Barbell Shrugged - [HIIT] A Minimalist Approach to Building Muscle and Vo2Max w/ Dr. Martin Gibala, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #756

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Dr. Martin Gibala is a professor and the Faculty of Science Research Chair in Integrative Exercise Physiology at McMaster University. His research examines the mechanistic basis of exercise responses and the impacts on health and performance. Dr. Gibala is widely known for his work on high-intensity interval training. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles and his work is frequently cited by major media outlets. Dr. Gibala also coauthored a bestselling book on the topic of time-efficient exercise, The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That’s Smarter, Faster, Shorter.   Dr. Gibala’s Website www.martingibala.com   Dr. Gibala’s Published Research https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-023-01938-6 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36121130/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34669625/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32362039/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31691289/   Work with RAPID Health Optimization Dr. Martin Gibala on X Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Martin Givala is coming on to the podcast. And in this week's episode, we're gonna be talking about high-intensity interval training, all the way down to one-minute workouts and the benefits that could come along with just doing a little tiny bit every single day

to move the needle forward in your own health and fitness. How to approach it, not just one-minute workouts, but totally understanding what it means to be in a high-intensity interval training workout do it how to build strength how to build vo2 max all of the details in between as always friends make sure you head over to rapidehealthreport.com that is where dr andy galpin has a free eight minute video on how you can unlock your true physiological potential that's right the three-step process that we use here at Rapid Health Optimization

to make the best in the world better. And you can access that free report over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson. Dr. Martin Gabal-Lah.

Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're gonna be talking about high intensity, which is high intensity interval training, which is phenomenal because we started this podcast really targeted at all of the CrossFit people out there and the big rides of CrossFit where I feel like high intensity interval training turned into a sport. But you've been studying this stuff in the lab. I'd love to hear starting this thing, like where the interest came from and a little bit about history on your career. Yeah. So thanks for having me. You know, I think HIIT is one of these things that we just rediscover every decade or so, you know, athletes have been doing it for a long time.

I got interested in it for basically personal and professional reasons. So I've been at McMaster 25 years now. When I first got to McMaster, you know, a busy young professor had two small children, working partner. And so ironically for a professor of kinesiology, I didn't have a whole lot of time to work out. And so I was reading about, you know, this high intensity interval training stuff, and I thought I would try it. And I found it was a way for me at least to maintain my fitness. And that sort of dovetailed with this professional interest. For a long time, I've taught a course on the integrative physiology of human performance. And my students were always really interested in, you know, I would ask the question, why do these high level endurance athletes include short, hard sprints?

How does it make them better endurance athletes? athletes and as a way to sort of introduce underlying biochemistry and things like that uh but then i started just reading more and more and uh that got us interested in asking the question certainly you know this idea of how low can you go or what's the minimum dose that might still be effective uh starting to apply it to to non-athletic individuals and there's been an explosion of interest, obviously, in high intensity interval training and cardiac rehabilitation and to, you know, many different people that we initially wouldn't think could perform this type of training and benefit from it. You wrote a quick circle back for people that aren't like 100% familiar with the science behind all this and just define intensity and just, you know, workouts that are hard, aren't necessarily intense and define time domains, et cetera. Yeah, for sure. So, so, you know, what is interval training? Uh, it, it's just simply peaks and valleys, right? So

alternating bouts of relatively intense exercise interspersed with recovery periods that could be complete rest. That could be lower intensity exercise what is high intensity uh to me it's vigorous intensity exercise which is already well defined in public health guidelines and so uh you know the simplest way would be uh you know the zero to ten scale where zero is laying on the couch uh ten is sprint from danger pace save your child from an oncoming car and so vigorous is a seven or an eight on a 10 point scale. So I think many people think that high intensity interval training is only this all out as hard as you can go gut busting type exercise that can certainly be a very effective method,

but it's not the only way. And the other thing is it's vigorous for you, right? And so the, what, what, what the workload or the work rate that would trigger a vigorous effort in a cardiac patient is obviously extremely different from a high level endurance athlete. So it can really be scaled to many different starting levels of fitness. For people who prefer heart rate, you know, the general rule of thumb for what, uh, reaches vigorous exercise is 77%. So you hear this sort of rule of thumb. If you're reaching 80% of your maximum heart rate, you're in sort of the high intensity, uh, domain. So really that's the type of efforts that we're talking here. Um, when you write a book, the one minute workout, you're dominating seven minute abs first. Um, can we really do and see good, like significant, um, gains in fitness with, uh, a minute, a hard out or all out effort?

