Transcript
0:00 Would you like a sciencebacked way to increase your V2 max by 44%. Yes, 44%. Well, I'm going to tell you the study that did that. Now, to put that into comparison, consider the other famed workouts that we go to that are researchbacked. Tobata sprints, guess what? Only increase V2 max by 14% in novices in six weeks or recreational athletes. The Norwegian 4x4 hyped by so many influencers. Guess what? Only between 10 and 13% increase in eight weeks of training. This study increased V2 max in noviceses by 44 freaking%.
0:46 Okay, it took people who didn't train really and some of them got V2 maxes from all the way up above 60 to high 60s which is in the sub elite category. in just 10 weeks. How in the world did this happen? Well, let's look at the miracle training that is evidence-based. All right, so this was a study by Hixon and Hollyy in 1977. We're going to the dawn of exercise science. And those results are true. I mean, the crazy thing is they tested V2 max every single week and it went up on average every single week. Now, there are some individual variations where you saw see some people plateau for a week or two, but then they'd keep getting that boost all the way through the 10 freaking weeks. It was just like this lineer increase of B2 max. Nuts. And for the skeptics, endurance performance went up with it. So, it wasn't just theoretical V2 max increases, endurance performance improves as well. How in the world did they did this? Why isn't everybody doing this evident space training play program? Simple.
2:02 It's crazy as hell. Listen to this program, okay? Six days a week, you are training and you alternate between running 40 minutes as fast as possible. Now, in other research, they noted that people got up to near max heart rate at the end of this 40 minutes, signifying they're going as fast as possible. Okay, you did that three days a week. In between those essentially 40 minute time trials, you had a cycling workout where you went six by five minutes at V2 max with 2 minutes active recovery.
2:47 You did that the other three days a week. So, Monday, 40 minutes as fast as possible. Tuesday, bike intervals. Wednesday, 40 minutes as fast as possible. Thursday, bike intervals. You get the idea. There were no easy training, no easy days. It's just 40 minutes of hell every day. And this is where we get to the interesting part. All of the increases in performance and physiology are true. But at the end of the study, the researchers noted, "Oh my gosh, V2 max is still going up in these people. It hasn't plateaued. Let's keep this thing going."
3:28 So they asked the participants. Unfortunately, I'm quoting from the paper. Unfortunately, they almost all unanimously refused for the reason that they found exercise of this frequency and intensity too tiring and too timeconsuming. A number said they had wanted to drop out of the study but had continued out of a sense of responsibility and because they knew the study was scheduled to last only 10 weeks. Only one subject trained for additional 3 weeks. God blessed the one guy who tried. You made it three more weeks and that's it. And here's the point. You should not go copy this training program. Okay? Don't do it. I'm not saying this. Don't get seduced by 44% increase. Like, go do this. The point of this video is this. Is often when we look at research or we hear people say, "Hey, I've got this evidencebased training program. Here's the study on Tabata Sprints. Here's the study on Norwegian 4x4. Here's the study on balot 3015 or 3030. Whatever the workout is, you hear this all the time in podcast health influence world. They say it's researchbacked. It's the best way to increase V2 max. It's the best way to increase these parameters.
4:47 The study, the problem is this. Nearly every training study is a shortterm intervention, meaning they last six weeks, 8 weeks, 10 weeks. If you're lucky, maybe sometimes you get 12 weeks beyond that. Very seldom, very few. Why? Because it's the reality of academic research. Who do you study in these training studies? Often it's collegeage students, many of who are in the exercise science programs that they're a part of. And what do you have? You have one semester to organize, get it all set up, get it going, do the training study, do all the testing afterwards. So, what do you get? You get a shortterm study. Also, if you stretch it out too long, you don't get compliance.
5:39 What we know from this Hixon study and a number of others, especially others that have looked at trying to simulate overtraining and find it's surprisingly hard to simulate overtraining in the lab in a short period of time. We can survive crazy for a short period. Our body is more robust. Our physiology is more robust. We tend to think that, oh no, if we just go over the edge a little bit, we're going to drop into overtraining. That's not what the research shows. It's not what the real world shows. Overtraining takes a long time to manifest. Okay, long time. Now, can you see performance dips in a shorter period of time?
6:25 Absolutely. Can you see injuries in a shorter period of time? Absolutely. But interesting, in this study, there was only one person who reported an injury, I believe, and it was some Achilles pain, and they were back at it after after a week of not being in it, if I remember correctly. The point is, the short-term research fools us, and it's not just this classic study, it's also the Norwegian 4x4, the Tabata sprints, the any every everything else. It fools us for additional reasons besides you can survive crazy stuff.
7:03 Intensity drivers, the intensity of training tends to drive faster adaptations. Okay, we have research on this. We also have Arthur Littyard who noted this half a century ago, maybe even longer than that, actually longer than that, who said, "Hey, you know what? when we sharpen up, we don't need to sharpen up for that long because we can get most of the bang for our buck in about six weeks. Okay? Now, that period of time is going to differ for everyone and it's not a rule or a law, so don't fall towards it. But what he noticed was, hey, the aerobic stuff, the easy stuff, the threshold work, all of that takes a much longer time to kind of accumulate and build. And sharpening doesn't to get those benefits. we don't have to spend as much time, okay, during a period of training. You can see this with some of the adaptations from our anorobic enzymes and other things and buffering capacity is we can get a good amount, maybe not all the way there, but a good amount in a short period of time. So what that leaves us is when we run studies that compare really intense training to more civilized normal training, the really intense training often makes it seem like it's better because it's driving adaptations faster because intensity is one of the most potent stimulants in the short term especially of adaptation.
