Listen in as I provide a sneak peek into the Flex Diet Certification Course and how I approach cardio programming with my clients. Enrollment in the Flex Diet Certification Course closes TONIGHT (Monday, Jan. 22, 2024). Go to https://flexdiet.com to enroll. And for all your electrolyte needs, check out https://drinklmnt.com/Mike Nelson.
Listen in as I provide a sneak peek into the Flex Diet Certification Course and how I approach cardio programming with my clients.
Enrollment in the Flex Diet Certification Course closes TONIGHT (Monday, Jan. 22, 2024). Go to https://flexdiet.com to enroll. And for all your electrolyte needs, check out https://drinklmnt.com/Mike Nelson.
Episode Chapters:
[00:00:00] Dr Mike T Nelson: Welcome back to the Flex Diet podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase muscle performance, improve body composition, and do all of it without destroying your health in a flexible framework. And if you want the complete system for nutrition and recovery, the Flex A Diet cert is on sale today.
[00:00:25] But today is the last day. Today being Monday, January 22nd, 2024. If you're listening in on the day that this podcast came out, you can still enroll. So go to flexdiet.com F L E X D I E T dot com before tonight, Monday, January 22nd, 2024 at midnight Pacific Standard Time. We'll have a link down below that you can get into the Flex Diet still today.
[00:00:58] The next time it will open will most likely be May or June. So right now it's opening around twice per year. So if you're listening to this podcast after that period of time, you can still go to flexdiet.com and you'll be able to sign up onto the waitlist for the next time that it's open. That'll put you on to the daily Insider email, where you'll get all sorts of other exclusive information also.
[00:01:26] So one of the concepts in the Flex Diet Cert that I wanted to talk about today real briefly, this one will be relatively short, is when we talk about fat loss, and even muscle gain to some degree, but we'll focus more on fat loss here today, yes, calories in and calories out do matter. And if you're doing aerobic training to burn calories, I do think that is helpful.
[00:01:52] Now, we have to put this in the bigger context of everything else that you're doing also. So some people think that they can solve all their nutritional ills by just doing more cardio. And in truth, you can, but the amount of cardio you would need to do, and potentially other issues you may run into, is quite high.
[00:02:15] So I've had this happen with a couple of clients recently who do a lot of weight training pretty advanced people, and they wanted to add more cardiovascular into their training. Two of them actually had a race that they were doing that was more of a cardiovascular based race and they significantly bumped up their aerobic training biking, running, et cetera.
[00:02:37] And, by bumped up, in both cases, they were doing many hours per week. Two to eight, sometimes scaling up for the event, twelve hours extra per week of cardiovascular training. And, in both cases, they got even significantly leaner. Now, the caveat is, that's a fair amount of time. I would argue both of them were doing it in a pretty intelligent manner, so they weren't.
[00:03:04] completely burning themselves out in the process, but it's a fair amount of time to do that. If you've ever worked with athletes that have just a really high output, such as CrossFit athletes, for one example, even American football, other team sports, individual sports, you do find that they can burn more calories than what they're taking in.
[00:03:27] A lot of times, at least in my experience and from talking to other coaches, Caloric needs are definitely off, meaning they do better increasing the amount of calories because they are burning so many calories. Now again, the caveat here is time. These people are spending a lot of time doing movement and doing their sport.
[00:03:48] So for most people, I put myself in this bucket right now, they don't have the luxury of spending an extra 8 hours a week to do more cardiovascular training. Again, there might be some benefits to that. from a calories burned perspective, but I think overall the industry is a little bit limited in its thinking that just doing cardio is only for burning calories.
[00:04:13] Yes, you do burn calories, but that is just one of the factors. So I like to look at it as we're looking at fat loss or even just in general I think your aerobic training or your aerobic adaptations or cardiovascular trainings, I'm just kinda Flipping the two terms here. You should look at what is the adaptation that you are trying to get.
[00:04:36] So when I program people for their aerobic or their cardiovascular training, even if their goal is purely for fat loss, my goal when I program them is what type of aerobic adaptation am I going to get? That is the number one driver for the programming for the training. And calories are a nice side benefit.
[00:05:00] This isn't to say that I never use cardio to burn calories. Sometimes I do. But it's not the first thing that I would do. And when I'm programming cardiovascular training, which I'll just now refer to as aerobic training, because I think that's a little bit more accurate, I primarily want to see what are the aerobic adaptations.