Yeah. So, so the short answer is yes. Where the title of the book comes from is, you know, when we started out doing these, uh, studies we would use, I'm sure you're familiar with a 30 second Wingate test, right? And that's a 30 second all out as hard as you can go effort, longest 30 seconds of your life. And we're having people do five, six, seven, eight repeats of that with a few minutes of recovery. And so the workouts start to finish, we're about half an hour. And, you know, it was pointed out, well, that's not really that time efficient. And so over time we'd scaled it down and we settled on a protocol that was 10 minutes in duration, start to finish. So a little bit of warmup, a little bit of cool down within that though, there were three 22nd hard bursts of exercise. So three 22nd efforts in a 10 minute

time commitment, that was a minute of hard exercise. Uh, and we've done numerous studies now showing that that can be beneficial and improve your cardio, respiratory fitness and improve different health related metrics. Uh, so that's where it comes from, you know, and now we're starting to do work on, uh, we, we call exercise snacks. So this idea of brief bursts of, of vigorous efforts spread throughout the day for people that never done that before like a 30 second windgate test or just any 30 second 100 effort test and you're doing repeated bouts like that is a is a brutal experience like if i knew on friday i had windgate tests to do i would be nervous all week like fuck like oh no why did i decide to do this

and and i i love i And I love intervals like that. Like, I have an assault bike in my garage, and I do things like this on a semi-regular basis. But every time I'm nervous about it, every time I finish it, I'm always glad I did it. But it is a harrowing experience if you're truly going 100%. Yeah, it's like one of the mean tricks you do when you own a gym is like when somebody walks in and they think they're really awesome. And you're like, yeah, well, the gym record's like 125 for 500 on the rower you can work out for like a minute and a half right like what do you what do you think you get we'll just see how it compares to this board and then they have to take like a whole day off work because

they're just absolutely destroyed it's it's hard to imagine that um a minute and a half can be that painful and affect the rest of your day. Where do you feel like kind of the lower limits and then the upper limits of getting the maximum benefit are for those? I would imagine it's kind of based on more energy systems and keeping the intensity as high as, and output as high as possible. Yeah. And so, you know, so many ways to make these comparisons and we sort of try to shy away from what's optimal or best one, because there probably is no single best metric for, or method for, for everyone. And it's sort of, well, what are you comparing it to, right? Compared to what? But, you know, there's no

free lunch at the end of the day. And so if you want the benefits of these short workouts, it has to be intense. And so, you know, as intense as you can go, if you want to make it as time efficient as possible, but that's not to say that's, you know, going to be appealing to many individuals. And so over time, we've tried to study different protocols, varying lengths in that to try and, you know, come up with different protocols that might be appealing to someone. We're not saying that everyone should do this or it's the only way to train. But we know that for those who are willing to put in this type of effort, even brief, they can reap a lot of benefits. Yeah. I didn't know. I've never done something like that, that short outside of like very, very fast, high intensity CrossFit workouts. But over the past year, I've had a real goal

of improving my mile time. Like I want to run a sub six mile. And part of that right now is the extremely painful, go run a mile as hard as you can. It doesn't need to be a PR. In my neighborhood, there's like little hills and things like that. But if you want to go get after it for six minutes and two seconds around the loop, that's all you need to do. It's unbelievably challenging. And it will just absolutely, especially when you're in 90-something degree heat, all you need to get in shape is seven minutes. Just get up and go run as hard as you can go. And, you know, there's lots of different ways to improve your VO2 max, but to your point, you know, even a single bout, the last three,

four, five, six minutes, extremely challenging. It can be extremely beneficial. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing

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Once again, it's rapidehealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. Where do you feel like the high intensity side of things? I feel like a lot of times it is associated really with the cardiovascular side of things. How would you kind of structure that for if the goal is hypertrophy? Yeah. So, you know, we've done some body weight style training protocols, you know, arguably any type of resistance training or hypertrophy training is interval based, right? You're going super hard. You're taking a break and repeating it. So then the question is, well, is that interval training? You know, we could have a debate on that. But in terms of hypertrophy training, and again, you're an educated audience here, and you guys would educate me on all of this, but I think there, you know, well, we're learning some

things, right? The work of Stu Phillips, my good colleague, who's talking about, you know, maybe we don't have to lift as heavy as we think, as long as you're willing to go to failure, right? The work of Stu Phillips, my good colleague, who's talking about, you know, maybe we don't have to lift as heavy as we think, as long as you're willing to go to failure, right? And so 40, 50% 1RM, if you do enough of it, the hypertrophy response can be quite similar. So, you know, in some ways, resistance exercises is an extreme example of interval training. And if we look at the forces that are generated during a 1Rm or a squat you know markedly higher than we would generate in a wingate test for for example yeah we had him on and he was saying he was doing a lot of the stuff with like bands at this point which you wouldn't think many times actually correlate directly to hypertrophy but with all the stimulus kind of put together he said he's having pretty good results with it all yeah

