Barbell Shrugged - How to Build a Killer Cardiovascular System w/ Dr. Mike T. Nelson, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #731

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis sit down with Anders coach, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. For those that have followed the show, you know Anders has been in pursuit of running a sub-6 minute mile at the age of 40. Dr. Nelson is the coach Anders hired to help with that goal. In this episode the crew walks through program design, initial intake, and execution of how to build cardiovascular fitness. You will learn performance tests used to design Anders training program, how priorities are scheduled into a busy life, understanding higher intensity efforts mixed with Vo2Max training, Zone 2 efforts, and how to maintain strength throughout the process. We hope you enjoy. Work with Dr. Nelson Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we are talking about the coolest thing ever, me! I'm kidding. We brought my coach, Dr. Michael T. Nelson, onto the show. Periodically on the show, we've talked about my pursuit of running a six minute mile. Today, we're bringing on the guy that I hired to help me do it.

If we could just figure out how to make it warm outside so that I could get to the track more often. Instead, it's like freezing and it feels like your lungs are going to close on you as soon as you start breathing heavy out in the, what feels like frigid, frigid weather. I know all the people up in the Northeast or in the Northern States are going to be laughing at me, but it's cold here in North Carolina right now. And it makes me not want to go outside and run fast because it hurts my lungs. But we're going to go through kind of like what I've been up to for the last six-ish months working with

Dr. Mike, the training program he has me on, how we're balancing strength, conditioning, sprinting for high-level output, the VO2 max training, how we're doing zone two work to supplement, and really just breaking into all things training on how you would want to kind of structure a pursuit of running a six minute mile. As always friends, you can get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization

will receive. You can access that video and you can access that report over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Marner. Doug Larson, Coach Travis Smash, Dr. Michael T. Nelson.

My coach on the show today on Barbell Shrugged. We're talking about the most important person in the world me and my most important thing my training why i hired dr michael t nelson to get me to run a sub six minute mile at the age of 40 years old which we still have that goal we still are going to do that before april 26th of 2025 is that is that new ground for you by way? Have you done sub six in the past? I've never. I've run in my own training. Oh, this is actually. We did a full show on this in the first quarter of COVID. I remember. The only place that you could go to socially distance and still do fitness was the track.

That's when you got kicked off the track at the high school right they're like get out of here and you're like the same guy called the cops on me i had to talk to mike the same middle school athletic director called the cops on me again like two months ago and came out and took a picture of my license plate and was like i'm turning you in and i i was like why is it so illegal to run in ovals like why is it i'm by myself how in the world is this illegal it's like the middle of a school day the kids aren't there you're just booting kids off the track for you to run even the time that he did it the football team was there. They're like in the middle, nothing else is going on.

And he, he came over and I was like, dude, he may not have liked the comment where I said, I feel like we're over-exaggerating your powers here at the local track. Like you should not be escorting me anywhere right now, but I left. He got a picture of my license.

Is it a public school? Yeah. It's a middle school. It works for you. Annie escorted you off the thing. It's a middle school. The football team was out there like, what are you going to do with the football team? Anyways, what I want to do today is walk through kind of like the high level.

When you hear some slightly above, above average athlete, like myself wants to run a sub six minute mile, which he's never done before. Um, I believe the best I've ever done leading up to this was six 30, which I did during COVID. And it was like six 30, right on the button. But I had no, all I was doing was just go fast, go to the track, random intervals and giddy up and go. There was no, there was no like real rhyme or reason outside of like i just needed to get out of my house and the track seemed like a really good place um but when when when a when a 40 year old with a decent athletic history and is in decent shape comes to you with uh a high goal of a 559 mile where where do you kind of start this process i mean i start with where are they

currently at which is it sounds so simple but i've gotten burned on this in the past where i took people at their word and you ask them how is your form oh it's great and then you realize like if you use a simple one rm max that they were off by 80 pounds and about six inches high on their squat so i've always said just getting some not really proof but just a current assessment of where they're at because if you don't have that then your programming is going to be off to start so once you have that then with something like your goal i divide it into is there kind of a conditioning aspect and then what is the the technical component and then i'll usually try to separate those as much as

possible initially because you can work on the technique stuff but you're probably not going to run a mile in great technique so lesser difference distances keeping good technique you know doing things like you know people classically trained sprinters for decades and longer. And the conditioning aspect, of course, if you can run, that's going to be more specific. But we'll get into, there's going to be some constraints. So maybe you could do a bike, you could do a rower, you could do other things so that you're still working within that person's constraints of what they have to get them to their goal because not everyone like we said is going to have access to the track every single day and can you know spend hours doing their warm-ups and their perfect drills and everything else like you have to

