Training Frequency - a natural precription

The other day I pointed to the Crossfit "World Class Fitness in 100 Words" as a good summary of where I am getting to in my thoughts about training and diet. I noted that there are some modifications that I might make but overall it is an excellent précis.

One of the things that I think is not that well developed in the Crossfit manifesto is the idea of training frequency and indeed the relationship between frequency and intensity. All their statement says is :

Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense.

Fair enough, but from my own training experience, the research and the ability to live a normal life, I think that training hard and intensely "5 or 6 days" a week is not the best solution.


This is where I think the thoughts of Art Devany are useful. One of the ideas that he proposes in his essay "Evolutionary Fitness" is that we would do well to look at optimal human activity patterns in terms of a "power law" distribution. This is a concept that he develops more in a post on his blog today:

Power Laws in Nature

The idea - in a simplified form - is that as the intensity of your exercise increases, its frequency should fall. You will get lots of rest, lots of easy low intensity movement and a few random bursts of hard, high intensity exercise.

Combine brief, but intense, work outs in a gym (the FT zone) with a wide variety of activities that mix intensity and duration randomly (mixing the IT and ST zones with brief spurts into the FT zone). Roller blading, bicycling, walking, sprinting, tennis, basketball, power walking, hitting softballs and so on are the sorts of activities that mix IT and ST fibers with intermittent FT action.

There is no hard and fast prescription to all this - it is about randomness, intermittency, a routine lack of routine. I try to put this into practice through lots of walking, daily balance exercises and a couple of gym/weight sessions a week, one interval based trying to work on VO2 max, one strength/power focussed. Always using "functional" movements - basically what Chek describes as primal patterns:

I’ve proposed that any primal man or woman who could not perform any of the primal patterns (squat, lunge, bend, push, pull, twist and gait) from a standing position, would have perished.

Read the post and the essay. Interesting and thought provoking.

Back to the Crossfit statement - "Routine is the enemy" needs to apply to intensity as well as other parameters.

Sprint vs interval training for football (soccer)

A little while I had a post up reporting a study that found that soccer was more effective for promoting fat loss than was jogging. I talked about soccer being a series of sprints / jogs / walks and speculated that it was this mix of intensities that was important - similar to Art DeVany's thoughts on the power law distribution - lots of easy stuff and a few hard bits randomly scattered in.

Here is another study looking at building training for soccer around sprints rather than long runs. In fact this study seems to indicate that repeated 40 metre sprints were more effective than longer intervals (4mins). It makes sense - football is about sprints, that do not usually go on longer than 40 metres. You don't run continually for 4 minutes in a game, so why train like that?

Sprint vs. Interval Training in Football.


The aim of this study was to compare the effects of high-intensity aerobic interval and repeated-sprint ability (RSA) training on aerobic and anaerobic physiological variables in male football players.

Forty-two participants were randomly assigned to either the interval training group (ITG, 4 x 4 min running at 90 - 95 % of HR (max); n = 21) or repeated-sprint training group (RSG, 3 x 6 maximal shuttle sprints of 40 m; n = 21).

The following outcomes were measured at baseline and after 7 weeks of training: maximum oxygen uptake, respiratory compensation point, football-specific endurance (Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test, YYIRT), 10-m sprint time, jump height and power, and RSA. Significant group x time interaction was found for YYIRT (p = 0.003) with RSG showing greater improvement (from 1917 +/- 439 to 2455 +/- 488 m) than ITG (from 1846 +/- 329 to 2077 +/- 300 m).

Similarly, a significant interaction was found in RSA mean time (p = 0.006) with only the RSG group showing an improvement after training (from 7.53 +/- 0.21 to 7.37 +/- 0.17 s). No other group x time interactions were found. Significant pre-post changes were found for absolute and relative maximum oxygen uptake and respiratory compensation point (p < 0.05). These findings suggest that the RSA training protocol used in this study can be an effective training strategy for inducing aerobic and football-specific training adaptations.

Do enough .... not too much

Vern Gambetta had an excellent post today on his blog, which I am going to reprint below, because I think it is worth a bit of reflection.

