Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Paul Hough on High-Intensity Interval Training (Everything You Need to Know)

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Paul Hough joins me to talk about high-intensity interval training (HIIT). I’ve written about HIIT plenty before, but I wanted to get Paul on the podcast to do a deeper dive on the subject. And HIIT is the subject of one of the chapters in his new textbook, Advanced Personal Training, which aims to turn science into applicable practice for personal trainers. So in this episode we’re chatting all about what HIIT is, how to do it correctly, and even whether you should do it at all. In case you’re not familiar with Paul, I recently shared a webinar I recorded with him for students at Oxford Brookes University in the UK, where Paul is a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Science. Not only is he a fellow author, but he’s worked with elite-level athletes in tennis and Formula One, and published several studies in academic journals. In our discussion, we chat about . . . What HIIT is (and how to test if you're actually doing a high intensity) Different types of HIIT (and what systems they stress) and their benefits The importance of exercise selection for HIIT Heart rate and when it's appropriate to use and when to use RPE Why you need to regulate intensity (and not just go all-out during every interval) The Afterburn effect and why HIIT isn't "special" for fat loss How HIIT can affect appetite Exercise "snacks" (what they are and the benefits - it’s not food) And more . . . So, if you’re curious about HIIT and want to know more about it, you’re going to enjoy this podcast! --- Timestamps: 0:00 - Legion VIP One-on-One Coaching: https://www.muscleforlife.show/vip 8:34 - What is high intensity interval training, is it the best way to lose fat? 10:58 - Do you correlate exercise intensity to how heavy your breathing is? 14:42 - Is HIIT better for burning calories? 17:40 - How much HIIT do I need to do to be equal to a 30 or 60 minute jog? 19:34 - Does HIIT have more recovery demands on my body? 23:46 - Can you clarify between type 4 and type 6? 28:12 - How does heart rate relate to how hard you’re training? 46:10 - What are your thoughts on everyone including HIIT into their workout routines? 1:04:33 - What is the exercise snacking concept? 1:16:43 - Where can we find you and your work? --- Mentioned on the show: Legion VIP One-on-One Coaching: https://www.muscleforlife.show/vip Paul Hough’s website: www.exerciseandsportscience.com Paul’s textbook Advanced Personal Training: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09HXGDLNT/?tag=mflweb-20 Paul’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_h0ugh/ Paul’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_hough

Hello friend and welcome to Muscle for Life. I'm Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for an episode on high intensity interval training, which is something that I have changed my mind about quite a bit over the last 10 years or so. For example, when I wrote the first edition of Bigger, Leaner, Stronger in, I guess that was 2012, I was a big proponent of high intensity interval training. In fact, I was recommending that people do just a few high intensity interval training workouts per week instead of, let's say, low intensity, steady state cardio every day. And now my position is that HIIT is a great way to burn a lot of calories in a little amount of time. And it's also a great way to build up your cardiovascular endurance. So if you are an endurance athlete, yes, you should be doing HIIT workouts. But beyond burning a bunch of calories and improving your cardiovascular endurance,

there aren't any other really good reasons to do HIIT workouts. And I wish it were otherwise. If I think back to 10 years ago or even eight years ago and the state of the scientific research, the literature on HIIT training, it was well established that you burned more calories in less time with HIIT training. But there were also theories and there was some evidence that was suggesting that HIIT training had some special advantages over lower intensity cardio and that that ultimately led to a lot more fat burning in addition to the calorie burning. Now, if we fast forward to today and look at the weight of the evidence, we find that those possible advantages don't seem to exist. And the one advantage really,

as far as fat loss goes, is just burning a lot of calories. So I have subsequently updated my books, Bigger Leaner Stronger, Thinner Leaner Stronger. I have updated articles over at Legion's website. And I have discussed what I just explained to you previously here on the podcast. But I wanted to speak to a subject matter expert on HIIT and to go a little bit deeper than what I just said, because there is more you can learn about HIIT training and just cardio in general that can help you achieve your health and fitness goals faster, depending on what those goals are. And so I invited Paul Huff to the show to talk

about it. Now, Paul is a senior lecturer in sport and exercise science at Oxford Brooks University, and he is a fellow author. He has worked with many elite level athletes in tennis and Formula One in particular. He has published research in various academic journals. And if you are a regular here at Muscle for Life, you have already met Paul because I don't know how long ago it will be when this goes live. Probably two months ago or so, you can find an episode which was Paul hosting me on a webinar for his class for his students. And that was on the topic of entrepreneurship in the fitness space. And I was answering questions about that, that his students had. And so in this talk, Paul and I get into every nook and cranny we can find about it. We talk

about what it is technically, like how do you actually know if you are doing high intensity interval training or just medium intensity interval training, for example. And of course, it's important to know where that threshold is. Paul talks about a few different ways to structure your HIIT workouts based on which energy systems in your body you want to stress the most or train the most. Paul talks about the importance of exercise selection in these workouts. He talks about measuring heart rate and when it would be appropriate to do that versus just using a rate of perceived exertion, maybe on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being all out maximum intensity. Paul talks about the afterburn effect and how

significant or insignificant it really is and a lot more. Before we get into it, I've worked with tens of thousands of people over the years and the biggest thing I see with the people I have helped the most is they're often missing just one crucial piece of the puzzle. And if you are having trouble reaching your fitness goals as quickly as you'd like, I'm going to guess it is the same thing with you. You are probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts, there's something you're not doing right. And that is what is giving you most of the grief. Maybe it's your calories. Maybe it's your macros. Maybe it's your exercise selection. Maybe it's food choices. Maybe you are not progressively overloading your muscles and whatever it is.

Here's what's important. Once you identify that one thing, once you figure it out, that's when everything finally clicks. That's when you start making serious progress. It's kind of like typing in your password to log into your computer. You can have all the letters, numbers, and symbols right, except just one. And what happens? You can't log in, right? But as soon as you get that last remaining character right, voila, you're in business. And I bet the same can be said about the body you really want. You are probably just one major shift, one important insight, one powerful new behavior away from easy street. And that's why I offer VIP one-on-one coaching where my team and I can help you do exactly that. This is high level coaching where we look at everything you're doing and we help you figure out that one thing

that is missing for you. And it can be a couple of things too. That's fine. There's no extra charge for that. But once we figure it out, that's when you start making real progress. That's when you start looking better and feeling better. So if you're ready to make more progress in the next three months than maybe you did in the last three years, and yes, that has happened for many of our clients, head on over to muscleforlife.show slash VIP. That's muscleforlife.show slash VIP and schedule your free consultation call, which by the way, is not a high pressure sales call. It's just a friendly chat where we get to learn about you and your goals and your lifestyle, and then determine whether our program is right

for you. Because sometimes we do speak with people who just aren't a good fit for our service, but we almost always have other experts and other resources to refer those people to. So if you are still listening to me and you are even slightly interested, go schedule your free consultation call now at muscleforlife.show slash VIP. Hey, Paul, thanks for taking time to do this. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on. It's great to be on. I'm a big fan of your podcast. So thank you for inviting me to talk. Absolutely. Absolutely. I appreciate you being flexible too. We had a previous date that I forget what happened. I was running behind on stuff that needed to get done that day. So thanks for being

willing to reschedule as well. No problem at all. All right. So we're going to talk about high intensity interval training here on today's interview. And as I was saying offline, this is something that I've written and I've spoken a bit about, but I haven't,