operate within their their real world constraints too yeah what was the testing that you ended up doing with andrews did you just say go around a mile tell me your time and then we'll take it from there or yeah yeah so what what was the initial time we did the we did the cooper test and that was actually what inspired it go ahead i'll let you i'll let you go yeah i was gonna say so we we would do a specific test which would be like a one mile like where are you at right now and then for conditioning i'll tend to do a vo2 max test so you can either do a 2k on the Concept2 rower, or in this case, running is going to be more specific. So you can do a 12 minute Cooper run

test, take 12 minutes, run as far as you can within those 12 minutes, loop up, type it in online, and it'll give you what your VO2 max is. So your volume of oxygen, kind of a marker for how big is your aerobic engine. And you can look at those two and see, okay, which of those two needs more work. If your technique looks good and your time isn't super far off, but your VO2 max is like the status of a field mouse and you're in the 20s,

you're like, wow, you're some sort of weird genetic freak where if we just get your aerobic base a little bit better, you're probably gonna be fine. Or most people are a mix. Like the aerobic base a little bit better you're probably going to be fine or most people are a mix like the aerobic system is probably pretty good but they probably need a combination of some specific technique work also what about like the like lactate threshold or just the anaerobic system because with the mile that's going to come into play yeah then the next i would say that would be the next level down so you can do things on the rower you can do them on the bike you can do running and just see kind of what are your split times

what are your pace and then if you don't have a fancy way of pricking your finger to get a lactate reading i just kind of do rpe and see where you're at um for people listening like the 400 meter is probably like the worst possible race to do because your lactate levels are so high but it's it's just long enough to start accumulating a lot of lactate but it's not long enough where you you still have to run pretty darn fast so you can break it up into just you know kind of 200 meter components and see where they kind of fall off or where they just report that yeah that was good that was good oh my god that was like you know horrible so if they report like the 400 meter was like the worst possible thing ever okay maybe we'll do a little bit more lactate you know

specific work and like you know you can get hyper specific and plot out you know different types of you know lactate testing and get really granular from there yeah for someone like anders though probably i think what you did was be perfect like you don't need to do the finger pricking you know no especially so we all know he came from crossfit so probably pretty good lactate threshold i bet yeah and you can do i use a rower as a surrogate because especially if some athletes, not enders, I don't really trust them to run real fast in terms of mechanics. So I'll be like, hey, get on the rower, do 30 seconds all out as hard as you can, do 60 seconds all out, and if I want to be really torturous, do 180.

So you're basically doing short, medium, and long. That three-minute, as hard as you can. So as soon long you know that three minute all as hard as you can so as soon as you start you're going as hard as you can for those three minutes it's awful what i've been doing a lot of is killing yeah and you can look at those three differences by pace because the rower is going to give you all that information it's also non-impact so that's kind of an easy way back of the envelope you can kind of get at it another way another reason i've chosen the just in my hip and so the roller is a great way to get in conditioning if you have hip issues yep yep a lot of people just can't take that impact and i don't want them

blowing a hamstring on day one doing a 60 second wind gator or something crazy. Back in a femur neck like me. Yeah. The Cooper test that we did really was, my main goal was to get on like a conditioning program because lifting at the time had gotten kind of like stale, like it does over time. And when we did the Cooper test, it's 12 minutes, max distance. And I didn't get kicked off the track that day,

but I went and I timed the mile and knowing that I still had to get to 12 minutes, I hit the mile at like 710 or something like that, knowing I still had five minutes to go. And I went, I bet if I crushed this thing, I could go 630 today without even thinking about it. And then all I got to do is knock off 630 to six minutes by actually training. And that said, that was when I was like, this is, this is now the goal. Can I run a, can I run a 559 at 40? It was, it was during that Cooper test when I, when I went basically ran a seven minute mile, knowing I still had five minutes left

with like tons left in the tank and i was like i bet i could get there yeah and that's a good part is you want goals that the person for them personally are going to want to do regardless of what anyone else thinks because that is going to be their biggest intrinsic motivator and what that's one of the reasons I do a fair amount of testing and assessments is many times, like you said, they'll come up with, oh, wow, my 2K in the roar really sucks. I want to hit this number now, or I want to hit this for 12 minutes, or I want to run a mile in this.

Like they'll come back to me with a specific goal that they want to hit, which is a lot better than me saying, well, I think you should do this or that number. They're going to be a lot more motivated to actually do it. Yeah. Why do you prefer the rower over the bike? 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 not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. Then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the

programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program. And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and it's my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidealthreport.com. And let's get back to the show. Why do you prefer the rower over the bike? I can't find a good movie. Travis knows

this a good, validated, legitimate test on the bike. Like everyone has their own protocols. And there's some debate, a good buddy of mine, Kenneth Jay, did some assessments off of the assault bike and mechanical efficiency. And maybe it's off a little bit. But we know that the Concept 2 did one that's pretty close. I measured it with my own metabolic card here. It's relatively close. So I know that one's been validated by a study. We know the Cooper Run test has been validated.