This is related to something that I was thinking about in response to some of the (anonymous) comments on the post the other day about interval training. If you can get the same effects from intervals as from long duration exercise (and that is how I read this reseach ) then why spend the extra time on the endurance training?

You need to do enough, but not more. More means more chance of injury. More means more recovery time.

Stimulus Threshold

It seems we all preach more is not better but then when it comes down to it we end doing more. As my good friend and colleague Gary Winckler so succinctly states “volume is not a biomotor quality.” I think there must be some comfort in doing more. What we need to focus on instead is the concept of the stimulus threshold. I define that as is the threshold amount of work that is the optimum amount to elicit a training response. If I can continually train at the threshold and push that threshold then I should be able to make continual adaptation. What good does it do to exceed the stimulus threshold and not be able to recover to do a subsequent session? Another way to describe this is to determine a training target in the context of the whole training plan and hit the target. I think part of the problem is that many people are unsure how to determine the target so they do more to cover themselves. We should be able to workout the stimulus thresholds for various qualities based on the training age of the athlete and their competition objectives. It is certainly not an arbitrary figure like 100 miles a week for a runner or x number of thousand yards for a swimmer; rather it is the actual breakdown and composition of the sessions with a distribution among the performance factors in the context of the training plan. Certainly it is necessary to overload, but remember that it is possible to overload by manipulating volume, intensity and density. Manipulating the means of overload will insure a positive adaptive response.


Perhaps another way to express this concept is to seek optimum training loads rather than maximum training loads.

What do you think?

Exercise for weight loss doesn't work?

There has been a bit of a debate recently on some blogs prompted by some comments within Gary Taubes new book: Good Calories, Bad Calories. The book is an excellent survey of the scientific research regarding diet and fat loss. One of the things he looks at is how the studies show that exercise is pretty ineffective for making people lose weight. exercising to stay healthy is one thing, but exercising to lose weight is usually doomed to failure.

This is another argument that seems somewhat heretical but Rob Wolf - a very good strength & conditioning coach (and former research biochemist - so he knows his science) - pointed out in a recent blog post that in his experience of training people over a number of years it is only when people adopt a fairly low carb diet that they make a significant change to their body composition.

Our nutritional recommendations are focused at insulin control. You could also say that our nutritional recommendations are what we are designed to eat and thrive on…but that sounds all hoity-toity. I wish soooo much that simply crushing people during a workout would solve the fat and body comp problem however, it simply does not. There are 168hrss in the week. We can crush folks for 3 of those hours and then they can destroy themselves with bad food choices for the remaining 165hrs. From what we see in the literature and day to day experience, we could exercise people morning, noon and night and if the food composition is poor they will pack in enough insulin spiking food to maintain or even regress. It’s a bummer, but it’s true.

This was also discussed a bit on Art DeVany's blog, although he concludes by saying that the food/activity set cannot be differentiated too easily:

Think of what happens to a hunter-gatherer when they leave the traditional life and go to the city. Both their activity and their diets change. They quickly become diabetic or pre-diabetic, whether they are Australian aboriginals or Eskimo. In the bush or wild their diets differ dramatically, though their activities are equally demanding. Yet, they share the same fate when they leave the bush for the city. They exchanged their evolutionarily adapted way of life for something very different. And, both suffer similarly. When they go back into the bush or tundra, they recover their health and strength. Which is the more important change? Their food or their activity? There is no answer because they are intertwined in metabolic networks and gene interactions that are far too complex to separate or assign degrees of "importance" to.

Anyway, I do not want only to be pointing to other blogs. I thought that this news story supported Taubes and Wolf:

There is no "one size fits all" when it comes to weight loss through exercise, says Queensland University of Technology behavioural scientist Neil King.

Dr Neil King, from QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, is the lead author of a study conducted in collaboration with the University of Leeds in the UK, which has been published in the latest edition of the International Journal of Obesity.

"When it comes to losing weight, a lot of people assume if you lose less than the predicted weight then you aren't exercising enough, and that is why you aren't getting the desired results," Dr King said.

