Low versus high heart rate conditioning for fitness. Which is best?

You want to improve your cardiovascular fitness.  What approach will you take?  Aerobics classes, such as spin and pump, are one option.  These classes combine low intensity movement with high heart rate.  Another option is cross conditioning, e.g. CrossFit or F45, which combines high intensity movement with high heart rate.  A final option might be to go for a run or to cycle.  Observe anyone running or cycling and you're very likely to also observe someone working hard; exercising with a high heart rate. 

There may be more than one way to get fit but the common denominator appears to be that improvements in fitness are associated with exercising with a high heart rate.  If I want to get fitter, I need to work hard.  The harder I work, the greater the outcome.  As one goes up, so does the other.  Is this correct?  No, it's not.

The human body has two energy systems for exercise or activity: an aerobic or low power system, and an anaerobic or high power system.  The aerobic system powers us more or less all of the time.  The high power system does not kick in until muscle work approaches a peak.  It's only good for a few seconds up to about one minute.  The body draws on the aerobic system for work below maximum and when muscles are working at peak.  The aerobic system is used to replace the fuel used during anaerobic and aerobic work.  We experience this as high breathing rates during and after exercise.  Where fitness is concerned, regardless of context, the aerobic or low power system is paramount.

Returning to our question: which training approach is best, the question we need to ask and answer is this: what is the strongest signal to expand the aerobic system?  The aerobic system works at every intensity level but are they all equal where outcomes are concerned?  The answer to this question is that there is a heart rate band or zone that produces the strongest signal for the aerobic system to expand and it may surprise to know that it's not very high: 60-70% of max heart rate.  In this heart rate zone, your breathing rate is often not elevated much above normal and it is possible to chat with someone.  That's why the advice given to endurance athletes is to work at levels that would allow you to talk.  

Low heart rate training is not the only level of work endurance athletes need to complete but it should be most of it - about 80% of total training load or volume.  Aerobic fitness is also not the only kind of capacity for work needed for exercise.  Strengthening muscles, for example, is also useful!  However, if fitness or endurance are your primary goals then you need to know how to effectively perform and distribute work to gain the best outcome.  The most common mistake in endurance training and exercise for fitness is believing that the harder I work, the greater the outcomes. 

Walking is a profound human activity

I wrote a post a few weeks back about walking in which I downplayed the transformational properties of walking.  I am ‘walking’ that back a little today.  Walking is a profound activity for humans; probably for all quadrupeds and bipeds.  Walking is human design at its most obvious.

I recently watched a Netflix documentary about a Mexican woman: Lorena Ramirez.  Ramirez is a native Raramuri Mexican.  She lives with her family in the high canyons of Chihuahua, many miles from their nearest neighbours.  The Raramuri or Tarahumara are famous for their capacity as long distance runners.  Running is how the Raramuri move between communities.  

Ramirez loves to run but running is not at the beginning of her story.  Like any individual who lives a subsistence life, Ramirez's life is made of walking.  For the Raramuri, like their more storied counterparts, the Africans of the Rift Valley, walking is a constant.  There is no data that I can find for this - it would make an illuminating research topic - but my educated guess is that subsistence farmers like the Raramuri would accumulate tens of thousands of steps in an average day.  Moreover, Raramuri children would rise to a daily step count far exceeding that of an adult in a modern Western nation very early in life.

Lorena Ramirez lives in a valley or canyon and her walking (and running) is consequently highly varied.  She is strong and balanced.  There is an obvious rhythm to her movement.  When she runs, it is an extension of her walking gait.  Ramirez is no slouch over half and full-marathon distances but she comes into her own for distances above 60 miles or 100 kilometers.  At these distances, running gait is not concerned with power but with rhythm and balance.  Every system in the body is in harmony and for Ramirez this comes naturally because she has a foundation of millions of walking steps with which metabolic and biomechanical balance was built.  

