Latest / Misfit Podcast / Throwback Episode: Training Smart AND Hard on Machines: The Misfit Gears Matrix 2.0 - E.367.2
Transcript
- speaker-0: All right. The gears matrix. here's how we're going to do this. I want to give you guys the origins of where this came from. Then we'll explain it. We'll talk about the original version and then we'll sort of get into the the new matrix, how to use it, where to download it, all that good stuff. I'm actually going to read my origins thing here because it puts me back into the head space ⁓ of sort of when I did this in the beginning. All right. Drew Crandall: Good morning Misfits, you are tuning into another episode of the Misfit Podcast. On this week's episode, we're doing a throwback to Hunter and I doing a deep dive on the Gears Matrix 2.0 from last fall. If you're watching on YouTube, you see this lovely... Butterfly situation we got going on up here in the corner down in Florida brought the little man down to see my parents in Florida So yeah, we've got the the gears matrix episode ton of people are asking questions with new people on the program I always think it's really good for people to brush up on this ⁓ talked about the origins of it the methodology ⁓ concepts behind it and then we talked about how to use it, which I think is really important for people Go over the the different categories that we have different pacing instructions all that good stuff ⁓ speaker-0: The origins of the gears matrix combined 11 years of data, a simple remote coaching tool, and a meathead kneeling at the altar of linear progression. It took eight or nine of those 11 years to develop a chart showing the optimal duration of rounds, total volume, and rest periods needed to move the needle in a test and retest format consistently. So think your cube test, your Mount Dooms, any of your power output wattage tests, that sort of thing. Drew Crandall: before I kick it back to Hunter and I from last year. A little bit of housekeeping, obviously offseason block one has gotten started. speaker-0: Along the way, it became clear that the more time spent at different paces that resulted in a trend towards high intensity. you start round one of any of these workouts will reference in ⁓ three, and then you end up in zone five, the better that the retest data looked as a remote coach. This led me to track my athletes results in a spreadsheet that allowed me to personalize workouts to force that different spectrum of pacing setting aside zone two and power output sessions. found that I could create workouts ⁓ roughly eight separate speeds. Drew Crandall: This time of year is fun for the coaching staff because ⁓ get people ⁓ on track, back on a path to reach their goals. And then we have sort of the sprinkling of people getting ready for the different semi-finals competitions that are coming up. A reminder, if you are trying to do online semi-finals prep, gonna get started here in two weeks on April 27th. We're gonna do an extra channel on Telegram so you'll be able to see it in there. The programming will be posted in there. ⁓ speaker-0: that could all trend into uncomfortable territory by the end of the workout. Not only should all coaches and athletes have access to this document, but it should be used to gamify and track progress all year. Any thoughts on that Hunter? Drew Crandall: ⁓ in PDF form. And there's, I want to say kind of three different angles we can take here. So the first one would be, there's going to be some people that are on it where it's just absolutely appropriate for them to be on a semi-finals prep. ⁓ are going to be some people in the middle and we can talk through what the scaling looks like for masters. We can talk about what maybe a hatching version of something would be. ⁓ And then we people who are on the back half of qualification. speaker-1: I mean, like, ⁓ that in the document you said? That's like the... ⁓ speaker-0: It's in that article. It's like the intro to the article that I share with people that I'm now going to update and put the new one in. But I really just wanted people to know that like, I didn't set off to create this. This kind of created itself over that period of time. speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things I think that gets kind of built out of necessity, especially at the higher for a higher level crossfitter. I think it's probably too in the weeds for your affiliate athlete and even maybe a GPP ask athlete, not because it's not valuable, but because like, like there, feel like there are so many other fundamentals that probably need work ahead of like dialing in the perfect pace on certain machines when it comes to Drew Crandall: We can talk, ⁓ obviously you guys can reach out to me anytime, but are a lot of people that have qualified where it's not going to be appropriate for them to follow a semi-finals peaking schedule. And honestly, if on the fence... Let's just talk through it because there's a ton of nuance here. There are some people who I think would be really cool for them to follow a prep and go through it and see what it's like, see what it's like for the people that are prepping to make it further in the season every year. speaker-1: the competitive side actually optimizing for, you know, the ideal amount of, you know, either effort, pace, ⁓ you know, score in a workout if it includes other stuff. Like we've talked about so many times, the ⁓ provides free information in the fact that there's a monitor and objective data associated with it. And if you're a competitive athlete and you go into an event and you don't know, this conversation with ⁓ actually about His K run at the CrossFit Games. was kind of funny. Even I talked to him about that. I was like, what was your pace? And I knew what the answer was and he kind of admitted like, well, I didn't really have one and even guys on the start line were like, where's your watch? And Justin was like, I don't have one. And I'm like, like, motherfucker, you got a free pacer that could be attached to your wrist. And those are, and that's the, and like that, maybe that was the difference. Maybe that's the difference for him in 10, 15, 20 points. he came out a little bit too hot and ⁓ you learn the finish line and like you for sure so Kind of a real-world example of those gears ⁓ and even talked to Kelly about this and like when we get into the actual nuts and bolts of the Kind of like breakdown Rigo power anaerobic aerobic there are like again when you get to the higher levels you can actually you can really notice like where an athlete has gaps ⁓ and Drew Crandall: So yeah, long story long, there's a lot of different. ⁓ situations for different levels of athletes that are qualifying here. That's what's unique about having it be top 2000. So if you're on the fence, get in touch with us, we can talk through it. you can email me coach at miss fed athletics.com. You can talk to us in telegram. ⁓ but there will be a group in there. You will be able to see the programming. ⁓ and we can just take it kind of one step at a time. So Monday, April 27th ⁓ when that group will get started. I'll post the ⁓ the weekend before. as always this episode of the podcast and all episodes of the podcast. speaker-1: share this because Kelly is I'm sure she wouldn't mind but like Kelly is an extremely strong and powerful athlete right we're talking like a near 250 pound clean like 300 pound back squat like some seriously impressive numbers and she's a master at this point and on the other end she actually really improved in some of the aerobic stuff the running event was one of her was was a far better finish than maybe we both expected and would have historically expected Drew Crandall: are brought to you by Gorilla Mind. Two products of the week ⁓ going to be the ones that I travel with the most. ⁓ travel enough for work and it starts getting really annoying ⁓ have your bag pulled at TSA for creatine and electrolytes. So what I do is I buy the creatine gummies ⁓ from Gorilla Mind. Four gummies, pretty damn good. We get the five grams of creatine that we want. I usually, if I'm traveling, I'm gonna do two to three doses of that in a day. speaker-1: She really, really struggles in the like, the easiest example is like the think the two, two, two, three interval type format, like very hard minutes of work, one minute of rest to recover. And it's like, you know, it's the, it's the game of like, can I get this workout done in three intervals or do I need the fourth or can I even get it done in two, whatever? She really struggles with that, like kind of black hole area of it's not a dead sprint. Drew Crandall: have their single serve electrolyte packets, IV rush, actually has ⁓ amount of sodium that's going to do something ⁓ the... speaker-1: but it's still a really, really hard effort and to be able to maintain a certain pace there and then get off the bike and do double unders, know, go handstand push up, bike hard, double under like at the masters games, that's an area that we need to improve on within the context of the sport of CrossFit. and all that to say is like, there are very distinct kind of effort levels that get attached to workouts and time domains. Drew Crandall: you know, accurate breakdown of the things that you're losing through exercise. So I always travel with the Ivy Rush and the creatine gummies. If you go to guerillamind.com for slash misfit, you can save and you're supporting the show or you can just use the code word misfit at checkout. Without further ado, I'm going to kick it back to Hunter and I last fall going over the gears matrix and we'll see you guys next week. speaker-1: The machines are the easiest place that we have to really kind of dial in as far as like objectively measuring output as opposed to, you know, doing burpees and thrusters and like, how'd that feel sort of vibe. So I think it's a, it's a really useful tool. think it's a, way that not to get too far into like the, thing or the sheet itself, but like, I think the improvements to it are, I think it's valuable cause there's a definitely a distinction when you get into the upper end power output ranges. for sure. I think it's just one of those tools that you need to have in your arsenal as a competitive crossfitter. speaker-0: The, one of the things that's so fun about my job is with my higher level competitors, there is this like ultimate proving