I've used other bike tests you know like we had you do some of them but i can't say that this is compared to a population status where i can look at those two tests and we can have tons of data on the population status for vo2 max and i can say hey you're you're at the 50 of a population or you're at the 90th percentile or with concept 2 because they have the whole entire logbook of a bunch or you're at the 90th percentile or with concept two because they have the whole entire logbook of a bunch of crazy people logging all their stuff yeah i can show you that out of all the people who are rowing you're at the 50th percentile here's what it would like to be hit the 75th percentile yeah i can give them very specific numbers and tell them how they rate to different

populations and the bike is so variable when it comes to like resistance even though the rower is kind of too but it doesn't seem to affect people as much as on the rower as it does on the bike yeah and the tip for the rower too is most people you're going to probably want to set your drag factor at 120 to 130 so go into it and if you just don't this makes no sense to you just google it because the damper you set on the side will be very different depending upon the condition and the rower etc all your numbers will still work out like it'll still account for it but if you've ever got on a rower and you're like man this rower pulls really hard like whoa this one's like way too easy if you

set that drag factor to the same every rower you're on now will be feeling the same each time you you pull same way yeah right for conditioning efforts i've actually always wondered this because there is like a short or like a very small like interval piece to or like an anaerobic piece almost to the rower because there's a rest after you pull does that change kind of the the stimulus stimulus that you are um looking for where when you're on the bike there's no there's no breathing whatsoever um like there's there's no rest your arms have to be moving legs have to be moving there's no pull and then recover the air make sure that you clarify you're talking about an airdyne airdyne right yeah yeah it's a big difference in a bike and an airdyne yeah yeah

the rogue assault bike that feels like a a german tank is sitting in my garage thing is a giant monstrosity but when you say though doc that like on the on the rower done properly there's always like you know after you extend you should be pulling it should be some hip flexion going on so there shouldn't be that rest unless you're chilling out i mean which you could do that on the bike too if you wanted to i guess yeah the the assault bike's a weird thing right it's like uh the we think of running right so you have your arm motion is going to be tapped with your leg motion rowing we kind of get that okay your legs and arms work together and on the assault bike you're pedaling but you're also moving your arms back and forth

so it's kind of a weird motion but you are stimulating a lot of muscle groups so i think on that just from a skill level there's nowhere nowhere to, quote unquote, relax. With the rower, you can kind of a little bit if we just use common parlance of like when the handle gets to you. You do have that kind of split second where it is going to be a little bit weightless. And you can get super far down that rabbit hole. Like I'll stick moxies on some on their quads. Look at how much oxygen is being used by the muscle and then if i can get them to relax for even a split second to get those vascular beds to open more get more oxygen you can do efficiency stuff like that but on the bike you're you're just kind of not

efficient by the virtue of the thing no matter how good you ever get at it? Well, I love it now. Um, I, uh, I think we did like a 20 minute test. Um, and I want to say the first half of it, you wanted me doing pure nasal breathing and then it was just open the floodgates and get after it. Um, where, uh, I would love to know just kind of the, the reasoning behind something, a test like that uh like one where you're controlling the the method at which you're breathing um and then if i'm trying to run a six minute mile like 20 minutes is two three times that that length yeah it's because most of i would say a capacity test like if i use a rower we'll do like a 20 minute or for people who are rowers you can use a 5k and so i just adapted it to the bike where i want a long enough period of time where

we do want a fair amount of aerobic fatigue to see how much you're how much you're going to go off that cliff like do you start great for five to seven minutes and then you're tanked or you can you hold a relatively high wattage for that period of time you knowiking, you get into functional power and all this other kind of crazy stuff. But you probably want a fair amount of time to see what happens there. And then I'll limit it by nasal breathing at first to see what is the difference between nasal breathing and if we don't limit you by airflow. If there's a massive difference between those two,

then I'm thinking, okay, maybe your efficiency of breathing isn't so good. So we may do a lot of nasal work to try to get that closer to your max, even though it's never going to be your max because you're limiting airflow through your nose versus your mouth. It just gives me an idea of kind of what their breathing patterns are. people where like nasal breathing you know their max heart rate was 120 and then you tell them just breathe however you can and they'll hit like 175 you know versus someone else is like 155 they're trying hard but they can still nasal breathe you know that's a pretty big difference between those two athletes you know at that lower end that nasal breathing where you're purposely capping them yeah i also uh when we're we're, when we're, when we're doing like a shorter, high intensity efforts, um, I I've, I've kind of like found,

call it a hundred meters, maybe a little bit longer outside my house where I can just, um, rolling start into wind sprints, five to six, seven reps somewhere in there. Um, my body feels phenomenal. If you're not, if you are not sprinting in your training, you are missing out on just the amazing feeling that goes along with just being able to feel like you're flying, even though I'm, Mash, how bad did I get beat by Johan? I was just looking at it the other day. Real bad. There's nothing better than feeling like you're flying and then knowing what it feels like is the second fastest human of all time yeah yeah yeah it was quite amazing he got me good um it looked like it looked like a cheetah chasing down a deer with a broken leg

tap tap tap dead yes and then and then at the end of every week, you make me feel like I'm going to want to die. And it's the exact opposite feeling when I'm on an airdyne and you say, go 30 seconds as hard as you possibly can. Why are those, the intervals are, call it roughly the same.