absolutely again with this idea of you know making making it more generalizable to many different folks, right? A lot of people can't lift heavy for different reasons. And so, you know, Stu's obviously very interested in healthy aging and maintaining health span and things like that. And, you know, that work is quite compelling, I think. I've applied a similar concept to, unquote cardio training with intervals here where if you're training to failure, whether you're doing a 5RM or a 25RM, you can get pretty good hypertrophy responses if you go to failure, as'm just going to stay above a hundred as long as I possibly can essentially kind of, kind of training to failure in a way of failure to stay at a hundred RPMs, or I could say at 90 RPMs for as long as possible. And if I do those max tests like that, which are again, are also brutal experiences. Um, it's kind of a, kind of a similar idea. Uh, it's a fun way for me to play with my performance. No, exactly. You know, we think about, well, what's the stimulus that's

leading to the adaptation here. And, you know, like we're talking about these molecular signals in muscle that sort of get triggered or turned on. And I think of it as, you know, one way to, you know, we can think of these molecular signals as like fuel gauges, molecular fuel gauges, literally. Right. And so one way to turn them on, was we start to run out of glycogen. So if you do traditional moderate intensity exercise, you're sort of dropping the glycogen very, very slowly, takes a long period of time for the fuel gauges to start lighting up. You know, to your point, you jump on a salt bike, you go for a minute or so, you're dropping the fuel or the energy reserves very, very quickly and seemingly can trigger very similar responses despite the fact that the time involved is, is quite short. So I think the underlying physiological remodeling is the same, and it's just the way that we trigger it. We can trigger it with, with different, different protocols. Yeah. From a performance standpoint, like talking about Andrew's six

minute mile, there's, there's different ways to approach that. Of course, like you could just try to run a faster and faster and faster mile every time you test, but you're running at a seven minute pace and then you're running at a six 50 pace and then you're running at a six 40 pace. You're trying to run a little faster, which, which kind of changes your mechanics to some extent. Maybe your stride length changes, your frequency changes. You're doing something different every time, as opposed to if you just run, say you're on a treadmill and you're running at a six minute mile pace. If you're running at 10 miles an hour, in this case, if you're running at 10 miles an hour, maybe you can only run 10 miles an hour for four and a half minutes. And then

you run 10 miles an hour for four hours for four minutes and 45 seconds. And then you, you run at that pace for longer and longer and longer and longer and longer as you get in better and better shape. There's kind of two approaches to it. So I like playing the other side of it from, from like an interval perspective. Yeah. I think all just variations on the overload, uh, you know, uh, concept, right. You're, you're triggering it in different ways. Yeah. Uh, you met, you mentioned VO2 max a moment ago. Um, I'd imagine this, this isn't the, the idea here isn't like full swap. Like if you were long, long, slow distance, and then now, now you're all intervals. It's not like this

binary thing where you've got to be one or the other. Uh, I'd imagine there's, there's, there's a place for both in a comprehensive program. Yeah, I think so, right? And obviously, zone two is having a moment right now, right? Zone two training. But if you look at the way that high-level athletes train, high-level endurance athletes, it's pretty much an 80-20 split, right? So 80% low intensity, low to moderate intensity, continuous type exercise, 20% high intensity intervals. Now, these individuals are doing 25, 30 hours a week of training. And so even 20% of that is a lot of time spent at high intensity. I think where the debate is right now, well, what if you're only doing an hour a week of exercise or you're doing the public health guidelines?

What should that split or ratio be? And that's where I think I would take exception to some of the suggestions out there around zone two just because elite endurance athletes train 80 20 i don't necessarily think it means it's the best or the optimal for for uh for everyone uh but you know still not a bad uh prescription and to your point yes you know this is not about one you know demonizing traditional cardio or it's all about high intensity interval training. We should be doing both. Absolutely. Right. In addition to resistance exercise, in addition to flexibility training, our work really is just saying for people who cite time as a barrier or would like to try and get away with less time, I think there's a place for more vigorous intensity exercise there in order to reap benefits with relatively short time commitment.

But we're not saying that's all that you should be doing or this is the solution to our inactivity problem or anything like that. Yeah, I'd love to dig into kind of the physiology side of like what is actually happening? Why does a marathoner want to train in time domains that are maybe sub one minute or in that three to five minute range? Like why probably the, the lay, the layman thinking, if you want to go run a marathon, you should do that, that approach where it's like, run your five miles. And then next week is your six miles.

And we start gradually progressing those. Um. But to have those professional athletes or high level athletes kind of really focusing on, you know, 20 to 30% of their time on these higher intensity outputs, where does that, how does that help their training in those longer durations? Yeah. So seemingly, you know, the high intensity, it seems to optimize, you know, why does your VO2 max go up? Right. Well, VO2 max largely depend on oxygen delivery. So cardiac output, high intensity exercise seems to maximize the improvements that you'll see in cardiac output, in stroke volume, left ventricular volumes, blood volumes, you know, the elasticity of your blood vessels, mitochondrial responses. So all of these seem to be optimized or potentiated for a given individual if they include the high intensity type exercise, but there's still something to the total volume for all of the other responses that have to take place, whether it's connective tissue,