I haven't really done a deep dive into it. I've kind of just shared some HIIT 101 information with people. Okay, what is it? What actually qualifies as a HIIT workout versus a high-ish intensity training session? Why might you want to do it? Some parameters for programming it. But I wanted to get you on the show to share your opinions on those things and then also get into some other details that I just have never talked or written

about regarding HIIT. And so maybe that's just a good place to start is a little bit of that 101. What is high intensity interval training specifically, technically? And then maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the reasons that some people might want to do it. Obviously, most people who reach out to me about it, at least are asking me about it, want to lose fat. And they're under the impression that that's the best way to lose fat as far as cardio goes. Sure, yeah. cardio goes sure yeah so at most basic level it is just an exercise which involves like brief intermittent bouts of high intensity exercise and those bouts are interspersed by like periods of rest or low intensity exercise the key question then is okay what is high intensity um because this obviously is a distinguishing factor between high intensity interval training

and other types of endurance training. So when we, in exercise physiology, when we refer to high intensity, it's an intensity which is performed, like we can use various physiological markers like the maximal lactate steady state or critical speed or power. But on a basic level, it's just an intensity that's not sustainable. So if you try to maintain that particular intensity, you would fatigue within 5 to 10 minutes or even shorter. So it's any intensity which isn't sustainable.

A way to gauge if you're doing high-intensity interval training is you should, when you're doing it, have a high RPE, which is rating of perceived exertion. So basically, if it feels really hard, you're probably working at a high intensity. You should experience a little bit of fatigue, particularly towards the end of the session. And if you were to try and carry out the exercise and make it sustainable, the reason why it isn't is because you'd just eventually reach your maximum oxygen uptake, which is your VO2 max. So there are different types of HIIT and I'll go on to those maybe a bit later on

and just explain what the point is and why it's become really popular. Quick question for you, if you don't mind. Do you like to correlate the exercise intensity to your breathing, how labored you're breathing, how easily you could have a conversation or speak at all? I do. And one of the most simple tests we can do sort of outside of the lab is called the talk test. And it's very useful just to get an idea, particularly if you're a personal trainer and you want to understand if your client's working at the appropriate high intensity. They shouldn't be able to maintain any form of conversation if they're doing high intensity interval training, not during the work about.

So I think that's a good idea. Your breathing should feel what we call ventilation. So your breathing rate should be high and you can only get one or two words out at a time. You can get nowhere near holding a conversation. Whereas moderate intensity continuous training, so for example, going out for a run for half an hour to 45 minutes, that's not high intensity because you could maintain a conversation at that intensity.

Great. I just wanted to ask your thoughts on that because that's something that I've found helpful, just engaging my effort. Am I pushing hard enough? If I can talk fairly easily, that's not quite there yet. Yeah, I'm a big fan of using perceived exertion to how hard something feels. In the lab, we used an RPE scale all the time, but you can have an internal one in your head. So 10 being maximum, couldn't possibly do any harder.

Zero is rest. And as a rule of thumb, if you're doing high intensity interval training, you should be like seven to 10 really. So in terms of the point or the benefits of doing HIIT, it's often portrayed as quite fairly new, like something that's been around over the last decade or so and that's certainly true of the research it's it's been really heavily studied over the last 20

years but it's actually like a lot of things in the fitness industry it's not really anything new i mean there's there's records and there's actually a book written on high intensity interval training back in the 70s and there's records of athletes doing it in the like 1950s and 60s one of the main benefits of doing HIIT for the sort of general population is it provides like a really strong physiological stimulus in a short period of time so that's often the cited benefit for doing HIIT is that you can get more done in terms of your work output in a shorter period of time and a lot of research is showing that it produces like the physiological adaptations that you get from moderate intensity training such as like the growth and division of mitochondria which are the the powerhouse of our cells and it also improves the size and the function of the heart and also

the vascular function and it can do that in a short period of time compared to moderate intensity continuous training. So that's really one of the key benefits is that you can achieve physiological adaptations in a shorter period of time than you can with moderate intensity continuous training and often athletes it's necessary to do high intensity interval training because it replicates the patterns of certain sports so for example playing tennis or any intermittent sport like football or it's soccer in america rugby, where the workouts are high intensity, then you have a period of rest, and then you go again. So it's actually necessary if you're training for certain sports.

But in terms of a general level, it's a time-efficient training method. Some people enjoy it more, but the kind of research is a little bit mixed on that. And what about calorie expenditure? Because there's usually a lot of talk about how much better it is for, and then burning fat. And sometimes those are used synonymously. Sometimes it's separated. But what are your thoughts on its utility as a fat loss tool yeah that's probably one of the the biggest sort of marketing or selling points that you'll see people using about hit is that it's a brilliant way of creating a large energy

deficit and burning calories and torching body fat you know insert whatever slogan that you want to see on instagram but um in terms of per unit of time uh yeah you do burn more energy because you're working at a higher intensity but because the hit setting is typically shorter in total duration then it's not necessarily that you're actually burning more energy than you would if you were say going out for a 30 to 60 minute cycle or run, it's just that you can burn more energy in a short period of time. One of the reasons why people have said it's excellent for weight loss or fat loss is the so-called sort of afterburn effect.

And in physiology, it's known as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. It's a bit of a mouthful, so we call it EPOC for short. In physiology, it's known as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. It's a bit of a mouthful, so we call it EPOC for short. And what this means is that because the intensity is so high, your body doesn't go back to homeostasis or a resting state straight away after exercise. It takes longer because you've essentially disrupted a lot of physiological systems. So in the period after you do a high-intensity interval session, you actually burn more energy than you would if you'd done a moderate-intensity training session.

And that has been kind of the real hook of, this is why it's great for losing body fat. But this is one of the things I recently wrote about in the Advanced Personal Training book, is that when we look at the literature on HIIT as a tool for reducing body fat, it's actually no better than moderate intensity continuous training, which I know is disappointing to a lot of people because moderate intensity training is usually longer, so the energy expenditure is

equivalent so the benefit you get from that greater so-called afterburn is kind of washed out because the total duration of the session is shorter so it's not really a better way of burning body fat or losing body fat no exercise is actually in itself a great tool for losing body fat, but that's a discussion for another day. But HIIT is good for burning energy in a short period of time, but it's not sort of a panacea for body fat reduction. And what about people who are thinking, well, what if I did enough hit, though, to outburn the moderate intensity? So how much hit, to phrase that another way, how much hit do I need to do to burn now more energy than going for the 30 to 60 minute jog every day?

