In this video Coach Erik discusses the various activities that wellness experts recommend for good health. It’s too much for most people to accomplish in a day, so he covers strategies on how to touch on and improve most of them, rather than adopting an all or nothing mentality. Additionally, he covers the interference effect of training, why it may be beneficial to do strength AND conditioning in the same session, and the practical considerations of group programming. His big message here: focus on the optimal FOR YOU, rather than the ideal. The transcript is below the video.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:00 What it Takes to Be Healthy
03:13 Understanding Adaptation
05:52 Understanding Interference
06:50 Ideal Training Structure
10:30 HOW to Optimize
14:20 Strength AND Conditioning?

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to the Fitness Edda. I am your host, Erik Castiglione, owner, and head coach of Viking Athletics here in West Hartford. It’s been a bit since we’ve done one of these. As always, if you find it useful, please give us a like, give us a subscribe, follow us on YouTube. Our goal is to educate free of charge. So, we hope you find this useful.

Today’s topic is organizing training and recovery for health and wellness. What is that all about? Well, pretty much – if you talk to wellness experts, there’s a lot of things that we’re supposed to do in order to be healthy. We’ll get to that list. And then we’re going to talk about how we can better organize it so that you can get the most possible benefits without giving up because it’s such an overwhelming list.

WHAT IT TAKES TO BE HEALTHY

So, what do we mean here? What does it take to be healthy? And I’m sure if you’re on social media, you’ve probably seen this list going around. According to wellness experts, in order to be healthy, we need to walk 7 ,500 plus steps per day. 10 ,000 seems to be the magic number. But that’s more in line with fat loss than for just general health. General health, we’re looking at 7 ,000 to 7 ,500. We need to strength train 2 plus times a week. We need to accumulate 150 minutes of moderately intense cardio per week.

We need to prep your meals so that you’re not eating out and you’re eating good foods. We need to track your intake to make sure that you are eating the right amount of foods. You’re supposed to get 10 minutes of sunlight for vitamin D every day, 10 minutes of mobility work every day, drinking half your body weight of ounces in water. And you’re supposed to journal and meditate daily.

Just reading this list and I’m exhausted. I’ve posted about it before, and the idea was to just do something. If you’ve only got five minutes, great! Maybe I am going to be outside for five minutes, or I’m going to drink a glass of water first thing in the morning. And we want to strive for progress in each of these rather than worrying about the accumulation of all of them.

So part of the reason that I wanted to talk about this is, there have been studies done talking about strength versus Conditioning versus strength and conditioning in the same session. Again, our gym is a strength and conditioning gym and one of our biggest programs is the CrossFit program and there is a ton of Back and forth on the best way to organize a CrossFit class Whether it should be strength plus conditioning strength only conditioning only or what have you. So, couple that with general health and wellness and that’s what led to this topic.

UNDERSTANDING ADAPTATION

First we want to understand when it comes to training, how we adapt to the training. And I’ve gone over this in other videos but essentially you exist at a baseline state here. You apply some form of stimulus whether that’s exercise – usually that’s what we’re talking about here. And you end up in a little bit of a degraded state. Your body bounces back stronger – this is what’s called super compensation. And we need to apply that stimulus again and that will again allow me to go into a degraded state and then bounce back stronger and you get a waveform that trends upward over time.

If I do too much, I get overly degraded into the fatigued state here and I’m not going to compensate. I’m going to struggle to get back to baseline – that’s why we say recovery is important. And if I don’t do enough I don’t really get much of an adaptation at all. I also like to think about this – my background is in electrical engineering and in college I focused on material science nanotechnology, and we had what we called state diagrams. The idea here is you have these two discrete states. Nothing in between doesn’t really matter. So same idea here – I have my current state of abilities I apply my stimulus and if it is enough I’m going to be above my maximum recoverable volume line here, and then I bounce back. My current state goes up and the amount of tolerance that I have to handle volume increases as well – that’s the space in between here and over time we increase that space. If I go too low, too much work, I’m overly fatigued, I cross this threshold of maximum recoverable volume, and I don’t bounce back. So that is how we kind of model adaptation over time.

