Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Dr. Stephen Seiler on the Right (and Wrong) Ways to Improve Endurance

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

What’s the best way to boost your endurance without overtraining or getting injured? Should you try to “hack” your physiology with hard intervals, Tabata workouts, and HIIT? Should you mimic the training methods of famous athletes? Or something else entirely? In this episode, I chat with Dr. Stephen Seiler, an exercise physiologist renowned for his work studying and documenting the training practices of elite endurance athletes, including cross-country skiers, cyclists, rowers, swimmers, runners, skaters, and others, and for extracting the key principles from these training programs and adapting them for recreational athletes. In this episode, you’ll learn . . . The importance of endurance training for overall health and fitness How to use optimize your endurance workouts with the “three-zone model” The best intensity for improving your cardiovascular fitness over time How to effectively balance the frequency, duration, and intensity of your workouts Practical tips for setting and achieving fitness goals, such as running a 5k or 10k race The scientific reasons for rest days How to set up your training program for long-term enjoyment and success And more . . . So, whether you're aiming to enhance your cardiovascular health, set PRs in your endurance sport of choice, or simply get more out of your existing cardio routine, you want to listen to this episode. --- Timestamps: (06:13) What are the benefits of endurance and cardiovascular training? (11:24) How to properly balance the frequency, duration, and intensity of your endurance workouts (15:33) The importance of cardiovascular training for young people (25:01) What is the 3-zone model? (32:13) What is polarized training? (40:15) What does programming for a 5k look like? (45:34) Is one interval day per week sufficient? (46:25) What does progression look like after one year of endurance training? (49:14) What is the sweet spot for marathon training? (54:04) A scientific argument for rest days (58:56) What is a suitable timeframe for someone starting endurance training to prepare for a marathon? (01:04:29) Why is intrinsic motivation important? How can we optimize our training plan for this? --- Mentioned on the Show: Bigger Leaner Stronger Thinner Leaner Stronger Muscle for Life Phoenix Legion Diet Quiz Stephen Seiler Google Scholar Stephen Seiler YouTube

that slow evolution towards, you know, really focusing and really optimizing and kind of maximizing what you're good for within that endurance domain. And then saying, you know, right now strength is on the back burner. I have to have enough strength in order for it to be functional. I have to have optimal strength for cycling or for running the half marathon if they go that direction. Hello, and thank you for joining me, Mike Matthews, for another episode of Muscle for Life, where I chat with Dr. Steven Seiler, who is an exercise physiologist renowned for his work on endurance training, particularly with elite athletes, about why you should be working to improve your cardiovascular endurance in addition to your strength training, what the additional

benefits are of doing that, and then how to go about doing that the right ways as well as some of the wrong ways. And there are many, many wrong ways to program and do endurance exercise, just as there are many, many wrong ways to program and do strength training. And so in this episode, you're going to learn how to do it correctly, how to incorporate endurance training into your existing regimen correctly, how to avoid common mistakes and pitfalls that cause people to fail and quit in their endurance training, and how to work towards specific endurance goals like running a 5k or a 10k or even more ambitious goals like a half marathon or a full marathon. So if you would like to learn about things like the three zone model of cardiovascular training and how to use it to optimize your programming, the best way to balance frequency,

duration, and intensity in your cardiovascular training, how to incorporate rest into your regimen, what's enough rest, what's not enough rest, what's too much rest, as well as how to set yourself up for long-term success with endurance training, how to ensure that you don't burn out, how to ensure that you don't get hurt and have to quit because of that, then this episode's for you. But first, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, then you will probably like my award-winning fitness books for men and women of all ages and abilities, which have sold over 2 million copies, have received over 15,000 four and five star reviews on Amazon, and which have helped tens of thousands of people build

their best body ever. Now, a caveat, my books and programs cannot give you a lean and toned Hollywood body in 30 days, and they are not full of dubious diet and exercise hacks and shortcuts for gaining lean muscle and melting belly fat faster than a sneeze in a cyclone. But they will show you exactly how to eat and exercise to lose up to 35 pounds of fat or more if you need to lose more or want to lose more and gain eye catching amounts of muscle definition and strength. And even better, you will learn how to do those things without having to live in the gym, give up all the foods or drinks that you love or do long, grueling workouts that you hate. And with my books and programs, you will do that. You will transform your physique

faster than you probably think is possible, or I will give you your money back. If you are unsatisfied with any of my books or programs, the results, anything, for whatever reason, just let me know and you will get a full refund on the spot. Now I do have several books and programs, including bigger, leaner, stronger, thinner, leaner, stronger, and muscle for life. And to help you understand which one is right for you. It's pretty simple. If you are a guy aged 18 to let's say 40 to 45, bigger, leaner, stronger is the book and program for you. If you are a gal, same age range, thinner, leaner, stronger is going to be for you. And if you are a guy or gal, 40 to maybe 45 plus muscle for life is for you. Hey, Steven, thank you for taking the time to come on my podcast.

Well, thanks for the invitation. I'm kind of on vacation here in Norway, so it worked out well. Oh, nice. Never been that far north. Have I been that far east? I don't know. I'd have to look at a map, but I'd like to, for good things, I'd like to visit someday. So we're here to talk about endurance training And many people listening are into being fit, they're into being healthy, but they're not necessarily looking to set a PR in a triathlon. So for those people, and also add a little bit more context, and just for people listening, if you are somebody who's spending a few hours per week on your fitness, and your focus is strength training,

I think that makes a lot of sense. And if you've been following me in my work for any time, now you know that over the last year or two, I've been putting more emphasis, I've been trying to sell more people on including cardiovascular training in their regimen, something a bit more difficult than just walking. I think walking is great, it's fine, but it's not the same as what we're gonna be talking about today. And the benefits are not the same. There are certainly benefits to adding walking to your routine if you're not doing much walking,

but you can get a lot more out of cardiovascular training if you do some higher intensity work. So for people who, they may be looking at endurance training more as exercise, meaning they haven't been very regimented about maybe tracking workouts and planning out training blocks and so forth. I'm one of those people. I hop on this bike and I do 30, 45 minutes several times per week. And I just try to stay in zone two, which I know you're going to talk about. And that's it. That's my cardio routine. Now, of course, it could be more involved

than that. But for people who are, again, maybe they're doing some walking, maybe they're doing a little bit of cardio here and there. Why should they care about endurance training, cardiovascular training? What benefits are there beyond doing maybe just your 10,000 steps per day? Well, I think, look, I was a strength guy. I was an American football and track and field athlete and wanted to get stronger. And I went to the Soviet Union back when it was still the Soviet Union, learned how to do the Olympic lifts. And I taught them and heck, my claim to fame is I used to coach Scotty Pippen in the weight room when I was a youngster. So I have a bit of a background in string training, but I got hurt. I injured my knee, had an avulsion of my patellar tendon. And in the process of rehabilitation, I got on a bike.