ground and pressure for a coach where it's like this athlete struggled with this thing and it was obvious for them and for everyone else. Can you the needle on it because we're going to test it again and everyone's going to know whether you can get somebody better at this thing. And a lot of those things over the years have been machine or running related. So ⁓ for me. ⁓ So much of this came from like one of the things that can be really tough for people is like, I'm not a runner and I need to become one and having an actual plan of like how to move the needle for them and show them in real time, how they're doing before they go to retest is incredibly important. So again, that's where so much of this came from was like, I need to be able to get this person better. Obviously. And then the psyche of an athlete who has a weakness, how do I show them that they're getting better in real time? Because we can do all of these different intervals and categorize them in whatever way that we want. But if they are kind of random and always changing, whether it's always changing modality, always changing, you know, whether you're measuring Watts calories, it's an AMRAP, it's a specific distance. Sometimes it can be hard for athletes to know whether they're improving or speaker-1: Yeah, I think... Sorry, go ahead. speaker-0: Go ahead. No, I was going to get into the explanation of the, the actual matrix. speaker-1: I think it's like your point, this is a good lesson because an athlete can get ⁓ for the wrong reasons really easily and they not know it. And an example of that is like, I coached the class today that was skiing in front squats and front squats a perfect example of a movement where it's like, I don't like front squat. I don't lift it very, I can't do it very well. It's uncomfortable. It's like yada, yada, yada, whatever. Understood then you start to ask the athletes like well, what what don't you like about it? It's like I just like I'm not very I'm not very strong at it It's like well, why aren't you very strong at it? Cuz you back squat a house like why don't you like it? It's like well, it turns out that like it's kind of uncomfortable like my wrist hurts a little bit and it's like, okay Well, you you're mo your overhead your shoulder mobility isn't great and you because you sit at a desk all day you walk around a little bit of kyphosis like rounding of the upper back it's like So the problem isn't the front squat. The problem is like, let's just tackle a little bit more mobility in like the upper back area. Let's spend a few minutes before you start the front squat session or take a class. Like here's a couple of mobilizations to help like loosen those positions up. And all of a sudden it's like, well, my wrist doesn't hurt anymore. I can keep my elbows up and now I can actually use the leg strength that I thought I had, but this front squat workout was making me question. And now it's not that I hate the front squat. It's that. My mobility is not great and it makes this exercise harder. So instead of being upset about not being able to hold a pace, for example, or not more likely not knowing what pace to hold and therefore the unknown element makes you anxious, confuses you, makes you not like the workout. Like we now have a way to like at least answer a question for you. Like what's the pace I should hold? Well, this is the pace you should hold and this is why. speaker-0: Yep. All right. So the gears matrix is essentially we have, we'll keep it simple to start and then talk about the additions. have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Those are eight gears. being the slowest eight being the fastest and the matrix shows all the gears and then each machine. ⁓ the idea would be we'll pick fifth gear for an example, AMRAP four minutes times four rest two minutes and seconds. And then the matrix shows row, run, ski, bike, ERK, eco bike. If you were to do an AMRAP. at on any of those machines or during a run, what would your pace be? What would your cows per hour be? What would your wattage be? You want to make sure you're recording all of those. So you have the context for how they're different. And then you kind of have to audit a little bit of like, okay, was that like crash and burn? Was that really good pacing? Did I kind of nail it? And we'll get into a little bit more there, but over time you have this sheet that gives you on five different machines. Eight different speeds, which honestly takes care of basically the entire range of what you would be using in almost any context within the sport, which is really cool. And that's when we can begin to bring in this concept of using linear progression. you know, strength is just a little bit easier because we can always just add, you know, we can grab the fractional plates. We can add two and half, two and a half pounds, you know, we can add five pounds. We can add 10 pounds, depending on what the lift is. And over time we see the progress. If machines, if we don't have that same option on a machine, there can be a bit of the like pissing into the wind because you are increasing GP through stimulus, but the athlete IQ kind of stays stagnant and bringing those together