[00:05:20] And the next question is what do you look at with that? So the main one I'm going to look at first is your VO2max. to your volume of oxygen that you can pull through the system. And you don't necessarily need anything fancy per se to do that. Yes, I do have a PNOE device, which is a metabolic heart, where you can measure the amount of air that goes in and out.
[00:05:43] We can look at the amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen. We can get an idea of what fuels you're burning, how much air is going in and out. And that can give us a best, my air quotes here, direct measure, because it is what's called indirect calorimetry, which we'll save that for another time maybe.
[00:06:00] But it's a direct measurement of the volume of oxygen that you are using in this case. I think it is useful. The downside is, it is pretty expensive, it's in the several thousands of dollars, although it is quite a bit cheaper than the standard metabolic hearts. And if people want more information about that, you can just reach out to me, I can answer any questions you have.
[00:06:23] Side note, I am affiliate for PNOE, so I do some stuff for them related to that, in terms of full disclosure. But if you don't have that, I don't think you necessarily need it. There's a time and a place if you want to get that level of accuracy that can be very useful. But for most people, you can just do a 12 minute Cooper run test.
[00:06:42] So run as far as you can in 12 minutes exactly. Go online and just type in 12 minute Cooper run test. And then you can also do a 2K on the Concept2 rower or erg. They've got a study that's been done on this. You type in Concept2 VO2max equation. Type in your time. And in both cases, it will tell you your VO2max.
[00:07:08] Most clients I have will use the rower to do their VO2max because most clients I have are not runners. If you are a runner, which I do have a couple of clients that have running goals, then we're probably going to do a Cooper Run test. If you're, I'd say, a mixed mode athlete, so you're doing a sport like American or even Australian rules football or other things.
[00:07:28] Then I'm probably going to do both with you, because you're going to do some running, but I also want to know if we have to go to a low impact version, we can then use the rower, and we'll probably track both of them, even though running is going to be more specific to your sport. The takeaway is, do some type of measure of your VO2max, see where you're at.
[00:07:49] If it's very low, then you know you need to work on different programs to build that up. So I think by looking at that's one way of looking at the adaptation that also will help you determine in your training, how much time and emphasis should you put on this. And the part that I think people forget is that when you have a higher VO2 max, you are literally able to do more work.
[00:08:18] You can also do more work in less time, so your density is going to be better. So this doesn't mean that you have to spend more and more time to accomplish more said work. Imagine you had a 3 cylinder Yugo, and you compare that to a fancy, even a V8 Corvette engine or a V12 engine. You want a bigger engine, you're going to get more performance out of it, and you're going to use more fuel.
[00:08:46] So when you have a higher VO2 max, even if we left the percentage of that work that is being used as fat, as fueling that exercise. When you increase that number, you're obviously burning more fat for fuel. So again, a lot of times people look at low intensity fasted cardio, which I am a fan of. I do think it can be helpful.
[00:09:10] However, the total amount of calories that you burn doing that can be on the lower side. Even though you're using a hundred percent of that or a very high percentage of that as fat. Turns out there's a huge amount of variability in that, so that may not always be the case, but for our little example here, we'll say that it is.
[00:09:32] So when you have a bigger engine, you're just simply using more gas. And so that way you are using more fat as a fuel. You have better performance. It is easier to recover. from one exercise set to the next from when you're doing weight training. There's a whole lot of other benefits longevity benefits which have been shown.
[00:09:53] So there's a lot of positives to increasing your VO2 max. And a side benefit is that you actually do use more fat for fuel on average and it's something you can measure. So a lot of times unless you have a metabolic heart you're not really going to be able to measure. what exact fuel mix that you are using.
[00:10:13] There are ways you can push it one direction or not, which we cover in the FlexDiet Cert. However, you're not really going to be able to measure it directly. Again, there's some rough field tests you can use to get at it. So when I'm looking at programming aerobic training for fat loss, the number one thing I'm going to look at is, what is VO2 max?
[00:10:34] If it's very low, so you have a very small aerobic engine, We're going to try to increase that because we know that's related to performance. It's going to make everything else you're doing easier. You are going to be able to burn more calories in less time. And more of those calories are actually going to be coming from fat just because you are burning much more calorics, caloric needs at that time.
[00:11:01] So I think that's one way of looking at where is your system at. And then, how can you change it for the long term? Instead of saying you just need to do 10 minutes of steady state, and then 15 minutes, and 20 minutes, and just slowly increasing it. There are some benefits to lower intensity zone 2 stuff.