And six weeks later, I was in a bike race and got third and kind of discovered, oh, well, I guess I've got a bit of a talent for this thing called endurance. And that's how it started for me. But the point of all that is, is I've kind of been both on both sides of this. And now I try to, I do do both but the balance has shifted towards endurance for me now if and i'm pushing 60 so my needs at 60 are probably different than my needs were at 30 and that's i think a useful starting point is for younger people and people maybe in their 40s early 50s you know the cardiovascular part can be pretty important just from a health point of view.

Unfortunately, a lot of us have some issues with maybe high blood pressure or other risk factors for cardiovascular disease. And then the endurance exercise is a prophylactic measure. It's a preventative measure. It's not a guarantee, fortunately, but it helps. And then as we get older, you know, I do think that the strength training becomes more and more important. As you, at my age, you know, I feel like I really need to get in the weight room twice a week just to maintain as much muscle mass, mobility, functional balance, and mobilization ability, just different aspects of all that.

So I try to put them both together, the endurance part and the strength and mobilization part. So I think both are important. They kind of shift. But as humans, I got to say, we have a remarkable capacity to improve our endurance. And that alone is kind of fun, is to be able to be, you know, kind of down at the baseline. You know, you're just above sofa sitting if you're just doing strength training. You know, you're not going to have a whole lot of endurance working for you if you're just doing squats and bench and so forth. But it doesn't take long before you can do quite a lot. whole lot of endurance working for you if you're just doing squats and bench and so forth. But

it doesn't take long before you can do quite a lot because it's kind of our genetics to be, to have endurance. It's kind of a genetic, a latent capacity that's waiting on us to explore and to exploit if we choose to. And so I've had, like, I used to have a former, a master student that, you know, he was kind of a chubby dude, you know, and then he got into serious strength training. He got really strong. You know, he was benching 200 kilos, which in pounds is about what? 440, not bad. And, uh, and then he decides, well, I'm going to see if I can still do that and run a marathon. And he pulls it off. And so he starts getting into this idea of how, you know, how fit can I be in both at the same time?

So there's, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of interest in that is just seeing how, how can I push my body in different ways over time and exploit the capacity I have. So I guess that's part of it. You know, for your crowd, your strength training oriented people, you know, is, hey, you may choose to do a one year experiment on your body and see what you can do and whether you can run a pretty strong 10K at the end of that year. And then experience the same type of wins you experience in the weight room when you hit a PR or achieve some sort of body composition goal. It sounds like there's just the endurance equivalent of that.

So it's just another dimension of achievement that you can enjoy. Yeah. And also, you know, let's face it. If you're a if you've been strength training for years, your bench press and your squat have probably plateaued. You know, it just doesn't go up into heaven. Yeah, that's true. Whereas you can get all the newbie gains and have a great time if you haven't done much endurance training.

That first year or two, it'll bring you back. You'll have nostalgia to the weight room for the first year or two. Yeah. So if you want to experience progress, then just switch sports every once in a while. That's at least one way to have some freshness in the routine. And it all adds up to just a good, healthy lifestyle often. I think that's the bottom line is getting out there, moving, using our bodies. And then when it comes to endurance training, we have these basic levers we can pull, which are frequency and duration and intensity. And I say them in that direction or that order because I think that's the appropriate order to think about is first decide on a frequency of training for that discipline. You know, if you're going to say, all right, I'm going to start getting out the door and I'm going to do some running or I'm going to cycle,

then I'm going to say, all right, well, how many times a week? You know, what's the frequency going to be? What's the input going to be? What works for you? And maybe you say, ah, three days a week. Okay, then first let's establish that habit. And so we're going to really focus on just getting out the door three days a week. And I'm not going to be too worried about what you do.

I'm going to mostly just say, can we get that habit? Does it work in your life with what you're already doing, the coaching you're doing on the side with the kids, you know, everything. It fits in and it doesn't add more stress to your life, but it actually adds something positive. And then once we got that habit going, maybe after six weeks, then we'll say, all right, what have you been doing? Step trainer for 20 minutes, three times a week. Okay, not bad, but let's see if we can stretch it a bit. Let's see if we can take at least one, maybe two of those and start lengthening that

duration and maybe get to an hour, at least one of those sessions of those three sessions each week. So now I'm going to use the second lever that we have in endurance training, which is duration. Because duration helps. If you go from 20 to 40 to 60 minutes, you get a better stimuli. You get a larger stimuli for adaptation. Just like in bench press, you're going to probably increase sets and reps over some period of over a progression. Well, it's a bit the same. The volume, the duration matters. So first we have frequency. Then we're going to do a little bit more duration.

And then only then, maybe now we're talking three months in, I haven't even talked about intensity. I haven't said anything about interval training or sprint training or any of these things. But after 12 weeks and you've got to have it and you're already going to feel like, you know what, I'm fitter. This feels, I'm already feeling better, even though I'm really not trying very hard. And then we'll add in maybe one of those workouts each week. Those three, we'll do more intensity oriented, maybe hill training or find a track at the local high school, do some repeats and let the intensity go up. Think a little bit more speed,

let the heart rate go up, push yourself, feel the lactate, feel the burn. And so that's the direction I would do it. Now, the temptation will be to do the opposite which is the same i mean the same mistake that people make with strength training many people make at least where they they try to make up for a lack of frequency and volume which would be the equivalent of of duration with intensity so instead of instead of going three days a week and following a well-designed program they're going in one day a week and trying to destroy themselves every set to absolute failure. And that doesn't work for people saying that that's not a good way to go about it. I mean, it's better than doing nothing as long as it doesn't get you hurt, but it, but it's not a very,

uh, it's not a very effective way to program your training. Yeah. And it's the same. Same with endurance training. I always say the best endurance athletes think long game. So they're in it over the long haul. They know they're going to be doing a lot of workouts each year. They don't get too crazy about any one workout as being the magic session or the epic workout or whatever, because they know that it's not really the way it works.

And they know they need to stay healthy. They need to stay motivated. And that consistency is the superpower. It's a quiet superpower, you know, in the training process or any kind of process is being able to get out there consistently string together weeks and weeks of reasonably healthy training, man, good things happen. So that's true for your bench press or your power clean or your 10K. Those basic principles are the same. Before we continue with training principles, I wanted to come back to something that you mentioned earlier, and that is the importance of cardiovascular training for younger people. And I wanted to come back to that because the general message, at least in the body composition community, which obviously is

weighted more toward strength training, is that your cardiovascular health and capacity, maybe you could even be specific and say your VO2 max is more important when you get older. You want to make sure you maintain that because it declines just like how your lean mass will decline with age. And if your VO2 max declines too much, you can't even do everyday activities and then eventually you die is what happens. And so I've seen this argument made by many people that you need to be doing more cardio, more endurance training as you get older, just to maintain, you don't want to maintain, I mean, ideally you want to maintain an above average cardiovascular fitness or even beyond that. So VO2 max, but that's more important as you get older. When you're younger, you have age on your

side. And so you would want to focus on strength training, use that to your advantage, build a strong base of muscularity, of strength, that then as you get older, you can transition into just maintaining. And of course, maintaining muscle and strength is so much easier than gaining muscle and strength. You could easily maintain a very muscular, strong body on just two workouts a week, or you could just do an upper workout and a lower workout per week, maybe an hour per session. You have some intensity in there and you can stay jacked actually, but you're probably not gonna get jacked with just training two days per week.

