250 watts is our marker.

So why do these high intensity intervals move the needle on improving max VO2 compared to doing longer sustain 45 minutes, hour and a half longer runs? It's probably literally just as simple as a said principle, right? So specific adaptation to impose demand. If you're doing zone three or zone two, let's say 40 minutes, there are definitely some huge benefits to that. I think some people who are more untrained could see some transfer for that. But in general, it's

just not at a high enough intensity to be specific to the thing you're doing. So when you have someone do a VO2 max test, very simply you want a test long enough so that they'll reach if you're looking at what's called indirect calorimetry. You've got the little mask on. We're measuring all the air that goes in and out. We're looking at oxygen and CO2 and flow rates and all this stuff. But if you look at that raw data, all I'm really looking at to see if it's a legit VO2 max test is it's probably going to be longer than five minutes, maybe eight minutes, somewhere in the eight to 12-ish minutes range. And I'm going to look to see that O2, right? So we're measuring that O2 that's going in and out.

That O2 is coming up and it's hitting the plateau. And despite them going as hard as they can, and potentially the output even going up a little bit more, the oxygen use rates hasn't changed at all. If that's true, by definition, you can sustain that for an arbitrary period of time, maybe 30 to 60 seconds, there's different debates on that. You've literally hit a VO2 max. And the cool part is if we have that test, we know about what wattage that is.

Now, if I wanna get better at that thing, I probably have to get close to that intensity again and do it for a long enough period of time. The hard part is if I'm really kind of untrained, I'm not gonna be able to hold that for like eight minutes, right? I'm gonna see my output start and then it's gonna drop. So I want to shorten that time period to keep that intensity high, allow recovery and then to hit that intensity again so that I can increase the amount of

exposure to that thing. It's just like lifting. If you really want to get better at a one or M in your squat, if you're new, shit, you could probably do reps of five, eight, ten. Like you're probably just gonna get better at a one or M. If you're Travis Mash, you're probably gonna do a lot of singles, doubles, and triples, right? You need a certain amount of volume and exposure at that intensity for it to transfer to increase it. Yeah. Again, we do these types of testing, the VO2 max testing, with all of our clients. And we've gotten the comment many times from people who don't quite understand what VO2 max testing

really is, where they're on the treadmill or bike or whatever it is, and they're going hard, they're sweating, they're working, and then the person facilitating the test say, okay, you're done. And they're like, no, I'm not done. I can keep going. I haven't reached failure, so to speak. I'm not all the way fatigued. And they're like, no, no, no, the test is over. Go ahead and step off. And they're like kind of bummed and they don't really get it. And they come to us and they're like, no, no, no, the test is over, go ahead and step off. And they're like kind of bummed and they don't really get it. And they come to us and they're like, no, no, no, my score is better than that. They made me get off. They made me stop.

They're not truly understanding what's being tested and how that test works. Can you dig into the details of what exactly the VO2Max test is testing and why they were told to get off before they felt like they were done? Yeah, so different software, and this is using what's called indirect calorimetry. So you have the little mask on, we're measuring all the air that goes in and out and everything.

And so when you're doing these, and I've done hundreds of these, I have my own freaking metabolic heart at my house and Moxley set up and all this fun stuff to do. Most of the time they're looking at the actual O2 level, at least this is what I would look at. There's a couple indicators, so one of them is RPE, how hard did you feel like the test was. Again, I've been that as more of a qualitative marker. There's another one called RER, which is respiratory exchange ratio. If you hit 1.0, you are 100% use of carbohydrates. If you're at 0.7, you are 100% use of fats. And we all know that high, high intensity stuff is going to be pretty much 100% carbohydrates. So you want to make sure that the RER goes well over one.

It'll actually go a little bit beyond that because your respiratory rate will increase really high, which can drive it over one. So I want to see a very high RER. I want to see that plateau in O2. Most new systems, you will be able to measure that and see that live, depending on what averaging you're using. And for some clients, it may not feel like their true max, right? Because they could still get a little bit more output from it. Usually the more trained people, it'll be pretty darn close to what their RPE is at the top. But I would say it probably depends on just their experience level.