than going for the 30 to 60 minute jog every day that approach you can do that but it it does go back on one of the main benefits of hit which is time saving so if you do do an extended hit session and it's time equated to say you did half an hour of hit and you're doing long form high intensity interval training so like doing three minute intervals over half an hour with like three minute rest periods your total energy expenditure before and after is probably going to be greater than half an hour of moderate intensity training but then you've done the same sort of duration of exercise so yes you can do. But then there are other things that you need to consider as well. And one of them is appetite regulation. So, I mean, this is quite variable between individuals. Some people find that, and the research shows this as well, is that high intensity training kind of depresses their appetite and they don't have any desire to eat after training whereas other people feel quite ravenous and hungry so then they over compensate and they're taking more calories than they would have done had they not done the HIIT so they end up on a sort of like a back in energy balance

so yeah you can do a longer HIIT session but my philosophy on HIIT is to use it to improve your fitness or your health, depending on your goals, rather than just to burn energy. And what are your thoughts on the recovery implications of HIIT? Obviously, it's going to depend what you're doing, right? If you're sprinting on concrete, that's different than biking, but people will ask me this and they'll ask, well, yeah, I understand if I go out and sprint on concrete, I can feel everything hurting. But if I go in the pool or if I get on my roaming machine, or if I get on my bike, Or if I get on my bike, I don't feel beat up per se, but am I actually placing larger recovery demands on my body? Does it matter?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And this is where the technicalities of HIIT come into play. And there's been a lot written on this by probably two of the leading experts, Martinin uh boucher and paul larson who've um written a lot on high intensity interval training both sort of like uh in the mainstream press but also in the scientific literature so the way they go about designing a hip testing is is basically three stages the first one they look at is is what physiological systems you want to target. So there's the aerobic system, the glycolytic or anaerobic system, and the neuromuscular strain. So essentially, when you do HIIT, it places a stress on each of these systems. But the type of HIIT you do will elicit sort of higher stress on any one of those systems. So I'll give you an example.

They classify hit into six different types. So let's go from type one, which is like really aerobic. So it stresses your aerobic system and places the maximum demand on what we call the oxygen transport system. So this type of training would be something like you're doing one minute, the classic sort of like one minute work bouts around 90% of heart rate max, resting for a minute and then going again. So that puts a high stress on the oxidative system. I won't go through each of the six types because it gets quite technical,

but the opposite end of the six types because it gets quite technical um but the opposite end of the spectrum is type six which would be just basically purely a neuromuscular strain so something like an all-out sprint and then resting for like five six minutes and then sprinting again so it just places more strain on your neuromuscular system. So depending on the type of hit you do, it will put a different stress on one of the systems. So like the middle one, like a type four setting, as they would classify it, is it kind of puts a strain on everything. So it stresses your aerobic system, your anaerobic glycolytic system and neuromuscular system. So an example of this would be something like which is done in a

lot of sort of team sports by athletes which is like repeated sprints so you do a sprint you rest for like 15-20 seconds then you sprint again and then do a series of those say you do 10 reps and then you have a rep period and you go again and that type of repeat sprint training that really imposes a lot of stress on all of the systems so it takes longer to recover from so this is when like you have to get a bit more technical with things with athletes because you need to know what type of hit to do certain settings so that it doesn't impact on your other training and the same is true if you're not an athlete and if your priorities say, say, like building muscle, what you don't want to do is your conditioning session

is something like a session which has a really high neuromuscular stress, so fatiguing muscles, and then next day you're going to try and work those same muscles because they're going to be fatigued. So, yeah, you have to be quite careful in terms of programming high-intensity interval training so that it doesn't impact on other forms of exercise.

If you're just time-pressing, you only train twice a week, it doesn't really matter. But it's kind of like when you are training more frequently and you're doing different types of training, that's when you have to think a bit more carefully about the type of uh hit that you're doing and could you clarify the difference between the type four and the type six uh because i mean i'm asking for myself because they sounded pretty similar to me i just didn't get the difference there yeah it's rest basically so in a type four you're limiting your rest so the glycolytic system or your lactate response is really high these you're getting a long lot of anaerobic stress and metabolic disruption they're producing a lot of lactate in the muscle whereas if you're doing type six it's kind of how sprinters train so they do a really high intensive effort lactate is low there's almost no aerobic

strain there because then they rest so long in between but that that kind of second in the middle where you're doing hard efforts with short breath periods it kind of stresses a bit of everything and the other important factor to consider is the type uh the mode of exercise so if you're doing running and it's you've got like i think you mentioned the the surface like if you're running on concrete and you're doing turns or shuttles so that's going to place a high stress on your neuromuscular system whereas if you're doing extended workouts on a cycle because there's no sort of eccentric component you don't really get any muscle damage so that puts a lower neuromuscular strain on your system. So that type of cycling exercise is typically more

easy to recover from. Yeah, years ago, probably 10 plus years ago, I think it was in my mid-20s, I was just playing around with different types of HIIT and seeing how it impacted my recovery and it impacted my weightlifting. And so I'm in my early to mid twenties. I'm essentially invincible physiologically because I'm 24 or whatever, right. And doing all of the things that you're supposed to be doing to recover, blah, blah, blah. So running sprints, I'm trying to remember, I remember doing it. I remember where I used to go to do it, but I'm trying to remember the protocol. They were probably 40 to 60 yard sprints and resting. It's probably something closer to, I would say a type four-ish than a type six. So shorter, but not 30 second rest periods,

but probably not more than a minute or so. And then just running all out. And I think I got up to doing about 20 minutes of that. But I eventually stopped because I simply couldn't recover from that training adequately enough to continue squatting and deadlifting. I got to the point where my lower body was always sore, you know, to the touch. And that's when I said, okay, that's enough of that. I'll move on to something else because it's just too much. Yeah, and that's the way, if you're training for other things as well and maybe conditioning isn't your priority,

then you do have to be careful with the type of hit you do because, yeah, I've been in a similar situation. Back in my 20s, I could get away with that doing running-based hit, then I'd be fine for for lower body work and then playing football as well but um as you age obviously your recovery capacity um is not as good as what it used to be so if you throw into the mix doing something which is a high neuromuscular stress for your conditioning and then you're doing that again when you're

weight training then yeah it's going to take away. So yeah, program design. And that for me, by the way, was running on concrete. I also then did it on grass. I did it on sand at the beach. I did it on incline grass and sand, and those were better, but still harder on my recovery than biking or swimming or rowing yeah so those are the two i would choose if

if recovery is the priority you don't want to detract from the other training is cycling and swimming based uh interval training um i mean some people have gone the cross trainer but i'd find personally i just i can't get to a high enough intensity um so because it's completely unloaded and then i just find it a bit awkward you know when you increase the resistance and that slows you down so much that you don't really get that that aerobic cardiovascular stress um it's quite difficult to get there so i find i can get there with cycling and um not so much swimming so not very good at swimming but definitely with rowing as well they have a lower neuromuscular stress but really sort of high aerobic stress uh so you get that stimulus from those types of training what are your thoughts on heart rate and how that relates to how hard

you're working again something that people ask me can i watch my heart rate and determine if i'm doing it correctly based on my heart rate yeah um it does depend on the type of uh high intensity interval training you're doing so i mentioned there that um you know there are all these different sort of like types which cause different strain on systems um the way i classify things for uh just kind of the general problem people are using hips or just general conditioning is there are three types of HIIT protocol. So you can do sprint intervals, which is all-out work, lasting anything from 10 to 30 seconds, and you have long recovery periods. you have long recovery periods and that's kind of where the classic sort of hit research stems from is that type of uh training where they get people to do wingate test which is 30 seconds all out cycling four minutes rest and then they go again and they do that four or five times it sounds like

pretty easy but if you've ever done a wing gate test it's absolutely brutal so uh it's tough it's not easy yeah yeah i mean i've seen plenty plenty of people throw up after one wing gate test let alone four or five yeah i was gonna say i mean i can remember feeling like i simply am gonna suffocate because i can't breathe. I can't get enough oxygen in my body, no matter how hard I'm breathing. Yeah, it's brutal. And a lot of the benefits probably came from those early studies, just because it really is, in every sense of the word, high intensity. So that's sprint interval training.