What are your thoughts on that perspective and what it might be missing in terms of specifically what you mentioned about cardiovascular health and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and how if you start that earlier as you get older, you're probably gonna be glad you did. Well, I'm thinking of it as a pure epidemiological.

What we know is that a lot of us have had parents or a father that died at 48 of a heart attack or because of a genetic predisposition. And so generally, cardiovascular disease will hit early if it's there if there's a genetic predisposition it'll it'll take people out and i'm now i'm being you know just to use a harsh way of it take takes me out way too early and it takes them out in their 40s and 50s and so that's why i say and that's in that young it's still still young. And once you get my age, you start feeling like that's still young. So if you get past 60 and you're still cooking, probably you don't have a genetic predisposition for heart disease. You with me?

So what's going to kill you? Well, of course, we have things like cancer and so forth. But the other thing that's going to end up killing you is you're too weak strength-wise to resist a slippery surface. You fall and you break your hip at 78 years old, 80 years old, and it's a downward spiral from there. All right. Now, I'm not trying to be doomsday, but this is the reality. If we go to the hospitals in Norway, they'll just say, yeah, you know, if it's an icy day, then we're going to have 10 hip fractures that day. And nine of them are going to be older people. Okay.

Senior citizens slip on the ice, break a hip. And then it happened to my grandfather. And my mother called me from the emergency room, said, son, you need to talk to your grandfather because it may be the last time you get to talk to him. What had happened? He'd just fallen and broken his hip. And he was an old man. And she knew she had been a nurse. And so, and she was right. And so the point is, is that muscular strength becomes equal to health almost at very advanced age. You have to have, it's not your VO2 max that'll get you. It's your inability to stay upright under various duress, under various challenges.

It's your inability to walk two flights of stairs with a bag of groceries in your hand. So these become the limiting factors for us in a long-term healthy life where we use our potential through many decades, which I think all of us have that goal. So let me tell you, the vanity will go away eventually. And then you get down to the bottom line, which is function. And you can feel the differences. I'm still functioning at 60. I can still do 20 dips and I'm watching those teenagers and I can beat most of them. I'm more into that, to be honest with you.

I don't need to strip down my shirt and have a pose off with them, but I want to function and I want to still be able to play that, still be able to do that, you know, still be able to do things that I could when I was 20 at 60. And that's going to require strength training. And if you were speaking to, let's say some 30 somethings who are doing strength training and they're, they're doing well there, they're not doing much cardiovascular training under the assumption that I'm 30, whatever, I don't need to do cardio. I'll do that when I'm older. What would you say to them?

Well, you know, it's their life. I'm not a life coach, but I'm going to say, you know, give it a try. Maybe because you've got a long life, you've got this body that's full of capacity. Do an experiment for a year and see where it takes you. I mean, that's what I ended up doing is I did an experiment. I realized, my goodness, this is interesting. And then I fine-tuned my sport and ended up being a rower, which was kind of a nice combo because it was a combination of strength and endurance, a very important combination. You had to have the strength. So we were in the weight room a lot, but then we were doing a lot of endurance training. And it was

like, you know, if you see world-class rowers, they're pretty jacked, to be honest, to use your term. And so I liked looking like a rower way more than I would have liked looking like a marathon runner, to be honest with you. So yeah, there's differences. There are differences even within the endurance world as far as kind of what physique and what aptitudes favor you. If you're very slight and lean naturally, then running may be your thing. But if you're a big athlete anyway, you were a basketball player on the high school team, you may say, look, this running thing is not for me, man. I weigh 100 kilos and running just hurts. All right, well, let me introduce you to some other sports like rowing

or swimming or even cycling, you know, can be a better alternative. So that's another issue is running is not going to be for everybody, for sure. I'm one of those people. I never enjoyed running. And I played. I got into ice hockey. I played some baseball and I got into ice hockey, which I loved. And I always had good endurance.

But running for me, I just never came to like it. I liked running if it was in the context of a sport uh if i were even just playing football like pick up football sure great but just going for a run i can remember one time i still remember this when i ran to a point where i got past the point of hating it but i felt really good and so i under if it, if it were like that regularly, and I didn't have to like go through what felt like at the time and in an inordinate amount of pain to, to then somehow break through it and be like, Ooh, I feel good now. I would understand running and I would be, I would go out for a run every day, but, but for me,

for whatever reason, it's, it might just be psychological. Uh, but you know, I don't know. I mean, I'll hop on the bike. I don't mind that. Yeah. So there are alternatives and I know everybody's relationship to running is not positive. There are, you know, running suits a lot of us well, and, and I was, you know, I was a pretty decent track athlete, but I didn't like distance running either. And then after I found out I had a clotting disorder and I got a blood clot in my leg and I had to rehabilitate, I got up to two and a half hours running in the forest, you know, and got pretty fit at running, but then I ended up hurting myself again and running. So, you know, I kept extending until I pushed it too far. And

then I said, okay, this is ridiculous. I'm, I'm going to start cycling, you know? And so, uh, that's my thing these days. So I would just say to your listeners, you know, yeah, if you say, ah, I want to do some cardiovascular, but man, the running just doesn't work. Okay. That's fine. There are rowing machines, there are ski ergometers, there are swimming, there's cycling, there are alternatives. You know, roller ski, you name it. Lots of possibilities. Yep. Can you talk about, now getting back to some more of the technical components of endurance training, could you talk about, before we go back to the frequency and the duration, the intensity,

can you talk about the three-zone model? and the duration, the intensity. Can you talk about the three zone model? A lot of people are hearing about this now more so than at any point that I can remember in the last 10 years or so that I've been doing this type of work and what these zones mean. Sure. Well, I'm a simple guy, so I usually use colors as a first approximation to help people get their eyes around it, you know, get it in their head, green, yellow, red. So green zone is low intensity. It is an intensity that often will be called talking pace, which means that, you know, you can chat up with the guy or girl beside you and talk about whatever happened at the game yesterday. You may not want to talk all run, but you can do it. That's one issue. If you're wearing a heart rate monitor after, say, 10, 12, 15 minutes, you will flatten out on heart rate and it should stay pretty flat. It shouldn't just be going up, up, up. It should come

into this nice kind of steady state that can last for, if know, if you're reasonably fit for at least an hour. Okay. And for the super fit, it can go for hours and hours, you know, but, but let's say regular folks who haven't been doing much of this, a good goal would be to be able to do something for an hour and have heart rate stay pretty flat. All right. That's another indicator of being in that so-called green zone. Another issue or another indicator of being in the green zone is you can just kind of be distracted. You can be mentally thinking about other stuff. You can be externally oriented, looking at things going on around you and maintain that pace and kind of forget time. Okay. And then the fourth thing would be that as soon as you're done with it, you take a deep breath and you go, huh, when's dinner?