just the, you know, the mental side of it in terms of being able to compete for a long time, right? Cyclists would be the, you know, the real example there. You know, you just got to spend time on the bike to condition lots of things, including your mind. But physiologically, it seems like spending a certain amount of time at a high intensity that if you only did it at a moderate continuous pace, you wouldn't be able to reach that level for sufficient time. You have to do it with intervals in order to maximize these physiological responses that I just laid out. Yeah. For someone who's just kind of a normal 50-year-old person, you care about health and longevity. You want to keep your joints healthy. you want to play with the kids,

kind of all the all the things a normal person would want at that age. What are what are your thoughts for a person like that? Like, what's a what's a joint friendly, the most joint friendly ways to do this? Like, what's a good example protocol? touching touching max heart rate once a week seems to be a good idea in my mind, but what are, what are your thoughts on frequency and duration, et cetera? Yeah. So in, in, you know, uh, people often think high intensity, oh, that's, you know, a lot of, uh, high impact forces and that, but to your point, it really depends on the protocol. So I I'd be a classic example, right? Just turned 56. I have knee osteoarthritis, my left knee from a running injury when I was very young, I can't run anymore. Right. And so, but I do a lot of high intensity exercise, but it's all on the bike. I, I, I, you know, I, I like riding a bike it's

low impact, but I could swim, I could get on a rowing erg, I could do, you know, elliptical, but for me, it's cycling. And so I think that's an excellent exercise that allows you to achieve high cardiovascular stress with relatively low low impact you know you pretty much have to use some sort of equipment unless you're swimming in in order to to elicit that but you know uphill walking hiking uphill adding elevation is another way to minimize the impact forces but still increase the cardiovascular load or, uh, or stress on that. So, you know, many different modes, uh, that you can apply, uh, high intensity interval training, uh, if you want to minimize the, uh, the impact, uh, forces in the, uh, the MSK, uh, risk, you know,

in, in terms of how, how much, yeah, I think at least one interval training session a week is is beneficial right you you need to huffing and puffing regularly is is a good strategy right and so we're you know uh and again that that typical 50 year old who's worried about house span and playing with their kids and that where where where are they starting out right and so a common refrain for us is hey just get out of your comfort zone to start right so you know so you're a little bit more out of breath a little bit harder to talk to your workout partner and that we're not saying just go and sprint like your life depended on it right so just get out of your comfort zone to start and uh and and build from there i'm someone who does a lot you know not that anyone should

train the way that i do but i i like interval training i i do a lot of it right and so you you know you read or you hear these sort of truisms. Oh, no one can do high intensity more than once a week. Well, you know, it depends on what you're actually doing, what you like and enjoy. So I don't think these, you know, one size fits all approaches apply to across the board. Yeah, actually, that was going to be exactly kind of lead into exactly what I wanted to think to ask about structuring this into, you know, probably the CrossFit, the Orange Theory, F45. These are like the most kind of like popular places where you're going to be able to go and do high intensity training on a daily basis.

And then we kind of get the backlash, you know, four, five, six months down the road. We're like, well, I don't know why my stress levels are so high. I have I run a business and then I go to CrossFit every day and my recovery's off. Like what happened? Um, when did we kind of hit the, uh, maybe like the, we've gone too far and we need to back this thing down because the answer isn't high intensity on, you know, and just hammering yourself every day. No, no agree. You know, again, we, I'm sure we could have a debate about this, but like to me, overtraining, overreaching more related to volume than just intensity per se, but, and, and, you know, it's so variable, right? We take a hundred

people, we put them on the same program. So any one of those programs you just mentioned, you know, some are thriving, some are going to wither over the course of that. So it really depends about individual resiliency and all of that. But, you know, look, looking at some common markers, right? How's your waking heart rate? You know, how is your sleep overnight? Looking at these subjective indices that might give you some indication of maybe you're overdoing it a little bit. I would actually, I would almost, I don't know where this would show up in the debate, but I feel like, or if there's any reason to debate, but I would love to know.

I personally feel like the long slow beats me down so much more than anything high intensity, just the total reps and the fact that in order to feel like you're getting the stimulus, you have to go so far because the pace that you're doing five miles at can't be at perfect form. Like you could go and do a one mile all out. There's just, there's, there's more musculature, um, and, and power behind that one six minute mile or whatever it is output where at five miles, you're just at some point to get the stimulus, you're just kind of like dragging your body across the finish line.

