WHOOP Podcast - Strength, Conditioning, and Rest: How Strength Training Can Help You Get Stronger, Faster, and Healthier

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Kristen Holmes, WHOOP VP of Performance, is joined on this week's podcast by Cedric Unholz, WHOOP Senior Performance Scientist and Strength & Conditioning Coach for Olympic Windsurfers, and Chris Chapman, WHOOP Sr. Sports Scientist and Lead Strength & Conditioning Coach for Freestyle Ski Canada’s Slopestyle and Big Air National Team to share the physiological benefits of a strength training regimen. They discuss the benefits of a strength training program (6:45), the difference between traditional strength training and functional training (8:50), where most people go wrong when strength training (14:58), difference in training protocol between men and women (23:09), how to plan for recovery after a hard training session (24:23), what the interference effect is, and how it can influence how and what you train (33:05), how to evaluate your one-rep max (37:27), and the importance of building rest into your training (38:40). Find the research mentioned in this episode here.Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with the best of the best, top athletes, researchers, scientists, and more. Learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak. And what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop. And we are on a mission to unlock human performance. This week, we're talking all about strength training

and how it not only benefits your performance, but plays a key role in your overall health. Kristen Holmes, our VP of performance, sits down with Cedric Unholes, Whoop Senior Performance Scientists, and Chris Chapman, Woop, senior sports scientist, for an incredibly informative discussion.

In addition to being members of the Woop team, Cedric is also a strength and conditioning coach for Olympic windsurfers and Waterman in the Dominican Republic, and Chris is a certified exercise physiologist, who's the lead strength and conditioning coach for Freestyle Ski, Canada's Slope Style, and Big Air National Team. All right, they discuss the benefits of incorporating strength training into your training regime and how it's even more important as you age, where many people go wrong when strength training, why soreness is not necessary to get stronger, the differences in strength training for men and women,

how to think about and plan for recovery after a hard training, session and why rest is essential for building strength, what the interference effect is, and how to balance strength and endurance, and how to program your workouts if you incorporate cardiovascular and strength training components. A reminder, if you're a new member signing up for WOOP, we've got a great offer for you to get started. Use the code will when you're checking out to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. You can use your credit on battery packs, new bands, WOOP body app.

peril and more. That is join.woop.com. Get started. All right, without further ado, here are Kristen, Cedric, and Chris. On today's podcast, I have the pleasure of interviewing two of our senior sports scientist Christopher Chapman and Cedric Unholz. Massive backgrounds in both the Olympic and professional level and incredible athletes in their own right. So for quick context, Chris and Cedric joined Woop from Push. Push was acquired by WOOP about a year ago. Push is an incredible system that uses a science of velocity-based training to help folks get stronger, faster. Chris and Cedric have been instrumental in helping WOOP think about how we can incorporate this technology into our own platform so we can be smarter and how we're quantifying weight-lifting strain.

As a starting point today, considering we've never had a science-based discussion about strength training on the WOOP podcast, we're going to leverage our two resident experts on the subject to see what we can learn. this pot is for folks who are already locked into strength work but are looking to improve and also for folks who want to strength train might be a little bit intimidated or just might not be aware of the benefits. So to start, Cedric, why don't you give us just a quick overview of just what is exactly strength training and what are the different variations between kind of we hear strength training, we hear weight lifting, we hear power lifting, maybe just a quick one, two, on just some of the differences there. Strength training is kind of the general catch-all, right?

So, I mean, obviously within strength training, like you said, there's different disciplines such as powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting. Those are very, you know, distinct forms of strength training and, you know, goals and sports in and of themselves. But when we're talking about strength training, really, we're talking about improving the neuromuscular function of the body and the muscular, musculoskeletal function of the body to produce force, okay? So tied into that is obviously also the expression of power

and being able to develop power, but really it all kind of comes back to improving force production capabilities. So if we consider, you know, I feel a lot of folks on our platform are elite athletes, then we also have folks who are just trying to live a healthy, long life. Are there differences between strength, training, weightlifting for longevity and strength training and weightlifting for performance? Yeah, I mean, that's a big question.

