VO2max Isn't Everything + Q&A w/ Alec Blenis (SSOF Ep 200)

Alec Blenis2:02

And then as you get further and further out from that, so if we use a percentage based model where 5K pace, it's 100%. We have 105%, it's a little bit faster than 5K pace. 95% is a little bit slower than 5K pace. That kind of step out in each direction would be what I call first tier of supportive training.

And we can keep going out in tiers. So, if you're training for 5K, we have our 100% our very specific stuff. Anything from 95 to 105% in that ballpark is going to be fairly specific. Then we have kind of these next brackets over which is 90 to 95% and 105 to 110%. That's tier one support.

We can go further out. We have that 85 to 90% of 5K pace. Getting a little bit more general. It's more like second tier support. Same thing like that 110, 115% second tier speed support. And so we just have this kind of layered approach where the further out we go from the most specific training and more generally we get we're just kind of going down those rungs of support.

And to me good training or good conditioning for any goal is about recognizing how different types of workouts and kind of rungs of support one another and how general training supports more specific training and so on and so forth. But then being able to look at a specific athlete, not only their own strengths and weaknesses but also where they're at in the season and figure out okay how much, where are the gaps in terms of these rungs of support and then am I progressing intelligently from more general to specific emphasis as their season progresses and we get closer to competition.

I think taking that very simple just kind of tiers of support approach makes it pretty simple to apply this framework to a wide range of potential goals whether it is 5K and we're talking about percentage based workouts of 5K pace when we're doing some much faster and much slower stuff when we're doing more specific stuff but you could apply it to anything like repeat sprint efforts.

What is going to be similar to that but a little bit more in the speed side versus a little bit more on the endurance side, make sure we have those kinds of rungs of support developed, so on and so forth.

So if I had to give one answer, what is my conditioning philosophy? It would be that kind of approach of just being able to kind of categorize into quadrants, more general training versus more specific training, things that the athlete is better at, kind of strengths and weaknesses. Then we have kind of that Punnett square of general things that the athlete is also weak at, general things that the athlete is already good at, specific things the athlete is weak at, specific things the athlete is good at, and then having a system in place to make sure we're developing those in the right order and placing the right amount of emphasis on kind of each of those squares. Hopefully that makes sense. I know it was a lot, but that's the most generalizable philosophy I could say.

James de Lacey5:22

So, how does the general to specific work then? Because you mentioned obviously the 5K and 5K the running is the sport. So it's relatively easy to kind of map that out. How does the general to specific then work for say combat athletes or other sporting athletes where the specific is the sport itself?

Alec Blenis5:39

So there's different variables you can manipulate with anything that's going to make a workout a little bit more specific or a little bit more general. So when conditioning or when kind of the sport itself is the most specific thing, say for a combat athlete take sparring rounds where they're just getting their ass kicked. It feels like a conditioning workout like 2 minutes on one minute off kind of sparring situation.

I would consider that kind of one tier of support over. It's still very specific. You're still doing the sport but we've now kind of put this conditioning framework around it. That'd be one way to think about just making something a little bit more general.

As we get into alternate modalities for example. So take a combat athlete, but now we're doing something on an assault bike or they're going for a run. That change in modality has kind of that's an extra tier down. It's got a lot more general at that point. I think doing general training is still important and sometimes just training to train, you're training to get fit enough to do the training for the specific thing. You can be a couple tiers of support down.

But that's how I would think about it. Anytime we're training for a specific sport, any sort of non-sport conditioning, assault bike running, whatever, is already going to be kind of a tier of support away. I'd say one of the common mistakes that I see though is when people think about the specific sport demands in terms of work rest ratios or the length of a specific belt. I think people are a little bit too eager to try to map that on to conditioning really cleanly.

And they'll say like oh it's a 30-second belt so it's this energy system because when we think of 30 second running belts or 30 second cycling belts it's this energy system. I don't think that always maps super cleanly one to one just because sport, like combat sports, introduce so many other variables that I think can shift kind of what energy system is actually being strained a little bit more compared to traditional monostructural cyclical style work. So to be a little bit careful there with mapping kind of time domains and stuff like that. But hopefully that makes sense.

James de Lacey8:06

It does. It's definitely a common I guess misnomer. People kind of like to map energy systems to time and don't quite realize everything's in play and you're not just doing anaerobic work or whatever they want to label it as. You're getting everything and depending on the intensity is the fuel you're being used, all kinds of stuff whether you're targeting more central peripheral adaptations. There's so much more that goes in versus just hey my fight or my activity is one minute long which means I'm only going to do one minute conditioning efforts or whatever it is.