And the way I classify other methods is you've got long intervals and short intervals. So long intervals are periods of two to four minutes. And these are performed at an intensity close to or at your VO2 max intensity. So most people don't have access to a gas analyzer. So they don't know what their oxygen uptake is but what you can use is is heart rate as a proxy for that so you find out your maximum heart rate and i'd recommend finding that out by doing maximal exercise rather than using a prediction equation so a simple way of doing this is get on the treadmill again a relatively comfortable speed

and then just keep increasing the gradient until you can't carry on you should last like anything from 8 to 12 minutes and take your maximum heart rate from that so then once you've got your maximum heart rate when you're doing long interval training the goal should be that your heart rate is above 85% of your maximum heart rate. So you can use heart rate when you're doing long interval training. The final method that I would classify is short intervals. So this would be kind of like what you might see people do on personal trainers do with clients where they do like one minute on one minute off the intensity is slightly higher than for long intervals so we're looking at um above an intensity that would get you to vo2 max the problem with using heart rate on short intervals is because the work belt

is shorter it's 60 seconds or even less then initially you won't get that heart rate response in terms of you won't see it straight away so there's a bit of a lag so if you're doing short intervals or anything uh 60 seconds or below i would recommend using um your perceived exertion so rpe and also speed or power if you're on a cycle as well sprint interval is really easy to regulate because you just go all out 100 percent like nothing left and that's right from the start no pacing but um heart rate really is is useful for long intervals but not so much for doing short intervals or sprint interval training yeah that's a good point because um many people make the mistake with the longer intervals of doing them starting with the same intensity as the shorter intervals and of course

they burn themselves out because you're not going to be able to do those longer intervals again and again at a hundred percent all out nothing in the Yeah, I mean, that's probably the biggest misconception about HIIT is that everything is done all out 100%. If you're doing the long interval session, these are two to four minute work bouts. And they're often called VOT max intervals because they've been shown in studies to be really effective for improving your VOT max, your marker of aerobic fitness. But they have to be done at the right intensity, and that's not all out. So if you are programmed to do, say, five work bouts of four minutes, for example, and on the fifth one you can't maintain the intensity, then you've gone too hard at the start.

And on the fifth one, you can't maintain the intensity, then you've gone too hard at the start. You should be able to complete all of your planned work bouts at the right intensity. And if you're ending a workout shortly, you've probably overcooked it a little bit and you've done too much. Short intervals are a little bit more difficult to regulate because they're shorter as the name suggests so these um you kind of have to go off a lot of feel using your perceived exertion but again they're not sprint interval training and people make the mistake of trying to do 60 seconds all out if you do that for your first work bout then that's pretty much the session over you're not going to be able to recover for the subsequent work bouts, so your intensity will drop off. So harder isn't always better.

It's necessary in sprint and full training, but in short and long in fulls, you need to regulate your intensity. Yeah, I mean, just speaking to, again, the hit that I mentioned earlier, I want to say it was about 60 yards, a bit longer probably than it should have been actually. But I was in pretty good cardiovascular shape. I mean, I've always played sports. I played a lot of hockey growing up. So I've always had good cardio. But when I was running as hard as I could run, I mean, 60 to 70 yards was exhausting. And that didn't last that long, but it was exhausting, especially after i had

done it a couple of times yeah and that's the other thing is you kind of have to uh trust yourself at the start of the session because particularly with um long interval training you might feel that the first two work periods are kind of a bit too easy but you've got to bear in mind that your fatigue will accumulate so even though you're having those rest periods of either complete rest or active recovery between your work bouts you're still going to take fatigue into the next um rep so over the course of the session you'll see that your your heart rate actually drifts upwards um and you'll notice that if you if you use a heart rate monitor and do

short intervals at the start, the heart rate response, it'll be relatively low. But by the time you get to, say, your 10th repetition of, say, if you're doing a minute protocol, minute on, minute off, it might be around like 90 or close to max heart rate because you've got that cardiovascular drift. People make a similar mistake. I mean, I made this mistake myself in my weightlifting many years ago where I would push too close to muscular failure too often, period. Like if I was doing four sets of a bench press, that first set is going to be zero to one good reps left. I'm going to push it right up to the point of failure. I'm going to, I'm going to push it right up to the point of failure. And then I still have three more sets to go. And now I train quite

differently. That first set, I like to, I like to feel like I have two or three good reps left. That seems to be a sweet spot with, with an exercise like a bench press or a squat or a deadlift. If it's a biceps curl, I'm not too concerned about it. I'll push a little bit close to failure on every set. But with the bigger exercises that are more systemically fatiguing and that require more recovery and that I wouldn't say are dangerous, but the risk of injury is higher if you mess something up. I like to pace myself, I guess you'd say a little bit better in my work. And so maybe by set four, I have one or two good reps left. I started with two to three. By set four on that bench press, I feel like I get one, maybe two more.

That seems to be a sweet spot for me. And I know there's research to back that up as well for making progress and not getting hurt and also minimizing repetitive stress injuries, which people don't necessarily think of as getting hurt. But the risk of that goes up too, right? If you just push too close to failure, you know, too hard, too often. Yeah, I completely agree.

It's something that um yeah when i was you know starting my training career is that um it seemed like counterintuitive not to go maximum or or reach failure on on uh every step but then it's similar with like high intense interval training and resistance training the same in that respect is that you've got to remember that you're um you're building up to the next step and then the next step after that and you want to maintain the quality so if you overcook the first step so like in resistance training if you've got like no reps in reserve then you're probably going to miss reps on the second third and fourth step and it's the same in interval training is that you've you've got to plan for the for the whole session and not just the first one and in general that

the harder you go whether that's resistance training or interval training then that's going to have implications on your recovery so if you if you do it if you plan in four or five training sessions a week then once you get to what you a certain level, you just can't train like that because one workout impedes on the next. This is a slightly different subject. really deconditioned or sedentary um it's not necessarily in my opinion at least that the best option to go through straight away because you need to learn what how to regulate intensity so if you go and i've seen this when i when i was personal training many years ago is that i would try it with clients that were maybe not that well conditioned. And the first two reps they were doing, like a minute on, a minute off, would cause so much fatigue that the minute rep period wasn't enough.