I mean, like, obviously there's overlap between the two, right? I mean, and everyone's definition of performance can and will differ, you know, depending on if we're talking about elderly populations, if we're talking about professional athletes, if we're talking about, you know, people that are adults, but, you know, just getting into training for the first time. So performance is kind of like a bit of a moving target and it's obviously relative to what the person's goals are.

For me, personally, there's not really, there's not really difference, right? I mean, when we're looking to strength train for a particular performance or for a particular activity or even life in general, we need to look at what the demands of that activity are and then basically match out training or use our training in order to best prepare ourselves for the activities and the forces that we're likely to encounter. So for me, that means that the actual question needs to be, what are you training for and what do you want to be prepared for and really, I mean, you know, that that will then kind of dictate what the definition of performance is and therefore what we will be doing

or what we should try to strive for in our training. So I think I'll add one thing to what Cedric said there in that I do think training for performance and longevity overall are the same, but I think I would coach them very differently in that someone who's training for performance, their goal is to win to be the best. So it's kind of whatever it takes. So they might do a lot of stuff they don't enjoy doing or a lot of stuff that pushes them to the limits. Whereas someone who's training for longevity,

there's a lot of research around training not to failure and not pushing yourself to the max every day is more sustainable over the long term. And I think the biggest thing for someone training for longevity is that it has to be fun and enjoyable because they're going to be doing it for the rest of their life. Most people who are training for performance, there's some kind of set end goal.

And they would switch over to a longevity model. So I think the biggest difference would be longevity is let's base it around things you enjoy doing. And you're more likely to do those things for the remainder of your life. I love that. You know, and I think we consider just exercise generally, it's probably the most potent drug we have for extending kind of the quality of our life. I think on that note, in addition to extending potentially our health span, what are the benefits of strength training? Being stronger will just help you. function in life. Tasks become easier. So they require energy and less effort to complete. It's kind of a strength reserve model of endurance. I think there's an injury prevention. There's a more resilience or robustness, the more tissues can handle load. Through consistent loading, you're increasing their capacity or their tolerance. Therefore, they're less likely to fail, which is injury in sport or in life. Yeah, for sure. I mean, like, Like Chris mentioned, that kind of concept of increasing physical reserves, you know, is just really, really important.

But, I mean, you know, aside from the actual kind of output capabilities and being able to absorb force, you know, you've also gotten major benefits for optimizing, you know, health and well-being markers in general, right? So, you know, strength training, like, has positive effects on, you know, things like body composition and blood broke profiles, cognitive function, mental health, you know, even things like hormonal balance and all that kind of stuff. So it's, like, like Chris said, the list is kind of endless, really. What about strengthening just bones? How does weightlifting strength training help with bones? Yeah. So, I mean, muscles pull on bones. Muscles attach to bones

through tendons. So when we load our muscles with resistance, it's pulling on our bones. Our bones remodel at about 10% a year. So technically, if you lift weights for 10 years, you've fully remodeled your skeleton in theory. And the way, that the bones remodel, there's tissues on the inside called trabeculae, and they form based on the lines of force applied to them. So basically, if you do full body training, you're putting all these lines of force through your bones, and they're going to build stronger in every direction. So the more you resistance train, especially earlier in life, the more bone matter you're going to build, or bone density, which can help you again later in life and preventing

later in life, bone injuries, fractures from falls, stuff like that. Why don't we just take a second to kind of define the difference between traditional strength training and functional strength training? What are the differences and maybe just a quick laundry list of how each of them are beneficial, but different and kind of do different things? The thing is, if you look at the word functional, again, it kind of comes back to what are we training for therefore what function do we need to exhibit and therefore you know any training that we do in order to support that or improve that is by definition functional training right so i guess if we look at it kind of like in the modern worlds i mean we're looking at you know functional training