is how you learn how to be an actual competitor. So the original gears matrix again is just gears one through eight aerobic stimulus, higher volume, sustained pacing, meaning I am going to be a hundred percent sure that I can hold this pace throughout, but I want to be in kind of rough shape by the very end of the last round. That's gears one, two, and three four through eight are a bit more of an anaerobic stimulus. It's moderate volume and it's reach pacing. ⁓ I typically like for most athletes when it comes to, the build stuff is what we would call it gears four through eight is you choose a pace sort of like the aerobic that you're positive that you can hold. And then you audit after a round or two, like feel pretty good today. I can go for negative splits and that can just be, that doesn't need to be like I'm going from a 155 to 154 to 153. I the projected finish and just being like, if I get a meter, that's a negative split, right? So I'm sort of working in that, in that regard. And then by the end, what you would do is you would take your average over the course of those. You don't want to take your fastest because then you'd be real sad when you go to try to repeat that workout, but you take your average over the course of all of those. And the workouts in the original came from actual workouts. I was writing for specific athletes. So all of those workouts I created, I realized, man, if they, and this makes sense in CrossFit, but probably less so in the monostructural, you know, sort of endurance community. The more separate speeds they do, the better they are in the retest. The more I repeat workouts, especially weakness workouts, the lower they do on that. So there is something too, like you still give them, you know, maybe their wheelhouse workouts, eighth gear, and another one is first gear. You still give them those because it creates a great stimulus. You know, they really execute on it well. They probably go into it with a bit more confidence, that sort of thing. But those workouts, again, were written for specific athletes and What happens is you get an athlete who either from a physical or mental standpoint can kind of lock in in specific areas that another athlete can't. And one of the workouts that was in the old gears matrix was like a seven minute by two. And it was either fourth or fifth gear and it didn't really fit very well with the rest of them. And basically Caroline could do it. So you guys needed to be able to do it. Turns out that's just kind of that middle distance, which is fucked up. Is a bit of wheelhouse for her again, whether it's a physical thing or a mental thing and a lot of athletes are just like, what the fuck is this workout? Like this is harder. This is harder than like my six gear workout. Like this doesn't, I don't understand what's going on here. So after enough time here, it's like, okay, the new matrix, we're going to make sure that we know which workouts slot in really well and create that different speed for more people. And then the ones that don't are going to be simple math on work to rest ratios. So like very, thing that I did is I very much like these are gears one through three. This is their own classification. The work to rest is significantly less. And then when we jump up to fourth to eighth, giving people an opportunity to definitely go faster when we're going to that moderate volume. And then the other addition here that you're going to see if you are already using this is I have zone one zone two, and then all of our power output stuff, because again, the more data that we have. We know our floor, we know our ceiling, we have all these different tools that we can use and we can just go back to a place where we have that. So I'll have the PDF for you guys to download. I'll have an Excel sheet for you guys to download if you want to be able to type your stuff in there. But yeah, that's, that's kind of the gist of like, okay, we need a gears matrix 2.0. We know that this one works well and this one works well and this one works well. But if I go back and look at the data, where are the discrepancies? Where is someone jumping four seconds? You know I mean? And ⁓ gear to the next, which would be a lot for like a C two machine split. And then where is someone either going slower, staying at the same speed from one gear to the next. ⁓ that's what gave me sort of outliers there. speaker-1: So I have a question. the addition that I think is really useful is the power output ones, what we call P1, P2, P3. P3 being 30 seconds of work, P2 being 20 seconds of work, P1 being 15 seconds of work. So the implication there is just, you you've got it in the notes here, like a controlled send, a nearly full send, and then like a reckless sort of send. Where do you, we're getting really nuanced here, but. So this is 15, the P1, the most powerful output one is 15 seconds of work. So theoretically, you could go quite a bit harder than if you were going for 30 seconds. Where do you see, or where do you think of programming when it's like even shorter than that? So true. speaker-0: Yeah, so. speaker-1: Like using a machine for true. And at that point, we're probably talking more about like