Yeah. And, and so I, you know, the one thing with intervals is the infinite variety, right? To your point, there's only so many ways to get on a treadmill and jog at a moderate pace for 45 minutes or an hour. But with intervals, the sky's the limit in terms of the duration of the intervals, the duration of the recovery periods, the nature of the recovery periods, the specific intensity of the intervals, our recovery periods, complete rest

or not. And so I think for people that want to vary that stimulus, it can be an extremely appealing way to train, uh, you know, in part to prevent for what a lot of people deem the boredom of, of, and the time commitment of the more traditional long, slow distance approach. But again, not saying it's the best or the only way to do it. And back to Doug's point, it's like, I think varying it up is going to be the best approach for, for most. Yeah. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the rest period. It's something that people don't think about too much. Um, going from, you know, 400 at a two to one, uh, rest to work ratio to three to one, four to one, and how kind of those stimuluses may have different adaptations and

what we'd be going for and longer rest periods, shorter rest periods, et cetera. Yeah. And so obviously, you know, again, not meaning to hedge, but it really depends on how intense those preceding efforts are. Right. And so, you know, we could talk about a 10 by one, 10, one minute efforts. Well, are those one minute efforts all out or are they at 80%, right? Because that's going to impact on the recovery period. You know, a general rule of thumb has been the recovery period. You know, a general rule of thumb has been the recovery periods. You know, you allow your, if you're using heart rate as a metric, you allow it to get back down to about 60% of maximum before you go again. I think where

people can make a mistake is they make the recovery intervals too hard, right? And so you, the point of the recovery periods is just that to recover so that you can go hard on your subsequent uh interval uh and so i i think whether you're using perceived effort level you know you feel you've recovered to a certain level that you can go back and hit that seven or eight or nine again um that should be guiding your, your recovery intervals. But, you know, to give you specific examples, when we've been using these 20 second all out efforts, we're giving people two minutes of recovery, right. And because those 20 second efforts are so hard. So that's a one to six ratio, right? Oftentimes, uh, when athletes are doing these four minute efforts repeated a couple

of times, they're using two or three minute recovery periods. So that's less than one to one. And so that's where it really depends on how hard, what's the absolute work rate during those hard intervals. But I think to sum up, make the recovery periods easy, utilize the recovery periods so that you're prepared to go hard on that subsequent interval. One of the most famous protocols is

the Tabata protocol where it's four minutes, essentially 30 second intervals, 20 on, 10 off, 20 on, 10 off for four minutes. And I use, whenever I would do those things, I would actually sit there and think like, this is the worst workout I've ever done because 10 seconds is nowhere near enough time for me to be able to actually get the stimulus that I want. So it's forcing my, my output to be significantly lower, knowing that I've got two more minutes on the back half of this thing in 10 seconds. Even if you're just doing pushups, it's, it's the recovery is not nearly enough to be able to get you to where you want to go. And even if you were to do a 20-second all-out sprint, that's insanely painful if you're doing

that. 10 seconds is nowhere near enough recovery time to be able to go and do that. I would almost hedge for most people, and I would love to hear your thoughts, on longer rest periods and higher output, work output. That way you're not kind of running into this like, well, I'm only operating at 70% knowing that I got four minutes to go and there's only this like 10 second, which is basically enough time to like feel bad for yourself. And then you're right back into something where that, that output just dies towards the end.

Yeah, no, no, I agree with you. And you look at the original tabata studies they were done on a bike right but you know to many people tabata has morphed into body weight style training or calisthenics or things like that and you know even if it's a push-up workout extremely demanding to do 20 seconds of push-ups only 10 seconds of recovery and then to keep the push-ups going so i i agree with you and i think for many individuals uh you know even like you survive a tabata right it's extremely challenging you survive it you get through it is it a physiological stress absolutely you know is it optimal for a given individual i'm not sure

i think what happens you know we're not it's not a nutrition show but it's a bit like everyone's doing keto but everyone's sort of doing modified keto, right? Like the precise keto is really, really hard. So I think a lot of people end up doing modified Tabatas, right? They stick to the 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, but it's not the all out, right? Or the intensity really falls as they go through. So I think it's back to this idea. I think for many people, a more quality interval session can involve longer periods of recovery so that those hard efforts can actually be really hard. And I think that's an overall more quality workout for a lot of folks. I mean, if cardiovascular output and response to that output really is the goal, then local

muscular failure shouldn't be a part of the equation. You should be using a large amount of muscle mass without actually experiencing fatigue in those muscles in the sense that you actually go to failure. No, correct. You're absolutely right. And, you know, and I think this is where body weight style training can be effective, you know, depending on the specific body weight exercises that you're talking about. And to your point, you know, using more exercises that are engaging the larger muscle groups are are are better off there because you're right otherwise you're getting local muscle failure and you're not necessarily getting the cardiovascular stimulus uh if if your goal is uh is cardiac uh conditioning right you're not getting

any cardio effect from doing tabatas with bodyweight squats or whatever but you still will but we're not the exact stimulus we're talking about here correct right and again back to some of our original discussion like what's the goal, right? Is this for general health? How much time do you have available? We're not necessarily saying this is optimal, but you know, all of these things are going to be providing some benefit, but it, you know, I think for a given individual, it's like, how much time am I willing to allocate to my fitness and then work within that? What's the best way to structure that for you in order to get the most benefit? Yeah, I'd love to dig into you mentioned the exercise snacks and kind of what that structure looks like. Maybe across a 24 hour window, maybe leave out the part where you're sleeping and set an alarm to wake up and do some air squats.