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That can be part of the training but I guess what is the underlying physiology you want to change or what is the thing you're trying to target as you mentioned that strength and weakness side which also becomes important where I think people kind of, it's not their fault though. They're just kind of trying to train and do the best they can for their sport but it's kind of the I guess the message that's portrayed on social media a lot is this idea that you can kind of just isolate everything into oblivion.

Alec Blenis10:02

I think that for whatever reason, one of the key differences I see working with actual conditioning athletes, runners and triathletes and what have you versus sport athletes, whether it's fighters or basketball players or whatever, is I think conditioning athletes, they understand more intuitively this idea of developing fundamental qualities and training generally does move general to specific. As kind of cliche as it is, runners all know the idea of building a base and getting more specific later in a season and things like that.

But I find that with athletes like a team sport athlete or combat athlete, they just want to be super specific all the time. It's harder for them to understand how general training can support specific training and how you might periodize some of that and that sort of thing.

On the flip side, I don't think that a combat athlete needs to do the whole build an aerobic base in the same sense that an endurance runner would, right? Like it's totally different demands, but I think every sport has their version of base building. There's some sort of foundational pieces that you need to develop and then work towards specificity.

That's not going to look like going out and slogging through a bunch of easy miles for a combat athlete like it would for an endurance runner, but there still should be some, what are those like second and third tier down supportive workouts that are going to help prepare us for progressively more specific and higher quality training.

James de Lacey10:02

Thank you for that message because I get targeted on Instagram and stuff when I say stuff like that where you don't need the same kind of aerobic base, but it's good to have it on here as well.

And I wanted to come back a little bit as well to you mentioned about balancing the conditioning with the strength athletes so they don't lose strength. I think that'd be a cool topic to kind of go down. How do you look at conditioning in those instances where someone's trying to—I guess their main, you could apply it to combat sport to any other sport too I guess with the technical training—but specifically with strength, how are you then balancing for these athletes their conditioning to not lose or at least negatively impact some of their strength training or their technical training?

Alec Blenis12:19

Everyone wants kind of a simple answer of like you just arrange workouts in this way and this is how you think about it for all types of workouts all the time. And unfortunately, depending on the specific workout, is this more of a skill-based session or is this a hypertrophy type session? Like what are we targeting here? Different levels of fatigue and potential interference will be more or less tolerated. So how you go about arranging someone's week and what sessions get priority and which ones are you going into maybe a little bit fatigued, that can vary as opposed to there being kind of a one-size-fits-all rule.

But what I will say is a lot of people get caught up worrying about mechanisms like mTOR and AMPK battling it out or they're worried about their glycogen availability from this session to that session. And that stuff might matter a little bit. The mechanisms are interesting, but I think by and large the most important thing is just the ability to actually deliver the training stimulus itself.

A lot of times people get caught up in like, oh, if I run after my strength session, is that then going to downregulate the mTOR pathway I just stimulated? And to me, it's like the most important thing is were you able to lift heavy enough in that strength session? Like if you're getting the work done at sufficient quality, that's everything.

Because at the end of the day, when you look at a week, there's going to be something about it that's not optimal. You're either a little bit tired going into this session or in this case you downregulated this pathway from the way you stacked these sessions. Like you're always going to be able to argue that something was not right.

And so if I have to prioritize one thing, it's just are we getting the quality training done period. And then a lot of those mechanisms and pathways and stuff like that I feel is very, very secondary. So that'd be the main thing is just making sure that the quality gets done and then being aware of which sessions are going to be most sensitive to fatigue so that I know what sessions do I need to protect a little bit more in the schedule so that that quality that we need can still be achieved.

So higher skill stuff for sure is going to be a little bit more protected. What that generally means is you might do some of the stuff that's a little bit more fatiguing very shortly afterwards. You may not want to do it at that time. But sometimes the best bet—I was having a chat with someone just recently about how many professional baseball players just with the frequency of competition, the best time for them to sometimes do their strength training is immediately after a game, which sucks because you just want to be done and go home, right?

But if you want to maximize the amount of time and recovery you have so that you're fresh for the next game, probably your best bet is to do that lift right after the game, then you have a couple days before the next one and so on.

And so for a lot of strength athletes, for combat athletes as well, people who have some of these very important sessions that require them to be operating near 100%, whether in terms of skill or just power output and so on and so forth, sometimes doing some of the more fatiguing conditioning very in close proximity, after immediately after that session is one of their best bets for them being able to turn around and be fresh when it's time to perform again.

James de Lacey15:39

Yeah, that interference effect is often overblown as you mentioned. I mean, you look at team sports for decades, you're doing two, three sessions a day on the field in the morning, hitting the gym, then on the field again in the afternoon. Dudes are getting bigger, stronger, faster over the years. So there's only so much—I mean, if you're an IFBB Pro bodybuilder or some [expletive] you maybe you don't want to do that, but that's to the extreme ends of the spectrum.