So their intensity over the course of that, those 10 workouts would actually drop off. You'd end up almost kind of like losing the benefit, which is you have the rep period being you can replicate the hard effort but if your hard effort is way too hard then you end up just kind of doing a a flat intensity definitely you're not getting those peaks and troughs so you have that regulation of uh intensity and i think that's the same for resistance training as well, is learning sort of what failure is. So I'd always recommend that, you know,

when it's safe on certain exercises, that you periodically train to failure, so you've got no reps left in reserve, so that you can sort of self-calibrate and you know what that's like. Because, you know, sometimes it's guesswork, but if you don't go to failure that often what you think is failure could be quite far off it and it's the same

you know if you particularly have been training for a while and haven't gone to fail yeah that's something i've spoken about recently i referred to it as intensity discipline i don't think that's that's just how what i call it because I think it makes sense. But that's something that I have consciously gotten better at in my training because some time ago, I realized that, yeah, I was saying that was a three RAR, reps in reserve, people listening. But if I pushed it, it was more like a five. And so I realized that I was making that mistake in a lot of my training that I thought I was training harder than I was. And so what I do, and this is built into my program,

is every four months at the end of a four-month training block, I do some AMRAP sets. So as many reps as possible. And I do that on my bench, my overhead press, my squat, my deadlift. And on my isolation exercises, I'm a little bit more just kind of go by feel, take sets to failure now and then. I'm not too concerned about being specific because, again, even the peripheral fatigue, again, like a biceps curl or a side raise, not concerned about those things. My perception of effort was more accurate when I was training a small muscle group. And that's probably the case with a lot of people. But when it was with the compound exercises, especially those whole body exercises, like any type of squat,

any type of deadlift, even an overhead press, um, to some degree, my, my perception of effort was off. And so now, uh, every four months I, I load the bar fairly heavy, something around 90% of one rep max 95% that was calculated a couple of months prior though. So it's, it's something that in my normal day-to-day training, it's like a four to six rep probably weight, and then push it, set one as close to just right up to that point of failure. I'm comfortable on my squat going to a zero or maybe a one. I actually am comfortable with that. A zero to maybe, but if it's a one, it's going to be a grinder that I almost miss,

like pushing right up to that point. On my deadlift, I actually just don't do that. I back it off with one to two. So that final rep in that set of a deadlift is very hard, but it's not a grinder. I'm not starting to shake, you know, whole body. I don't, I don't push it to that because I don't think it's necessary. Um, and then a bench press a zero to one I'm comfortable with. I have a spotter, not a big deal, maintain good form and an overhead press also I'm okay with because I have the hooks right in front of me. So, you know, if I get to here and I'm,

also I'm okay with because I have the hooks right in front of me. So, you know, if I get to here and I'm, that's about it, I can just put it back. And I've found that that has helped a lot in my training. It's helped me again, just maintain that understanding of what failure actually feels like. And then it's helped with tracking my reps and reserve in all of my other training too. And I've found that I've gotten more accurate over time because I track all my training. It's all in Google sheets. So I can go back years ago and look at what I was doing. So, so I just did this actually last week. And so, for example, on my deadlifts, I put 375 on the bar and I got seven with what I felt was like one or two good reps left. And if I look back in my training, I had, I think the week before was, it was 365 for four and I put like maybe three good reps left. So not perfect. But

I've also noticed, and I don't want to go off on too many tangents, but I've just, it's just something that's interesting that maybe people listening will find interesting that I tend to perform better in those amrap workouts than in any of my other workouts it must be a psychological thing i'm a little bit excited to do it i feel like it's you know i grew up playing sports i always liked that feeling of big game you know the more on the line the more fun yeah because you're putting a concerted effort in on that one set. And I think that's why the, I don't know, you might have done the 5-3-1 at some point program, the Jim Wendland one.

I think that's why that worked pretty well because it's very low volume, but it gives you that sort of like that concentrated step to like controlled failure. So yeah, you kind of really push it on that one and that's where i think as well not training to fail all the time um is a good idea because then like you just said like when you do then you can really sort of know what going all out is approach i basically use um particularly if i was like squatting is just look at my velocity i don't

measure it. You could get really technical and do that. But if I'm coming out of the bottom of the squat and it's really slow, I know that I've probably got one, maybe two max reps in reserve. So I think speed is a good sort of proxy for failure. I use that if I am turning it on to failure. Is this going, like, is the intent there? If it's maximal intent and you're grinding the weight up,

then you're probably pretty close to failure. Hey there, if you are hearing this, you are still listening, which is awesome. Thank you. And if you are enjoying this podcast, or if you just like my podcast in general, and you are getting at least something out of it, would you mind sharing it with a friend or a loved one or a not so loved one even who might want to learn something new? Word of mouth helps really bigly in growing the show. So if you think of someone who might like this episode or another one, please do tell them about it.

thoughts um about everyday people people who are are not they don't have to perform athletically for any particular reason uh and again this is something people will ask me are the health benefits let's say somebody i'm asking you i'm somebody i'm saying look i i do some cardio every day and i understand the health benefits i don't particularly like hit but is it worth including in my regimen are there really enough additional benefits or is my 30 minutes of moderate intensity daily cardio enough i mean it sounds like a bit of a cop-out but any time that someone would say to me i don't really like doing that form of exercise um then i wouldn't necessarily say it has to be included so if if um you're not training for a particular like uh fitness target so you're not an athlete you're preparing for a race or something uh or conditioning for a sport and you absolutely

don't enjoy it then i would do another form of of conditioning so you could do traditional moderate intensity continuous training so that would be you know going out for a 30 minute bike or run or maybe longer um you can do fartlek training which is similar but you just kind of do random periods where you do higher intensity lower intensity so you mix up intensity um not necessarily in a structured way like HIIT so I wouldn't say that it's um it has to be included I think because it becomes so prevalent in the fitness industry you see a lot of these like HIIT workouts on social media I do think people think that it's it's necessary that they have to do it but just because um you know a lot of people are doing it and the research shows that you can get similar

benefits in a shorter period of time it doesn't mean say it's a better form of training um it's necessary like say if you're an athlete but um yeah for general population if you're really not into high intensity interval training then uh and you're doing other forms of aerobic training um i i wouldn't say you have to do it at all and and keep in mind people that um one of the reasons you see it all over social media is it makes for better social media posts than moderate intensity. Just hopping on this bike back here and spinning away for 30 minutes on a phone call, which is literally what I do. Either I read on my phone or I make a phone call

that I need to make for work or a personal phone call. And I just tell if it's even a work call, I'm like, hey, I'm on a bike, so I'm gonna be breathing a little bit, but I can still talk. That doesn't make for a good instagram reel no exactly yeah yeah sitting on a bike for half an hour doing a yeah conference call is not as exciting yeah or reading on my little kindle app yeah wouldn't make for the most interesting reel but let's let's time lapse that and post it as a reel yeah yeah it wouldn't be uh quite as uh interesting as you know these blood and guts uh

films that you see on instagram but i think the other thing is as well is um once a lot of the research does show you know clear benefits to to hit training in terms of it being more time efficient not many people actually go and delve into the studies i remember doing a talk at a personal training conference a few years ago and um you know everyone when i asked them about it everyone was saying sabata and uh i asked them if you know the audience if they'd ever sort of know where it came from and it's one study that was done over, I think, a Japanese group. And when you look at the study, I think they only had like seven or eight participants.