I mean, it could be 15 seconds versus 30, but inside 30 seconds, the intervals being the same same the intensity of my output by myself being the same one of them makes me feel amazing and fast and the other one makes me feel like i'm gonna throw up immediately being on an airdyne going that hard yeah the the reason for that is we're trying to get some basically sprinting mechanics and efficiency so if you take someone who has a like a the same level of conditioning but you can increase their mechanics and they can become more efficient they'll obviously run faster right because their

efficiency is better it's you know if you don't always have track access it's a little bit hard to do that so when we're doing those short um intervals running the goal is it it should feel like you're going fast but it also should feel like it's relatively my little air quotes here easy like if you watch 100 meter sprinters in slow motion like their lips are moving all over the place like they are there's nothing that is excess tension that doesn't need to be tense like everything is perfectly timed and it just looks like it you can watch them finish you're like wow that looked like it was pretty easy oh yeah they don't even breathing hard they're just not even breathing hard ready to talk to the cameras i'm like yeah i'd be thrown up yeah yeah and so that's what we want for that efficiency

right because that is that's the goal of that session it's not necessary to add a bunch of fatigue on it if we add a bunch of fatigue to that your performance is going to drop and your form is probably going to go to hell now you're just doing a bunch of bad reps and you're just running around all conditioned however if we remove that and we use like the bike where it's not necessarily running on purpose we can try to develop some of those you know that systems that max out around purpose, we can try to develop some of those systems that max out around 30 seconds. We're trying to make it more mechanically inefficient,

and we're actually trying to do it in something that hopefully won't transfer to sprinting, meaning we're trying to give you a bigger aerobic engine without disturbing and messing up the sprinting mechanics. So we're going to use a different modality on purpose to do that. So after you get the initial testing done with anders and you kind of figure out what your baselines are and how you want to uh how you want to approach his first mesocycle what does that first week look like how do you how do you structure uh intervals versus longer duration

cardio versus keeping some strength training in there etc the i would say the routine the split that i use probably had 80 90 of the time just to start with people is some lifting monday wednesday friday again in this case was a little bit different some type of conditioning tuesday thursday saturday sunday or at least one day a week is completely off like just just max unload the system as best you can go for a walk lock yourself in a float tank do some breath work whatever um and then within that the lifting is geared more towards what's missing lower body he had some upper body goals also the conditioning then is the higher priority stuff that we think will have the most transfer will then be loaded towards the beginning

of the week so in his case he'll have sat Saturday and Sunday off. So the technique stuff would be then we move to Monday in this case, because we want to do it ideally when his nervous system and everything else is as fresh as possible. And then the things, you know, from there got pushed out. If we're looking at, you know, conditioning stuff on a bike, and it can be later in the week, if you have a little bit of fatigue on board, we're not looking for anything technical you're probably going to be fine it probably sucks more but i'm not as concerned about the outputs from those particular um sessions so i usually will do it in terms of a priority arrangement and then also you know my background i did a master's in mechanical engineering so i always think of like what are the constraints on

the system oh i can only get to the track this day or i can only get to a bigger gym this day i can use the stuff in my garage this time i only have this amount of time so those things you have to operate within whatever their constraints are and then just you know rearrange stuff and do the best you can then andrews from your perspective after after having done this for a number of weeks like what do you feel like has has moved the needle the most out of all the training you've done with mike today uh the i feel like um people maybe not people, meatheads in general, neglect movement and think that we're doing a lot of moving when we sit down and stand up with a bar on our back. And we're like, yeah, like I'm athletic. I'm standing in place and squatting.

And you don't realize how much your body genuinely wants to get up and go move and breathe. And like the it's easy to stay in shape. Um, lifting weights, you can do it a little bit faster. You can do a little lighter, a little heavier. There's some variants in there. And like, you can, you can do a zillion different exercises to kind of get to change things up, keep it interesting. Um, but there and I also think that, um, maybe even like during my CrossFit career, whatever that, whatever that means. Um, I don't know if I ever intentionally trained like VO2 max or like did really sustained efforts at high intensity, uh, like on the bike or things like that. It was always just like, I just went and trained with my friends and did workouts. So like

being on a structured conditioning program makes your body feel amazing. And I don't like, I can go, I would say all of the, the like talk about like zone two stuff, obviously like zone two training is very important, but I feel like I get all of that running around and playing with my kids at night. Like that's, that's where I do this like elevated heart rate, low intensity thing. Like I'm playing street hockey and trying to play kickball and like just normal life. Like it's just live an active life and you don't really have to work. You don't need to hop on a bike and like, make sure your heart rate's at 120 to 130 and live in this like rigid, rigid thing. Go out and play. Sitting on a bike at maximum intensity for five minutes and trying