And it is important to note that the maximum recoverable volume here is absolute, whereas your adaptation here is modality specific. So, if I am doing both strength and conditioning, I may get a little adaptation in both. But if I’m doing too much total volume, it doesn’t matter whether it is running or lifting or a combination of the two. If I exceed my maximum recoverable volume, I’m not going to recover.

UNDERSTANDING INTERFERENCE

Where this gets a little bit more important is when we talk about interference. Again, going back to my engineering background, you have two waves. If they are in phase with each other, basically the peaks are at the same time, they amplify, and we get a bigger wave. That’s just another way to illustrate what happens with the interference effect. If I’m doing too much and not recovering enough, I’m going to exceed, you can see in my, I didn’t extend the dotted line, but I would exceed my maximum recoverable volume.

So, the goal of training different modalities like strength and conditioning is to do so in such a way that I’m going to minimize that interference, so I don’t exceed my maximum recoverable volume. That’s why I wanted to go over these models, is really to explain what all that means.

IDEAL TRAINING STRUCTURE 

So, what would the ideal look like? I’m going to strength train three to four days a week for about an hour. A good way to split that, again this is largely dependent on goals. My training would look different if I’m training purely for aesthetics or muscle growth but for general population, most people are training for strength and a little bit of muscle mass. So, three to four days per week for an hour, you’re going to focus on more power for one to two sessions and strength for one to two sessions.

Whether that’s full body or upper lower body split really depends on you. And we’re going to space this out throughout the week to allow for that super compensation to occur. So, you know an example schedule will be Monday we do lower body, call it strength work. Wednesday we do upper body strength work. Friday would be lower body power. Saturday upper body power. That’s just one example of how to organize training in an ideal way to allow you to hit the requisite three to four days per week and allow for recovery between mean sessions.

Now we have cardio and conditioning as well, three to four days per week for an hour. We’re going to, you know, again, if I have four days of this and I can get three days of this, that’s seven total days. I don’t really have a recovery day there. That’s probably going to be too much. So how do we stack our days in such a way that we’re not going to exceed our maximum recoverable volume? Well, on Tuesday I could do conditioning. Also on Thursday,  and then maybe one or two of my training days, separated by six hours, I can get in an additional cardio session.

Plus, we want to sleep eight hours per night. Plus, we want to walk 750, I’m sorry, 7 ,500 or more steps in a day. If you do the math on all this, that is a lot of time to dedicate to training. Couple that with your job, your family life, everything else you have going on, commutes back and forth to work, commutes all kids’ activities. Unless you have flexibility in your schedule where training becomes the central tenant of your life and you can organize everything else around it, this is not realistic. That’s why we say this is the ideal.

This would make me super healthy. I would be pretty dang elite in everything that I’m doing. I would be, oh, I didn’t even get into meal prep included in this. You know, you got to space out your meals and make sure you’re hitting everything in that sense as well. It’s just not realistic for most people. So, if we go back to our initial list, this is why people see all this and they give up. They’re like, there’s no way I can commit multiple hours a day to my fitness. One hour is a stretch for a lot of people. Our class times last an hour, and you’ve got to commute to and from. So really you’re looking at 90 minutes to two hours a day.

HOW TO OPTIMIZE

It’s just not going to happen seven days a week for most people. So, they just don’t even start. So, the way that I want people to think about all these things on the list is, think of them as stocks in a mutual fund. If all of my stocks are performing okay, I’m going to make a fair amount of money. If one of the stocks performs poorly, I’m not going to sell the whole mutual fund for that one stock, especially if one stock goes down and two more go up. It’s a net positive depending on the magnitude of the loss.