You know, you're hungry. And you may think, well, what's that have to do with anything? Well, green zone, we're at an intensity where we this first threshold that we talk about, which is if we were using blood lactate or if we were using ventilation measurements, we'd be able to see a break point where we'd see a nonlinear jump in lactate and breathing as we move into that yellow zone. And that yellow zone, it's not a yellow point, it's a zone. We talk about it being the threshold zone. And what happens there? Well, there you're going to start feeling like, okay, I got to start thinking about this. You'll start scanning your body. You're trying to hold that pace.

And it's doable. I mean, if you're fit, you may be able to stay in that yellow zone, super fit. You may be able to stay there for two hours, but reasonably fit, you may be able to, you should be able to stay there for 40 minutes to an hour. And the heart rate is going to go up and it will kind of slide up during, if you're in these yellow zone workouts, but lactate will go up and then kind of flatten out, but it flattens out at a higher level. Okay. If, if one, one and a half millimolar, just to use a number, the audience doesn't necessarily have to have a big understanding of it, but let's say 1.5 becomes three or four, but it flattens out at three or four. All right. Millimolar, that's just a concentration of

lactate. All right. Now, so that's yellow zone. It's tougher. It feels purposeful and pretty tough, but you can stay there for many minutes. And then we move to red. And when we pass from yellow into red zone, now basically the time that you can accumulate there is down to minutes. And every minute feels like a freaking long nightmare. If you want to know just how long a minute can be, do this. Yeah. Yeah. Time stretches, time warps in the red zone, let me tell you. And so you go from, oh, wow, a half hour passed around and then to going like 60 seconds left. I still got 60 seconds.

Jesus, you know, am I going to get through this? So time really changes your brain's perception. You're working and you're counting for sure minutes. And towards the end of intervals, it can be you're counting seconds, to be honest. It's purposeful, very tough, very, you're out of, you know, you're out of breath. You're sure as heck not talking to anybody. You feel poisoned by the so're out of you know you're out of breath you're sure as heck not

talking to anybody you feel poisoned by the so-called you know all the hydrogen ions that we call it the lactate but it's really not the lactate that's poisoning you but it gets higher so we talked about one and a half in the green zone and three or four millimolar in the yellow zone and now we're at eight or nine or 10 or even 12 in that red zone. Okay. So it's, it's way higher. And, and these workouts are tough. They're useful, but you sure as heck can't do them every day. Or if you do, you're going to get stagnated and burned out in a pretty quick hurry. You definitely don't need supplements to lose fat and no fat loss supplements are going to make a major difference in your bottom line results. How you eat, how you train,

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their biggest superpowers is they get out the door pretty much every day. So that frequency is pretty high on the endurance side. They train regularly, pretty much daily. And at the elite level, a lot of them are training twice a day. So that's one issue. And what that means is, they're not going to be able to train with that kind of frequency if they're also trying to train with very high intensity each of those workouts. So over decades of just experimentation, coaches and athletes in swimming and running and rowing and cross-country skiing and so forth, cycling, seem to have just independent of each other come to the same kind of basic breakdown. And they say, well, something like 80% of my workouts are low and long and about 20%

are shorter and harder. What one of these universal constants is you can almost just default to it within a lot of domains. You can assume there's probably some sort of 80-20 relationship here. Yeah, it's some kind of it's a self-organizing issue. Now, we're actually learning quite a bit about why this is true, looking at molecular signaling, looking at stress responses. We kind of, the coaches and athletes figured it out before the scientists were able to tell them why. And that's often the case, that the athletes figure things out either technically, they invent new techniques like the butterfly in swimming or the V-style and cross-country and ski jump. Or, you know, lots of just pretty much every technical innovation has come from the athletes.

All right. The Fosbury flop from Dix Fosbury, just a change in technique that revolutionized high jump. That comes from the athletes doing the daily training, figuring stuff out. And they're figuring out because they're not good enough. They're getting beat usually. So it's not the ones that are on top that are innovative. It's the ones that are under, just under and are trying to figure out a way to climb up. And they're innovative. Okay. So that's where innovation happens. That's where they figure things out. And then the scientists come up behind them and tell them, okay, well, this is why that works. And they have to figure that out. That's why I've studied athletes is because kind of that's where the innovation is happening. All right. That's where they're the ones that have had through

trial and error have come to understand, you know what, we can't train at the threshold every day. It sounds good. Sounds like a smart idea, but it doesn't work. And so that's what I try to help us regular folks that are trying to do endurance work. Our default will tend to be exactly that. We'll fall into this so-called intensity black hole, which will be that every workout will end up being in that middle zone. It will tend to go yellow every day or yellow-red-ish. Starts yellow, ends up pretty red. And green is not even in our color coordination system. That's the warm-up. Yeah. Well, heck, warm-up? What are you talking about? I ain't got no time for warming up. I got

to get moving. You know, and so that's, you know, time is of the essence and people think that they're just going to get out the door and just. All right. Well, then you got to, you just had to get past the green to get to the yellow and red. Then that's all, that's all it is. It's just, it's just, it's just like a hurdle you have to get over. I don't need no green. So, so that will be the most common mistake that people will make. And then they get the first they stagnate and then then worse, they'll often kind of burn out. Because it's just not very fun. Right. And even elite athletes that I talk to, people that are making a living doing this stuff, they're saying, look, you know, there needs to be some joy in all of this.

There needs to be some enjoyment. You can't suffer every day. The whole idea of no pain, no gain is just not right. It doesn't actually work that way in the long term. Yes, sometimes you need some pain and there is an association, you know, but it's not an everyday deal, even for the best athletes in the world. And that applies to anything difficult. I think that applies.