So from a research perspective, not great because, you know, the smaller the sample size, the more difficult it is to detect a meaningful change. I won't go into the reasons, but a lot of the HIT studies have used quite small samples. So this can maybe lead to an over-exaggeration of the benefits. And what happens is the study, they have a press release with it. And I've come across this myself when you know journalists might ask you to comment on something and obviously they want a headline which is not

the the research title of the study but something snappy like uh you know double your hit doubles your time to exhaustion in less than two weeks or something like that yeah or or what was it like 10 minutes of hit burns more fat than 60 minutes of inclined walking i remember seeing one along those lines 60 seconds yeah has the same benefits as 45 minutes i think that was a very popular one that did the rounds and that that was based off a sprint interval training study which um yeah i mean it did show benefits, but, you know, there are limitations to all of these research. Yeah, it's when marketers get their hands on it, right, and then run amok with it.

They start playing with things, and, yeah, and it might not even be accurate what they're saying, but. Yeah, and then these things become sort of like ingrained in folklore like a little bit like the the sort of thing i mentioned earlier about the the afterburn effect it's it's really in some circles it's not even questioned whether that's true or not it's just kind of become well it's really good for it uh like raises your metabolism and you burn loads of calories after exercise but when you actually look into sort of the research on it it's um it's not quite as promising as a lot of um sort of programs would have you believe and so that it is a beneficial form of exercise in terms

of being time efficient but it doesn't mean that it's you know better than other forms of exercise and uh i think yeah we just need to be careful about um yeah the other issue is some of these studies which showed these like really massive improvements in things like vot max and muscle metabolism measures they um they were relatively short studies um and one of the problems in sports sciences a lot of studies aren't replicated because they're more difficult to get published you end up with like uh one study being done such as like tabata i mean that's that's not just in sports science i mean i'm sure you know this but for people listening that's it yeah yeah sure it's a problem across the sciences yeah because we get

things like um you know publication bias where journals want studies which show new novel interesting findings um and if you just kind of have replicated another study um and reported that it did the same thing it's probably less likely to get published. So some of the hit research, yeah, it's really promising. And then there's the problem of trying to submit trials that showed no results, right? Like who wants to do that? Exactly. The no result, that is a problem as well yeah is that because i um lecturing sometimes students when they when they've done their project they'll they'll say things like

unfortunately we didn't find anything significant and i always think that's interesting you're saying that it's unfortunate because you know that's what it's not unfortunate it's the result of your your study it's uh you know it's still an important result otherwise this is why we end up you know going down um sort of like a following path which where we just take things as being true because they're not tested again so what i'm not saying that the hit research isn't promising or it it certainly is but i just think maybe some of the the claims that you might see in in articles particularly in the like in the media when they serialize this uh study might be a little bit over exaggerated i mean i've run into that uh with conversion rate optimization

in in e-commerce with with legion my sports nutrition company and it's it's similar in that you if you're going to do it right, you need to do it with a scientific method, so to speak. So you have to create a hypothesis of, okay, if we do this by doing this, it will produce this result because of a reason. And then you take that hypothesis and go about testing it in different ways.

And a lot of conversion rate optimization is not done that way. It's very tactical. It's just trying to find wins. It's just looking at what other people are doing and going, oh, that's clever. Let's try that and see what happens. But you can get wins that way, but you don't get learnings. You don't get a deeper understanding of the psychology of the prospects and of the customers. And so, yes, of course, ultimately, you want to get to wins.

But often to get to wins, to get to deep wins, big wins, you have to go through losses that teach you. So you have this hypothesis, you generated this test and it lost. Well, that can be very useful, actually, because you've learned something now. And if you understand what you've learned, so, OK, why did this lose? New hypothesis. OK, maybe it's these reasons. Let's try that now. OK, that lost.

It wasn't that. OK, let's try again. Maybe it was this. Maybe this was the element that needs to be emphasized, de-emphasized, changed, removed, added, whatever. Test that. You get a win. Okay, now you've learned further. And then you go, can we do this even more now? Okay, we've learned something here. How can we embed this into this sales page or homepage or whatever? Can we embed this into this sales page or homepage or whatever? And, you know, I've gone through that process. And then in the end, you can get to where you've increased conversion rates by a large percentage. But it wasn't as linear as, you know, you might have hoped.

A bit more messy and not a straight line. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep. Yeah, not a straight line, yeah. Exactly. Yep, yep. Where it might have been, again, a lot of just losses to finally get to one or two wins that unlocked something and that showed you what you were missing. And then after that, you get the big wins. So anyway, I find that kind of work interesting.

Yeah, I often serialize little studies on Instagram. And it's interesting that you say that. I don't have any great knowledge in analytics or things, but I often find that posts or studies which are a little bit more clear-cut, they get more favorable responses. Because I suppose it's human nature to want to have that kind of binary. Oh, okay, that's good. And then ones where they're inconclusive, you'll often get comments like, well, what does this mean?

Is it good? Is it bad? And that's where sort of the nuance comes in of like communicating science, I suppose. It's, you know, some people just want their one answer, but in reality, there isn't that answer. Yeah, I find also that people often respond better to, if we're talking about studies or even advice, do this. Here's a study that shows if you do this,

something good will happen versus the other side of the coin, which is don't do this. This type of DNA-based diet isn't going to help you lose fat faster. Here's some research. Let me explain it. There are exceptions in both of those, of course, but I find that often it's the simple, just here's a simple tip, do this and you're going to feel fuller. Go for a walk after you eat a meal, let your body turn off your appetite. People really like that. But if it's something to not do, then it tends to get less engagement. Yeah, and I can sympathize with that as well.

Because this is my field, exercise and sports science. So I'm quite comfortable with nuance and things changing all the time. But then if I put myself in the position of someone that maybe not that interested in it and they just want the answer, I could see why it would be frustrating when, you know, I wouldn't necessarily give a straight answer. It's a bit like if, you know, I don't know a lot about financial investments and if I was speaking to,

to an expert in that, and they said, oh, you could invest in this, but then your stocks might be better in this. I'd just be like, that's why I'm hiring you. What should I do? So I do kind of understand that, that one. Or if they start off and they tell you, well, let me tell you a hundred things to not do.

Then we'll get to what to do. You're like, why don't we just skip that and just get right to what I'm supposed to do yeah yeah what should i put my money yeah exactly and it's the same with um yeah i suppose the fitness advice for a lot of people they they just kind of it's not really their passion they don't maybe want it to consume too much of their time and they they just want the is it good or is it bad and um yeah less nuance, yeah, which I understand as well. And it's something that I've always tried to keep in mind from the beginning is to serve the interests of the people I'm speaking to, not my own interests, not maybe even someone like you, not your interests per se. But again, the people I'm trying to help are understandably people who they live busy lives. They have a few hours a week to give to this stuff.