also incorporating things such as instability training um you know things things more along the line of that nature, maybe even kind of trying to mimic the, the sport, for example, that we're training for and loading that in some way in the weight room. And, you know, the more traditional view would be, okay, the training itself in the gym and what we do away from our sport is general preparation, develops general physical qualities that will then transfer and support us in the specific activity that we're looking to do. But really, for me, good strength training, well progressed in kind of a comprehensive system that builds people up is functional training if it's done with either a specific goal in mind or like Chris said before, you know, just

improving the general kind of capacity of the body to produce output and just be healthy in general. What are the necessary components of that progression? I guess the first place to start is you need to understand the individual and what they're looking to do, right? And then from there you're looking to set up a structured cohesive plan. You know, that provides systematic kind of progressive overload over time and appropriate to where the individual is actually starting from, right? So depending what people are training for, everyone's got a training history, everyone's got an injury history. And then, you know, first of all, determining, okay, where is that person at? Where do they want to get to or where do they need to be? And then

basically connecting the dots between those two points. What's the best way to measure progress and weightlifting? Yeah, there's a lot of different options. I mean, you know, traditionally you'd be looking at increases in body mass or, you know, weight on the bar. Obviously, with technological advancements, you know, there's a lot of different, different ways that you can look at things, be it, you know, velocity outputs or even, you know, using force plates for power outputs and things like that. Even if we're looking at more subjective kind of style praisals of progress, you know, if you're looking at reps and reserve, RPEs, things like that, integrating those are a really, really powerful way to not only kind of keep tabs on, okay, what is the right intensity

for me to use on a particular day, but also is the time that I'm spending training, is it actually resulting in something? So there's many different ways, both subjective and objective methods can be used for sure. A lot of folks are interested in not getting injured. It's really important. How can people think about it in a way that they can continue strength training and get stronger, but not get injured? What are some of the components that people need to think about in order to maintain like unadjured of healthy status where they're training at least you know five six times a week yes i mean we mentioned earlier on about improving physical reserves right so i mean another way to look at it is almost like kind of building building buffering capacity what we do by becoming stronger

becoming faster being able to produce more power is we improve our buffering capacity and we improve our resilience to the potential of injury you're increasing your ability to handle what's being thrown at you more and more. So it's less likely that you're going to break down when you do encounter certain forces. In the ergonomics world, injury is force, posture, and repetition. So those three things. So you're in a bad posture that can lead to injury because tissues are in bad positions. If you repeat something too much, you've created fatigue. So it's the ability to tolerate the forces goes away. Or it's just a single bout of more force than you can handle. And all three of those conditions can cause, you know, the tissue to break, whether that's muscle, ligament,

tendon, bone. If we go back to kind of framing it around someone just starting work training, I think one of the easiest things people can do is if you take a scale of 1 to 10, 0,1 being the easiest workout, sitting, doing nothing, 10 being the hardest you've ever worked, try to keep things six or seven for the first long while. You don't need to be in the eight, nine,'s, tens. build some capacity and safe loads before you start going into the more intense workout. Is soreness necessary to get stronger? I do not believe so, and there's a lot of literature to support that. Soreness comes primarily from eccentric contraction, so the lengthening of the muscle.

So think of hiking downhill versus uphill. If all you did was hike downhill, you'd be a lot more sore afterwards that delayed onset muscle soreness, which we call it doms. Whereas if you were just hiking uphill, you might feel more burned during it, but you're not going to be as sore after. And training to failure has been shown to create a lot more residual fatigue that will carry over. So again, if we keep a few reps in the tank, we're less likely to go into an area that's going to create a lot more soreness or muscle damage. One of my favorite analogies for like highlighting how training, you know, should be structured with what you just said in mind is kind of around the concept of getting a sun tan, right?