It'd be cool to go down maybe because you obviously mentioned some pathways and all that kind of stuff. It'd be cool to go down a little bit maybe of some of the physiology. I know you've talked previously about—I don't want to skew words, but I'm going to say the not the lesser, the overemphasis of VO2 max. Let's put it that way. Correct me if I'm wrong if I got that wrong, but it'd be cool to kind of maybe go down some of the physiology around that. Maybe your thoughts around VO2 max for whether it's endurance sports or combat or other team sports.

Alec Blenis16:37

Yeah, for sure. One of the things with VO2 max, just broadly speaking, maybe to set the stage, when we look at how well does VO2 max correlate with performance in a range of sports, I think you're going to get very different, you're going to walk away with very different conclusions depending on the size of the sample or the range of the sample that you're looking at.

So for example, really good example of this, there was a study that looked at VO2 max versus 3K run performance, like 2-mile run performance. And if you zoom out far enough and you're looking at really slow runners all the way up to elite runners, the correlation between the VO2 max and two-mile run time is really strong. Just kind of looks like a straight line like, oh, more VO2 max, faster run time.

But at any point on that graph, if you really zoom in, you're like, okay, let's just look at elite two-mile runners, like how important is VO2 max within this population, then all the correlation goes away. And within kind of narrow subsets, it seems to not really matter all that much. Or at least we know all of these people and they're performing at this level, especially with elites, have probably developed or kind of reached their VO2 max potential for the most part. And now other qualities are emerging as potentially more important.

But anytime you zoom out further, the further and further you zoom out, the more important it tends to look. And the more you look at fairly homogeneous populations, for example, let's look at a study on VO2 max among elite soccer players, you'll probably see a pretty wide range of values and see it doesn't matter a ton. And so I think that's important because when you zoom out, it clearly matters.

Someone's aerobic capacity definitely matters. But when we start looking at these homogeneous populations where a lot of genetic potential has already been reached or they're above some minimum requirement where it's no longer a limiting factor, then other things start to come into play.

And so for someone like a combat athlete, right? Like varying levels of kind of zooming out versus zooming in are going to be important depending on who you're working with. And so if I'm working with a combat athlete who has very little training experience, training history, they're fairly sedentary, they work a desk job, their VO2 max is 39, they go to jiu-jitsu twice a week, right?

Like if I'm working with that combat athlete, doing more kind of classic conditioning and just kind of thinking like, okay, maybe we should just get this guy's VO2 max up, let's actually get this dude doing some monostructural steady work. That might make a lot more sense than for someone who has been engaged in some sort of sport for a very long time.

They're going to practice their main sport 5 days out of the week. They're also doing a lot of gym training and stuff like that. Their VO2 max is already 50 something. Like for them, VO2 max is not even a conversation. I wouldn't even think of that in the slightest. But again kind of knowing how much are we zooming in, zooming out? Are we at a point where some of those general like second, third, fourth tier support qualities for a combat athlete like VO2 max might be relevant?

The further and further you get into someone's career, training career, the more just kind of I say brute force training—if you just train enough period, you're going to develop some level of aerobic base. And for a combat athlete, just years and years in the sport, hard training in general is probably going to be sufficient for something like that. But it really does depend on the person. And I have some combat athletes that are more recreational that we do some more classic kind of VO2 max style work because

They only train a couple hours a week. They're very sedentary and they don't have a big sporting background.

James de Lacey20:31

Dude, you're preaching to the choir here. I'm glad people can hear it from people other than me too on the podcast and everything else because we have this obsession with this aerobic base building V02 max as this kind of ceiling value, and I like to use the analogy of, or not an analogy, maybe compare it to other max metrics, right?

Jump height, 1RM, any kind of max output number that people will use to compare here, maybe "Hey, am I good enough or not?" But it doesn't tell you how, it doesn't tell you what's happening under the hood. It just gives you, "Hey, this is my max," but how did you get there? What's happening in other parts of the body?

Especially when V02 max is so heavily influenced by oxygen delivery, it's, "Okay, but then what's happening at the muscle?" And then you got all these different things coming through where you can, as you mentioned, you have this huge range of V02 maxes that when you have this more homogeneous population you're looking at, so what is separating them? Because if it's not V02 max, it's something else. And as you mentioned, if someone's training a ton of maybe the combat sport or other sport, that other thing is, do you have time to now slog long miles? Is that the thing that's limiting your performance?

Yeah, there's just so many more factors that go into it than just this one number that people love to see as, "Hey, if I keep building my base, that means everything else is going to go up," and it's like, "Well, is it?"