Herein lies the secret.  As we raise power - increase the rate of work - our bodies must 'know' how to locate balance or harmony to properly harness energy.  Without balance across and within systems, one or more of them will overwork and we experience that as fatigue and discomfort.  It was while watching Ramirez that I saw this.  She holds no expectation of herself when running.  She simply seeks harmony within the act and when it arrives, as it usually does, she is then able to accelerate if that is her wish or stay the course.
There are compelling lessons for all of us through the example of individuals like Lorena Ramirez:

• walking is a profound functional and health platform for the human body
• the more walking we do, the stronger and more adaptable our bodies become
• first seek balance or harmony - physiological and psychological - and then raise power
• moving back down in the gears, to re-establish harmony, is a sensible choice and solution.  Ramirez walks when it is sensible to do so
• harmony reduces wear on the body and 'spends' energy far more effectively and efficiently
• low intensity cardio is the most important training zone with which to build performance
• high volume supercedes and must precede speed and power for mid and long distance runners
• learn to listen to your bodies messages.  Walk-jogging is not weakness, in the moment it is exactly what your body is instructing you to do

Back strengthening

Strong backs are healthy backs.  Too much sitting and insufficient activity causes backs to weaken and become grumpy.  It is also the basis for common injuries and conditions, such as bulging discs.  Consult your physician and safely strengthen the soft tissues of your back - core/ torso stabilisers.
Capacity in these muscles builds slowly (months is needed) so commit to a strategy for life.

Back strengthening routine Nov 2019

To abuse or not abuse?

This is an all to common tale of a talented young athlete abused by her coach and sporting program.  It's easy enough at this distance to see this behaviour as the abuse it was, but how many parents (of young athletes) buy in to the justifications of charismatic and reputationally credible coaches?  How many are guilty of supporting lesser crimes of the same basic variety?  Just as sideline abuse is common, so are the crimes of poor judgement by parents and self-service by coaches. 
Is all this necessary?  Can it ever be justified to behave this way with a young athlete who dreams of excellence and a career in elite sport?  No, and for one simple reason: truths, whatever they may be, must be discovered for oneself.  Any idea, however well supported by experience or science, is a blunt tool until is it shaped and honed by the individual in the context of who they are.  Real meaning cannot be generated from the outside but from within.  Every individual must own their choices in order to understand them.
A coach, or a parent for that matter, may present an idea and join an athlete along a pathway of discovery and expression but, after a fashion, it is the athlete who must decide which tools to gather and which paths to walk.  Any other kind of leadership is simply a form of self-service; an example of the coach or of the parent satisfying their own wants and needs.  That is indeed shameful. 

Nike's shame: How famed running program ruined a young girl

Why do children loath testing and what can we do about?

Consider this:

A child enjoys and is highly motivated in their sport or activity

That activity has a learning or progressive development architecture that can be assessed or measured (tested), at a point in time, to show level of achievement or progress

The child highly dislikes or is intimidated by the assessment

Children seek and desire feedback so why does testing or formal assessment make them feel this way?  The answer, sensibly enough, is the negative impression or connotation they have toward the results.  Feedback may be formative or summative.  Formative feedback is qualitative and individualised: concerned with what’s occurring throughout the learning process, while summative feedback is quantitative and compares the individual to an external standard.  School exams is an example of summative testing.  Coaching feedback is formative. 

There is probably not a whole lot that can be done to change the way we generally feel about external standards.  They’re inherently threatening though they do contain useful stage-of-development information.  If there is one thing to consider, it’s how we ‘sell’ it.  Testing should belong to the individual.  It can be a way to learn, to assess the strength of what’s understood and in place, and not merely a way to identify what’s missing.  We don’t have to talk about how test results compare externally.  We can also point out that every effort is a test of sorts.  If we take time to individualise the dialogue: past, present, and future, then there is a chance we might lessen the fear just enough for the individual to discover testing hasn’t diminished them.

Feel free to add your own thoughts and experiences of testing on our Facebook page:

Sport Performance on Facebook

Are target times a good idea?