So basically, if you're looking to get a sun tan, you know, one massive exposure of sun is just going to burn you, but you're probably not going to tan off of it. So it's much more about kind of accumulating successive bouts of, you know, slightly overloaded exposure in terms of sun, but being able to kind of get the dosage correct and also the frequency correct with the appropriate amounts of recovery in between that then lead to the sun tams. So why don't we talk a little bit about where folks go wrong when they're straight training? The first one for me is usually that many people don't really have a rhyme or a reason

or at least a cohesive plan in place that, you know, target specific qualities and provide systematic progressive overload relative to what they're trying to achieve, right? So another aspect of this is that within this plan, like we mentioned before, you need to be able to determine progress. You need to be able to have that GPS that tells you, okay, this is where you're at, this is what you're doing, this is where it's leading you to, you're either on course or you're not. And just on that point when you say folks don't have a plan, like where is the best place to get a plan? Yeah, I mean, obviously there's a lot of self-study that can be done.

You know, it also depends on the source, right? I mean, there's a plethora of really, really, you know, intelligent coaches out there to have their material online. You know, it's also about, like, if people are really serious about training, then it is worth spending the money on getting a good coach, right, and engaging in that, depending on what the goals are. I think another thing to add on is surrounding yourself with a community of like-minded individuals. I think one of the best things CrossFit done is create a community. You know, you go to the gym and there's 20 people trying to achieve the exact same thing as you, which is more like a team, you know, from the environment that Cedric and I are from,

as opposed to just you kind of on your own trying to figure things out. So it can expedite the learning when you have 20 minds trying to achieve the same thing. And a community, you can ask questions and bounce things off. And maybe there's a coach for those 20 people as well. So I definitely think surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals and, as I said, good coaching. I think one of the biggest mistakes I see is assuming, you can do things correctly. Obviously, the more complex you get with your lifting, the more you have

to control and coordinate all your joints into a movement pattern. We are dealing with the most complex machine in the planet, in my opinion, in the human body. You can hurt yourself. As soon as you're applying load, especially with speed and repeating it over and over, it's not to scare people off, but you can't hurt yourself. So if you don't know, definitely try to get a coach. And if you can't get a coach, look on YouTube. There's a million videos from a million coaches on how to perform exercises correctly. And you can film yourself. You can set up your camera and your little tripod and see if what you're doing looks like

and matches what the video or the coach is saying. When we talk about building strength, do we have to use weights? What are some other ways we can build strengths? I think for the general population, no, you don't have to use weights. It's resistance training might be a better term. What are you using to create resistance? Maybe it's elastic bands you put in your suitcase, which create resistance. Maybe it's water in a pool.

Maybe it's cross-training using a sport that has a strength component, such as paddling, like stand-up paddle boarding or cycling where you're pushing your legs on a gear. There's definitely other ways to get resistance. And I think Cedric would agree with me that if we're going more towards the performance, side, and we're really trying to maximize the outcomes for specific goals of strength and power that you do need to start using heavy external loads and moving them at high velocities. And with that being said, and Chris is spot on, the other way in order to achieve that is also through working with obviously really general kind of acceleration work,

plyometrics jumping, actually looking to stimulate the body in those ways with ground impacts and things like that too. So like Chris said, like the resistance training is actually a much nicer way of putting it because usually when people think about strength training, it's just lifting, okay, for the most part. But really, if we're looking at like things like pyometrics, like jumps and sprinting and things like that, we're still teaching the body to produce force. We're still putting force into the ground and teaching the body to absorb impact and create outputs after that.

But it's also done in a way where you're improving other quality. and not just strength. Let's talk a little bit about balanced type of training. I think some folks might just do biceps and triceps, maybe a shoulder press. Talk about just how important it is to have a balanced program and what does a balanced program actually look like? As humans, we tend to see what's in front of us more, so the mirror muscles. We don't see all the stuff on the back.