Alec Blenis21:57

Yeah, this is maybe a little bit of a hot take, but I think especially with V02 max, there's a pretty wide range of just genetics, and some people naturally, with very minimal training, their V02 max will be over 60, which in combat sports terms that's really excellent, whereas other people are going to struggle to get closer to 50. And I think a mistake would be looking at something like that and then making too strong of conclusions about how much conditioning someone might need.

So for example, take just the genetic freak who they do zero conditioning whatsoever, their V02 max is already 60. I think it would be a mistake to take that person and say, "Oh, you don't need to do any conditioning at all," because there's still so much low-hanging fruit that if we can do just a little bit of work and then you get even fitter, then why the hell would we not do that? Still pick the low-hanging fruit for that individual.

And then on the same token, someone who just is genetically a little bit more challenged with conditioning, I don't think that that means that we need to just condition the [expletive] out of them and just make that their full-time job to try to get their V02 max up to these normative values because time is limited, and at some point you're putting so much work to just make these very marginal gains that it's like, "Well, sucks for you, man, but you just have a little bit lower aerobic capacity, and we're going to have to focus on some of this other stuff that's going to move the needle a little bit more for you."

So I think trying to chase these normative values of, "Oh, if you want to be a good fighter, your V02 max should be 50 to 54 or whatever," you see these charts where people are—

I don't think there's a whole lot of value in that. I think oftentimes, regardless of baseline fitness level, most combat athletes should probably be doing a similar amount of conditioning and just pick some of that low-hanging fruit and then move on. Maybe that's controversial, I don't know.

James de Lacey23:37

Not controversial here. You're good. You mentioned so some place say a low V02 max there, you're looking at target some other low-hanging fruit. What would that be in that instance? So with the busy ones, let's just say.

Alec Blenis24:10

Yeah, so I would say especially for combat sports, I think you're going to see a stronger correlation in repeat bout efforts and things like that when looking at lactate threshold or fractional utilization even compared to absolute V02 max. Maybe that gets—I think that that may be a little bit underrated because I think we sometimes go so specific, it's just all these short repeat efforts, but being able to sustain a hard 20 minutes at a very high percentage of V02 max, I think that's a useful skill.

You will have people, say that genetic freak I mentioned earlier who just no conditioning, V02 max is already in the 60s—their fractional utilization or their ability to sustain a high percentage of their V02 max, their threshold, might be down at 70%. So say their V02 max is 60, 70% of that is 42. They can sustain a kind of oxygen demand of 42, give or take, for a very long period of time.

Compare that to someone who their V02 max is not quite as good, it's more like 45 to 50, but their fractional utilization or threshold sits closer to 90%. They might—those two athletes might have the same ability to sustain a high output for a 20 to 30 minute bout just because one of them has such a superior kind of fractional utilization.

And this goes even into endurance sports like marathon running. If you actually maximize a lot of these other qualities, like movement economy and fractional utilization, you can put down some pretty disgusting numbers with a very mediocre V02 max. Again, having a higher V02 max would always be great. If you offer one to me, I'll take it. But you could run a sub-3 marathon with a V02 max of 50 if you had very high fractional utilization and good movement economy.

So if I had a combat athlete whose V02 max was not great, I'd probably just want to focus a little bit more on improving that lactate threshold. Obviously doing some of the shorter intervals as well, but I'd probably do some longer threshold type tempo type of stuff and obviously the actual sport conditioning itself, just getting more efficient with the movements and stuff like that.

I think you could still put down some pretty disgusting performances even with a mediocre V02 max if you're maxing out some of those other qualities too. And a lot of times that is a little bit more time efficient as well. Actually improving V02 max long term can be very time-consuming.

James de Lacey26:39

Yeah, I think people forget as well, just because something is intense doesn't mean you're not developing aerobic qualities. And I think people forget that a lot because they think aerobic work has to be low intensity. But yeah—

You look through anything and everything, you look at what happens at the muscle, you look at any papers in terms of any system contribution—

It's just not the case. But I do want to get to some questions, man. A ton of questions came through. You obviously got some loyal followers here. So some of these are related to this, some of them are not, but we're just going to run through some of these as well. So Jeremy Faring, he's asking, "What are your thoughts on the backyard ultra style event, including specific training considerations?" What the hell is a backyard ultra style event?

Alec Blenis27:23

So backyard ultra is—it's this last man, it's called last man standing, where basically there's a 4.2 mile loop and everyone just has—

James de Lacey27:30

Like a Nick Bett ranch thing?

Alec Blenis27:33

Yeah, just like that one. You run one lap per hour every hour until no one is left standing.

Training considerations for that—I mean, for something like that, we're now on the total opposite end of the spectrum. We've been—

James de Lacey27:46

You got to be a psycho, right?