But the first I actually had heard of that was, and it probably was your research, Dr. Galpin on the Huberman Lab podcast when he mentioned that. What does that look like? Because I could probably get up off my butt a little bit more throughout the day too. Yeah. So we, you know, we didn't coin the term, but we've defined exercise snack as a lesson or equal to one minute bout. So one minute bout or less of vigorous intensity exercise that's performed sporadically throughout the day.

And in our studies, we've had people do three, four, five of these exercise snacks daily. And we actually have some ongoing randomized controlled trials right now looking at this. But again, one minute or less vigorous intensity exercise spread throughout the day. So it is that classic, you know, you're heading to the subway in the morning and you pick up the pace for vigorous effort. You're carrying your heavy backpack, right? And you're literally running along in order to get into that vigorous range. You get to work, you have the option of taking the elevator, you take the stairs, maybe you work on the sixth floor, you take the stairs, right? And then you do it again at your break, on your lunch hour, and when you leave for the day. Or, you know, as I'm sitting right here, as I'm having an interview with you, I could get up,

from my chair, do a series of air squats for a minute. That's an exercise snack. And so we're asking, and so the benefit there is if you engage in sufficient vigorous effort, maybe that's going to add up enough to move the needle in terms of your cardiospiratory fitness, but you're simultaneously breaking up prolonged periods of sedentary behavior, right? So wherever you are, whatever your baseline fitness or workout routine is, incorporate more of these snacks through the day to break up the prolonged periods of sitting. Because the evidence is it's quite compelling that ideally we want to spread the exercise out throughout the day. And there's work showing three 10-minute bouts of exercise spread throughout the day might actually be better for you than one 30 minute bout of continuous exercise. And maybe it relates to this idea of breaking up periods of prolonged sitting, you know, to stimulate your glucose

uptake and things like that. So, you know, we're doing these exercise snack studies in more individuals who are less fit, who are insufficiently or completely inactive, individuals who have type 2 diabetes, and just saying, hey, could you give us three, four minutes a day? We're outfitting them with continuous glucose monitors. And we're saying at the end of three months or so of this structured type of exercise,

and we're actually, we're delivering it to them on smartphones. So in a quote unquote real life setting, at work or at home. So they get a ping on their smartphone. It's like, Hey, it's time for your exercise snack. Here's your options. Pick one of those takes them to a YouTube video, walks them through. And we want to say, if people do this, if they engage in this for, you know, a couple of minutes a day for three months, is that enough to move the, move the needle in terms of glucose control, blood fat markers, fitness markers? So those people aren't doing any other quote unquote real workouts, normal workouts. They're

only doing the exercise snacks for a period of time. And you guys are trying to see what the results are thereafter. Exactly. And, you know, we have some small proof of concept laboratory based studies, but that's different, right? You know, you bring them in the lab, you supervise them, very controlled settings. We're trying to take that more out into into the real world. But yes, exactly. These are individuals who are, you know, not otherwise meeting physical activity guidelines, many quite inactive. And we're just seeing if, you know, they do this, can it be beneficial for them? Because, you know, again, we want for wherever people are, just getting out of that lowest fitness zone is most important for your overall health, reducing your risk of dying from all causes. You know, you just want to move out of that low fitness zone to to protect your health. Yeah, I imagine that in order for that to be time efficient, really, if it's going to be intense and you don't want to have to like have a lengthy warm-up in order to do something that's intense then it kind of has to be something like cycling where you just you can just hop on a bike and just go right from the get-go where you're not doing you know you certainly wouldn't want to travel to do it you're

not going to the gym and doing something's got to be something you can do at home where there's no commute where there's no warm-up where you can just do it and get it and be done with it where actually full duration. You're doing it under 10 minutes. Like you leave your laptop, you're back to your laptop. You're back to working in that 10 minute span. Exactly.

Right. And as simple as it sounds, again, we, we think there's potential benefit there, but you got to make it easy for, for people, right?

Like exactly. When it comes to the energy systems, you, you mentioned earlier that VO2 or like zone two is really like picked up in its popularity. After doing a lot of VO2 max efforts, I know they're significantly harder, so they're less popular. Do you feel like that has a better effect on like the total health of the body um because you're able to hit uh that that higher intensity effort actually has more carryover to whatever zone two would be like i i really do struggle sometimes when i see people go i'm doing this like you're kind of just like playing with

your kids which is great like everybody should go for walks and play with your kids. But once we start kind of like glorifying and putting like zone two and talking about the importance of it, we start to lose touch with the, let's actually try really hard to do something, which really gets into the VO2 max efforts. And I'd love to hear your thoughts kind of on if we need to stay in a, in an energy system or with a goal, I find it hard sometimes listening to the zone to talk because we don't have the, the output and the energy and the difficulty that goes along with training. And so, and, you know, to, to be fair to the zone to proponents, uh, you know, I, I think generally the recommendation is that 80, 20 be fair to the zone two proponents, you know, I think generally the