The inspiration for this question were the responses from the kids after the NZ Winter Swim Championships, held last weekend.  Most had a great weekend but we got talking about why some feel they didn't have a great meet, even after swimming personal bests.  The uniform response, including from those who did enjoy the meet, involved the idea that target times are set and if you don't hit them the meet is a failure even where the result was a personal best.  That seems crazy to me and I thought it needed a little analysis.
We're using the question and feedback format on our Facebook page:Sport Performance Facebook page.  Our blog will present what I think are some important considerations but feel free to contribute your own ideas on our Facebook page.

The first thought I wanted to share about the use of target times, is that it's a risky strategy for measuring success.  It permits no nuance or flexibility in relation to the conditions of the race.  It essentially says that, while other sporting events may contain natural variability, a swimming pool is always and only a 25m or 50m stretch of water.  Is this reasonable?
The first fact to question concerns the pool.  Unless you train at the competition venue, the pool is not the same.  Differences in water depth, which are common from one pool to the next, impart big contrasts in the movement of the water, as any swimmer knows.  There are also the facts of competition to consider.  Try as we might, humans are not static creatures or even close to it, and children are practically a storm of day to day variations.  Competition throws many balls into the air, and the notion that 'it's just the same stretch of water' is at best naive.  The allowance that most sports permit for variation is important because it recognises that every race and every competition is unique in many ways.
Is a target time a valid proposition: are they supported by sport and coaching science?  Peaking certainly is and we see evidence of this in the achievement of personal bests: prepare and execute correctly and you will advance.  Target times derive from the same thinking but they take the basic idea into the realm of fortune teller.  We simply cannot extrapolate progress with such precision.  My suspicion about target times is that they're not supposed to be thought of as 'real' expectations but as a kind of inducement: 'believe it strongly enough and you will achieve it'.  That kind of psychological strategy doesn't concern me.  What should concern us, is the effect they have on athletes after the fact.  At Sport Performance, we have young athletes in every major sport played in NZ, and many minor ones as well, and swimmers hold the most negative impressions of their performances of all sports.
Target times are not the sole reason for this but they're part of the landscape of poorly conceived coaching propositions.  Sport, by it's nature, will challenge self-belief and an individual's sense of capability.  The most important job of the coach is to add balance to this thinking; to show the athlete all the good that is done.  A stop watch, like a personal best and a placing, says little of what happened.  It says nothing specific about preparation and execution.  It provides no information about mood and attitude.  It gives no clues for the future.
The problems, as I see it, with target times is 1) they're basically unreasonable, and 2) they're not counterpointed sufficiently well with coach feedback to permit individuals a balanced and wider sense of what was done.  Most young swimmers I observe do a very good job conducting themselves and too many don't realise it. 

team sport values and full value contracts

The title is a bit of a mouthful but bear with me here.  I get to interact with a lot of sports teams and there are common practices in all of them.  One common practice concerns team building or, rather, how teams are not built.  They're not constructed from a foundation of an agreed and shared culture: how will be behave toward one another and what do we want from our experience?  The first point to make about building a team culture is that it serves two outcomes: team performance and team experience.  My experiences have shown me that by developing the right team experience, we place ourselves in the strongest position to control team performance.  The shared experience should always come first because in serving team performance, it also drives individual goals and outcomes.

I'm not going to tell others which team culture is best; it's highly flexible, and it's in the nature of culture that the individuals involved must define it.  I am going to say, though, that you can't go wrong by including enjoyment as a primary goal.  With the goal of enjoying the experience, we can frame effective training prescriptions and structures.  We also plan for positive thoughts and moods, and I probably don't need to say how useful these are.  Enjoyment also guides the behaviour of individual team members, and it can be used to define acceptable and unacceptable behaviour without entering the murky waters of relationships.  It's a proactive ingredient in building team culture.