Alec Blenis27:48

You got to be a psycho. You got to do a ton of volume, for sure. Obviously structural, orthopedic tolerance and stuff like that comes into play, and there's no substitute for just gradually accumulating more time on feet and mileage and stuff over many, many years of training.

A lot of that comes down to fueling and strategy and pacing, ability to sleep in these very small chunks. My friend Mark, who just won a recent one with 400 some miles, he's good at sleeping for 8 minutes at a time, which is crazy. He'll run a lap, sleep 8 minutes, run another lap. So yeah, we're getting at the very edges of just really nuts adaptations and stuff like that. V02 max, lactate threshold, all that stuff, I don't think is very significant there. We're talking about some pretty weird stuff.

James de Lacey28:42

Yeah, that's crazy. I swear you got to be crazier than being a fighter to do something like that.

All right, Joseph Chung, I think. "What are your main lifts that if you were short on time, you'd never skip?"

Alec Blenis28:58

Oh, that's a good one. I mean, kind of cliché, just I'd make sure to get the main compounds like a squat, hinge, push, pull. I probably—I love a lunge. I love a classic RDL. Love a dip. Love a weighted chin up. Those would probably be my four.

James de Lacey29:21

Perfect. I hear someone in the chat here. Famous music is always here. "Good to see Alec on this channel." You got some fans here, too. Yeah, Joe Moxy fit is asking, "Best carb source post-workout. Not OJ."

What is this [expletive]?

Alec Blenis29:39

Dude, these are your guys.

Not OJ. I actually I'm a sucker for sports drink, good glucose fructose blend, couple electrolytes in there. Tasty. Just two scoops, get 100 grams of carbs.

I'm crushing 100 grams of sports drink after most of my endurance sessions these days. I don't think everyone has to go that far, but with my volume, I'm usually going 100 grams immediately after every session.

James de Lacey30:10

Nice. AJ Soul is asking foundational dietary principles and how to balance eating for performance and health. Pretty big general question, but I'll throw it.

Alec Blenis30:19

General, very general question. I'd say foundational principles would just be adequate calories foundation. Second tier up, protein, produce, and fiber. I think if you're eating enough calories for your energy expenditure, I think if you're hitting roughly a gram per pound of lean body mass, protein target, and you're hitting your fiber intake, I think you're going to be in pretty good shape.

I think a lot of people easily hit protein, fall short on fiber. A lot of people will hit fiber goals but maybe a little on the low side on protein. I think if you're consistently hitting upper end of protein and fiber guidelines, it's pretty hard to [expletive] up too badly. So those would be my main two.

James de Lacey31:02

Yeah. One here from Kyle Harrison asking, I think S and Z progression, I'm assuming that's your sex and zombies one. Make it to the end of rep range at X weight then go up and wait.

You can, if you haven't seen it already, I have a YouTube video on progressive overload where I talk about a couple different strategies for progressing within a block like that. That's probably the most common approach that people do is they just try to add reps at a given weight and they kind of recycle that progression over again.

But I don't think that's inherently superior to any other strategy like microloading for example, anything like that. I think as long as you're in the rep range and you're at the target RPE, I think a wide range of progression strategies, whether it's a little bit more rep focused or weight focused, whatever, I think it's all perfectly valid.

Nice. I have a question in the live chat here from Famous Music. He's asking, "What's your opinion experience with high frequency strength training for hybrid athletes? Not Bulgarian level madness, but say a couple of sets a day of core lifts."

Alec Blenis32:06

Yeah. From a physiological perspective, I like it and I've done quite a lot of that myself. I think distributing your lifting stress a little bit more evenly across the week is nice because you don't have these big spikes in fatigue or soreness or anything like that.

It takes kind of idiot proofs to program a little bit where you're no longer worried about okay where do I place this session relative to this session to minimize fatigue because you get just kind of this background level of fatigue from kind of spreading the stress so evenly. I've done it myself where I just kind of do a high frequency lower upper split just alternating a little bit of lower and upper every single day. I thought it worked great from that physiological perspective.

The thing I worry about and I've struggled with it a little bit myself is really just the psychological and logistical side of always having two workouts in a day every day for long stretches of time. Where for me consolidating some of that work a little bit more so I have days where I don't have to go to the gym. I can just knock out a run in the morning and then relax. That is often really refreshing from a psychological standpoint. So keep that in mind.

I think it can definitely work. I did it for a couple years pretty consistently myself. Just be aware of managing psychological training load because I think that element of managing someone's program is consistently underrated.

James de Lacey33:35

Nice. I have a one here from Hector Wang Physio. I believe he follows us both. What's your general conditioning advice for fighters? I think we touched on that, but we'll go with it again.