a bike or just straight up sprinting, which I know we don't share a ton of, but like where, where do you think of like the five to 10 second output of just like that is full all out reckless, but it's also from a physiological perspective. It's short enough where you're, know, even anaerobic system doesn't really have time. Your glycolytic energy pathway doesn't even have time to kick in. It's purely you're just. Tapping out your ATP and then getting full recovery and it's borderline a lifting session at that point Where do you write do can athletes expect to see that sort of stuff? Is it? do we say? like lifting speaker-0: And this is honestly the perfect question to also explain the difference between power output gears and like your normal ones because there is a range. So I would say if it's going to be conditioning and it's a continuous machine, so I have it broken up on here. If it's a continuous machine, you're thinking your, you know, your eco bike, C2 bike, pushing a sled, running that sort of thing. If it's a ski or a row, we find that people can sustain the pace for longer because of the recovery period. So that's upwards of two X timing when it comes to that. But I will start an athlete that needs to work on this all the way down at 10 seconds. That's about the lowest that I go there. I would consider anything outside of that to be more in the strength realm. If we were separating strength and conditioning. speaker-1: Yeah, just think and yeah, 10 seconds is that number that I was kind of thinking of speaker-0: And what's funny is that has actually changed a lot in the last few years. So tongue in cheek a lot of times that people start to call it the machine games and not the CrossFit games with the amount of monostructural conditioning that's in the sport now. The athlete's ability to repeat with less rest is getting a little crazy. So am I talking to someone who's on the GPP program an open athlete? You know? Having them go five by 10 seconds and resting as much as they need to, to be able to truly send it each time is awesome. It's great. But I have athletes who are so aerobically inclined that they can do every three minutes for five sets. They can sprint for 15 seconds on an eco bike and their power up, what doesn't drop across five. They need to go up. I'll go 16 and then 17 and then 18. NP1, I want your last score to be worse than your first score. Like I want to go in and tap that to the point where you're not doing as well. MP3, it's, I flip it in the opposite direction. How long can we go and maintain power output? Right? So we would do a thing where we would actually probably be shortening that just to make sure that we're good there. And the gears here are incredibly imperfect. I got a message, um, from a competitor recently that was like, Hey, sometimes the timing is just different. Like I can sprint for, you know, let's say it says that it's P three, but sometimes it's 25 seconds and sometimes it's 35 or 40. Like those are different speeds. care more about the stimulus. I like the idea of the speed because I can track if I'm getting better over time, but we don't tell athletes to stare at their P one, right? Like they manufacture it with their effort and sometimes their nervous systems along for the ride. And sometimes they've done a fucking nasty five by five back squat before other times they got 10 hours of sleep and six cups of coffee and they're ready to go. That sort of thing. So we're going to see real differences here. What we want to do is take really good notes about all of our power output stuff and see how it's trending in different spots, that sort of thing. And obviously the longer you go. So if you are doing, you know, Every five minutes times three AMRAP one minute, you know, row for calories. Like first and foremost, yuck. That's not very fun. You can probably get pretty close to, to see like, like comparing workouts day to day on something like that. But the true power output stuff, like, I mean, I've, I've said this on here before and I'll say it again. have to check a box. have to mention this every six months for my ego. The first time. speaker-1: Yeah, I'm skipping that day. speaker-0: I ever did the Maffetone warmup. 20 cows on the ⁓ bike in my garage in 12 seconds. That was a PR and it was like, wow, warming up is so cool. I yet ⁓ to that again. So like really just changes like how much water you drank. Like there's just so much to it. The way that you feel and everyone's had those days where they just feel like a monster and they feel like they can repeat power output. Then you have those days where like you're literally your second one. You're like, wow. No glycogen in my hamstrings. Good. Good to know. Yeah. Beautiful. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, I mean at that at that level of effort It's more like a we talked about kind of like a lifting session than a than a conditioning one where it's like you go into the gym and you're supposed to up to 90 % of your one rep max and you're like motherfucker That is ten pounds over my one rep max today like just based on how you feel your nervous system and stuff like that Yeah, just think it's a ⁓ it's there's a I think is a big difference between ⁓ the 10, like a 10 second effort, a lot of people can, you know, repeat that like and over again. Once you start to creep past that, obviously we're, we're tapping out like the immediate ATP energy stores and, are banking on some muscle glycogen to, to assist, but. speaker-0: The other end of the spectrum that has been added, and again, just to give you that full picture of your monostructural conditioning is our zone one and zone two work. This is all below threshold. It's long and slow. It's your forever pacing. You can base it on multiple things. So you can do more pacing or wattage based zone one and zone two stuff so that you don't fluctuate as much. There's the idea of cardiac drift where if someone is Forcing themselves into high end zone two and they're not super used to it You're typically going to see someone get slower over the course of their whole workout from a wattage standpoint or a running pace standpoint And we don't really want to teach the body to do that, right? like zone two is not meant to be like I'm gonna flirt with threshold at one second in and then Slowly get slower over the course of the whole thing So we don't want that and one of the ways that you can combat cardiac drift is you can start at the lower heart rate or you can start at a wattage or a run pace that gets you into that low end zone too, and eventually gets you to the high end zone too. And then that way you aren't teaching yourself to go slower as you go. But the instructions related to this stuff are super important because I think a lot of people do this stuff wrong. and up essentially doing an extra. Like 45 90 minute conditioning ⁓ which is going torch your nervous system. speaker-1: Well, it's also like at that point you're pushing into like kind of that zone three range, which is essential, which is like the junk mile range, right? It's too, it's too slow to get the aerobic benefits or two. I'm sorry. Too slow to get the like anaerobic or any sort of power speed benefit, but it's too fast to get the, the aerobic benefit of a zone two session. speaker-0: And if you are fast enough that zone three is actually a good workout for you, then you're really fucking your nervous system. You're going in the room. If you're super fit. speaker-1: Yeah, exactly. You're fit enough to go fast and think that it's benefiting you. speaker-0: So the window that we create is a heart rate of 160 minus your age. So if you're 40, 160, that is a 120. That would be the low end of your zone two flirting with zone one and then 180 minus your age. If you're 40, that's a 140. So you'd be staying between a 120 and a 140. I personally like to use that to establish our pace or our wattage. And then I either keep an athlete and this is in a remote coaching setting. But I keep an athlete at the same wattage over the course of a whole phase and I increase the time that they're going. I keep them ⁓ on, know, if it's schedule or, know, their strengths and weaknesses, maybe I keep them at 45 minutes or 50 minutes and we try to increase the wattage or the pace incrementally over time. But I find that athletes, and this kind of goes back to the whole point of this thing, do a little bit better with, are we getting better? Like, this, are we getting better here? They can wrap their mind around it and I can do it in a safe way. Like I can really tell if an athlete's ready for me to just give them a few extra watts or a few extra minutes. speaker-1: you just talk so maybe good time to clarify because for a while there we prescribed the 180 minus your age as kind of like that's the heart rate and that's the what the mafetone method kind of recommends there were a couple of caveats where you might add or subtract a couple of beats per minute to that heart rate based on your fitness level but for For the most part, that's actually like a fairly high heart rate. 180 minus your age for zone two is like probably slightly outside of the like one, the traditional strength and conditioning. Like I think it's what 60, 70 % of your max heart rate. And I know that's not a great metric, but. speaker-0: Right. Two actually stands for how much lactate you have in your blood and not. speaker-1: Right. Yeah. And then, the building in of the range now? So now we've kind of just added, you added the 160 minus your age is kind of the lower end to 180 minus your age being the very upper end. Why did we go away from ⁓ the singular? ⁓ speaker-0: kind of two reasons when the true intention of that was to to be around there but never go above it so which is again if we speaker-1: People saw it as a challenge to speaker-0: Yeah, so that's that's one reason this gives us again a range to teach ourselves What is actually supposed to feel like and then the other side of this is Dependent on much of a beast someone is in a particular modality BC Program after program and ⁓ we we had with it three or four years ago as well So it's it's it's not just other people but athletes will skip really, you know, top 10, top 20 athletes in the world are skipping their zone two bike sessions, especially on their active rest day. Cause they're like, I'm fucking torched. You know what I