So a very general rule of thumb for the general exercise. You know, train the stuff you don't see just as much. or more than the stuff you do see, we do tend to neglect things on the back side because we don't see them. And our brain just visually wants to work on the things we're looking at all the time. And I guess another general one would be to actually include some form of energy system development, conditioning, cardio, whatever people want to call it. Most people think, you know, that, I don't know, aerobic training or whatever will, quote unquote, steal their gains or, you know, not allow them to progress in the gym the way that they want to. But quite the opposite is

true as long as you're picking the correct intensities of your aerobic training, right? So not only can we improve our recoveries from strength sessions or introset recoveries with aerobic training, but we can also just in general create a more resilient body, which is going to mean that you can train harder, you can train more frequently. So including conditioning, I think, is something that's really, really important, not just for general health, but actually to drive the strength training improvements as well. And I think back, I mean, you were talking different muscles, right? There's a couple ways you can look at this. Like I was saying front back before anterior or posterior could be up or lower.

You know, you break things into upper body training and lower body training. You do classically see people neglect lower body a lot of the time. It is harder. It's more difficult. And this is where, you know, you start getting to barbell and maybe some of the term functional comes in is that you can get a lot more bang for your buck in doing things like squats and deadlifts and stuff that is whole body, you know, that is core, that is, that is everything all in one.

I think classically you go into any gym and there's all these machines and each one breaks down a body part. So you've got to think, oh, I got to do each one individually, which is a style of training. And if we think of all these muscles as a chain, you know, it's only as strong as its weakest length. So sometimes you do have to train that individual muscle. But if you only have a certain amount of time and you want to get bang for your buck, pick stuff that tries to train more muscles than less.

or compound movements, as we call them. That's where you're using multiple joints as one. So a bicep curl might be a single joint exercise that's more of an isolation, whereas a pull-up is a little more of a compound movement. Anything where you're using more joints, like a squat, a deadlift. The other way that it can be broken down, and this tends to be used more in the performance world, is by movement pattern. So typically there's three lower body major patterns.

There's a squat, a hinge. which is a hip hinge or more of a deadlift and a lunge pattern. And then upper body, we have our push pull in the horizontal plane and push pull in the vertical plane. Then you might add in your Olympic lifts might be a category. Your run, jump throws might be a category. And then anything else would be an accessory movement. Some people have carries as a movement patterns.

Some people have core as a movement pattern. But most people summarize it in the four-directional. upper body and the three lower body patterns. Yeah, no, spot on exactly. And then I use it. And then I have like separate categories for, you know, like you said, run, jump, throw. I do have a pretty extensive kind of categorization for trunk work. So there I kind of break it up into the movement planes, so sagittal frontal and transverse. So transverse is rotational work. So for me, that's a really important mainstay than any of my programming. Apart from that, I pretty much follow what chap's just outlined as well. Are there any considerations, like any sex differences in lifting that

need to be considered. It's not something that I'm an expert in. So, you know, I definitely defer to the work that you're doing, Kristen. But for me, the goals, if we're looking at physical development and the effects that we're trying to get out of strength training, they're pretty much the same between men and women. Yeah, I would just say, you know, considerations in terms of what we've learned doing our research on just our member data is that there are clear physiological differences during different phases of the menstrual cycle. You know, we're just more primed to take on higher load during certain times of our of our menstrual cycle. So in the early and late follicular phase, we're going to be more primed to lift heavier weights. You know, that's when we really want to

take on a lot of load. We're primed to do that. As we move into our alludeal phase early and to go into the late, we become less prime to adapt to those higher volumes and intensities. So I think for women, you know, looking, using loop, for example, to just kind of understand where you are in each phase of your cycle and be able to modify or modulate training quarterly can be really beneficial and just help you reduce as much friction as possible. You know, you want to work with your body. And I think, you know, maybe this is a good time to talk a little bit about recovery. You know, if we're under recovered, for example, you know, and maybe our HRV is trending kind of down over the course of a few days. You know, how does that impact our volume and intensity? How much load we put on our body?