And you could very well hit a VO2 max and have it not air quotes feel like a max. But if they've hit the indications and the qualifiers, then it is a VO2 max. Cause remember, VO2 max is the volume of air that you're taking in using aerobically. You can still eke out a little bit more performance, my air quotes, and aerobically,

these are not lean delineations, but for the sake of argument, it works well. Personally, when I do tests, I just drive them all the way to a frigging max till they hit the button and they can't go anymore. Because what I wanna see is one, I don't want them to complain at me, honestly. Two, I want to see what that output is of their true max even though it may be above their VO2 max. And what I really want to see to know that I have a

valid test, this is just my preference, is when I graph those lines, I'm going to graph output against VO2 and I want to see VO2 plateauing and I want to see outputs starting to trend up a little bit more. If I see that by definition, I know I've hit their VO2 max where despite them doing a little bit better on the output on the test, they are not pulling in more oxygen to use that. So by definition, I know that they've hit a plateau at that point. Yeah, I was wondering why people are facilitating those tests. And again, we're 100% virtual, our clients live all over the place. So it's a different center for almost every single

person depending on what city they live in and whatnot. So it's hard to direct traffic on all these third party hospitals or wherever they're going. But I always wonder why people don't just let them go until they're done. I don't know either. My other pet peeve is I always ask for the raw data. We've had this happen a few times, Andy and I have talked about this, where some new programs on the machine, depending on how the algorithm is set up, it may be scanning that O2 for just a one-off number that's a high number.

Because we've had just a few cases where, you know, one of them was a person's VO2 max came back to be like 63. And they're like, there's no way mine's that high. And so Andy and I got the raw data and looked at it. And it was probably closer to like 51. And what it was, was there was an error in one measurement where they were going breath by breath. And so there was one measurement at 63,

but that wasn't a plateau, it was just an outlier. So if they have an algorithm that's just scanning that column for the biggest number, not looking at the average, you can get some errors once in a while on that. Doesn't happen that often. And last thing too, I wanna look at, I like graphing their respiratory rate

versus their output also, because you can see where they become very uncoordinated. So a lot of times if their output is kind of linearly going up and they have this huge spike up in their respiratory rate like before it, that's telling me that they just need more coordination in addition to training at that point. So I might do a specific breathing cadence or change their stroke rate on the rower or something like that, just to try to make them a little bit more coordinated at that point, which will be harder at first, but it'll make that higher intensity exercise over time feel a

little bit better. I know earlier you said that being above 50 is really kind of the big picture goal, but that's a very broad thing to say. Oh, very broad. Can you run through more of a nuanced standard for people based on age, gender, pro athlete versus not pro athlete, endurance athletes versus strength athletes, mixed modal athletes, et cetera? Yeah. So it really depends on what your goal is and what sport you're in right if if you're a high-level powerlifter

Do you really need a vo2 max of 50 probably not right the amount of time you're gonna trade off to get a vo2 max Of 50 just to move heavy reps for one rep It's not gonna be a very good trade-off if you're a high-level endurance athlete and your vo2 max is only 50 That's pretty crappy, right? You probably need to be significantly higher than that. And within that, VO2 max, even in the endurance realm, is only roughly associative with performance, right? The next thing down is there's called VT1, VT2.

In English, it's just if VO2 max is up here, you're super high level. What percentage of that can you use and for how long? Right? And that gets into sub areas of critical power and all this other stuff. So I would say for most lifters, the easiest thing that I do is VO2 max charts are really easy to find on the internet.

So once you did like a 2K or 12 minute Cooper run test, just type in VO2 max norms for your age and it'll come up and it'll give you norms per general population. What I like people to be compared to general population is my bias is at least 80% of that, maybe even 90%. Because again, general population, these people are generally not really training. That's kind of like the goal. If you have a platform that accumulates data from people like the Concept2Rower, you can

put in things and it'll list everyone who has the app who's doing it. You can go in there and spec, you know, 2k row, your age, your name and everything and it'll give you what the distribution is also. Now again, these are people are nutty enough to do the rower and nutty enough to log all their data That's definitely more of a fitness based population, but just purely off your time You'll see okay. Am I in the bottom 5% 50% 75% or 90% To me on that area. I like most people to be at least 50% of that population Like I think you get a lot of benefit. You don't have to worry about interference that area, I like most people to be at least 50% of that population.