recommendation is that 80-20 split modeled after the high level athletes. And the suggestion would be that the zone two is more important for optimizing your mitochondrial health, you know, your muscle, your metabolic health, and the 20%, they would call it zone two or sorry, VO2 max intervals. That's important for the cardiovascular uh training again my i would ask where is the evidence that that is optimal for individuals who are only doing an hour a week of exercise or so and also you know i don't think many people are measuring their lactate thresholds or or things like that so uh you know again nothing

wrong with that style of training at all i take exception with the suggestion that it's optimal certainly in terms of being a great scientist right now in terms of you know maximizing your mitochondrial capacity i i would just say like where is the evidence uh in uh in in support of that and again my point would be um because you know uh some of the proponents of zone two are saying great um but you got to do three to four hours of it to start right and and i think we got to meet people where they are right and so most people aren't even doing the physical activity guidelines, which are, you know, 150 minutes a week, right? So if we're going to say you got to start by doing four hours of low intensity zone two, I think a lot of people are going to tune that out. So again, my question would be, and I think, again, we could have the great debate, like

someone's going to give you an hour a week what's the best way to structure that hour for them in terms of intensity domains and and for me i i think getting into a more high intensity vigorous efforts would be better because i think you know going back to cardiovascular fitness uh the data is pretty clear that for a given dose of exercise a given amount if you engage in more vigorous compared to modern intensity exercise, you're going to see greater gains in VO2 max, which is just such a robust, important health-related metric. And it doesn't cost you four hours of your time.

It just costs you a little bit of your soul every time you do it. That's the hard part. You got to give a little of your soul away every time you go sprint. If you have multiple goals in your fitness life, do kind of the, for lack of a better term, I'll use, I haven't said this in many years, but a mixed modal approach to this. Look at that guy. Say you are. CrossFit is shaking out of him right now. I know, right?

I was never a super CrossFit disciple despite having a kind of CrossFit-y podcast. But no, it's a thing. So if you are trying to be the most efficient with your time and you are friendly to CrossFit type things, if you did a set of three on power cleans and then you immediately moved into a max set of push-ups and then a max set of pull-ups and then you hit 20 seconds on a bike and then you had had a four minute rest and did all that again, like combining those, those, um, those types of intervals where you do get some type of a higher perturbed benefit. You do get some type of a strength and power benefit, but then you're also getting the interval style cardiovascular benefit on top of it. Um, I don't know what the research has, has done with things like that, but, uh, on its face, I feel like conceptually that's still check the box here. A hundred percent. It can beneficial you know it's almost like a hybrid style of training

right your you know your strength your hypertrophy improvements aren't necessarily going to be a grade as a traditional heavy weight lifting uh workout and the endurance benefits might not be you know the same as a traditional uh endurance training protocol but fantastic for all around hybrid type training, time efficient, doesn't necessarily require much space, equipment, anything like that, but you're going to see improvements in strength, improvements in endurance if you keep those recovery periods short. So I think it's a tremendous way of training. Yeah. I did things like that during COVID where I was at home all day with my kids and I was trying to help. I had little kids and I'm trying to help my wife, parents, and I would go into the garage

and I would do a hard set for a minute. And then I would come inside and like be cooking dinner and be like breathing hard while I'm cooking. And then be like, okay, I'm going to go in the garage for one minute, come back inside, quit hitting him, get away from him, back it up. I'll be back in one minute. And so I was able to get a workout in while basically not even taking a break from parenting almost. You were just ahead of the curve.

You were already doing the exercise snacks just before we'd even coined it. So, you know, like a lot of things, just ahead of the curve. That was our best-selling program during the pandemic. Yeah, E-Momestetics. Super Sets. I have a colleague. You guys would have heard of the 5BX program. You've heard of 5BX?

I'm actually not familiar. What is that? So a colleague of mine says it's just P90X without the marketing. 5BX was a program started by the Canadian government in the late 1950s. And it stood for five basic exercises and it was designed for service members who were stationed literally near the North pole at the height of the cold war. And they're in these bases where there wasn't a lot of equipment. But at one point, fully one third of Canadian Air Force pilots were so unfit, they were deemed they couldn't fly. And so the government

realized that they had a problem. And so one of the first exercise physiologists to work for the government created this very simple program that was just bodyweight style exercise, much like the program that, you know, Doug just described earlier. And eventually the Canadian government produced 20 million of these pamphlets to try and encourage physical activity. And so, you know, that was in the late 1950s, it falls out of fashion, it comes back again. And so this is just this idea, you know, that I think, people talk is hit a fad. Absolutely not. I think the concept is enduring. It just gets packaged in different ways, and we sort of rediscover it every decade or so. the masses like how do we get them in better shape better fitness um when you look at like a european soccer player that has to run probably eight to ten miles in a game and have this like massive aerobic system and then also in the middle of that be responsible for uh these these very