You know, do we want to modify our strength training? I think our psychology comes into it as well. If I'm lower recovered, it's easier for me to go out on just a nice, long, easy run or even do a short interval workout than it is for me to get the energy up to weight lift. But for some people, it might be opposite. So anyway, curious to kind of just hear your thoughts about how to think about recovery and if we can tap into HRV, that'd be great. Yeah, so HRV and weightlifting is an interesting one. There's definitely a dose response relationship. So if you dig into the literature, there's not a lot of literature. but what's there, there's a few things. So we know there's an intensity threshold where it takes about 70% of your maximum, so 70% of your 1RM, so it's heavy strength training to see a decrease in HRV or an effect on the autonomic nervous system. You know, anything less than that, it tends not to affect HRV that much. There is a volume dose response, so the more volume you,

you do, sets times reps times weight, the more you're going to see an effect on your HRV. There's also a amount of muscle used. There was one study that looked at upper body training, then looked at lower body training, then looked at total body. And basically, the more muscles you use in training, the more of effect you see on HRV, which this all makes sense. I mean, it's stress to the body. It's the neuromuscular system.

so it's stress on the nervous system. So the more you do, and the more intense it is, the more we're going to see an effect on our autonomic nervous system. So the other thing when we're talking about recovery, apart from, you know, HIV responses and things like that is dosage, right? So in order to progress in our strength training over time, we need to make sure that we can apply a stimulus at a frequency that will allow things to kind of stack on top of each other. right so obviously it's about figuring out what an individual can recover from so if we're talking about

you know minimal effective volumes versus you know maximal recoverable volumes for example but really we also need to kind of follow that that notion of like stimulate don't annihilate um because if we have too much of a stimulus in one particular session you know by the time we've actually recovered from that session which you know if you really go after it it might even take you three or four days you know to recover properly in order to be able to train again, we're missing that window at which that next stimulus needs to occur in order for, you know, in order for us, for us to be able to kind of stack those blocks on top of each other. In that sense, recovery isn't just about what you do between the sessions, but it is actually dependent on what you do in the session and

how you stack those stimuli together. That's kind of how I look at it as well. Apart from, you know, the usual of making sure that your sleep is dialed in, you know, that your nutrition is good, hydration, and all these things that are very important to promote recovery as well. How would you say stretching post weightlifting session, like how does that help? How does it hinder? So me personally, post session for me is about getting back to homeostasis. So while we may have specific mobility work that is geared towards a measured deficit, whether that's through some kind of movement screen or injury that has reduced range of motion that we're trying to restore. I typically use post-session stretching and mobility as a decreased muscle tone and try to get

them back into the rest and digest state. I might couple that with breathing drills or some kind of active recovery. Like we play a light game of something, whether that's spike ball or something we have access to. It also gets their mind off. a little bit of general aerobic. But that's how I would typically use the post-session stretching for. I think classically, a lot of that is geared towards increasing some kind of range of motion. The only hesitancy I would have around that is, do we need to increase that range of motion? Like, do you already have enough for the tasks you're doing?

Or is it to counteract, say, sitting in a chair all day, which in that case makes sense. Like, what we're all doing right now is not how we're meant to be as human. So we do know that, you know, hit flexors and hamstrings get tight in these joint angles we're at. So we should do something to lengthen them and create some range back in those muscle groups. I just want to talk a little bit more specifically about certain types of athletes or disciplines. So how would you advise an adorn's athlete to kind of think about their strength training program versus, you know, someone who's really focused on speed? I think when it comes to, you know, if we use those two bit buckets as kind of the main. the main brackets, I guess. I mean, really what, for me, what changes is the relative distribution

of low intensity and high intensity elements within training. So if we're looking at strength training, you know, for runners, for example, or endurance runners, we're looking to increase movement efficiency. We're looking to increase, you know, the ability to sustain movement over a prolonged period of time without breaking down and increasing those strength or even speed reserves that we talked about before, right? Because if we have a given challenge with a set force output that needs to be met, the stronger that we are, the less relatively taxing that movement is. And it means that we can repeat it more often before experiencing a breakdown due to fatigue, for example. So obviously, strength training is really, really important for our