to hit numbers really makes your body feel amazing. It's really hard to hit numbers day in and day out, but there really is something to the cumulative effect of putting a really structured conditioning program together that your body really, really likes being able to pump blood, move oxygen to your muscles in a very easy way and the more you're able to do it um and different like we uh i don't want to take the words out of your mouth but we kind of structure like short high intensity uh longer duration like one two to four mile run a week um and then in there is like the bo2 max training of like five minute all-out. Um, can you hit numbers? Can you sustain higher level intensities like RPE nine, nine plus, um, and, and be able to do that. And over time, your body starts to adapt in a very different way than it does when you're just trying to get jacked. Um, and I think it feels significantly healthier for let's just call it this stage of life that I'm in where I want to

just feel healthy. Um, and I'm not going to like lose a lot of muscle mass. I don't have to worry about getting weak, but there, if you can get on a structured conditioning program where you're consistently doing it, I think that you'll like many people from the meathead background would one benefit and to understand how much better they feel when their body is able to just transport oxygen significantly easier on a day-to-day basis. I think it's mentally healthy to just to have more measurables other than just force production.

Like at least for a power lifter, for me, it's exciting to have multiple variables to watch watch improve it's like every day it's like is it anaerobic or is it aerobic you know is it strength is it speed is it power like having all these measurables makes the workout so much fun because each day is a little different it's mentally much healthier yeah it there's there's kind of like a letting go of that the like meathead ego side to it and just ish ish not all the way not all the way your boy got the hundreds for six last week two sets of six that's awesome i'm going three sets this week dumbbell bench press

mash i got them for everyone listening you don't have to become a weakling to do this yes i'm still struggling with 100 views so yeah bottom row all the way to the right is where you should hang out on those dumbbells when you go to the the lifetime fitness don't don't hang out in the top row um but the uh but i think that's that's really been the the biggest benefit doug is is I really enjoy moving fast and sprint. There's just no opportunities unless you force the issue in life to need to go sprint. And there's no opportunities just built into normal life where you got to just giddy up and go. So you need a coach and you need a goal and you got to have somebody that's

going to structure it for you and you really do start to feel significantly better just i don't know what exact physiological physiological changes happen when the blood just pumps better but you can feel it absolutely yeah last night was the first time in my life where someone actually was trying to beat me with a conditioning test that's never happened ever didn't succeed and i was like who am i but anyway it was exciting yeah regarding the the goal of the six minute mile are there are there any milestones or benchmarks along the way that you're looking to achieve? And then that's when you say, okay, now's the time to go test and go see if we can do it. Yeah. 75 degree weather. I really feel like, um, if I were to get to the track right now for a consistent month, I would be very, very close. Like I've again, uh, anytime you say like, this is the healthiest I've ever felt or whatever that means.

Um, you're, you're, you always go back to like a 27 year old version, peak testosterone peak, like, or whatever that like growling noise is when you're about to like gnaw on a barbell for an afternoon. Like that's always there if you're like am i in better shape but i feel better um and i feel like i can go run sprints on flat ground and not get injured i can i can go run a half marathon tomorrow if i needed to um all of those things are like very not intimidating to me at all um and if i if I, if, if we, if it was 75 degrees and, um, I wouldn't go to jail right now trying to run around the track. Um, I feel like I would get really close and we, we haven't put any track work in at all in the last two, three months as the weather's kind of changed. Uh, Mike, what about from your perspective? Like, what are you,

what are you looking for? Where, where you look at my anders and go like based on these numbers you can probably do this now even though we haven't tested it like i feel very confident that you'd be able to hit it um and where is he at in comparison to whatever those goals might be yeah and that's i would say most of that is going to be basically on his feedback so basically what he just said because again you're you're constraint limited you can't go out and do any type of testing that would be the one mile but once the weather is better one of the things i'll have people do if we're not sure so we're you know once the weather is available you can go run a mile and do it at an rp of a maybe a seven

or an eight you know you're not going to go all out you're going to go you know pretty hard but you're not going to you know go go balls out on it and even that will give you a pretty good idea you know if you go out and you just say it's an rp of an eight you're just going to test it and you're at 7 30 oh yikes maybe you're at 730, yikes, maybe you're a little farther off than you thought. Or if you're at 630, 620, you're like, okay, yeah, now you're probably within striking distance of where you need to be. So I think a lot of sub-max tests that are specific to the goal, I think are highly underrated. And because it's a sub- sub max there isn't nearly as much of a risk involved with it either as opposed to hey bro i think you're ready and just you know ignore how