Alec Blenis33:48

Yeah. I mean, we didn't really get into a ton of specifics. I'd say a lot of qualities and underlying physiology matters to varying degrees. We talked about VO2 max. I think it matters just how much depends on how much you're kind of zooming in and out. I think lactate threshold probably matters a little bit more. Some shorter, faster repeat efforts matter as well.

I think that fighters probably overestimate the actual intensity that they're getting from fighting itself. I think fighting itself, especially if you're doing a lot of sport practice, you're accumulating a lot of just kind of brute force volume at moderate to high intensities, but I don't think that you're necessarily approaching true max intensity from a metabolic standpoint the way that you think you might be. You might feel like it, but I don't think that you are.

So I'd say true max effort conditioning, all out, 10 to 30 second sprints and stuff is something I would still dose quite a bit of in a conditioning or in a fighter program. I do a fair amount of that. Some longer intervals, things where we're targeting more someone's lactate threshold, for example. So some longer intervals, I personally think that you should still do some of that. I just think the dosing looks dramatically different than it does in traditional endurance sports.

Rather than have a workout like yesterday for example I did 11 by 3 minutes at threshold with 1 minute recovery in between I think a fighter could do a workout that has similar goals. The volume would just be totally different. I think you could do the four by 3 minutes at threshold which is not a terribly difficult session but it shouldn't be.

I think you're just kind of dosing in a little bit of that quality and you should still be pretty fresh for your fighting and stuff later. But I'd probably dose in a little bit of that style kind of moderate intensity continuous or longer intervals. I would just do a little bit less honestly.

James de Lacey35:59

Dude, 100%. When you mentioned about the intensity side, people always say how hard combat sports training is and stuff, which yeah, it is hard, sparring live training is pretty tough, but then when you actually get someone to do a real sprint interval and people will say, "Oh yeah, I do sprints on a bike, whatever." And no, when you actually do one where you're not holding anything back, then you realize what max actually is and then you realize whatever you do in training is not that.

And that is what I think a lot of people miss. And that's such a potent stimulus for adaptation that it's and people I think they think that because it's so high intensity you can't do it year round you can't do it every week or whatever and games stop because it's too intense which is not one all of those are not the case but the volume's so low you can get such crazy gains out of it and yes at the time you'll feel fatigued but you won't have a lot of the residual fatigue that save.

Maybe if you're doing a 2-hour [expletive] run and like, oh yeah, it's low intensity, but man, 2-hour run that's you're going to be still feel pretty [expletive] up your legs and stuff are going to be pretty heavy for training that day or the next day versus one minute of total work on a bike as an example.

Alec Blenis37:17

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's hard to say much more than that just because I we kind of alluded to this before. Depending on how much energy and recovery resources someone is putting into their sport, the additional time and resource allocation to conditioning could be a little bit different. But yeah, I think that principle of you have to actually hit real max intensity is probably the most important part.

James de Lacey37:44

Yeah. I got a question here from Hashim training systems. I attempted to do 30 second sprint, 90 second rest on the assault bike. I only managed to sprint 21 to 22 seconds before power fell off a cliff and rested 98 seconds. Is this still good repeat sprint training?

Alec Blenis37:44

Yeah, I mean it's hard to say because with conditioning if the workout is hard, it's a valid workout. It just isn't valid for the goal of the session. There's no bad conditioning. You just maybe don't know what the workout is called or what it would be optimally used for.

Kind of going back to our previous point, I would rather someone air on the side of a little bit higher intensity and in lower volume. So if you're gassed a little bit early, I would just call the session once your peak performances are dropping off a little bit.

So, if you're hitting a given power output for 20 or whatever seconds and that's the goal of the session and you get through four of them at say I don't know 900 watts or 800 watts or whatever you get through four of those kind of close to that 900 watt target you have and then by rep five and six you're only hitting 700 watts. That's where I'd probably pull the plug on the session is when you see a significant drop off in the repeat belt performance.

But if you're, "Oh, I just maybe went out a little bit hot and I'm now doing 20 second repeats instead of 25 second repeats." That's still a very valid session. I would just be mindful of digging so deep that you're no longer accumulating the hitting the targets you want to hit across the session.

James de Lacey39:21

I've got another one for you from Instagram. Dan shed, "Any tips on post-run stretching movements while lifting later or in general?" I'm assuming running in the morning and lifting later in the day.

Alec Blenis39:34

I do think that some mobility training is valid. I think good effective mobility training for most people should be fairly high intensity and done under some load. I think some low intensity passive stuff in between bouts of higher intensity mobility work can be somewhat useful, but it's not the main thing that's going to really move the needle forward for you.