strength power athletes or our more anaerobic athletes, because we're going to have high force outputs, we're going to have dynamic movements, we're going to have the need for high power outputs. And obviously strength training will help us with that too. The use of the modalities is just as important for both populations, but probably the amount that you will do, not just based on what the person can do, but what their sports practice allows, right? So if you've got a marathon runner who's running, you know, logging a lot of miles and stuff, you may only be able to strength train or maybe once or twice a week, but then you

really have to make sure that you're focusing on those qualities, right? Whereas if you're more of a power speed athlete, you might be able to train, you know, three, maybe even four times a week in the gym, which means that you will obviously be able to progress at a relatively larger rate in terms of strength development, for example. But like I mentioned, it's the amount and the relative use of the amount of those training modalities that mainly differ between the two groups. I think the piece I would add here, you know, I've trained a lot of endurance athletes. See it more a little more in the cycling and the running. They don't want to put on muscle mass. They're afraid that more muscle mass equal.

worse performance or working against gravity. And so the first thing is you can increase strength without putting on muscle math. Easiest way to do that is train not to failure. Don't go to failure once again. We know that training to failure irrespective of load is one of the best ways to increase muscle math. And the second is that if you dig into the literature on any endurance sport, one of the best things you can do is train heavy weights, train max strength.

And what it does, as Sedric said, it makes your pedal stroke or your oar stroke if you're rowing or your swing stroke a less percentage of your max. So you're increasing your economy. And if you talk to any endurance athlete, they understand economy. How much energy does it take me to produce that pedal stroke or that that rowing stroke or that running step? And if I get stronger, it's going to take a lot less energy. And my muscles are contracting less so I can deliver more oxygen and nutrients. pull more waist away. So by heavy strength training, you increase economy. And there is no negative effect like VO2 max or these endurance qualities that is definitely believed out there. And I'd say

that's one of the myths do. So if you're an endurance athlete, heavy weights is probably where you should start in the gym. What do we do first? Does it matter if we're an endurance athlete versus a speed and power athlete? Do we do our weight training prior to our long run and to our track workout or vice versa. What's the best order of operation? I dove into the literature early on when I started working with endurance board. And this is called the interference effect, originally found by Hickson, a physiologist in the 80s. Basically, if you do endurance before strength, there's a detrimental effect on your strength session. You know, you've used up all your energy stores and the effort you can put in is a lot less. Whereas if you flip-flop them,

do your strength before your endurance. You're maximizing your strength. outcomes and it has minimal effect on the endurance training because it's a lot more of the physiological processes. So in general, do your strength before your endurance. Obviously, there's exceptions and if you start getting really fancy, you start pairing, is it a central effect? Like, is it more heart and nervous system or is it more peripheral at the muscle end? And you can start to align things, but that's when you start getting really advanced in your splitting hairs for high performance. If somebody has a benefit of the time, putting high intensity components on one day, and then the next day you follow up with a low intensity component, or your conditioning, for

example, and basically flip-flot between the two across the week. So the nice thing about there is that you're spreading out the volume of work. You're minimizing the interference effect that Chris just mentioned. But the nice thing about it is, depending on what you do on your low intensity days, you can actually accelerate the recovery from your high-intensity bouts through that work as well, okay? If we're talking about getting blood flowing and you know, heating the system and, you know, obviously aerobic work in general is good for things like sleep and stuff as well. If we can use that kind of flip-flopping of the two zones, we get an overall kind of greater effect across the week as well as not kind of overcooking ourselves on a single day.

What would be kind of the perfect progression in your mind to just get stronger over time? I'd say in terms of minimal effect of dice, I mean, if you look at the literature, I mean, we're probably talking about something like two to three times a week, you know, in terms of really being able to stimulate properly and make progress over time. I'd say two times a week would be the minimum. If we're looking at conditioning side of things, we're probably looking at two to four times a week of about an hour in that kind of zone too, in that blue zone. that tends to be what the literature supports.

