¶ Defining Work Capacity Challenges
Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co host Rob Mauseri, and we're going to talk about work capacity in the context of powerlifting today.
So
To get this episode to work uh in the best way, we decided to change the format slightly. So I'm not going to talk about the physiology first. Um, we're actually going to kind of hash it out together the uh the problem as we see it, or more accurately as Rob sees it, and then he sends me videos to look at of people that are saying strange things. Um, but basically we're gonna try and um hash out what we see as the problem of the uh of of how work capacity is being talked about.
in the powerlifting community at the moment and why m the assumptions that underpin that uh kind of idea that uh it that it is had about work capacity are actually not correct. So Um, very quickly before we uh do jump into that, I'm just going to clarify that work capacity uh is poorly defined also in the strength and conditioning literature and also in the exercise science literature.
Um so it's not really uh kind of fair really to sort of target powerlifting communities being the people that don't understand it and everybody else does. That's not true at all. This is a kind of worldwide uh kind of problem in the sense that
Um nobody in exercise science has really uh kind of sat down and gone, at least to my knowledge, has sat down and gone, this is how work capacity should be defined. Um, typically speaking, if you were to ask an exercise scientist, they would actually have to do what I did when I was asked about it. which is literally to try and build up a definition uh from from scratch and sort of say, Well, this is what I think you mean uh but of course, generally speaking, that isn't what most people mean. So
¶ Volume Tolerance and Repeat Bout Effect
Um, Rob, let's kind of just start talking about this. Um, you've obviously seen a lot of um the parallel community using the concept um work capacity. Can you just kind of break down a little bit for us what you're seeing and how you're seeing people use that terminology?
Yeah, Chris. So I think um one of the one of the biggest things I see in regards to like improving work capacity is people trying to improve their ability to tolerate uh more volume for future training sessions. And you know, just kinda like some arbitrary amount, just kinda u using a program where they're increasing sets over time, things like that. Um, no talk about, you know, rep range, proximity to failure, or any of those things, just kind of increasing like
total volume load essentially over time as a means of increasing the amount of work that they can do overall and recover from. And that's uh I would say that's kind of the first big one.
Okay, cool. Um basically what's happening there then is we're talking about two separate things. We're talking about um the Desired outcome, which is the ability to recover from a specific number of sets, say. I mean, we can simplify it a little bit and just say
imagine we were talking about it more of a bodybuilding context'cause that's much kind of uh much more more straightforward. Imagine that we're just saying, well, you know, this person is doing this number of sets uh per workout per week. and the desired outcome is to be able to do, um, you know, two or three more sets, um, per workout per week. So instead of being doing three sets to failure three times a week, maybe the goal is to be able to do
five sets to failure three times a week. So the the ex the stated goal then is to kind of change the amount of sets that we can do. And of course that would then lead to better adaptations in the future because technically we would be doing a bigger stimulus in each workout, assuming that the recovery
in both cases was exactly the same. So essentially what people are looking at here, if we phrase our work capacity in that way, as in the ability to do a certain number of sets in a workout and recover from it by the next workout, what we're actually saying is that they're trying to change the magnitude of the repeat about effect. So in other words, we're doing uh a workout, we create a repeat about effect.
And uh ultimately uh the idea is that you can continue creating more repeated mat effects as you continue doing more and more work and essentially that leads to you being able to do a uh kind of higher number of sets per workout and still recover from it. The problem with that is that exercise science has studied the repeatable effect and also what we could casually call the multiple repeatable effect and has shown that pretty much all the effect that you're gonna get
almost all the effect you're gonna get is from workout one to workout two. So you do a workout and you kind of uh sort of uh apply calcium ions to the muscle fibers that you've just used and they then respond by various different adaptations and that underpins uh a reduction in the amount of fatigue that you get next time. You then come back to uh do the same kind of uh exercise again next time and you don't really get a subsequently uh kind of a similar reduction in post workout D.
after that workout, it just kind of you get a little bit of reduction and maybe again after the third workout you get a little bit more and after that it kinda tapers off. So there isn't really any way to do what people think they are doing. by kind of throwing more and more volume at a a kind of training session. It isn't actually going to change the recovery capacity of that person.
um to the uh type of workout, the type of exercise that they're doing. So uh fundamentally I don't think that that is a an achievable goal, at least in the exercise science literature, it's pretty clear that you can't really continue creating bigger and bigger repeatabad effects just by throwing more and more uh volume at the problem. Otherwise fatigue accumulation wouldn't really be a thing and it absolutely is a thing.