So, using that as kind of a framework for all of this stuff, how do we optimize for ourselves? So, if I can get 7 hours of sleep and get up an hour earlier and maybe do 30 minutes of exercise instead of getting that extra hour of sleep, I’m now getting 30 minutes of exercise per day instead of none. That’s a hell of a lot better than getting 8 hours of sleep and not doing any exercise. And then let’s say I take the extra 30 minutes out of that hour since I’ve just created an hour for myself by getting 7 hours of sleep instead of 8. Maybe I do my exercise and then I go for a walk and now I’ve increased my step count.

Or maybe I use that 30 minutes to get some sunlight outside, or to do some quick food prep. We’re detracting from the stock of sleep, but we’re boosting at least two other stocks and I’m getting a net positive. So that would be one way that we can look at this and I can organize my day in such a way that I’m targeting multiple things on this list without obsessing about it and without, you know, I don’t have two and a half hours to train. How do I make the most of my time? So that’s one example and the mutual fund example made a lot of sense to me so I wanted to share that with you guys.

How do we get a net positive? How do we touch on all these things on the list in such a way that’s realistic for our busy lives and schedules? And then, you know, I gave that as an example for general health, but let’s say I have a specific goal of weight loss. Sleep becomes immensely important if I’m looking at six hours and I can get to seven by maybe doing 7 ,500 steps instead of 10 ,000. I’m walking a crazy amount. Yes, my caloric expenditure may go down slightly, but if I’m getting more sleep I’m going to be better recovered. I’m going to be less hungry and perhaps I can stave off some of my cravings that I may get from being overly active and not recovering.

So, depending on your goal, we want to look at what do we need to do to accomplish this goal. And then we look at where am I deficient and again we’re never going to be perfect we’re never going to achieve the ideal so how do I target some of these things where can I pull back and maybe make a small sacrifice to get a big gain that’s how I like to look at this for general health and wellness.

STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING?

When it comes to the CrossFit space and doing strength and conditioning in the same session that’s pretty much what we’re doing here. Yes, the ideal would be to do strength only in one session, and then do conditioning on off days but when I’m programming for a group I have to consider the different logistical schedules of everybody.

I have people that are religiously here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday – those are their three days. If we only did strength on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, these people would never get conditioning. If we only did conditioning on those days, they would never get strength. So when I program for a group classes, logistics are a major, major factor in how that’s structured.

And for most people, if we smartly stack strength and conditioning, yes, you’re going to get some interference. But we can minimize that by pairing things appropriately. So, if I’m doing a heavy lift, and we focus on short and tense conditioning, they pair well together. We still have conditioning only days when we’re doing longer conditioning, and we still have strength only days where we’re getting our accessory work in.

But for the vast majority of people, if this is where they come to get most of their work in, we have to stack these things so that we’re hitting various stimuli. And that’s okay to get some interference as long as we’re not crossing the maximum recoverable volume.

If I were working with a CrossFit Games athlete, again, we would get back to the ideal. Their whole schedule is focused around training. They are full -time athletes, they are sponsored athletes, and that is their job. Training is going to look different. The structure is going to look different. For the vast majority of people, we focus on the optimal rather than the ideal based on schedule and what’s realistic for them.

So in theory, I can argue ad nauseam about the best way to structure things ideally so that you’re able to do everything. Well, let’s be real. If we spent our entire lives focused on health and wellness, we probably wouldn’t get any work done. Probably wouldn’t be able to… provide for our families and it’s just not sustainable long term. So everything is a compromise in order to get the best for most people.

Anyway that is how I organize programming at the gym and this is an example of how you can set up your day if you can’t make it to the gym so that you get bits of a lot of this and you are good enough on most of these things rather than perfect on one and sacrificing everything else. So, focus on the optimal rather than the ideal based on what’s realistic for you. If you need help that’s what coaches are for. That’s why we’re here. Please don’t hesitate to reach out.

I hope this made sense. I hope it was useful. If so, please give us a like. Give us a subscribe. Follow us. We’re happy to help. We’ll keep doing this as long as you keep listening. Until next time, see you guys in the gym.