And then obviously we fill in anything that we need specifically for what we're training for if there is anything additional, right? You know, once you kind of have those things established, it's very much about also, you know, deciding what kind of splits that you want to do. I mean, you might have a whole body day every day. You might split it up into uppers and lowers.

So upper body work one day, lower body the other day. You might break it up by movement patterns so that you're making sure that you're hitting each of the movement patterns once, maybe twice a week, depending on what it is. So, you know, there's a large choice available for splitting up the training. But in terms of frequencies,

I think those would be the minimums that people should try to achieve. The one thing I would add is if we're talking, you know, minimums. I agree two times a week seems to be the minimum. One, just in the literature or something, say one, but it just doesn't quite cut it. specifically with people doing endurance sport, once you go above three times a week, the burdens become very diminishing. You probably don't want to spend that extra time weightlifting.

So a Monday, Wednesday, Friday type split actually works really well for most people in most scenarios. From a reps and sets standpoint, again, yeah, two sets. I mean, there's some programs out there like one by 20, so one set of 20 reps of a muscle group or movement. movement and move on. But typically two is a minimum for maintenance. As you get better and you adapt, sometimes you need three, four, five, six. You need that stimulus, depending on what it is. But I think the critical factor is making sure you are training the quality that you want. So if it's strength, you've got to stay close to your one RM. So maybe six reps or less so that you're you're activating the motor unit in a way that is closest to maximum strength.

Like if you're if you're just lifting super lightweight all the time, you're not stimulating that strength pathway or activating the motor units. And how does an individual figure out their one R and their one rep max? You know, the classic book in our world is the National Strength Conditioning Association, essentials of strength conditioning. Basically, you start out of lightweight and you increase the weight. until you find you can't lift it anymore. Now, if you're going to failure,

have a spotter, someone who's experienced or have a coach with you. Now, if you're completely new to lifting or you don't have help, you can basically pick any weight up to about 10 reps. So see how many reps you can do that weight. If you do more than 10, grab something a little heavier. Once you get to 8 reps, 10 reps,

there's charts you can find online, 1RM conversion charts and you plug in that weight how many reps you did and it'll tell you your estimated 1RM and that's pretty accurate plus or minus 5 pounds for the most part there are other ways with measurement tools using the velocity of the lift or how fast you lift

it has a relationship with load so if I take a load and my squat is 0.5 there's charts where you can extrapolate and it's more mathematical but it's just another way to do it that you don't have to lift a failure to figure out your one-r-m. Oftentimes, like, people just don't take enough rest in order to promote the quality that they're trying to target, right?

So by that, I mean, you know, if we're doing strength work, it's important for us to work, as Chris said, at a particular level, but we need to be able to do that multiple times in order for us to stimulate what we're looking to stimulate. If we don't take enough rest, our outputs and our ability to achieve those stimuli goes down across sets, for example, right? So we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot by not resting enough. Interestingly, even when it comes to training for size, so hypertrophy, the same thing applies. So Chris Beardsley showed that it's really, really important not just to train to failure, but also we need to be able to rest enough in between sets in order to repeat that.

stimulus in order to get the most amounts of growth or progress as well. So rest is a really, really important variable. And it doesn't matter if we're talking about sprint work or if we're talking about lifting. It's something that I feel people don't pay enough attention to or are not as disciplined with as they should be. And I think that's a really important thing for people to consider. Chris and Stedric, thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights and your expertise. I'll just say it is an absolute joy to learn from you both and just have the opportunity to work with you every day. So it's really fun to get a chance to chat and hear more about the things that you're so passionate about. Yeah, I appreciate it. Wilson, thanks for having us,

Kristen. Thank you to Kristen, Cedric and Chris for coming on the WOOP podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating. Please subscribe. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com or call us. at 508-443-4952, and we are going to do a podcast Q&A in the future. New members can use the code, Will, W-I-L, get a $60 credit on W-W-A-Accessaries when you sign up. And with that, I wish you a great week. We'll be back next week. Stay healthy and stay in the green.

Thank you.