Like I think you get a lot of benefit, you don't have to worry about interference, you don't have to add a ton of training time. To go from 50% to 75%, you probably need to be a little more dedicated, a little bit less return on your investment, but if it's something you want to do, I'd say, yeah, go for it. If not, you're probably good enough. You know, 75 to 90th percentile, you're probably not going to see a lot of transfer. You know, if you want to, you know, beat the the 2k row, then yeah, you're going to need a lot of dedicated time. So like all things, you're going to have this kind of curve that's

going to go up and it's definitely going to plateau. Just like lifting, right? If you're trying to get an elite total, that's different than just doing your first powerlifting meet. Right. So the more you get and more advanced you get, you're going to need to be more specific, the issue you're always going to run into at some point is how much concentrated specific work can you do? The more you can do and recover from whatever relative rate is to your genetics and run rate, you can do a little bit better, but now you have to trade that off from something else at that point too. And so I think like 80-90% of the general population you're pretty good. Using the

concept two thing, you know, 50%. I think that's very doable without a ton of effort and most people would see a huge return on their investment. And how often do you suppose someone really needs to do a true VO2 max test? I mean, if someone just says, okay, my goal is to really increase it, I would like them to do it at least once every eight weeks. Now, the trade-off I have is if anyone's ever done a true all-out max, like at least RP of a nine and a half,

it sucks, it's horrible. I have people I tested in my house who've literally told me to my face, four years later, I'm never coming back to your house and I'm never doing that test again. I don't care what. So a lot of it is the trade-off on the psychological cost also. But if somebody says, hey, I really want to improve this thing, at some point you're going to have to retest them. I mean, I'm okay even doing it quarterly if they're following everything else. You could do some what I call soft tests or sub max tests

that will get you somewhere. I think that is kind of useful. Yeah. The other hard part people forget to is as you get better, a max test is always gonna suck. They have one client a couple of years ago. I think he started, he was eight minutes on the 2k test and we got him to like, it was like probably a year, we got him to 723 I think. So pretty big improvement in a year and he's like, I don't understand this, I just got 723 which was seven seconds better than my last test and it was still horrible. I'm like, yeah, it's always going to be horrible because you by definition are doing a max test.

You're doing a little bit better than what you did before. You made a lot of progress, but it's still going to stock. So other things to look at too are changes in HRV, usually more cardiovascular training. HRV baseline will tend to go up. Rust in heart rate will tend to go down, respiratory rate may change, usually it'll go down, but sometimes need more dedicated work there. So there's other proxy measures you can use. I even use qualitative stuff, like how do you feel your energy is day to day?

And if you wanted to go next level, you could do a two minute heart rate recovery test, get up to a max, you know, hold it there for just a bit, see how long you stop, how long over two minutes your heart rate comes down. Again, rough marker there, two minute heart rate recovery, I like at least 50 beats. So if you hit 180 in two minutes, ideally, I'd like to just see 50 beats below that, so 130 or below.

So there's some other proxy measures you can use along the way. And of course, just their day-to-day training. Are they making, just like lifting, progressive overload? Are you able to do a little bit more? You're able to keep that at the intensity you want? If you are, by definition, we know you're getting better. How much better?

It's hard to know without an actual test again. As adding kind of the meathead element back into this, balancing the two, how do you kind of feel like structuring a week looks on in your mind? Yeah, for lifting I really like... I feel like I'm on the way low end of the meathead side. Like when we were only training like two days a week, that's like a low number. Yeah. I mean, some people can, again, a lot of it is by their constraints. How much time do they have?