"This study is the first evidence-based study that shows despite people doing the same amount of supervised exercise people lose different amounts of weight."

The study, which focused on 35 overweight and obese people from the UK, sought to identify and characterise the variability in exercise-induced weight loss.

Participants undertook a 12-week supervised exercise program that was individually tailored to expend 500 calories per session. During this time their weight loss and behavioural outcomes were monitored.

Dr King said the study found the role of exercise as an effective weight management method could be undermined by "compensatory responses" such as a person's increased hunger and food intake as a result of their increased energy expenditure.

"People, who we refer to as compensators, are those who compensate for the increase in exercise-induced energy expenditure, by adjusting their food intake" he said.

"For some people this might be in responses to an automatic biological drive, whereas for others it might be a deliberate reward-based increase."

Dr King said what this study showed was that some individuals were predisposed to compensatory responses, rendering them resistant to the theoretical weight loss benefits of exercise.

"The individual variability here demonstrates the need to treat people as individuals," he said.

"It also highlights the importance of determining the mechanisms that may explain this variability, such as how to treat the more resistant compensatory person to improve their weight management outcomes.

"Those resistant to exercise might be better suited to weight management strategies which include controlled dietary intake, in addition to exercise."

Dr King said the novelty and therefore the strength of this study, was that the exercise was supervised.

"Therefore, unlike unsupervised exercise interventions, any variability in weight loss cannot be explained by differences in exercise compliance," he said.

There is another study here by the same scientists that says basically the same thing: some individuals will be predisposed to compensatory responses that render them resistant to the weight loss benefits theoretically associated with an exercise-induced increase in energy expenditure.

Taubes, Wolf and DeVany of course would tell us that the key issue that King needs to take account of is insulin control....which means a lower carb diet or some fasting.

Soccer burns more fat than jogging....

I have put up a few posts about the benefits of interval training - short intense intervals of work separated by rest periods. (for example here, here and here)

I've also mentioned some problems with respect to the standard prescription for aerobic exercise of long slow endurance type training / "cardio". (here and here)


The research below illustrates this idea and also highlights some issues that Art DeVany has written about in his blog and research on what he calls Evolutionary Fitness, particularly around the "power law" distribution, an example of which is below.




You have frequency on the vertical axis and intensity on the horizontal axis. So In any time period you have a high frequency of low intensity activity and a low frequency of high intensity activity. So maybe lots of easy walking and jogging, plus a few hard and intense sprints/jumps/dives or whatever.

He explains it thus: The power law shown here is the signature of nature's strategy of organization and one humans followed for millenia. It is one I follow today. Note the frequency versus intensity scaling and the lack of a central tendancy. The mean is not a good indicator of the typical activity, in fact the mode is over at the far left where languid ease is the rule. The variance is infinite, which is the same thing as saying it does not exist. Constant variation but within a pattern of constained novelty is the human condition until very recently.

Another writer I like is Clarence Bass. He arrived at a similar position "My own aerobics program is a combination of high and low intensity. I call this "a barbell aerobics strategy" in my new book Challenge Yourself, published a few days ago as I write this (late May 1999). In Challenge Yourself, I explain that "one hard aerobics session [per week] is enough -- if combined with frequent walks or some similar activity." I completely eliminate the moderate-intensity aerobics that most people do. This high/low or "barbell" aerobics strategy works wonderfully well, especially for someone who also trains hard with weights. See my new book for complete details."


Many sports end up with this power law distribution...which is actually the natural pattern for human activity. Think of "soccer" (sorry but I find "soccer" an alien concept; it seems like the only country in the world that calls football "soccer" is the USA). For much of the match a player will be stood still or walking or jogging - they are the high frequency activities, but they are low intensity. However you also get occasional hard sprints or jumps or tackles - low frequency but high intensity.

Which brings us....finally to this study! The researchers examined the effect of training on a football team, comparing their performance to a group who were just jogging. The sport - the power law application with high intensity work and lots of low intensity stuff too - led to improvements in insulin sensitivity, balance, muscle mass and body composition.