I think you could skip post-run stretching and you'd be totally fine. If you enjoy it or you enjoy the ritual element of it, knock yourself out with 5 minutes or something like that, but I'd say you're really going to make those mobility gains, especially as it relates to, I don't know if you're a fighter listening to this, trying to have good range of motion on the mats and stuff like that, you want to do that under high tension, something that's going to be a little bit more specific, whether that's loaded holds at end range, things like that, hard 30 to 60 seconds. I think that's going to do a lot more for you than just a two-minute quad stretch post run.

James de Lacey40:36

Got to make that structural change. Frank Smith is asking, "How did you adjust your water and sodium from Minnesota to Texas? Is a gallon a day still standard?"

Alec Blenis40:46

I've been having a gallon a day by 10:00 a.m.

James de Lacey40:54

Dude, it is stupid hot here.

Alec Blenis40:56

It is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I was doing some heat training in Minnesota. I was doing some sauna stuff. I put on some sweatpants and stuff like that and hit the stair master. So, I was still sweating quite a bit. But here it's absolutely disgusting. In a typical 90-minute workout late morning, I'll drink on the run and I'll still come back and weigh myself and be 5, 6 pounds down. So, it's pretty wild.

I still, despite the insane amount of sweating, I still stand by my claim that electrolyte supplementation is overrated. I would still do some, if you're going to go out and sweat several liters in a single bout, taking some electrolytes is probably a good idea, but I don't think it has to be as much as you think, especially if you're fairly heat acclimatized.

Initially, if you're coming from a cool climate and you show up in the desert and you're sweating, you're going to have more concentrated sweat when you're not acclimatized. But if you're sweating regularly, if you live in a hot climate, your sweat is going to get a little bit more dilute over time with that acclimatization, especially if you have decent aerobic fitness. So I wouldn't overdo it.

And I also, post-workout yesterday, I got a Chipotle burrito. It's 3,000 milligrams of sodium. I'm getting plenty of sodium in my diet. So, just enough to kind of survive some longer sessions is fine. And that's not terribly difficult to do. You don't have to be adding additional electrolytes by the thousand milligrams at a time, I don't think.

James de Lacey42:32

The thousand milligram packet when you wake up seems to be the one being—

Alec Blenis42:39

I think this is one from one of my followers here, badminton 816. Your opinion on zone five sprint training over other zones for combat and other sports.

James de Lacey42:51

Depends on how you define the zone. One of the reasons I'm kind of hesitant sometimes to talk about zone-based training is if I talked about zone five sprint training, five people could walk away with five different interpretations of that depending on what that really means to them, especially in the upper zones like zone 5 or zone 5 plus or whatever zone system you're using.

Are we talking heart rate and then we have to talk about heart rate lag and are the intervals actually long enough for heart rate to be valid proxy for effort? Are we doing power-based targets and then what are those power-based targets based off of and so on and so forth? Really much beyond the second lactate threshold to where zone 4 kind of starts much beyond that, I'm just kind of a straight RP guy. I'm not really going to talk about zones much beyond threshold. So I guess I'm not really sure how to answer that question further.

I mean, zone 5 is high intensity, no matter how you slice it, and we've kind of already covered that intensity piece. But I would just say, if I had to give you one piece of advice with that, I'd say with very high intensity stuff like zone 5 or 5 plus or 5B or whatever terminology you're using, I think RP is everything. Not a big fan of chasing heart rates or anything like that. I think you end up—it's kind of like trying to get to a certain heart rate doing heavy squats at that point. Your heart rate's going to go up. That's not the goal.

Alec Blenis44:28

For sure. I have another one here from John Doe. Anon definitely doesn't want to be—

James de Lacey44:35

No one's question. John Doe is already anonymous, but you have to add anonymous on the end. Avoiding burnout and maintaining momentum while dealing with the business of life. That's a deep question.

Alec Blenis44:35

That is a deep question. I mean there's so much to dive into there. I think just purely on the training side, I think having—taking a biopsychosocial BPS approach to periodization is underrated. Most of the time when we're talking about periodization, we're talking about going from general to specific and some of the things we talked about so far. But I think kind of taking that BPS lens to periodization of having phases where you're pushing a little bit more and phases where you're coasting a little bit more or just having variation in what you're focused on, having seasons where you're focused a little bit more on—I don't know, maybe running 5Ks is a hobby to you and you're a fighter—having seasons where you run a little bit more and seasons where you fight a little bit more, just having some seasonal fluctuation I think is good just for avoiding burnout so it doesn't just feel like you're doing that same, running that same exact training week again and again and again. So some variation there I think is great.

Some people I think respond really well psychologically to kind of an up down structure like build and deload structure and other people I see that being less relevant for. But if you're someone who enjoys going up for three or four weeks and then taking a lighter week off of training or with reduced training, sometimes that can be really helpful just from purely a psychological perspective.