You think about in your work. I think about in my work, I would say it's very much the same where you need to make sure that you are spending a lot of your time on stuff that you genuinely enjoy. And sometimes you got to do stuff you don't enjoy. And sometimes you don't even enjoy the stuff that you typically enjoy. times you got to do stuff you don't enjoy. And sometimes you don't even enjoy the stuff that you typically enjoy. But I mean, I can just speak personally that I think made some, well, I guess the outcomes were good. So fine. But I've learned this lesson that more on the business side of things, because I like creating content. I like doing creative type of work. That's the

type of work I like to do the most. A lot of the operations type of work that goes into business, I just don't really like. And so I have a couple businesses that I've spent extended time in doing things that I don't enjoy that needed to get done. That's fine. But I just think of periods where if that goes on for too long, I think it takes a bit of a, an emotional toll or a psychological toll on you, even if you are just the grinder type and yeah, you're going to show up and do it. There's no question of whether you're going to do it or not. Um, but anyway, I just, uh, I've just experienced that. I've experienced that in training, but I've experienced that in, again, in, in other arenas that just involve effort and discipline and so forth. Yeah, no, I think it is, there's a bit of a universality to this. And if we're lucky enough

to be able to be in jobs that give us creative spark or give us autonomy and, you know, an independence, then we're willing to work hard. But that work feels like a flow state where we're doing something that, where we're in that area where it's sufficiently challenging. And, but at the same time, there's a sense of mastery in all, most fields. I'm a professor at a university and I can assure you that we have our 20% that's crappy. You know, the grading of exams and administrative stuff, we all have to deal with that, but, but we almost take it as like, all right, I get this done and then I get to do what I really love, which I just love

research. And I actually like teaching. So I think every, almost most people have jobs. If they're lucky that we'll have a lot of enjoyment or at least a lot of challenge that feels good. And it's some work that doesn't feel so great. And training is like that too. You know, whether it's, I don't like stretching, for example, but,

but I got to do it. And so I think we all have to kind of find that balance. And in the endurance world, the top athletes have figured out that balance and it ends up being that they exchange intensity for duration. So they do a lot more duration because they can stay under the stress radar and they recover better from a low intensity, longer session than they do from a high intensity session. So they recover faster.

And so when you're training every day, that ends up being pretty darn important. So that's kind of why this green, this 80-20 relationship and mostly green. So if your listeners are only training three days a week, then yeah, they could get away with pretty much going out and going yellow every time. If they're training 45 minutes three times a week and they'll come up to a certain level and they're going to kind of plateau. But if they're satisfied with that, that's okay. However, if they say, you know, I want more, I want to see where I can get on my 5k or my 10k, then I'm going to start tweaking things a bit. And what would that look like? Just because I could imagine that many

people listening, they like that goal orientation. So getting out there a few days a week, getting into the yellow, nothing wrong with that. And I would label that exercise, which is great. And if you want to turn it into training, though, of course, you need to have something now that you're working toward. You need to have a bit of a system there. There needs to be a methodical approach to it. Often, at least in running, that often is, okay, I want to run a 5K or I want to run a 10K or one day I want to run a marathon. So for people who maybe have never done the 5K or the 10K, how would you think about approaching that? What does that require and what does that programming look like? require and what does that programming look like? Right. Well, I would start like we began where I would say, well, let's just first get a habit going because as we're getting that habit going, we're also training some, you know, getting some tendon strength, getting used to that eccentric concentric loading, getting that initial soreness out of the way. So we're doing some

physiology as we're also just getting the habit in place. Because even getting out 20, 30 minutes, three times a week will have pretty profound effects. Because the first week they do that, they're going to be sore. They're going to be sore just from that, even though they've been in the weight room. They'll be like, what the heck? I shouldn't be sore. Yeah, sorry, you will be because this is a different load on your muscles than what you've been doing. So we're going to get past that. We're going to get into kind of a groove three days a week. And they're going to kind of start feeling like, yeah, things are starting to flatten out.

All right. So now I want to stretch maybe one of those three sessions a week. I want to have that be the kind of the duration day, the long day. I want to have that be the kind of the duration day, the long day. And I'm going to use duration as a lever because duration has some effects at the cellular level in terms of turning on mitochondrial synthesis, capillary synthesis, and so forth. That's very useful. And so we want to use those signaling effects. And so we want to use that, those signaling effects. And then on another day, we're going to kind of let that be the neutral day, just kind of a basic day that's pretty much green zone, not too long, not too hard, just kind of feels like status quo.

And then we'll have that third day will be an intensity oriented day. Okay. So I'm going to, you know, given three days a week, I'm gonna basically just have a regular day, a long day, and a hard day, if that makes sense. At least that way I can start to differentiate a bit and start thinking in terms of what's gonna be my race pace if I'm gonna try to do a 5K.

What's, after a while, you're gonna start getting a feeling for what might be a reasonable goal. Is it 30 minutes? Is it 25 minutes? Is it 22 minutes? You with me? And then you can start to figure out what the pace needs to be to achieve that goal. can start to say, all right, five kilometers, a 5K, 3.1 miles is this many laps. So I can start breaking it down into some kind of an interval session, maybe five times 1,000 meters. And I can start to think, or maybe at first I have to only go three or four times 1,000 meters, and that's enough. And I'm going to start thinking about goal pace for that longer, that 5K or that 10K as an intensity that I'm going to start thinking about goal pace for that longer, that 5k or that 10k as an intensity

that I'm going to start stringing together more and more repetitions. Three times 1k, four times 1k, five times 1k. And if you can do five times 1k at your race pace on just a regular day, all by yourself on the track alone, you're going to be pretty close to being able to do that for 5k in the heat of the moment, best effort with lots of people around you clapping. So it's a reasonable kind of test, a goal test. And the same way for the 10, except it'll be something like five times 2k. And those intervals, would those be your red sessions or your yellow sessions until eventually they're... Yeah, they're going to start upper yellow and then go red. Because remember, the thing about this is, is when you start getting into that higher

intensity range, it is feeling tougher every rep. Okay? It's just like the bench press, doing a set of 10. Starts out smacking it, you know, and then towards the end, you're the velocity of the bar is going down, right? Same deal with, with the intervals on the track or, or heel repeats is you have to mobilize more and more to achieve the same pace. So you, you don't want to start out. I started to say balls to the wall. You know what I'm saying? You don't want to start out too hard because then you fail. So you want to have a, to understand that ideally you're going

to be, find a pace that feels hard, but pretty okay the first rep. And then by the time you get to the last rep, you're, it's feeling really tough, but you manage it. What you want to avoid is a failure kind of scenario where you went out too fast, and then you just slowly fall apart. Because that's not good for the brain, and it doesn't particularly help the training either. And so then these intervals, if I'm hearing you right, as you're working toward, let's say, this 5K, if you're training three days a week, you're maybe doing these, it sounds like probably one day a week is is your interval day that's going to be enough uh given given your

base and that you don't want to do more than that and it'll give you a good effect you'll get a night you know and so that's a reasonable way to do a three day a week program if you say well what about four then i would just have two normal days probably and then a long day and a hard day. And then once you get to maybe five days a week, you might start thinking a little extra intensity, you know, might start approaching two harder days. So it really depends on the individual and how it all fits together for them. That 80-20 is not going to mathematically work if you're training three days a week, but that's okay because you have all these rest days. Yep. Yep. That makes sense. And then for people who, um, let's say, let's say they do the three day a week program, they get up to their 5k goal.