Yeah. And I've heard that rephrased as well as you know, the same thing, but people will say it as volume tolerance. And so you know you just
That's actually a much better terminology, isn't it? Because it sort of gets away from the idea of work and time and all that kind of thing. It's just
Like what is your volume tolerance? What's your workout volume tolerance? So I think that would be great actually, just irrespective of, you know, people listening to this and and disliking what I'm saying because I'm I'm I'm I'm disagreeing with them. It would be really cool if If people mean volume tolerance instead of work capacity, it'd be really cool if they would adopt that terminology because it would make it super clear that we're not talking about
you know, being able to do a certain amount of work in a certain amount of time. It literally just means can I recover from this number of sets in a workout or can I not recover from this number of sets in a workout? Uh, and that's obviously then very, very clearly tying to post workout muscle damage and recovery rates and that kind of thing. So yeah, that would be really cool if terminology would change in that direction. So volume tolerance, uh definite definite uh
Seal of approval from me on that on that on that terminology. Cool. So um let's come back to your original uh kind of explanation. So
¶ Recovery Within Sessions: Initial Concepts
You're seeing people talk about um, you know, increasing volumes to be able to do more volume in the future. So that really fits very clearly into the kind of repeat about effect uh kind of phenomenon. But uh word capacity also obviously uh has other connotations, other meanings of people using it in other ways as well. Can you kind of uh tap into that for us?
Yeah, one of the other ones is obviously recovery like within sessions. Okay. Either between um exercises for the same muscle group, sets of, you know, sets of bench, sets of squat, whatever it may be, or exercises for different muscle groups. generally just getting, you know, too fatigued within a session to have quality work by the end. Um and I've seen a lot of different programming strategies people will use to try to address that. Uh circuit training is one I've seen like barbell circuits.
I've seen limited rest periods, so just incomplete rest. So instead of doing your your three, four minutes, whatever it might be, between a heavy squat, you do something with like more moderate or even sometimes high reps, and then you just limit the rest. Things like that. And uh obviously I don't find those things very useful as a strategy to improve your ability to recover through the workout. A lot of different things I would uh manage first, you know, like rep range, proximity to failure.
Things like that before I go giving someone short and complete rest protocols and that to address that. So if you want to handle that.
Yeah, absolutely. There's actually two really cool things there. So On the one hand and and it actually depends on um how the intervention is being structured. So uh there's kind of a difference between throwing a whole bunch of, say, uh sort of uh single joint or even multi joint exercise is a particular muscle group and that's very different from kind of coming at things from a more circuit style point of view. One is going to train local muscular endurance and the other one is going to train
uh kind of cardiovascular capacity. And so they're kind of and and ultimately from um You know, maybe from the external perspective they're kind of getting you in moving in the same direction, but they're actually doing physiologically very, very different things. Um Now, as you were talking it occurred to me that many power lifters, at least um a a while back, many powerlifters
tended to set their work weights as a percentage of their uh one rep max. So they might be saying, Well, this is my kind of one rip max for my last competition or my working one rep max or whatever the uh kind of the terminology they're using. And then they might go, I'm going to use this percentage of that and there are a certain number of repetitions with that, um, in the sessions that I have planned. And obviously if we then take that as a template and assume that that's what's happening,
¶ Physiology of Local Muscular Endurance
You could then go, okay, so if I improve um my local muscular endurance, uh, which could be done with this kind of uh single joint uh kind of exercise type protocol that you described, that would then allow me to do a greater number of repetitions with the percentage of one root max than I was doing previously. Because ultimately what relative muscular endurance is doing and what local muscular endurance improvements are doing
is actually um increasing the number of reps you can do with a given percentage of one remox. I mean I can uh walk through the physiology quickly um but basically that's kind of where the end result is. Um As a result, they will actually notice exactly if they are programming in this way, they will actually notice an improvement in what they perceive to be their work capacity as a result of doing that thing.