And then last but not least, just making sure that to the best of your ability, you're finding joy outside of the gym and outside of training and outside of your sport, having things that you do purely for the love of the game. I know most of us love our sport and we love what we do and that's part of why we do it. But the better you get at something, the longer you've been doing it, the more we start to chase outcomes and become, even if we try not to, somewhat results-oriented or we kind of care about what we're getting out of it.

So, I think being intentional about scheduling other things into your life that just you have zero outcomes attached to whatsoever, whether that's music or art or a second fitness hobby of some kind where you're just not really concerned with the outcome. Just making sure that that stays part of your week. Even if you have to put it in the calendar to get it done, keeping something like that in your life, I think is important.

James de Lacey47:22

That's a great answer there. This one has no context, but Albraham is asking, "Thoughts on sandbag training repeatedly shouldering?"

Alec Blenis47:35

Thoughts on sandbag? That is tough without context.

James de Lacey47:42

Basically lifting a sand to your shoulder and down repeatedly.

Alec Blenis47:46

Man, what value can I add to that?

James de Lacey47:56

You can maybe just—if you like it, sure.

Alec Blenis48:01

From a strongman perspective, thinking about people who do a variety of odd lifts and carries and things like that. I think taking—if it's something that you want to be good at for its own sake, we'll add that context. If you just want to be good at that or you're training to be good at sandbag lifts and stuff like that, don't underestimate kind of the skill aspect of it.

It's obviously not technical in the sense that a snatch is, but I think it kind of is. It's probably more technical than you give it credit for. It's one of those things where no matter how bad your technique is, you'll probably still accomplish the lift or you can do it, but there's a lot of skill involved in doing those things very efficiently.

So, programming it more like skill work or you would think about Olympic weightlifting for example, where you're not just burning yourself out with fatigue, which be really efficient with how you go about the movement. Do 10 sets of two clusters or something like that. I would do something like that if you're trying to just get good at the skill of those sandbag lifts and then program in some other non sport skill exercises for the general side. Do some other deadlifts or cleans or Jefferson curls or something.

But then when you are practicing that sport skill, do that sport skill consistently with sport intent. So if you're training for heavy strongman lifts, always go at it with that sort of intent and stuff behind it. Hopefully that context we made up is—

James de Lacey49:35

I'm gonna ask you this question and then while you answer I'm just gonna quickly run downstairs and let the dog out. But NTY is asking please ask his thoughts on training upper body muscular endurance and the best modalities.

Alec Blenis49:48

Okay, I'll ramble on this question for a minute while James goes and lets the dogs out. Muscular endurance in general I would say I think of it as an emergent property rather than a unique or fundamental quality of a muscle fiber. We have maximal strength that is obviously very important, that's a fundamental trainable quality, and then we also have just oxidative capacity, capillary to fiber ratio, aerobic qualities, and these can be muscle fiber specific. So we can have, we can think about oxidative capacity of fast twitch muscle fibers themselves.

But when we kind of separate muscular endurance into these two halves, thinking about the maximal output and then also just the pure oxidative capacity of that muscle fiber, and seeing how those kind of come together as an emergent property that is muscular endurance, I think the majority of your muscular endurance training should be more polarized where you have some of that maximal strength and then you have stuff that's more pure kind of aerobic development where you're just trying to accumulate a lot of volume, specifically volume of work for those fast twitch muscle fibers.

And then when it comes to the thing you actually want to perform at itself. So when you think about okay I want muscular endurance for wall balls. I have Hyrox athletes who they want muscular endurance in their shoulders for wall balls. Do that thing specifically because there's a skill, there's pacing, there's strategy, there's movement efficiency and all that kind of stuff that goes into muscular endurance performance.

But just make sure that you keep awareness of what the fundamental qualities underpinning that is. And that's still going to be some maximal strength for your shoulders and then just a ton of general volume accumulation for those fast twitch fibers. That should be the basis. And then the icing on the cake is just the movement economy you get with that specific practice for the actual goal itself.

James de Lacey51:48

Nice. Nice. I know you got a call coming up soon, Alec, but where can people find and follow you and keep up with what you're doing?

Alec Blenis51:48

So, follow me on Instagram, Alec Blenis. Also been putting out a lot of long form content on YouTube as well. Same thing, Alec Blenis there. I run a Q&A similar to this in my Instagram once or twice a month. So, keep an eye on my stories for that.

And I will soon be launching a kind of group call Q&A type discussion on my template program, Sex and Zombies. So any subscribers on that will have access to kind of individualized live Q&A calls as well coming soon.

James de Lacey52:28

Perfect. I'll link all this up in the description as well when this is out. So for anyone who's interested, go follow Alec. And I appreciate you coming on.

Alec Blenis52:35

Yeah, man. Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.