The final point I am going to make about building team culture is the role and importance of a 'full value' contract, which implies that individual team members must participate fully in the agreed culture.  Values hold little power if they're not shared, and sharing occurs when individuals participate.  A small step that I believe helps at this point, is to present the team values and the idea of the contract to parents.  Parents play a critical role in team culture via reinforcement of behaviours.  Where parents understand what's expected (of individuals) it is simply more likely that ideas and messages communicated to their children are consistent with the agreed team values.

Rather than hoping for a cohesive and successful team performance, we can help children understand what it means to be a good team member.  We can give them the agency to determine what matters in their sporting experience.     

   

Why children stay involved in the gym program - lessons for parents/ coaches

One of the great benefits of having a run a gym program for children over many years are the observations and lessons learned about them and none is perhaps greater than what I have learned about motivation: why children get and remained involved.

Lesson#1

A majority of children don't choose gym; parents and coaches do.  Children can be very enthusiastic once the idea has been seeded but it's not something that sits in their minds waiting for an opportunity.

What's important to take from this is that, as parents and coaches, we should not reply on a child's comprehension or internal motivation to get them there and keep them going.  Other connections are needed.

Lesson#2

A small number of children connect strongly to gym - their minds or bodies feel good about it - but the majority of children need a social connection.  This is the greatest lesson about extra-curricular exercise: exercise that isn't the main sport, and it applies to many sporting experiences as well.  Social connections are external motivators and they're the single strongest driver in the lives of children.  Social connections are currency that is spent to develop experiences and grow personal meaning and internal connection.  

Deeper, personalised, meaning is the ultimate goal but it takes a lot of time to achieve the connections needed.  It's not a reasonable expectation for many children and, where we can't see the signs of a strong, personal connection to exercise, we have to seed motivation in other ways and that's the role of social connection.

Social connection is the great benefit of joining a gym program through a sports club or team.  The connections are very likely already in place and they are transported with the children.  Another strategy for parents to consider is 'bring a friend'.  At Sport Performance, we're big fans of our kids bringing their mates to class because we know that all it takes is one friend and the likelihood of the child remaining involved is significantly raised.   

Insights from my training

I have had a big surge forward in recent weeks in my run training coinciding with my discovery (thanks to Michael Eccles) of Stephen Seiler's polarised training model.  I have been listening today (link below) to a podcast concerned with how different motor units - slow to fast - are recruited in relation to low versus high power output endurance exercise.  Motor units are the interface between the nervous system, which controls movement and exercise, and the muscles.  The nervous system works to match exercise with the correct pattern of motor units depending on the demands of the task.
The podcast I have been listening to today makes the point that there are two means of recruiting the high force motor units: via high intensity intervals and with pre-exhaustion of slow units during long, slow training.
An aspect of my running that I have struggled to understand and resolve concerns how I am able to significantly increase run tempo after many long, slow km's with no outward sign of any increase in stress (e.g. heart rate) but starting a run at high tempo exhausts me.  In other words, I can tolerate much higher tempos after a long, slow build up than I can begin a run with.  I am certain this is a common phenomenon.
After today's listening, I believe I have an answer and it relates to motor unit capacity and recruitment.  The first, and perhaps most important, point to make is this: power output after 60s of exercise is essentially aerobic power; the size and efficiency of the oxidative metabolic system, lungs and heart all the way down to the muscle fibers.  This is a point that Seiler and his cohorts make over and over.  Regardless of circumstance, build your aerobic capacity above all and that means training 80-90% of the time with a low heart rate (not above 70% of HR max).  The remainder of the time (10-20%), train like you're being chased by a pack of wild dogs.
So what did I learn to explain my pattern of fatiguing less when I start slower and spend a bucket load before try to hit the accelerator?  The answer is my recruitment pattern of slow versus high force motor units.  Faster runs use more of the faster motor units.  When I start fast, I am using a higher percentage of these than when I start slow.  The problem is, they're also fast fatiguing and that explains the crash I experience during fast starts.  The thing is, they're not supposed to be the only units in play - I'm not running that fast!  The slower, more aerobically efficient units are also supposed to be engaged but I don't think they are; at least not in the numbers I need.
The clue to understanding what might be going on in my body is provided by the other phenomenon of my body hitting a fast 'steady state' after a long, slow warm-up.  I don't think I have been training the slow motor units correctly and this has impaired the way my nervous system uses it's resources.  By training with a higher than ideal heart rate, I have signaled to my brain that I want a greater proportion of high force motor units engaged at all times.
My long, slow runs are forcing my body to properly recruit the slow motor units and as these sub-serve the fast units, the whole system begins to operate efficiently.  Without the slow units doing their job, the fast units quickly run out of gas.
What does all this mean for my training?  It says that I have to spend most of my time running slowly both to grow capacity in the aerobic system and also to ingrain the correct recruitment pattern across all runs: slow to fast.