because but if you were working with if you were working with uh reps in reserve you would not see a difference because all happened is that your actual work weig um would increase so that you had to maintain the same number of um kind of uh uh reps in reserve as you were doing previously. So ultimately uh it really depends on whether or not so uh local muscular endurance impact will depend on whether somebody is programming based on percentage of one rep max.
or whether they're programming based on reps in reserve. If they're programming based on reps in reserve, they won't actually see a benefit in terms of their their perceived or it's a perceived benefit really. They won't perceive a benefit as a result of uh kind of doing this kind of training programme.
Um but basically, yeah, I mean ultimately if you were to say to somebody, Okay, well, you know, I'm still interested despite the fact that you're telling me it doesn't really do anything uh you know if they say to me, Okay, well how do I do that? Well how you would do that would be you would target
Um you would target types of training that create a large amount of local metabolite accumulation. That's what you would do. So if you wanted to trigger an increase in local muscular endurance so that you could do more reps with the same percentage of one rep max. Um, then ultimately what you would do is you would uh find exercises like single joint
exercises, especially those with a contractor position, uh peak effort point. So if you've got an exercise that has peak effort in a contractor position or even a partial range of motion in that contractor position and you do small muscle mass exercises, if you do large muscle mass exercises, it's not going to work.
Because that's going to basically rely on the cardiovascular system and you're going to sort of send all the metabolites out into the bloodstream and and it's sort of just going to wash away. And you end up with a cardiovascular response.
Uh but if you're using small muscle mass exercises, especially those in a contracted position, you're gonna get a lot of metabolites accumulation very quickly in that particular location, and it's then gonna stimulate resistance to that set of fatigue mechanisms, and you're then gonna find you can do more reps with the same percentage of one remote max. So ultimately if people do want to go down that route. that is actually the correct way of doing it. So it's cool to see that actually
you know, with the stated or at least perceived uh kind of goal that they have, they're actually training in a way that gets them close to that. But just to be clear, it isn't actually gonna change anything as far as training stimulus is concerned. Because ultimately, you know, we kinda deal with uh rips and reserve as being the primary governing factor for, you know, how close we are to muscular failure as being the primary governing factor for many of the adaptations that we're talking about.
So um that but that actually would would get them moving in the direction of uh an improvement in work capacity in the sense that uh we're doing more reps um for the same percentage of one remote.
¶ Cardiovascular Capacity for In-Session Recovery
In terms of the cardiovascular side of it though, which is the other side, if you're like going, Well, okay, I'm I'm not gonna go down the route of doing lots of kind of um, you know, single joint exercises uh for the for the muscle group that I want to improve the muscular endurance of or the work capacity of,
I'm going to go down the route instead of uh training multiple different parts of the body all in one go and creating a really big cardiovascular effect. Um, and the idea there would be that you would increase um uh sort of your ability to recover um between sets essentially of large muscle mass exercises as we see in in powerlifting uh obviously. So
Um
This again, it's like, well, you know, does that work? Well, yeah, it does. But d does it work optimally? Well, not really. Because ultimately, if you imagine what you're kind of really doing with a a kind of a uh uh a circuit type training uh set up. On the one hand, you're um you're basically training like intervals, really. Um so essentially it's is kind of like interval training uh because you're using uh a relatively uh high intensity of uh cardiovascular uh kind of exercise.
uh and you're doing kind of a bout of work and then stopping and then doing another bout of work and then stopping and taking rests. So essentially you're you're doing interval training really. The problem is you're also I mean depending on how close to failure you're going, you're also probably going to start creating quite a lot of muscle damage by that particular protocol. And the reality is that um neither of those thing two things are actually necessary.
