Conditioning Research

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 w...

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 physiologi...

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 elic...

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 t...

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...