your body feels just go balls out and see what happens there's a time and a place you know do that type of distress training but i wouldn't do that as like the first thing i would do a couple warm-ups or if they are going to do that type of thing i haven't do a progressive warm-up where just run a short distance just go at 50 percent walk back give me 60 walk back give me 70 walk back give me 80 walk back give me 90 and if you feel good and everything is operating well and you can slowly scale up to you know a max sprint yeah rest completely maybe give the one mile a shot on that day right because in his case we have the luxury of time in that he doesn't have to go out and perform this on saturday at 10 a.m and a meet or something like that so there's no reason to force something when it's it's not there i think a lot of people when it's test day you know if they're not

competing they get stuck in their head that they have to go that day and reality most people probably don't if it's not there it's not there pick another day and then if you're not sure just run a sub max test and see where you're at i think it's the max test um will also make sure that you don't mentally discourage the oh 100 because anders is motivated intrinsically but like if you have that person who is just like easily discouraged that's the last thing you want to do is go out run the test and they fail they're gonna quit yeah um to put some numbers to that doug we before the weather turned um i we did four quarter mile repeats and i want to say that my slowest one was like one. Everything was between 120 and 123.

So you run those numbers out and that gets you to like a 520. And now you've got roughly 40 seconds of slowing down slash trying to stay below like anaerobic threshold bonking on lap three really is the last one you can you can die on the last one but uh lap three is the one that you got to kind of watch out for um and make sure you're going slower than anticipated how much rest do you get between those quarter miles? I think we're just doing complete rest if I remember right so one of the things I'll do is this is back when we had access to a track and it wasn't getting booted out in weird weather you can take take your goal and be like okay if you can't do the full mile at that time could you do a half a mile could you do a

quarter mile did you do an eighth of a mile Could you give me something that is at that pace or close to? Again, we ran a little bit of a buffers. We're going to have them do repeats. And he said it felt good. How I know I'm developing those qualities specifically. And then if you go complete rest, go back again. So you're trying to hit a certain pace and you're accumulating volume at that pace. And then once you can do that, your options are lengthen it and see if you can still hit the same pace. Or now you can do the density method where you're starting to condense them. So now instead of having three to five minutes between, okay, give me a three minute rest, go back, hit that same pace. Okay, give me a two and a half minute rest, hit that same pace. You're trying to compress it back together, but you don't want the output to actually suffer i think that's the mistake people make is they go make it hard but their output is getting worse and so what they're training is they're literally training to run slower than what they needed to run which is fine if you're going to do conditioning but make that a conditioning thing

and make it separate don't make it a specific to the goal at that point. Yeah. I'd love to talk a little bit about the VO two max training and how people can kind of structure that in, into their, their own, their own training. Like, does it need to be five minutes?

Does it need to be seven, 10? Like where, where's kind of like a sweet spot on those intervals for kind of like higher intensity sustained outputs yeah so most literature for my interpretation would say that intervals at a pretty high output you want probably two to six minutes somewhere in there where if we just look at i put up a post about why people should not only do zone two training and like everyone got super pissed at me and put up things of about why people should not only do zone two training and like

everyone got super pissed at me and put up things of like well i had this guy who was doing 13 hours of zone two and it improved his vo2 max and all these weird cases where i was just saying like doing two to three hours of zone two stuff has its benefit it's good for aerobic base building but you're probably not going to see a massive increase in VO2 max. Again, having a place to do it, it's useful. So to me, I classify them as zone two, almost recovery, very bottom of the aerobic base building. Then the next level up, you have what I call it, just a cardiac development.

Something you can hold at a pretty decent pace for 10, 20, maybe 30 minutes. A little bit higher heart rate, not super max, but it's definitely higher. After that, you're getting into some type of interval, the O2 max thing, pretty high output, two to six minutes, somewhere in there. Beyond that, you're kind of getting into the wind gates and the short 30, 60 seconds, you know, repeats and that kind of stuff. So most people I think would do better if they're already pretty decently fit, do more cardiac development stuff, and then add just like one session of intervals. The caveat being start with a shorter interval, have it be relatively hard, then repeat that

interval. But I will only let them drop the output by maybe five to maybe 10% of the absolute max. So you're going to rest as long as you can to hit that, say two minutes again at a very similar output again, rest completely and hit another one. So you don't, again, similar, you don't want the quality to just drop off so hard because you're not training that then a high enough output to get the adaptation. It'll feel hard when you're doing it but when you're resting it almost feels too easy and so people like to mash everything together and have the whole thing feel difficult but if you look at their output over the intervals you'll see interval one interval three interval three was like 40 of interval one it's like bro just just rest longer like we we want

to train your body you need to hit these outputs and are just like lifting. At some point, if you want to get stronger, you have to hit close to your top end weights in order to kind of move that needle. Yes, there's transfer. Yes, some of the other stuff works. But it's the same thing with intervals. If you've got this huge difference between them,

then that's probably a little bit too much. And again, over time in an advanced athlete, yeah, maybe you hit a two-minute interval and you're doing incomplete rest where you're resting for 30 seconds and then you go again. Great. If you can hold that output, awesome.