Because we could this is the crazy thing. When we when we talk about this, when we look at this, I'm like, why why would you do that? I mean,'cause you can literally just do cardiovascular exercises to low intensity and you get more of the benefits, you get better kind of improvement in your cardiovascular capacity and two, you don't get the negative side of the muscle damage, especially if you structure it properly. But I mean, ultimately this is just crazy because
You know, on the one hand you could say, well, you know, okay, fine. It is cardiovascular exercise and it is creating a stimulus to improve cardiovascular capacity and that is going to help me recover between sets and all of that is true. But it's a very, very long way away from actually being the best way of uh creating that.
And then you just take away from getting like any real good training in.
Yeah.
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¶ Critique of Work Capacity Training Blocks
If you I mean like again, coming back to some of the videos and uh kind of things that you sent me about this uh topic, if we look at those, what we tend to notice is that many of these uh people are programming blocks.
So they'll program an entire block of training dedicated to improving uh w uh work capacity, which we're talking about today. Um, but the problem is that That then means that during that period of time they're not working um effectively or as effectively as they could be on the main lift.
Because they're doing this block. They're doing this kind of dedicated amount of training. They're coming into the gym and they're doing all these kind of machine exercises maybe. Or some barbell exercises, uh, some machine exercises. And the idea being
Either uh w we talked about earlier, which is where they're trying to do just a ton of volume in order to be able to then tolerate um greater volume in a subsequent block, which is kinda trying to manipulate the repeat of add effect in a way that it won't be manipulated.
Or alternatively, they're trying to push this cardiovascular uh kind of or more local muscular endurance adaption, um, or which on the m local muscular endurance side only really manifests itself if you're based off percentage of one rate max in your training. If your training loads are based off Ripmaxes, you won't actually notice any change whatsoever as a result of gaining no co-muscular endurance. It will literally be completely opaque to you.
Uh whereas cardiovascular endurance side, that will actually have a benefit. You will notice that you recover more quickly from one set to the next. And that obviously then is uh or you don't get as gassed throughout a training session, you're able to just carry on doing a little bit more work towards the end of the session, which, you know, is is absolutely beneficial. Although I would note I've told this story a couple of times, I'm gonna tell it again.
when I was doing the most squatting that I've ever done. a two year period of time when I kind of ran Hepburn um and uh sort of took my squat as high as it's ever gone. And h ever will go now at this point in my life. Um the at the same kind of period of time, I was also doing a lot of road cycling. Uh lived in an area um where it was very, very popular to do that particular um uh sport.
And so I was doing a lot of road cycling and on Saturday mornings I would typically ride for anywhere between sixty and a hundred miles every single uh weekend. So my cardiovascular capacity was probably again about as good as it ever has been and will be. Um so But even so, during the hepburn routines I was doing eight sets of two rising to three, by the time I got to the end of that eight sets of two rising to three, I was lying on my back on the floor, absolutely sucking air in.
Um and I was miserable. I was really miserable. It was literally the most miserable part of my week was the last couple of sets of the headburn routine. Um I every time I switched over from eight sets of three down to eight sets of two, I used to be so happy.
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Exactly. Now of course I wouldn't touch eight sets of anything, but you know, I mean it it would be five sets probably. But um anyway, so I've told that story before, but I'm just pointing out that even with the best cardiovascular system uh in the world, if you are a a power lifter who's able to move serious amounts of weight, you're probably gonna find that you are gassed.
uh because fundamentally you've got a lot of muscle mass and it really doesn't matter how good your cardiovascular system is, it's not gonna be able to keep up. Um so you are gonna get that kind of post uh set effect, especially if you're doing, you know, ev even if you're doing just a couple of reps each time.