8:37 So what happens is when we only look at short-term studies, the crazy does really well. This is why allout Tobata sprints look really good for 6 weeks. This is why doing three to four sessions of 4x4 minutes hard at V2 max looks really good over eight weeks. The problem is if we stretch things out, which is seldom done, but we can see it in high school training, college training, professional training. we stretch things out, the adaptations start to wayne. We start to plateau. We start to get some of the overtraining, overreaching, and then overtraining effects.
9:21 And in the real world, what we're after is not training that we can do for 8 weeks or 10 weeks or even 12 weeks, but training that we can do for months and years for a long period of time. The other thing that often fools us when we look at this research is it's often on noviceses that adapt to anything. And guess what? If you've never done much at all, intensity is a really good stimulus or gets a huge boost in B2 max and other things. Partly physiological, partly because you've never increased your heart rate max to that point. you've never recruited many muscle fibers before, ever. And we know that muscle fiber recruitment is tied to V2 max as well. The more muscle fibers recruit, the more oxygen man increases. So what happens is you throw a lot of intensity, your body, body and brain are like, "Oh crap, we got to recruit all these things." Like bring it online and you get a big boost. Okay?
10:22 Again, it fools us. The novice fools us into thinking this is the gold. So what? When it comes to training research, I'm very very cautious on studies that are done comparing workouts. Why? Because of everything I just outlined. It's 6 to 10 weeks. You can't learn much. Honestly, it's also often contrived because in research you have to constrain things.
10:53 So you often have to match the training program. So what often happens is you compare a really highintensity training program to a control group which is essentially go keep doing what you're already doing which is jogging around for whatever 30 40 minutes. Okay. Other research they control they compare moderate easy training but they they match it to energy output or caloric expenditure often. And what's the point of easy training that you can accumulate more volume of it than highintensity stuff? So once again, it fools you even if we were to compare them directly. And the last thing I'll say is if we look at it, okay, training is often not just I'm trying to do X workout three to four times a week compared to another workout done three to four times a week. It's how the pieces match up. This is why one of my favorite studies, I covered it in the science of running. What they did is they took people and they did interval training essentially predominantly for eight weeks I think it was and then switched them to endurance training predominantly for 8 weeks and then they had another group do the opposite. And what they found is the adaptations of interval training were more when it was preceded by a large base of endurance training. Hello Arthur Lyard or going back to Pavo Narmy base allows you to build the foundation. Interval training allows you to get some of the spices or finishing touches. Research showed it.
12:28 So the point being is the interaction matters a lot. So what the point of this video is not to give you the magic training program. is not to tell you to do this 10 weeks of crazy insane crap. It's to say that we can handle really crazy stuff for a short period of time. Some people might get injured happens, but we can handle crazy stuff sometimes for longer than we think. If we look back to the training of the 1940s and 50s and 60s, there are people who handled insane training for months, if not years before falling apart. Jim Ryan, a perfect example of that. Go look at his high school or or college training. Some of it's the craziest stuff you've ever heard. He was world record holder. 800 mile. Did it did it all. Okay. But then he went through this period of overtraining because he was training like crazy for a while and he was young and he could handle it because we can do crazy stuff when we're young.
13:32 But eventually it catches up. What training research is really good for is telling us mechanisms and help fine-tuning the workouts that we do by explaining the physiology, the lactate levels, the muscle fiber recruitment, what's going on maybe in the signaling pathways. That is good information, but it's often fine-tuning. The other thing that works really well when we look at research is what I'd call, you know, evaluating more natural experiments of what occurs in training. So tracking high school, college or professional athletes, seeing what happens in their training while measuring some factors and saying, "Okay, let's explain why they do what they do."
14:19 Steven Syler's work is brilliant in this area. He came along during the era of heavy interval training and noticed like, hey, wait a minute. All these skiers, runners were doing a heck of a lot of easy work as well. Like, why are they doing this? He explained why. I love research. I love science. I'm a science nerd at heart. That's my background. That's what my book, The Science of Running, is a ode to nerding out on research.
14:45 But that book is also an ode to coaching. And I think when it comes to research applied to the real world and often amateur or noviceses or even sub elite runners, we make the mistake of looking for validated workouts instead of seeing the limitations of that approach and looking at what research can actually tell us and instead going towards the history of training both at the professional level and the high school level or amateur level and seeing how those things changed. I've covered this in the past in my history of training video. But we could also look at this not at the professional level, but see what popular coaching books were out there that guided people in training. Because guess what? Before the internet, you had to.
15:39 And if you were amateur or novice or high school coach, didn't know much better, what'd you do? You picked up the latest coaching book to inform your training. And maybe I'll do this at some point, but if you look at the tracking of the popular coaching books, you can see how even amateur training evolved. And then compare that with looking at how kind of amateur performances, whether we're looking at Boston Marathon qualifiers and other things like that, how that shifts and changes over the years.
16:11 look to history and how training has evolved to understand which direction we need to go in training and how to put the pieces together. The research helps explain the details, the mechanisms, helps us fine-tune. So there you go. Next time you hear some podcaster or health influencer, say Norwegian 4x4, Tobata, Bot 3030, whatever other crazy workouts you've done, remember the Hixon 1977 study. You can do crazy stuff. And one caveat, I'm not saying that 4x4 minutes is bad or Tabata is necessarily bad.
16:50 Although I think Tabata as originally constructed is a worse workout than the 4x4 minutes. What I am telling you is that often these workouts the way they were done in the research is not the best way that they should be done. Okay. Okay. For long-term success and if you manipulated those workouts and added some variables, you probably have even more success in long-term adaptation. So there you go. A little primer on what we can listen to for the research and training and what we shouldn't. Hopefully that helps you. If it does, like, subscribe, share, all those good things. We're here for a nononsense, research informed, coachinformed, real world informed look at training and performance and endurance performance and running. And that's what I'm all about. So, if you enjoy that, jump on board. Let's go.