Now I'm not saying that everyone should go out and join a football team, but the principles are there - exercise and exercise with a good mix of intensities - lots of easy stuff and few hard, intense bits thrown in too. Plus something to test your balance and agility, which gym based work often omits.



Soccer burns more fat than jogging
(It isn't clear where this research is being published, so I've just put the press release below)


The experiment Sports scientist Peter Krustrup and his colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, the Copenhagen University Hospital and Bispebjerg Hospital have followed a soccer team consisting of 14 untrained men aged 20 to 40 years.

For a period of 3 months, the players have been subjected to a number of tests such as fitness ratings, total mass of muscles, percentage of fat, blood pressure, insulin sensitivity and balance.

Surprising results - 2-3 weekly rounds of soccer practise, of the duration of app. 1 hour, released massive health and training benefits. Their percentage of fat went down, the total mass of muscle went up, their blood pressure fell and their fitness ratings improved significantly. Everything we tested improved, says Peter Krustrup.

In parallel with the soccer-experiment, the research group did the same tests on a group of joggers as well as on a passive control group. The joggers also trained 2-3 times a week, but their efforts showed smaller effect than that of the soccer players.

- It is healthy to run long distances in a moderate speed, but the results show that soccer practise is better in a number of ways. The improvement in fitness rating and the increase in total muscle mass were greater in the soccer players, and during the last 8 weeks of the experiment, only the soccer-players showed any improvement, Peter Krustrup says.

After 12 weeks, the soccer players had lost 3.5 kilos of fat and gained more than 2 kilos of extra muscle mass, whereas the joggers had lost 2 kilos of fat and showed no change in total muscle mass. Both groups showed significant improvements in blood pressure, insulin sensitivity and balance.

The sports scientist believes that it is the shifts between walking, running and sprinting that causes the soccer players to experience better health improvements.

- I think that is part of the secret. Soccer is an all-round form of practise because it both keeps the pulse up and has many high-intensity actions. When you sprint, jump and tackle your opponents, you use all the fibres in your muscles. When you jog at a moderate pace, you only use the slow fibres, says Peter Krustrup.

Fun takes focus from pain During the process, the participants were asked how hard the practise was, and the feedback makes Peter Krustrup smile. The soccer players expressed that they did not find the practise particularly hard. The joggers always said the opposite.

- The joggers always found it hard. Even though they moved at the same average speed as the soccer-players, it was harder on them. I think it is owed to the fact that when you jog you focus on yourself. You notice the efforts and the breathlessness. And then you start to feel a little sorry for your self, says Peter Krustrup and continues:

- When you play soccer, you push those thoughts aside. The players are caught up in the game and they don’t notice that their hearts are pounding. It is fun, and the team needs all players to contribute and so they forget that it is hard. That is also happends to be very good exercise is an additional bonus.

International fight against lifestyle related diseases The results have encouraged the researchers to continue the research from a physiological angle. The team has made arrangements of cooperation with universities in Rome, Brussel and Liverpool, and they are applying for funding through the EU, UEFA and FIFA.

Peter Krustrup sees large perspectives in soccer at exercise level in a time of lifestyle-related diseases. When a pleasureable and popular team-sport such as soccer turns out to be so beneficiary, it would make sense to consider that sport in the national and international efforts to prevent and treat lifestyle-related diseases.

- In the fight against obesity and inactivity, soccer seems to be an obvious alternative to jogging and fitness. Soccer is a popular sport in large parts of the population, and experience tells us that there are good chances of growing a permanent affiliation with a sport when it is both fun and combined you’re your social life, says Krustrup and continues:

- It really doesn’t take a lot. A lawn, two goalposts and a ball is all you need to begin a health-promoting training programme for 22 people.

The international cooperation will continue research in soccer at exercise level for various age groups. The researchers also consider examining other sports such as handball, volleyball and basketball.

Facts about the project: For a period of 12 weeks, a group of soccer players and joggers have been active for for one hour 2-3 times a week. The participants have been continuingly subjected to tests: fitness rating, percentage of bodyfat, total mass of muscles, cholesterol, blood pressure, insulin sensitivity and balance.