So uh just a w a word of kind of caution there. If you're expecting loads of cardio to have some kind of magical effect where you can do set up to set up to set with only a couple of minutes rest, it's not gonna happen. But at least I don't think it's gonna happen.
It just needs to be good enough. It's like if you're so out of shape that you can't get through an hour and a half, two hours of training, then yeah, it'll make a big difference. But if you're in decent enough shape already, yeah, like you said, just don't expect some like big huge impact and certainly don't expect some, you know, giant benefit to your max strength or your growth over time and stuff like that, it's not gonna make a giant difference.
No, I I really don't think it is. And and I think ultimate but yeah, it's absolutely worth having some cardio in your program if you don't have any, but it's not worth kind of dedicating entire block box to creating that, nor is it worth really kind of trying to push it as far as I did when I was doing crazy amounts of road cycling. But uh that was just because I was pursuing two totally separate hobbies at the same time.
¶ Conflating Three Work Capacity Meanings
Um so so yeah, okay. So where we got to then is we've got these um three separate aspects uh that are creeping into the definition of work capacity. We've got uh the original kind of the starting point which was this kind of idea that you could um
train in order to reduce the amount of calcium and related fatigue experience and therefore the amount of post workout fatigue experience and therefore the amount of volume you can do per workout. So uh you've kind of given us that volume tolerance label, which I think is way, way better. Um then secondly we've got
local muscular endurance improvements, which is kind of how I would uh probably define work capacity if I was starting at it from purely an exercise science point of view and not from a
uh kind of uh just observing how it's used in powerlifting context point of view. Uh and then uh thirdly we've got this uh cardiovascular capacity which is probably the most interesting from a kind of uh athletic or uh powerlifting point of view or strength sports point of view rather, uh essentially saying, you know, if you want to be able to recover within session, then this absolutely will work. You know, kind of you'd be able to use slightly shorter rest periods.
You should be able to find that you're not feeling as miserable by the end of the uh the session that you're doing. Um, improving cardiovascular capacity probably is gonna do that. Is that a fair kind of summary of what you're seeing in the powerlifting community at though?
Yeah, yeah, I think that sums it up pretty well.
And ultimately the problem is uh that they're blending these three things all together and assuming that they all kind of are related to each other.
Yeah, and th like you said there's no real working definition in sort of
So as I say, I'm not picking on these guys and saying, Oh, you know, you're the only people who don't know what it what it means. It's like Nobody knows what work capacity means. I mean like uh sometimes when people ask me the question I say, Well reduce it to the most absurd level and and and like tell me what you think work capacity means.
Like if I re if I reduced work capacity to the most absurd level, it's like, well, you wanna be able to do um more work in less time or you wanna be able to do more work in the same period of time or, you know, kind of whatever, or the same amount of work in less time. I mean all all of those kind of things. And people go, Yeah, that's exactly what I mean or Okay, but I can instantaneously do a lot more work in less time just by changing the rep range in the proximity to phase.
I mean I literally had this conversation with somebody the other day and I was like, if I want to do more work in less time, I just drop the weight right bel right down to below thirty percent to one minute max, so I haven't got any vascular occlusion going on. Now it's cardio. Now I can do monstrous amounts of work in really kind of very short periods of time because I just kind of work done obviously forced on the distance. I can just keep doing repetitions.
with this really light load and ultimately it doesn't create very much fatigue because I haven't got any vascular occlusion going on. And they go, Oh no, no, no, I d I don't mean that. I mean you know
more working less time but with these fixed constraints. I'm like, okay, but you've just inserted another level of detail that you didn't have and certainly doesn't exist in the definition. So I go, okay, well so you you're saying that you want to Talk about work capacity with fixed kind of loading parameters or fixed repetitions uh ranges or fixed.
uh kind of uh proximities to failure or something like that. Okay, fine. So you've you've set some parameters before you start and you want to change things in that context. Well, now you're back to the three a sets of adaptations that we've talked about, which is it's either going to be calcium i related T changes, so repeat about effect if you're talking about one workout to the next.