And now they have found some enjoyment in this and they're thinking with this maybe one year experiment, they're like, how far could I take this? What would progression look like for that person? Yeah, if they find out that they're a bit of a running phenom and they love it and they want to extend to a 10 or a half marathon, probably I'm going to have to say, well, I got to tell you, if it's going to be a good experience for you, we're going to have to up the frequency.

All right. We may have to intrude on one of your strength days and do a double session, you know, to get to four days a week. Or, you know, so you're going to have to make now you're going to start doing some tradeoffs here and decide maybe you're going to put the strength training on a maintenance level so that you can shift some emphasis over to your endurance training in order to achieve, you know, stretch yourself and achieve your goals. And so that would be one issue is to, first thing I would do is think frequency because you kind of need a reason, a higher frequency of than three days a week. If you're going to, I would say if you're going to have a really good experience in those longer types of events. Okay. You can can you can survive them

uh sorry i was just going to ask if that's be is that because of the amount of just training volume that you have to rack up every week and it just it just becomes unfeasible to try to do that in three sessions well i mean if you're going to run a half marathon, you know, or goodness gracious, a marathon, you need some miles in your legs because it does do some wear and tear on your body in the course of such a race. You hit the wall. There are some issues that the only way to get past those issues is to get a bigger base of miles in your legs. And pretty much the only way to do that is to increase frequency. You can't just keep making every workout longer and longer in a three-day-a-week program. It's going to get too tough.

So that's why athletes will start running more often. And then they'll reach some point where they'll start splitting up the day into two workouts. When we're talking high-performance endurance athletes, they'll say, well, instead of one two-hour workout, I'm doing two times one hour. And that's more sustainable. You know, so they also have to manage this stress relative to the training effect of the work they're doing. So if you're going to do the long, I'd say from half marathon up,

you're going to need to be at a higher frequency than three. If it's going to feel like a good and effective program, that's my feeling. And what do you feel is the sweet spot? Would that be five a week? I mean, I've heard from people over the years, they try to go six or seven a week. Yeah, it really, you know, six or seven is tough. And that's now you're an endurance athlete. You have become an endurance athlete. If you're training six or seven days a week, six days a week endurance, I don't know what you used to be, but you're an endurance athlete now.

And those six day a weekers, they will have a strength or two session or two, you know, in their built into all that. And they'll probably have a couple of, at least a couple of days of those six that they're doing two workouts in order to be able to do both. So that's, that's that slow evolution towards, you know, really focusing and really optimizing and kind of maximizing what you're good for within that endurance domain. And then saying, you know, right now strength is on the back burner. I have to have enough strength in order for it to be functional. I have to have optimal strength

for cycling or for running the half marathon. Okay. Uh, if they go that direction. So, but the sweet spot, I think from a, just a trying to do a bit of both probably is five days a week. And then I'm going to say to folks, you need a rest day somewhere in that mix. And that doesn't mean go lift weights. That's not, well, I didn't go run. That was an endurance rest day. Yeah.

So that's, that's tricky because if they're doing tough, they're trying to do pretty tough strength sessions, then they're getting a pretty tough load on the musculature. They're getting a lot of eccentric loading and so forth. I know for myself, if I do a tough jump session where I'm doing quite a bit of explosive work, it's going to affect my workout the next day, especially if I'm activating those type two fibers. I can do an easy session, no worries, but an interval session, the next day after a hard weight room session, I may find that, man, as soon as I go up to those higher powers, the legs are just not there. I've done something the day before that really wasn't, you know, I'm still recovering. I mean, I notice, I don't know if it's

just me noceboing myself, but I feel like my perception of the effort is also, is just higher. If my lower body, like to your point, if I train lower body pretty hard, and then I try to do something more difficult back on the bike here that I do on a regular basis, my perception of how hard it is, it's not just my legs. Like, yes, physically, my legs are not doing so great, but there seems to be a psychological component where that workout just feels a lot harder. And it's not just localized to my leg muscles. You know what I mean? Yeah. And it's, and the brain and the body are connected. So perception of effort, hopefully, and normally is connected to

the realities in the periphery. And so if there is some delayed onset muscular soreness, some fatigue, so forth, that will manifest as a different perception of effort. They are connected. And I think that I'm a physiologist, so I tend to think from the neck down. But as we get older and as we work in physiology long enough, we become hobby psychologists because of the deep connection between your perceptions and what's actually happening in the body and all of that. And your perception of effort is you can also be affected by things that have nothing to do with the weight room or the training. It can be the job.

It can be the marriage. It can be things with the kids. It can be many different things because it's all that kind of going into that same stress bucket, right? And I'm sure you've talked about that. So I think the stress bucket model is a useful, all models are wrong, but some are useful. And the stress bucket model is a useful kind of metaphor or way of thinking about this and that we have to give ourselves a break. So when you start trying to squeeze more into the day, which a lot of your listeners almost certainly do, they're high performance, they're going to get stuff done.

You're going to have to understand that there will be times when your stress bucket flows over and you have to give yourself a break in one way or another. And you have to decide what are the fixed costs that I can't get away from these stress sources and what are the variable costs that I can't. And that's, you know, sometimes it means you've got to take a day off from training. That's okay. That's okay. Get the kids to soccer. Get the bills paid.

Do the stuff on the Internet you've got to do. Uh, get the kids to soccer, get the bills paid, do the stuff on the internet. You got to do give yourself, because often a rest day, not only is good for your body, but it actually gives, it frees up a block of time, which then reduces your stress level on other stuff. So never, don't underestimate the value of a rest day. And it's not gonna, you're not going to lose your fitness. What are your thoughts on this point of just, just talking about your stress bucket and stress from the different sources? I mean, yeah, sure. There's training stress, but there are other

sources of stress. So, so you have this concept of a, of a rest day, but, but also maybe a lower stress day. So because let's say we just think about it in terms of exercise rest day. All right, fine. We're not doing any workout. We'll, we workout. We'll be active. Maybe we're going to walk around and stuff, whatever, but no workout. However, it's otherwise, let's say a stressful day because it's hectic and there are all these different things you have to get done. And that I can just speak personally that I do seem to notice a physiological difference between the low stress rest day and the high stress rest day. If I think about afterward and how I feel, even though I did take my, I did, I was a good boy. I didn't, I didn't do a workout, even though maybe I wanted to, but I didn't. And, but because that training stress, it seems like, was just replaced by other stress, I didn't feel as recuperated as a true lower stress day. Does that make sense?