But that's an extremely advanced thing that most people, even getting to a one-to-one work-to-rest ratio, in my opinion, is quite advanced. Mash, here's your test, buddy. You ready? Yes. You've got three five-minute intervals on the airdyne

and you got to hit two miles on each five minutes see how you can hold up buddy anybody that's listening to the show that's that's where i'm at every every two or every uh wednesday of my life that sounds terrible like what's the rest Is it complete rest in between or what? That would be nice, but we have kids coming home off the bus, and I got daycare pickup at 5. So if you start at 4, you run wind sprints to start, and then you got three intervals coming your way. It's probably like a one-to-one, like five on, five off, somewhere around there. It's not all the way back down probably like a one to one like five on five off somewhere around there

it's it's not it's not all the way back down to like a resting heart rate but you're you're sub 100 yeah three five minute intervals with a goal of two miles two miles we did that we did the test i i can i get very close to it every time uh we did the test the other day, and it was 2.07 miles in five minutes. I was stoked on that. That's good. You're a bad man. That's good. You're a bad man now.

The things that I, at the very beginning, when I knew that there was some real changes happening inside me was when we were doing the like nasal breathing only stuff. And I was, I was able through, um, trying to read whatever my polar, uh, heart rate monitor maintaining 160 to 170 beats a minute nasal breathing for five minutes is getting after it. That was when I was like, damn, this thing really is different. Like I've, I've never trained in that way. And then being roughly what, 85% of max heart rate, um, and just breathing through your nose and be able to sustain that at that high intensity was like, I knew things were moving in the right direction. I've learned so much in this podcast.

I've got so many notes. And I can't believe I'm taking notes about aerobic training. What has happened? Are we all dead? I feel like we're living a dream right now. Max is going to sign up for a marathon. Hold on a second. No, chill out, man.

5K at best at best mike can you can you dig into kind of the science and rationale behind nasal breathing during cardio like why why is that a thing why why not just breathe however however you need to breathe yeah i mean i'm a huge fan of the basically the gear system from brian mckenzie you know at low intensity, you should be nasal breathing. The next level up would be you can still nasal breathe, but it's going to you're putting a fair amount of effort in order to nasal breathe. Then can you breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth? And then at the very end, can you breathe in through your mouth and out through your mouth? If we think about how a lot of athletes I see initially, they're low intensity stuff. They're breathing in and out of their mouth all the time. And I'm like, this is low to moderate

intensity. Like you should not be limited by your airflow. So if you can breathe in through your nose, it's going to be better. You get some filtration, you get a little bit of resistance, which may help with, you know, some respiratory muscle training some other stuff who knows but it's as simple as like use it or lose it like i've done nasal training just low to moderate intensity with athletes and then maybe have them tape their mouth at night and shocker all of a sudden now during the night they can start breathing through their nose or they'll notice the rest of the day ah they can start breathing through their nose so to me it's a way to bring some level of awareness and to train them at a little bit higher stress level. And then hopefully that'll transfer

to the rest of the day and the rest of their sleep. Well, they will automatically try to switch to more nasal breathing. The caveat is I've seen some max VO2 tests from people and just I'm like, hey, just send me your raw data like this looks weird. And I'm looking at like their, you know, volumes of air and stuff and their heart rate. And'm like what were you like trying to do any breathing technique during this like oh yeah man it was a max test so i i was told the nasal breathe the whole time and i'm like your max test is limited by your airflow like you you were the one who limited your own airflow right so if it's an all-out max by all means like get you can get more air in you know through your mouth so you don't want to be limited by airflow per se on a max test where it's

you know 100 about performance so it's being able to to grade those there was a time and a place for for everything and i think just being intentional about those transitions and so like some of the stuff we did with anders like we may purposely push him really hard and restrict him to nasal breathing only for a period of time if that was a performance test though we probably wouldn't have that restriction on there again you're trying to train these specific things and then if it's a performance like okay kind of remove some of some of the limiters at that point but everyone wants to get into it's either 100 nasal breathing or all that's just you know bullcrap you don't need to do it just breathe however you want and shocker like the answer is both of them can be useful what are you trying to

do and then i find like doing a max test like a 2k on the rower if i can start out nasal breathing that gives me something to think about okay how long can i do that okay now i'll nasal breathe to mouth breathing and i also know that if i start shifting to that earlier oh this test is really gonna suck right and so over time you can use this as even a mental strategy to know okay you know to the halfway point i should be able to you know easily nasal breathe but by the end of it yeah i'm going to be breathing it out of my mouth 100 just because of the level of fatigue so i do think it just gives people something to focus on and also a way of moderating things like if you're running where you may not be constantly looking at a gps or having the feedback of where you're at either that becomes kind of your your feedback independent of heart rate too yeah one of the one of of the kind of things that I started to notice is you almost expect when