If you're talking about within workout, then it's got to be either be local muscular endurance changes or it's got to be cardiovascular changes. It's got to be one of those two. So but the three are different. I mean like there's I'm I noticed in one of the uh video clips that you uh sent me. Um
Yeah.
¶ Debunking Cardio-Fatigue Link
I just find it funny. I was gonna d s deluged with all these strange videos of people saying kind of weird things about work capacity. But yeah, so you sent me a video and they were talking about uh basically that um when they're trying to improve volume tolerance
When they're trying to improve this volume tolerance idea, this ability to do more work in less time sorry, the ability to recover from uh a workout and then do the same work out again a short period of time later, a couple of days later, they were actually assuming
that that was related to the within session fatigue as can as indicated s say by cardiovascular capacity. So the idea was that, you know, you would if if you were able to recover better within sessions, so like if your cardio was better So like if I can do my eight sets of two rising to three without lying on the floor at the end of the eighth or seventh or eighth set, then somehow that would mean that my post workout fatigue would also be improved.
Yeah, yeah, they're trying to tie it.
Seeing that tying together. And that's absolutely one hundred percent not true. That's absolutely not valid. The post work up D has zero to do with cardiovascular capacity. Absolutely zero. Um, now uh at some point I think I'm probably going to end up getting
um kind of argued against by some of the cardiovascular people. But um promise you that p post workout cardi post workout fatigue from a cardiovascular session is mainly gonna fall into the neuromuscular model that I've already presented, which is calcium minus
From
uh causing muscle damage. It's got absolutely got nothing to do with the autonomic nervous system or stress or anything like that. Um not that exercise is a stressor, but we can have that conversation.
Yeah, I was gonna say we can we can table that one'cause
We can do well. Yeah. Otherwise we'll be just talking forever. So yeah, but um just to kind of repeat what I'm saying here and just clarify it. Uh it's not true to say that if you reduce your within session fatigue by improving your cardiovascular capacity, that will somehow reduce your post workout fatigue. It won't. They are two one hundred percent different systems.
Um the cardiovascular system is literally on nothing to do with post workout fatigue whatsoever. Um, you are literally dealing with what's happening inside the muscle when we're talking about post workout fatigue. And the even this even the supraspinal CNFT that happens after a workout is actually caused by the muscle damage and the inflate inflammation response to that muscle damage. So it's just got absolutely nothing to do with the autonomic nervous.
Uh again, with the proviso that if you talk about stress, you can start to create problems for the inflammatory process, but that is a level of detail that we don't need to talk about right now.
Yeah. Otherwise you'd have a you have a marathoner who can just recover from almost anything through the week. It does not happen.
Absolutely doesn't happen. So um yeah. So okay, cool. So hopefully that is starting to take shape now. Is there anything else that you've seen um in the uh kind of uh social media uh kind of um at the moment that you're you're kind of well we haven't talked about regarding boat capacity.
¶ Practical Cardio for Powerlifters
Yeah, um one more very, very odd one. The idea that doing some insane amount of like warmups like very high rep um muscle specific warm-ups is gonna have some magical benefit like five sets of twenty-five on you know a leg curl and a leg extension and things like that um before your main lift. Obviously like you were saying, that would actually work pretty well to improve
local, you know, relative muscular endurance, but terms of like recovering within the session, not gonna do anything. In terms of like improving your ability to recover within the week, obviously it's not doing anything. And do you really need to get better at doing sets of twenty-five to be effective at powerlifting training. Um, I would argue not. I think people tend to think there's some big benefit to the ability to recover from your sets of like three to five when you do these things.
And, you know, three to five isn't stimulating any improvement in fatigue resistance. And you don't need to have fatigue resistance for three to five reps. Like it just doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, and wow, just doing that as part of a warm-up, that makes absolutely no sense. I mean, really, the number one rule of doing a warm-up is don't get fatigued. I mean, that absolutely is the number one rule is don't get fatigued. So yeah, don't do that.