They understand that there's a lot of nonsense. They just want to have something that works well for them, that's sustainable, that they enjoy. And if they can get to that, they're going to be very happy. And that might be all they ever want. They might not need to know anything else. happy and that might be all they ever want they might not need to know anything else you know i think that's the thing that's probably why a lot of charlatans in the fitness industry do really well because they offer that clarity that a lot of people are seeking so when it you see it all the time with things like nutrition where you've got like oh just do carnivore and it's

gonna you know just basically eat meat and cut everything else out. It's a really simple directive. And people go, okay, I'll just follow that. It's easy. Rather than making a more nuanced change to their diet and going into sort of in a bit more depth, it's easy to follow that sort of binary advice. Yeah. And in the case of that, also it has the the contrarian

appeal because it seems i mean it's the opposite of what so many other people are saying so many other people even mom they lied to you type thing yeah yeah yeah yeah and even mom told you to eat your vegetables and what does she know yeah and yeah i've seen that quite a few times going back to hit it was it's like um the myth of moderate intensity training and you should be doing hit because you know this is traditional i i was i was guilty of that uh probably right about nine or ten years ago and i at the time my understanding of the literature on it was that it seemed more promising than it turned out to be in terms of there was the afterburn think I ever said that's all you should do, but I was a bigger advocate of HIIT than I am now. And my position is very much like yours.

But there was a time when I myself also was doing it regularly. That was my normal cardio, was mostly HIIT. I did shorter sessions. I did 20-minute sessions, but I did several per week. And that's all I did for cardio. And that's where I see the real utility of it. You know, if you are working with someone and they are really time pressed, time limited, then almost it becomes the default because you haven't got that time to do, uh, accumulate the moderate intensity training. Um, so you have to increase

intensity and a good way of doing that is high-intensity interval training. So, yeah, I think that in some ways it kind of becomes necessary if someone's really time-pressed. And I think that's where a lot of the research is now moving out of the laboratory and looking at things like exercise snacking, as it's known, so doing small blocks of high intensity physical activity, not necessarily exercise. So a couple of studies have just looked at walking up three or four flights of stairs and then repeating that intermittently throughout the day.

So similar to the concept of like having a small meal, like a snack, snacking with exercise as opposed to having a planned structured session and that seems to be quite promising in terms of the benefits for that but again it does depend on your starting level if you if you're um you know couch potato that entry not really haven't done any exercise for a long period then that sort of exercise approach is probably going to get you some some benefits because you've gone from doing nothing to something if you're well trained you know doing you know running up um a flight of stairs three or four times a day is not going to

have the training load to give you any sort of additional improvements in your fitness so it's there's different different techniques really context you know, how much time you've got, what's your training status, and also, you know, what do you enjoy doing. And these things all should be considered before you prescribe someone exercise. That's why I'm not a big fan of, you know, when people just put a HIIT session on and say, follow this, because, you know, there's put a hit session on and say follow this because you know it's there's no individualization there at all and for people who are intrigued by this exercise snacking concept can you just talk a little bit more about how that might look and what the

potential benefits would be let's say for somebody who is doing a few hours of strength training every week, maybe they're doing some aerobic exercise as well. I mean, I could think of maybe even someone like me, I might do a little bit more than the average person, but I'm not doing any high intensity stuff right now. There's not a lot of studies on it, but most of it is targeted at people that are not meeting the physical activity guidelines. So 150 minutes of exercise or physical activity a week. So in those individuals, basically, instead of saying do five hours or 30 minutes walking or whatever, split up the periods of your day. And it might fall to the advantage of it as i see it kind of fits organically within your day so for example if you're walking or you're commuting to work and you're on the train you could do a really brisk walk to the station and then if there's some instead of taking an escalator or lift you could get up the flight of stairs as quickly as

possible and that would be considered an exercise snack so you've done a small block of exercise and then got on with your day it's not what we would call like a traditional exercise session where we're planning it and going in the gym etc so repeating that sort of intermittent but high intensity blocks of physical activity has been shown in some studies to have some benefits on things like vo2 max and insulin sensitivity um but in terms of people that are trained i'm not sure that the the training stimulus there is great enough to give you any benefit more benefits um than say doing a structured high intensity session it's not really doing any harm i think it's quite a

good concept if you're not able to do a training session for whatever reason you can maybe over the course of the day look to try and uh include some form bouts of high intensity exercise just over the course of your day so for example for for me if i if i'm i often work out of a coffee shop if i'm a bit time pressed and i can't get to the gym i'll just cycle home as hard as i can and it's like 15 minutes um and that that's like it's not a formal sort of planned gym session, but I've done something. I've got my heart rate up for a small period of time. And that's, I think, where the research is probably going to go is looking at how we can factor in or include exercise or physical activity in people's daily routines, as opposed to exercise prescription as it's been previously done, you know know like in a gym setting or um you know

prescribed in sort of sets reps that type of thing and that can be useful for people who are getting in the gym and doing strength training but are not making time to do any sort of cardiovascular aerobic uh or even high you know high intensity anaerobic or glycolytic as you'd mentioned doing any of that i could see some of those people thinking, all right, I mean, I don't have the time or don't want to make the time to get on the bike for 30 minutes and do that. But I do, I have my gym sessions and I'm already thinking with how I, you know, my daily routine, I can work in a couple of these high intensity kind of snacks, so to speak. And if I do enough of those, do a few a day, let's say it's

even seven days per week over time, you know, I'm reaping maybe not most, but I'm reaping a fair amount of the benefits that would come with a more structured routine, right? Yeah, exactly. If you've got very little aerobic stimulus to start with and you're basically just doing resistance training then you're more likely to get a benefit from that type of approach where you kind of structure in some high intensity workouts just throughout the day whereas if you are already doing aerobic conditioning um it's not going to give you much else and in fact it you know it could take away if you're kind a couple of high-intensity blocks, maybe like in London, if you were on the underground,

some stations, it's a really long climb to get to the platform. So if you were to do that, and I've done it a couple of times myself, you get to street level, you're absolutely exhausted. If you're on the way to the gym, that's probably not a good idea. But just for the general population to to kind of get some exercise and particularly higher intensity exercising in your day i think that's important um the recommendation actually changed government recommendations it used to be physical activity for it to count as physical activity had to be

in blocks of 10 minutes or more but now because basically they they recognize that you know a lot of people weren't able to or willing to do that they've just let anything count you know like just be as active as possible so not sedentary um minimize being sedentary throughout the day, and you're likely to get some benefits. Yeah, I talked about shared advice, particularly with bodyweight training, that if they're just getting started with resistance training, and if they're not comfortable getting into a gym, or it just doesn't work for them getting into a gym, you could take a 30-minute body weight routine and break it up into a few

five or 10 minute little mini workouts that you do and just, just get it done. However you get it done throughout the day and you're, you're on your way. It works. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like I'm almost envious of some people that are going from,

from, you know, I'm almost envious of some people that are going from that position because you get so much like your rewards from doing such a small amount of activity. The emotional payoff is so much larger. It's funny you say that, actually, because it's a little bit counterintuitive because you might look at somebody who's very fit, then look at somebody who's just getting started and think that the very fit person generally is a lot more emotionally satisfied with their training and the whole process. Probably not, because they're probably not making much progress to speak of anymore. If any, yeah, because it's been maintained and trying to stop regression. Yeah, and trying to stop regression. Yeah, whereas that person who's new, who is not fit at all, they might not be emotionally satisfied with their level of fitness, maybe what they see in the mirror.