What is their schedule? All that kind of stuff. But if we say middle of the road, like what are most people doing? I like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday lifting at least. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, some type of cardio. Sundays and off day, unload, take a walk, do all your food prep, all that kind of stuff. So I like it if you're trying to make progress on it. If I can even get one more cardiovascular session

from you at some point, I do find cardiovascular appears to respond better to frequency. The good part is it's very easy to change intensity and you can shorten it or make it easier. From a lifting and thing, that's what I like you have your heavier sympathetic days Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday a little bit easier more kind of parasympathetic. Within that if they are doing like the VO2 max intervals they can either do that on a separate day or they might pair it on like an upper body lifting day

Not ideal, but you could still you know get it done And if they really want to go crazy I do like a split where they would do some cardiovascular training in the morning and they would lift in the afternoon Some people that's not always possible, but a lot of people have a bike. They have a rower. It's at their home You know, I've gotten really good progress with what I call just six-minute progressives. Get on the rower, not necessarily don't have to warm up much. Just give me six minutes total time. And I want to see at the end, your heart rate's going to just barely hit 80, probably about

90% of your max. But it's going to look like this slow increase, increase and it's not gonna be hard for long. Just doing that five or six days a week, people can make some pretty good progress. With that, without a whole lot of time, without a whole lot of changing to their schedule either. Yeah, one of the giant side benefits is when you start, it totally sucks.

Oh yeah. In like 10 days into it, or like week two, maybe three of training, and you go, I feel really good right now. And that's the sign that you're doing it right, and you just wanna keep going. Like it becomes a part of really like balancing out the meathead part is having a really good conditioning

system that just like really actually makes you feel fantastic. Yeah, I'm in the middle of doing a little experiment to see how many days in a row I could do cardiovascular training with, you know, presenting in Massachusetts, being in Mexico, being down here in South Padre, travel, everything else. And so right now I'm actually on day 60 in a row. And like some of them are just a short run for one mile. Like some of them are just 20 minutes of zone two at night. Some of them are just a couple of intervals at 30 seconds, super, super hard at the end of lifting. You can modify it to ways to fit in. And again, I just like that violent consistency over time.

Just like lifting, same principles apply. Pardio is like a sign of maturity. I just want everybody to know that too. It kind of is. You go on Twitter and you speak. It's like, yeah, you know, like every time I get on Twitter these days and I go and kick it with my buddy, Mike Boyle. Yeah.

You know what they're talking about? How great it feels to sit on an air dine. And you're like, all these old meatheads, all the kids just find an air dine and a rower and sit there and start breathing and feeling good. And all of a sudden you're like, oh yeah, this cardio thing, it's fun. I don't know why you're not doing zone two training. It's like, well, because now you're old. Now cardio is cool. It's a sign of maturity.

Yeah, I agree. Where can the people find you, sir? Best place is probably the website, which is miketnelson.com. Most of the information I have is on the newsletter. So there'll be a little tab on the top to go to newsletter. Just hit reply there and we'll send you a cool free gift and then we've got the website and then we've got Instagram Dr. Mike T Nelson and then the flex diet podcast also. There you go. I love it Douglas C Larson. Yes, sir. I'm on Instagram Douglas C Larson. Mr. Michael T Nelson. Appreciate you coming on the show brother I'm not sure what episode this is, but maybe maybe your 10th time on the show. It's been a while

Yeah, you gotta be setting records over here. But yeah, love itth time on the show has been... Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah, you're like double digits, man. Yeah, you got to be setting records over here. But yeah, love having you on the show. It's always fun. And then of course, love having you on the team here at Rapid Health. We didn't say this at the beginning of the call, but one of the many things that you do... I call you internally like our Swiss Army Knife because you can kind of do it all. If I ever need something, I know who to call. But on a more consistent daily basis,

Mike oversees all of the aura data within the company looking over sleep scores and Just looking making sure that people are getting high quality sleep and whatever Whatever metrics that they need to optimize Specifically related to sleep Mike oversees all that so appreciate you being on the team and thanks for coming on the show Thank you guys. Appreciate it I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner and we are barbell shrugged, barbell underscore shrugged, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com.

That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galvin are doing a free lab, lifestyle and performance analysis. You can access that free report over at rapidhealthreport.com. Team, we'll see you guys next week.