[00:11:21] I do use it as more of an aerobic based building. But at some point, you can't just add more lower intensity stuff, and expect it to increase your VO2 max. Some athletes can do that if they haven't addressed that area for a while or you want to dedicate many hours to it per week. So I like looking at one measurement, what is your VO2 max?
[00:11:44] You can use a Cooper run test, so 12 minutes, run as far as you can. You can use a 2K, so 2, 000 meters on a Concept 2 rower, which you can find in most gyms. Plug those numbers in online and see where you're at. If that number is very low, then you have a fair amount of work to do. So for most clients, unless they're high level athletes or they're specifically doing some type of aerobic performance, then I still like them to be in the high percentage of the population.
[00:12:19] So at least 75 percent near the top. Now again, that's of a population based data. A population, unfortunately, generally tends to be relatively low in VO2max. If you go on the Concept2 site, you can log into their logbook there, and you can get an idea of how you rate compared to everyone else who is logging their data on the Concept2 database for rowing.
[00:12:45] The nice part there is that you can see how you rate against everyone else who is also doing rowing. Now this is a little bit of a biased population because they're crazy enough to do rowing and they're crazy enough to actually monitor it. But I'll use that sometimes as a good marker also. So by using that data, and I got this from my buddy Dr.
[00:13:04] Kenneth J. I agree with him that you probably want to be around the 50th percentile and then from there depends on your goals what you want to do. I do think most people even within that data can get to the 75th percentile. That will take, in some cases, a fair amount of work that may take many months to even a few years to accomplish that.
[00:13:26] But I think going from 75th percentile to 90th, probably not worth the effort unless rowing is a highly specific part of your sport, then of course it would be worth it. So there are going to be trade offs here, even just going from the low bottom percentage to 50th percentile on that. I've noticed with clients over the years.
[00:13:47] Makes a huge difference. So the takeaway today for fat loss, Yes, calories in, calories out, still matters. However, I think looking at aerobic training and aerobic adaptations is the primary driver. And burning calories is a side effect. The reason I like this is because it's much easier to measure actual changes, right?
[00:14:11] So is their physiology literally different than what it was before? That gives you also a marker of how your programming is. Does all the work they're putting in, are they making a significant difference to their physiology besides just burning calories? And there might be a time, once you've maxed that out or they can't really do any more work, that you just need to burn more calories from the system.
[00:14:33] But I think we should look at it first in terms of adaptations that we want to get. And we can apply this same idea to muscle. Alright, so for performance of muscle, can you lift more, can you do it in less time, and then can you do more of it. So you've got volume, density, intensity. Same thing with fat loss.
[00:14:55] You're looking at aerobic training, you've got your higher intensity stuff, you've got volume work, and then you've got density or kind of pace work. So they all follow the same principles. And last point. By measuring an actual output, the VO2max in this case, and there are other things you can measure of course, then that allows you to see if your programming is working as best that it can be.
[00:15:19] And especially if someone has a very low VO2max, I can also say that if their energy levels are low, what I've noticed over the years of doing this, most likely it's highly associated. So taking someone from a very low VO2 max, even just 50 percent of a population standpoint they'll notice huge differences there too.
[00:15:39] Side benefits of being able to walk more, general movement, higher output, everything else. So it's something that is going to help overall movement, which is then going to consequently help you pull more calories out of the system. So, it is one of those adaptations I think it is worth looking at. And that's why in the Flex Diet Cert, we do talk all about nutrition.
[00:16:00] We talk about protein, fats, carbohydrates, how to use them. We also have a separate section on NEAT, so Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Walking, moving, twitching. We do have a whole section on exercise, so how you would track exercise. Sleep, micronutrition, fasting, keto. And then for some of the bonuses that I still have open right now, I've got a bunch of bonuses on aerobic training.
[00:16:27] Everything from the exact supplements I would use with higher level athletes, to how would you set up an aerobic program training wise, to increase VO2 max with supplements, and how would you program that out for several months. And then we've got also some unannounced roundtable discussions of aerobic training too.
[00:16:47] So, if you're still interested in that, go to flexdiet. com, it does close tonight, if you're listening to this when the podcast came out, Monday, January 22nd, 2024, at midnight Pacific Standard Time, so go to flexdiet. com, if you're listening to this podcast after that time, then you can still go there, get on the wait list, and you'll be on the daily.
[00:17:12] newsletter with all the other information. And once it's open again, we will let you know. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast as always. Really appreciate it. Stay tuned later this week. We've got another special guest, which will be on the podcast. We've got tons of special guests coming up.
[00:17:30] A couple of them I've already recorded. So thank you so much for listening. Appreciate it. Talk to you all later.
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