your output gets higher, that you're just going to start panting. Like you've been doing it your whole life. That you're just like, you're just, if you run, you just like, it's out of your mouth and you're just used to this like panting thing that

like kind of feels like that. But when you force yourself to do it through your nose, you almost, it requires your nervous system to be calmer and not feel like you're going to like, like you need to just gasp for air. Um, and there's definitely a learning curve to it, but once you become okay with that feeling, uh, I, i don't think it changed much on the performance side at all it was just now i'm just moving i'm just on the bike faster just i just i'm just breathing through my nose it doesn't it didn't change the performance it changes just the method at which the you know the directions are telling me to do it yeah and i have noticed that

higher outputs like on the rower and i've done this a couple people that if you get to kind of right where your limit is like you're trying pretty hard and you're still nasal breathing in and out so i did this a while ago my heart rate was like 165 and that was like that was definitely the limit it was pretty hard to stay there and i would switch to mouth breathing, my heart rate would instantly go up to like 168, 169. My output was the same. I fixed my output the same. So I think there is something where maybe it's a little bit more parasympathetic tone.

Maybe it's an efficiency. I'm not sure, but it seems like you do get a little bit lower heart rate for that same output. Again, the caveat being, these are all still sub max. This is not an absolute max test. And during a max test, you don't want that to be the limiter. like the the push and pull kind of like balancing the overall fatigue on lifting and how that then carries over into just like the the full recovery and into the next training when really the goal is

increasing cardiovascular fitness health whatever yeah the two things i look at there are just overall sort of systemic fatigue and then the transfer also motor patterns so if for example you said man all my sprints lately are just feeling like dog crap the first thing i would look at is what are we doing with lower body loading like are we gonna move some of this stuff up are we gonna go to more of split stand stuff you know safety bar front you know i would probably look at changing up those types of movements. The thought being maybe that movement pattern is interfering with sprinting. If sprinting is feeling great, you're like, man, everything's feeling good. It's great. Cool. I'm not going to worry about it. It's, it's probably going to be okay. And then also

just the overall fatigue, because yeah yeah if you can get stronger and you can get more power output that should transfer to sprinting that makes sense but if we bury you in the weight room and it's like wednesday before you're recovered again and you got to do technique work on monday now we're just impairing the thing that we know is the primary driver to improve you the thing that you stated was your number one goal yeah and sometimes with lifters that's that's hard right you know it's the old question of at one point do the lifts still transfer or do they stop transferring and i've talked to cal deets about this endless amounts of times of you know as he said like some of his you know back when he was

doing back squats years ago he's like yeah we could get a guy or gal, especially a guy in this case, when they're shot put throwers to go from back squat a 315 to 405 to maybe 455. He's like, at some point, they just got worse, right? Because the rate at which they're moving that load is now slower. They're an athlete doing an explosive sport, you know know going from 405 to say 455 wasn't beneficial it's not not worth the time they could take 315 and move it incredibly fast that's more useful to their sport again if you know that athlete can't back squat more than 95 pounds they're just weak and they need to get stronger yeah you're trying to find that that happy medium there too yeah doug you notice he didn't say anything about doing split squats if you tell are just weak and they need to get stronger yeah you're trying to find that that happy medium there

too yeah doug you notice he didn't say anything about doing split squats if you tell mike nelson that you want to go run a mile you don't have to do split squats anymore that's the best you're uh you're you're on you're on mute i see you agreeing with me on this the real rationale for training with Mike has surfaced here. Yeah. You don't have to be insanely sore doing the trust fall onto the toilet in the morning because the goal is to get faster, not be sore. Fantastic, man. This has been my favorite show ever. We talked about me being athletic. Yeah. The whole time. Incredible. Yeah. Guess that we can do that for a whole hour um where can people work with you which i also highly recommend uh you you set a call up with mike and uh go over some goals and and get a training program built and it's not just training that's just the piece that i'm doing but yeah

yeah this place is uh mike t nelson.com and yeah i'll have contact place there most of the writing everything i do goes out to the newsletter just go to mike t nelson.com there'll be a place you can hop onto the newsletter tab right on the top and it's free and yeah probably 90 of the writing i go is through that they can just hit reply once around the newsletter and ask any questions they have. More than willing to help anyone out. There you go. Coach Travis Mash, you can find him at Mash Elite. He had to go try and get in better shape so he could hang out with me.

Doug Larson. Man was sick of talking about Anders. He was like, I've had enough. I'm out. I'm out. I'm out. We're going to see a video on him on Instagram in about an hour, front squatting like 500.

Screw that. Screw that guy. I thought he was doing cardio now. Still front squatting 500 pounds, 50 years old. Right on. You can find me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson.

Mr. Mike T. Nelson, always wonderful to have you on the show, my friend. Thank you. Thanks guys. I appreciate it.

This was super fun. Absolutely, man. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner and we are Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged. Make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that free report at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.