what we're saying yes to every day and decide whether or not all of those yeses need to be yeses every day. And so maybe that, you know, like you said, well, I took a rest day, but I didn't really, I didn't rest. All I did was jacked up that day with more stuff. Well, that's on you then, because, you know, you're replacing one source of stress with another. So I think that's incumbent upon us to kind of evaluate all the things we say yes to. And I know, trust me, I'm past my daughter's 26. She's getting married in a couple of weeks. That's where I'm at now is marriage and, you know, and kids moving off to college and doing stuff like that. And that's a different kind of thing than it was when they were eight and nine and 10. And I'm the coach of the soccer team and I'm the coach of this and I, you know, and I'm doing all this extra stuff. So often for those, for your listeners that are in their mid thirties to early forties, they are at peak stress.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm 40 with two kids. So I understand 11, 11 and six. Yeah. You're burning the candle from both ends. You know, you get the kids in the bed and you're just like, you mean you fight, you fight to get them to bed. Yeah. You know, you try every trick in the book and then you got to go to work in your office after you get them to bed. I've been there. And I, we, you know, so I know that peak stress is in that area, 35 to 45 often. Okay. And that's when you're just a super overachiever as an exercising goal oriented, you know, entrepreneur with two kids who wants their kids, you decide, well, I'll have

to raise my hand when they ask for volunteers to coach, and you're the taxi driver, you're the coach, all these things. All I can say to you is, guys, gals, it gets better, okay? It will. And you'll almost miss it a little bit because pretty soon your kids are going to be off to college or they're going to be off on their own. You're like, man, they don't seem to need me anymore. But it does free up some time. And then as your body's decaying, at least you have more time to try to fight it. So I train more now than I did in that peak stress period. You know, I can train 10 hours a week now, but I didn't have time for that anywhere near at 40.

So, you know, so give yourself a break. Don't be hard on yourself. Take the small victories that you can. Man, I used to work out while watching my son do soccer practice, you know, and so I would do try to do a Murph, you can. Man, I used to work out while watching my son do soccer practice, you know, and so I would do try to do a Murph, you know, if you know what a Murph, I had the vest on, you know, so I was always trying to just optimize stuff. Right. And it was stressful. I, heck, I developed arrhythmias. I developed atrial fibrillation in that period when I just had work stress, I had life stress, I had divorce stress, I had it all. So I have a very keen understanding of the stress bucket. And if I can say to your listeners, you know, just give yourself a break, pat yourself on the back. If you're in that period in your life when you're responsible for a lot of different things,

you know, exercise needs to be, or your training process, your training goals need to be positives, not more stress. I think that's, yeah, I think that's great advice. And coming back, I have one more training related question for you. So we have somebody who wants to go from doing very little cardiovascular training. Again, maybe they get their 10,000 steps in, maybe they do a workout here or there, and they want to work up to one of these goals, 5k, 10k or beyond. What time frames should they be thinking with? And the reason I want to ask this is a mistake that I've seen over the years. Many people make endurance exercise and strength training is trying to do too much too quickly. And so maybe not the intensity point, but just

trying to think that you can go from kind of baseline cardiovascular fitness to your goal in inordinately short amount of time. And you had mentioned this point of then what happens is you go up, up, up, up, and then you go down, down, down, down, down, down, and then you quit. Well, putting numbers to this is a little bit, any number I say, somebody's going to go against me on it. But often we'll try to do something in 12 weeks, eight to 12 weeks, right? In two months, we're going to run a 5k and it's a tough go because you're, the first weeks are sore and tough. And then you're, you've got an adaptive phase and you're trying to squeeze everything in. So it, it can, it's going to be on the edge. You'll be able to run the 5k, but it won't necessarily be a great experience. So I would

double that. I would say, think in terms of six months for a 5k, if you're going to, you know, and probably that's reasonable for a 10k. But once you get beyond that, then I'm, if I'm talking half marathon marathon, I want to give myself a year, you know, let it be a nice, smooth progression and not, because otherwise if you get hurt, you know, which is going to be the likely scenario because running will tend to hurt you know which is going to be the likely scenario because running will tend to hurt you if you've got weak spots if you've got achilles issues if you've got knee issues if you're not balanced you'll get a niggle that turns into a long-term injury and then then you're not running for weeks and now that six months has cut to four and now it's a vicious cycle. So go do slower

instead of faster. Let things develop and double the time you think is necessary. If we want to give it a rule of thumb, if you think you can do it in eight weeks, double that or eight to 12, double that. And that'll probably be a better experience for you. that or eight to 12, double that. And that'll probably be a better experience for you. Yep. I think that's great advice. I think of in business, a good thought exercise to go through if you're considering a project, taking on a project is assume that it's going to take twice the effort, right? So twice the time, twice the cost, whatever the pain is going to be, double that and then assume that is... So let me let me back up first make what you think is a conservative estimate like really think about it try not to to engage in magical

thinking to to determine how much pain is this going to take okay double that and then try to make a conservative as effort of the the pleasure what's the reward going to be roi whatever we're talking about and then and then that, cut that in half, and then ask yourself, under those conditions, do you still want to do the thing? If not, don't do the thing. Find something that meets those qualifications. I like that rule. Double the pain estimate and half the pleasure estimate, and you'll be about ballpark yeah yeah i actually go through that exercise if i'm if i'm especially if i'm working through for talking about some sort of project that is going to entail a significant investment of resources that actually

is like part of the thing that the people i work with that we go through and do we still want to do it if not maybe we shouldn't do that then i I'm probably going to steal that from you. That's a good, a good basic rule as well. Please do. I stole it from, I think I stole it from, so it was a book, Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson, if I remember. Ready, Fire, Aim. That sounds good. Yeah. And a guy I interviewed, a speed skater named Nils van der Poel from Sweden. He's got a Dutch-ish name, but he's a Swedish athlete that broke the world record in the 5,000 and 10,000 meter on speed skating. Right. And he was a junior world champion. And he says, you know what? I became junior world champion. And that was really great for about 10 seconds. And then he corrected himself and said, well, maybe the whole day. And then he said, and then I started thinking, man, all the things I gave up, all the teenage fun stuff I gave up for this, I don't think it was worth it.