Polarised training and motor unit recruitment

Some ideas hurt: best and worst days

There is a lot to unpack in the concept of best versus worst day but I'll do my best to stay with the basic idea.
Young athletes have the impression that their best and worst days are poles apart.  Feel free to test this.  Is it reality though?  If we're gauging on outcomes alone then maybe.  Maybe?  No, not even then.  It just seems that way.  If we look away from an outcome and instead at the moment to moment behaviours and actions it is quickly obvious that not much is different from one performance to the next.  A win or personal best may contain a handful of well constructed moments but performances do not transform in the short or even medium term. 
The idea of a miraculous 'best day' is damaging.  It's simply not true and that's a problem all by itself.  A PB or win can appear as a new standard but what does that mean?  Any performance is a large collection of moments and a PB represents a higher than normal 'average' standard of execution.  It's actually not a requirement of a high performance standard that new physical standards are reached, only that the overall standard of work is high.  Exposing an athlete to the idea that they must become better than ever before is a very different kind of idea to executing better than ever before.  We are aiming for transformation in sport but it is not instantaneous and never miraculous.  Adaptation is a response to training and it involves immeasurably small improvements or differences over a long period of time.
The ultimate driver of progress is time, so our most important responsibility as parents and coaches and colleagues is to support ideas and attitudes and experiences that nurture and encourage participation.  Ideally, we need to prick the fallacy of competition as a transformative physical experience early on.  For the same reason it cannot transform, competition also cannot destroy.  We need to take the time to explain to children that there are no catastrophic days.  Certainly we can have catastrophic experiences but the greatest driver of these are emotional responses to the disappointment of not achieving what are, if we think about it, unreasonable expectations to begin with.  If we train well and keep practicing it is just a matter of time until we execute better than ever before, and just a matter of time also for our tools to grow and evolve to higher levels.
We all need good days, and proof or evidence also that progress is occurring but first we need to understand what this 'proof' is and what it's not.

Reflections on performance. Part-2

Many of our kids were involved in the recent National age group swim championships. I make a point of asking every swimmer how their meet went and I am happy to say many gave me the only answer I hope to hear: they enjoyed it! Some - usually more experienced swimmers - rarely seem to have a rewarding experience.

This needs to be unpacked as there is a common response pattern: immediate response is negative, and relates to swim performance. When asked specifically if they enjoyed themselves (at the meet), most say yes. Probed a little further, and it's actually also common for these athletes to have achieved one or more personal bests. However, even when it's acknowledged that the overall experience was enjoyable and there was at least one best ever performance, the trend is to stick with the first response - it wasn't a good meet.

This response pattern to competition is common. It reflects an expectation landscape that is virtually impossible to live up to. It goes like this: I have trained hard and nothing less than a good personal best in my target event is acceptable. Is this reasonable? Not even a little bit. Young athletes rise to the energy of an occasion but it requires extraordinary control to pull it all together in one moment. It's more likely that conditions will align some time during competition week and more likely again over a series of competitions. What's vital in all of this is an understanding of what high performance is constructed from: a positive mood or attitude, a physically ready mind and body, pre-prepared skills, and practiced race strategies. If I can look back on a swim, or any sporting performance, and recognise that I managed all or most of these responsibilities then I have every reason to be satisfied because it's just a matter of time until it clicks.