But then to your point, when they get going, and they start seeing these rapid changes, it's very motivating. And it makes it fun. And then you see that one day you are going to be that very fit person and then you realize what you don't realize is then it can be harder to stay motivated as the very fit person than it than it did in the beginning but you know the phases yeah particularly as you get older and your gains start your progress is slowed down but yeah newbies and people that are on trend i would say that you're in a great position because whatever you do extra now you're going to get good returns on that and um i think

that's something that we're maybe going to hit straight away it's a little bit of a like a flamethrower approach if you've got a client that's been inactive for four or five years, maybe longer, you know, there's really no need to get them doing sprint interval training. In some cases, or most cases, it's probably a bad idea. If you get them to build a base of, you know, maybe starting with that exercise snacking approach and then building from that and doing more sort of a planned or structured exercise and

you know go go from there there's really it's a bit like um in resistance training you know you wouldn't necessarily um with someone that's new like you just said you could get really good improvements just with body weight type exercises there's really no need to be doing like the big three and hitting all isolation exercises to start with uh yeah start basic and then build up yeah that's a mistake many trainers make i mean i see it in the gym i go to where they take people who are new and they run them through unnecessarily difficult workouts and then what happens of course is these people get really sore to the point where uh it actually makes living life harder and then it makes them less likely to continue understandably so when they can barely even walk around the next day i get it where they're like if this what it's if

this is what it takes i might not have what it takes yeah i've made that mistake as a personal trainer and and it's strange because in some cases people judge sort of the efficacy of your training session on that fatigue so some people actually seek it and if they don't feel like really fatigue the next day it's almost like you know what am i paying you for but then that's where the education part comes into to training someone is actually look but we can you can then exercise again whereas you know if i get you doing you know four or five sets of squats and rdls you know yeah you're going to be really sore for the next few days and you're not going to be able to train

again so that's where um yeah some people sort of chase muscle soreness as like a marker of a good training session um and in some ways there is a bit of pressure on you as a trainer you know if you're doing something that's quite basic and then there's another trainer in the gym and they've got you know a nice clever circuit worked out and you know they're doing boxing and then they're on trx and then they're doing some plyos so your session might seem a bit rudimentary. And so I can kind of see why the temptation is there to build these sort of quite complicated sessions, but then they're ultimately not unnecessary for people, for most people anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. A separate discussion. But as you said, you have to work with the person you have in front of you and take into account what do they like to do? What are their goals? And in some cases, doing the circuit might make more sense. I mean, if the person says, I understand the benefits of working with barbells and dumbbells, and I'll do a little bit of that but i just like this circuit training i have fun doing it okay that's a strong argument to do it right sure i mean that's what arguably crossfit has taken off that so well is that that sort of that group exercise effect and you know that having that small blocks of going as hard as possible that's really appealing to a lot of people and so i can yeah it's i would never kind of say i don't do that you know if someone's getting improvements

and they're enjoying that type of training that's fine it's just when maybe they're not conditioned enough to do it that's when you get into problems yeah or poor programming in the case of crossfit if you have the person running the show if they don't know what they're doing they can hurt people yeah yeah i mean yeah there's the injury rates for um for crossfit there's they're quite high when you when you look at some of the literature on it and that probably stems from that you know being overzealous at the start with with um with people that just can't handle that type of training load and they're doing it under fatigue. When you have people coming off the street and being told to run sprints and then do AMRAPs on a deadlift,

that's a problem. Yeah, I mean, if you're almost right, how would you injure this person? Yeah, how quickly? How quickly can we get them out? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that would be the approach to take. But anyways, we're rambling around. That's all I had for you on HIT. And that was great. It was a lot of great information. I really appreciate, again, you taking the time. And why don't we wrap up here and let people know about your work, the book that you published and allowed me to contribute a little bit to as well. And anything else that if you're active on social media, I think, yeah,

I think I've seen you on social media. I think I follow you actually. So if you want to let people know about social media or anything else that you want them to know if they liked this discussion. meter any anything else that you want them to know if they liked this discussion cool thanks um yes my main um role is that um i'm a sport and exercise science lecturer and sports scientist over in the uk at oxford brooks um most of my uh content is on it's quite a basic website but if i post anything um like i organized some webinars which are publicly accessible. So my website is exerciseandsportscience.com. So as you mentioned, I published a couple of books. They're textbooks and they're designed for personal trainers.

The latest one is Advanced Personal Training Science to Practice, which you kindly contributed to on the training for fat loss chapter so many thanks for that um so that book is the it's got a whole chapter actually dedicated to a lot of what we've talked about today um high intensity and sore training resistance training um and that's available on amazon and i will warn people, it is quite, um, well, it's, it's a very science based book. So, um, it's not necessarily a light read, but, um, yeah, that's available. But I would say for people who enjoyed this discussion, uh, I would recommend that book. I would say that it's written for maybe scientifically literate people, but it's not as difficult

to understand as a layman as trying to dig into research and sort out all the details. Yeah, and I think that's one reason why the second edition, I kind of bear that in mind and included a lot more sort of summary at the end of every section and a summarization table of the key take-home points. And that's had a lot of good feedback in that, because there's quite a lot of information in there. And that just sort of synthesizes it and gives you some take-home points. And what I do on Instagram is basically a lot of the content from the book um is serialized

in my uh posts on instagram so really like quick snapshots and what i do is keep it to one page or slide if you like and then if people are interested i write more about it in the comments and i found that that's worked pretty well is that you know, for people that just want the basic information, just read the slides. If they want a little bit more depth than some people do, they message me a lot of questions. Then it's in the comments. So I'm on Instagram. I'm also on Twitter, but probably a bit less active on that. I use that more of a resource to keep up with research and try and stay out of arguments as best I can. Yeah, arguing with random people on the internet is one of the most unproductive things we can do with our time.

So I'm with you there. It is, yeah, yeah, completely. And that's kind of why I got a favor in instagram a little bit more i find myself uh it's it's harder to go down those uh sort of rabbit holes whereas twitter it's kind of built for that isn't it you know you you make a comment and then suddenly you're like oh i've been discussing this for an hour and uh yeah just wasted an hour i'll never get back yeah yeah but I know I'm going to win at some point

I'm going to change their mind yeah of course we never did yeah exactly or there's going to be an epic dunk and I'm going to dunk on them so hard no that doesn't happen either yeah so I am on

both those um instagram and twitter and uh yeah um i'd say like if if people are interested anything i've mentioned then it might be interesting some of the webinars like again you kindly did one for for my students on being an entrepreneur in the fitness industry um but i do a variety of topics so the next one is actually uh on resistance training for endurance athletes. And I've had guests like Mike Israetel and Shana Housen and a lot, quite varied, like some people in academia, some people practitioners. They're originally for like sports science students,

but then I started getting requests from people in just the general public to attend. So yeah, I've opened them out as well. Awesome. Well, yeah, all of the links will be in the show notes so people can find everything there. And thanks again for taking the time to do this. And I look forward to the next one. I'm sure we can come up with another topic to talk about. Nice one. Thanks very much for having me on, Mike. I enjoyed the discussion. Thanks very much. 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 or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com, muscleforlife.com,

and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.