And he quit, you know, and then he ended up coming back and setting these world records, but he had to change the way he viewed his training. He had to change the parameters so that it was sustainable for him mentally. And that's kind of the outer edge of what you're talking about is a lot of times, man, we commit so much effort and we achieve these goals. And then we go, huh, was that, I thought it was going to be more. So enjoy the process. That's the bottom line training. You need to enjoy the process. There will be a product. It will be nice to set a PR, but PRs are never going to be satisfying forever. So make sure just doing this stuff is, is kind of fun, you know, because of the people you're with, because of the way it makes you feel inside all these different sources of some kind of a reward. I totally agree. Finding that intrinsic motivation is, it's makes me think of, of money, right? The lesson that, that everyone just insists on learning themselves in that reaching certain levels of income is about is satisfying

for, you know, maybe maybe a day, 10 seconds to a day, and then and then you just you you immediately adapt to wherever you're at. And, and then sometimes you reflect back on was it worth it all the things that I gave up, which also I think is a useful exercise before committing yourself to any sort of serious undertaking is make sure that you have thought about what you are giving up thought about all the other things that you can go and do. And if you consciously are aware of these things, and you consciously say, I don't want to do it. I'm willing to give up all of those things to go do this thing. Okay, then, you know, maybe you should go do the thing. And it may or may not work out the way that you hoped, even if you accomplish the thing. But at least at least you

thought about it. However, I think it is definitely a mistake to not even think about, well, wait a minute, if I'm going to be committing several 1000 hours to this big goal over the course of who knows how many years, why am I doing this? If it's related to money or status, I would say you should probably think more about that because I can guarantee you it's not going to be as great even if you get there as you think it's going to be. So do you have these intrinsic motivations? Do you just enjoy, generally enjoy it for its own sake? Are there things that are pulling you into it, again, that are not money related, not status related? And have you given thought to what else you could do with thousands of hours of time? Are you okay with sacrificing those things? Are you okay, basically, in a way, you're going to have to become a terminal

procrastinator in everything but this one thing. Here's the one thing that you never procrastinate in, but you're going to have to put off all these other things. There are going to be more things, too, along the way that are going to pop up that are going to look really attractive, and you're going to have to say no. You're making me think of my time as a PhD student when I was also a competitive rower and getting up every morning at five o'clock, training on the water at 5.30, five days a week. And then on Saturday and Sunday, we got to only start at 7 a.m. And so when you have that kind of schedule and you're a PhD student, you're poor. And I just remember I was a Spartan, you know, I was, I was like, it was straight out of, you know, a thousand years ago. And,

and I just was living sleep, eat, train, work. And, you know, but at that time I was willing to make those sacrifices and give up certain things. And I gave up dates. I gave up a lot of those social things because it's pretty darn hard to be much of a entertaining date when you're waking up. You got to say, well, I got to be up at five. Sorry, I got to go. So I think those are choices we make for periods of our life. And then we have to reevaluate and reflect on. But I do think that going through periods where you say, I'm going to train for that triathlon or I'm going to train for this or whatever, I do think they have value. I think they have, you know, it's an experiential thing that helps us to understand our brains, our bodies

and makes life interesting. So I do encourage people to choose something interesting that they haven't done before, like that 10K or whatever, and go through that process because it's a wonderful process to be able to, you know, it's one of the few, endurance is one of those few things where you can really see the results as they go. And it's quite rewarding. It's not always as easy in our business life or our family life and so forth to see that clear progress. So I'll throw in a advertisement for endurance as someone that also loves and has a long background in these other kinds of training. If you're curious, give it a whirl, give it a go, but double the time you think it'll take, like you said. And think first frequency, then duration, then intensity. Those are my two big kind of

recommendations. The third would be don't be afraid of rest days. Awesome. Well, this was a great interview. That's everything that I wanted to touch on. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that's bouncing around in your head? Anything that you wanted to say that I didn't ask about or have we covered it sufficiently? I think we've done it. Yeah, I think you pulled out what I know. So, no, I just, joy. I'll end with that. I was at a meeting a couple months ago lecturing to some of the top cross-country skiers in the world and their coaches and the sciences around it.

And the word that came up most often talking about successes and failures and athletes that had one world championships and then it fell apart, they all said, when it went wrong, it was because I lost the joy in the training. J-O-Y, joy. That's interesting that they would, because from the outside looking in, it sounds counterintuitive. Because you could assume that such things are just kind of mechanical. You just show up, you do the thing, you're good at the thing and you stay good at the thing and you go home. Who cares how you feel about it? It's it's it's that's the thing. You know, I've I've had the luxury or the good fortune to talk to a lot of really great athletes. And man, that's what I hear from all of them. You

know, Killian Jornet or Tim DeClercq on this bike. And they'll talk about, man, it's about your mates, your friends that you're cycling with. And you're on a long six-hour ride and you stop after three and have an espresso up in the mountains looking out. He says, you can't beat that. And he's talking about the joy, the joy of camaraderie, just doing stuff together. And it's not all about pain. And it can't be. And that's what I hear independently from all these great athletes.

So I, you know, if I just remind people of that, if that's true for the people that you look up to that can run the fastest you've ever seen, and they still say joy is important, then trust me, it's important for you too. Great advice. And I've spoken about that regularly, just in the context of making sure that you're enjoying your training program, your strength training program. You're not going to enjoy every workout. You're going to always have enjoyed the workout once it's done. Having worked out is always enjoyable. But on the whole, I think you should generally look forward to your workouts. You should generally enjoy the process of doing your workouts. And if you're not, then I would recommend that somebody

take a look at what they're doing and specifically what are they not liking about it and how can they change things, even if it makes their training less scientifically optimal, even if they have very specific goals, but if they can greatly increase the joy quotient in their training, that's worth it. Coming back to consistency. And so that's good advice. Yeah. And if you're getting it right, even those hard sessions, you'll look forward to them because you see a challenge. You're ready to face the challenge. So it doesn't necessarily, it's not joy, but there is a satisfaction.

There's a match between your readiness to take on the challenge and what's being asked of you or what you're asking of yourself. And when that's in balance, then good things tend to happen. When you're hoping that it rains and there's lightning so that you don't have to do that workout, that's not a good sign. Hoping for divine intervention of some kind to just get you out of it. Yeah, I'm hoping. Can there be like a flood so I don't have to do this workout on the river today? Well, this was a great discussion. And if people want to

know more about you, know about your work, where can they find you? Anything in particular you want them to know about? Well, I'm on X as it is now called just at Steven Seiler, my name. I'm a, I'm a, I'm an Elon Musk enjoyer, but that rebrand, I don't quite understand. I feel like that was a mistake, at least as it stands right now. I'm going to, you're, you're the business guy, but all I know is I, my, I still have an account there and it's verified. And so, so I do do quite a bit of discussion in the endurance sphere on, on X. I have a YouTube channel. It's kind of has quite a few

videos related to training that people can tap into. And obviously it's free. And then if people are super serious about me and want to geek out on actual research, then we have Google Scholar. They can go in and find all that stuff. Awesome. Well, thanks again for your time, Steven. This was a great discussion again for your time, Stephen. This was a great discussion. You bet. Take care. How many calories should you eat

to reach your fitness goals faster? What about your macros? What types of food should you eat? And how many meals should you eat every day? Well, I created a free 60-second diet quiz that'll answer those questions for you and others, including how much alcohol you should drink, whether you should eat more fatty fish to get enough omega-3 fatty acids, what supplements are worth taking and why, and more. To take the quiz

and get your free personalized diet plan, go to muscleforlife.show slash diet quiz, muscleforlife.show slash diet quiz. Now answer the questions and learn what you need to do in the kitchen to lose fat, build muscle and get healthy. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show, because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions

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