'Bests' and 'firsts' are blunt measures of performance - all or nothing. If your concept of a positive experience is pegged on a binary outcome then you're asking for trouble. Most disappointingly of all, however, is the fact that there are often a multitude of things that go well during competition even if the big race didn't. Consider the big learning from the first reflections blog: athletes can't control the outcome but the factors that make the outcome possible. The better and more often we stack conditions in our favour, the closer we get to our strongest performance. The greatest battle for any athlete is the mental one, and the very last thing we should permit is a young sports person to be blind to their own achievements.

We build self-esteem and belief not with dramatic leaps ahead but with smiles every day for the small things done well.

Reflections on performance. Part-1

Preparing for performance is one of the most difficult things for an athlete.  New city, new course/ court/ pool/ ground, lots of noise and distraction.  Different routines.  Certain personalities can really struggle, making life difficult for themselves and teammates.  Coaches and managers have a lot of work to do introducing responsibilities and helping athletes manage detail.  Some (coaches and managers) are better at this than others.

There are two big pieces that an athlete needs to grasp.  It helps also if coaches and parents understand too, and can reinforce the key messages:

1. There are lots of variables, and time and plenty of practice is needed to discover them and find a sweet spot.  The critical goals are to ensure good rest/ recovery processes, effective eating strategies, and comprehensive warm ups.  Errors are common in each
2. Athletes aim for personal bests and high performance levels at specific events but we cannot, despite best efforts, guarantee an outcome.  What we can do is give ourselves 'the best chance possible', and the probability of a good or great outcome depends on how often we achieve a 'best chance possible' state.  More of one improves probability of the other

Our performance strategy is not to hit a personal best or win the event but to arrange things in such a way that we achieve a 'best chance possible' state.  Winning is somewhat out of our control much of the time.  What we can control are the variables that make it possible.  This is a key message that young athletes need to hear and learn to grasp.

Why young athletes slow down during puberty, and many tap out soon after

Young athletes end their involvement in sport for two reasons: because it's no longer enjoyable, and/ or because they stopped making progress a while ago.
Many young athletes experience a performance plateau during puberty.  Speed/ endurance athletes often get slower.  The body grows significantly before puberty, and power to weight rises.  This, more than any other factor - coaching included! - is responsible for progress.  With the onset of puberty the nature of weight gain changes.  For females, the extra weight is non-lean mass (not muscle) due to the expression of the hormone oestrogen.  Before puberty, weight gain is associated with linear increases in strength (and power to weight).  With the onset of puberty, weight gain now has the opposite effect - it increases body weight for no additional gain in strength. 
There is a secondary factor superimposing all of this, which is that sporting skills tend to mature around the time of puberty as well.  This is a natural consequence of practice over time.  The problem is that the brain and body are running out of resources or tools with which to keep things moving forward: the body is now much heavier but not stronger with it, and the brain is also finding it harder and harder to refine skills.  We call this diminishing returns: more and more training time for less and less reward.
This is all very normal and impacts the majority of female athletes and some boys as well.  It also doesn't have to be the end.  What's needed, in the first place, is an explanation to them that this is what's happening.  In the absence of an understanding, children think it's their fault; they're just not good enough any more.  This interpretation couldn't be further from the truth.  New rules now apply and these need to be articulated and understood by the athlete as well.  There are there things children need to know:

1. what happens to my body and my performance, as a consequence
2. what do the changes mean - what are the new rules
3. I will be the best I can ever be another decade and a half further down the track (or more) - I have loads of time to get used to, and take advantage of, the new rules

Parents it's your responsibility to understand all of this and play a role in communicating to your child.  It's also critical that coaches understand, and true as well that most don't.  Hold them to account and insist they get off their butts and go find out.  It will likely change their coaching at every level, and if that means they stop treating every child like a performance athlete and do a better job of making sport more enjoyable then that's the biggest win of all!