short quick bursts um i find this whole kind of conversation very intriguing because how do we go and train somebody in both of these energy systems at the highest level where they can just run and play forever, but also in the middle of it, they're running 40-yard sprints every 30 seconds while kind of being in an aerobic zone of it's not zone two maybe zone two for them because they're in such good shape but doing all of these things combined together

and do we have to have rest breaks where it's not a full stop recovery but do we go i used to play like one of my favorite training things that you can do anywhere, like the mailbox game where I just pick a mailbox in my neighborhood, jog, jog that mailbox up there. I'm going to sprint five mailboxes and, and go. Um, but actually not having this like full stop, um, recovery period, are there additional benefits to kind of being in both of those, like training both at the same time. Yeah, I think this stop, you know, for stop and go type sports like that rugby, you know, European style football, American soccer, absolutely, this type of training can be very beneficial. And there's definitely scientific studies on high level soccer players, there's there's an individual named Jens Bangsbo, who's a Danish scientist who has done a lot of interval training research with high level players like that.

He himself was a very good national caliber soccer player. And when you introduce this type of stop and go interval style, they call it repeated speed endurance type training in soccer players. And then you, for example, you look at the glycogen depletion patterns, how much they lose muscle glycogen late in matches. They're able to utilize the energy systems much better, particularly late in matches and their performance decrements are less. So the style of training appears to be a particularly beneficial late in games when you otherwise, uh, would, would really see that pronounced fatigue. Both, uh, Anders and I are big fans of hill sprints in general. And, uh, we, there used to be a particularly, particularly intimidating

hill close to his place when we were living in San Diego together, we used to run on a regular basis him more than me, but, uh, what, what are the benefits there? You mentioned this earlier. What, why are hill sprints or stair sprints or things that are kind of concentric only, so to speak, beneficial here? I think, you know, so number one is by adding the incline, the elevation, you can increase the physiological stress without necessarily just increasing the speed, right? And so I think that's where the benefit comes from. Arguably, of course, you're getting some strengthening as speed, right? And so I think that's where the benefit comes from. Arguably, of course,

you're getting some strengthening as well, right? And so the strengthening benefit of running up the hill is gonna be better than running on the flat. So those would be the two things that I would point to, but in particular, this capacity to increase the stress without necessarily having to increase the turnover or the speed. Yeah. The lack of deceleration seems to keep forces low, which seems to be joint friendly

as well. Is that right? Absolutely. Correct. Yeah. So I feel like for older people, especially the more dinged up you are, the more hill sprints seem to be a fun thing to do. When you're young, just run flat sprints. Like you don't have to find a hill sprint when you're 22. Or even uphill fast walking, right? You know, you find enough of an incline, you know, stair climbing would be another great example, right? Where, you know, there the pace or the turnover can be relatively low. But when you add that incline, you're really increasing the physiological stress. So it's not even, you know, sprint running uphill.

For a lot of people it's uh jog running or fast walking up steep incline and you can get a very similar benefit but markedly lower impact forces particularly on the knees and ankles they're just so painful how do you not enjoy it really it's like it feels really good when it's over that's right it doesn't have to be fun i feel like i mean jerry rice had his hill everybody's kind of got like my hill right now is absolutely miserable not because uh it's so steep because you have to go fast on it and it is just as painful as a steep one but you gotta have a hill somewhere i don't know i just gotta go climb that thing today and in the end i'm supposed to

live a little bit longer hopefully but if you don't have a hill to climb, it's good to go find one. So I'm a cyclist, right? And near where I live, I live in a valley town. And, you know, there's a road called Sydenham Hill, and it's about two kilometers. So it's at 1.2 miles long. And the grade is fairly steep, right? And so even, you know, one ascent up Sydenham is challenging. But a lot of the cyclists will just do repeated hill ascents of that.

And there's a very famous Canadian Olympian cyclist who is famous for just, you know, doing that repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. So it's just, it's the cycling equivalent of what you just described. Fantastic, man. Where can people find you? They can find me at Kabbalah M on Twitter. And otherwise I do have a website, martingabbalah.com, where I put up, you know, links to our work, podcast interviews, things like this. So really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you guys and your interest in my work. Thank you.

There you go. Doug Larson. You bet. I'm Douglas E. Larson on Instagram. This was a very enjoyable conversation. I really had a good time here. So thank you for coming on the show. Yeah. Thanks for having me guys. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner and we are barbell shrug to barbell underscore shrug and make sure you get over to rapid health report.com. That's where Dr. Andy Galpin has an eight minute video ready for you on the

three steps to unlock your true physiological potential. Really the three step process that we use inside Rapid Health Optimization for you to feel healthy and perform at your best. You can access that video over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.