Stems from definitely stems from the idea that like light loads were not fatiguing and high reps were just giving you blood flow and these things that'll, you know, help your joints and yada yada yada. Obviously. super high reps and the light loads are not actually great for tendons in that anyway.
And just
Not needed in you know, in my opinion.
Th yeah, there's so much wrong there, isn't there? I mean yeah, but basically, um so just to kind of um kind of clarify what we're saying here, um the Kind of multiple sets of high rep uh sort of strength training will improve local muscular endurance, but if you want to do that, put it at the end of the workout. Uh I mean and again, I'm not recommending that we do do that because I don't think it helps powerlifting performance.
Um, but if somebody wants to do uh that kind of training, definitely don't do it as part of the walnut. Do it as part of the uh kind of post main lift part of the workout. Uh I mean it's like
Not a useful one. I really love my single reps. They're great. You know, they take no time. If I did five sets of 25 on like five different exercises before my main lifts, I mean I'd be in the gym for four hours. I would hate it.
And your lifts would suffer so, so badly. So you'd end up with lots of accumulated fatigue, you'd be um, yeah, failing to create the adaptations that you want. It would just not really be very logical. So yeah. So uh definitely not a good idea to put those kind of things into a woman. But again, um If people want to create the local muscular neurons improvement effect, they can do it by putting it at the end. But again, even then I'd be like, Why are you doing this? It makes no sense.
Just go for a job.
Well that's it. I mean so
Yeah.
In terms of powerlifters that you're working with, um, you know, if they need to put some cardio into their uh kind of uh routines, how I mean, how very, very briefly, how are you structuring that? Just something practical to finish on today.
Yeah, just um I mean just building like a good base of like long, slow cardio work. If you if you wanna go for a run or something like that, totally fine as long as it's not you don't find it too stressful on joints are hard to recover from. Um, I tend to prefer, you know, like an elliptical, uh, stationary bike with all the limbs working, things like that.
Uh if you want to do it after workout, that's when I do it. Some people do not love that feeling right after training hard and that's fine and then, you know, you can place it on your off day whenever it's uh convenient. And just, you know, you don't have to do a ton. I mean I do myself, maybe. on average at the moment, like twenty, thirty minutes of like low intensity cardio uh like three times a week at the moment.
and, you know, I've absolutely no trouble with recovering within a session and anything like that. So, you know, if you want to start there and I always recommend for for lifters, you start with an amount of cardio. see if it impacts anything, if you can recover from it, you know, whatnot. And then just roll with that if you want to taper it up slightly if you feel like you need more. You know.
Go up slowly. If you notice any negative effect, pull back a little bit and then, you know, just keep it there and, you know, just go a little harder each time. I mean, it's not not very complicated with cardio.
No, not at all. And I would just add to that and say that um if you're putting ten or fifteen minutes in three times a week and you do notice a negative effect, then you probably have a bigger problem than you thought. So so yeah, ten ten to fifteen minutes two times a week should be absolutely uh fine to and shouldn't and obviously unless this is running that people are not familiar with.
And they haven't done much running before, especially if it's on a hard surface. But certainly if it's elliptical or bike or something like that, it's added in. Uh three times ten uh minutes, three times fifteen minutes should be absolutely not even noticeable from a recovery point of view. Um, I would probably again kinda cap it around the forty five minute mark. I think uh pushing higher than that and you're kind of starting to turn yourself into an endurance athlete, really.
Cool. Um I think that's been uh a really useful uh kind of uh uh discussion of that uh idea. Um hopefully people have also other people have found it useful. Um You know, and that was kind of a different uh format for us'cause normally we kind of start with me uh talking about physiology for ages. But maybe they will do this one again in the future if it if it kinda works well.
So cool. So uh thank you to everyone for listening to us. We will be back with another episode next week talking about something completely different.