mean? I'm holding 250 Watts here for an hour. Like how is this my rest day? This is crazy. Yeah. And so what we need to do that heart rate should the fitter you are, the lower that should be that lower, that number should be. That's one super easy way to put it. If someone who's not very fit, goes out there and flirts with 180 minus their age while they're jogging and walking, they're fine. You are going to be absolutely fine. You need the fitness. You're not torching your nervous system. You're not going fucking fast enough to torch your nervous system. speaker-1: fitness. torture nervous system just get after it. speaker-0: Exactly. Yeah. So that's not a problem there, but then we go to the opposite end of the spectrum and the greatest runner who has ever lived or at least in has been measured basically only runs in zone one and training because it's like a six 30, six 40 mile for hours. And if he was to go run in zone two, he's probably five 50. And what does that do to you? You your muscles are not along for that ride for that mileage for that long, that sort of thing, especially, you know, once you get beyond the, your golden years of. testosterone and growth hormone flying out of your veins at all times. So as we trend back towards, so again, the better you are on a machine relative to how you want to be compared to your competitors, that sort of thing, the closer in zone two, should be to 160 minus your age. Again, we see this all the time on the C2 bike. Hey, why don't first of all do the warmup and do the RPMs the way that you're supposed to, right? 85 to 95. I don't allow myself to up the damper on a particular wattage until I've gotten up into the mid nineties. That's how I know my body is agreeing to become an aerobic machine. And what I used to do is just push the wattage at all costs and flirt with that 180. And again, not the worst thing in the world. I'm not very aerobically inclined and I don't fucking work out anywhere near as much as 99 % of the people listening to this thing. But like we are using this. for two reasons. One, we use zone two so that we can help someone who is, what did I, aerobically challenged, I believe is what I put in there. then also when we get into a competition phase, we need to be able to add volume without over training. And one the easiest ways to do that is to create volume through lower intensity and more time. Those things multiplied together. So if you have super high intensity, you can get stimulus from very short period of time. We move those sliders into the opposite direction and that creates something where we are moving the needle and you actually might even feel better because you did it. So those would be the two reasons that we're doing those things. Zone one interesting for a couple reasons. Recovery for most people. I mentioned this either on the podcast or just the hunter anecdotally, but if I do, you know, an hour and a half long bike ride outdoor on the road, And I'm in zone four, zone five the whole time. If I take a rest day the next day, the day after that, my HRV is still struggling. I'm still having a rough time. Like my body's like, Hey, do we need to be in zone five for an hour? this necessary? And I'm like, I live in zone five, bitch. I'm fine. Don't tell me I'm dying. Watch. know how I feel. If I do in the longer I do it, the better actually. But if I do a zone one session on a C2 bike the next day, speaker-1: Very. speaker-0: Not only do I feel better the following day, but my watch tells me I feel better. It's those things actually like line up together. So my HRV improves in that space. So it's a really good recovery tool. And then if you're a, again, if you're a f****g monster on a machine, you will get fitter from zone one. The fitter you are in a particular modality, the lower you can have your heart rate and still do better. And that's just because you're going faster. Like that's just kind of what that means. So. If you are a monster on the C2 bike or you struggle to get your heart rate in range for that care more about your wattage. Like, Hey, if you can, if you can get on there and you know, 200 Watts for a guy in. worry about your heart rate. long as you're not getting up beyond what we're looking for. It's not a big deal. Right? That's that stimulus kind of it's, it's more of speed related than that. So if I'm doing that for an athlete, I just tell them, Hey, every five or 10 minutes, look at your heart rate. and make sure we're not being stupid here. Like make sure you're still in zone one or zone two. The range for zone one is 160 minus your age down to 140 minus your age. So for me, that's roughly a hundred to 120 beats per minute. And that is very much a like through conversational pace. I don't get it. speaker-1: the range for zone 1. Are you getting aerobic zone 2 like benefits from zone 1? I guess probably depends on like when you alluded to it like if you're aerobically inclined and don't need the zone 2 volume per se. speaker-0: There's just really good research. Like if you were to decide to, if you really struggled with zone two running would be an example. You're like, I basically can't. there are athletes that are like that. Walking a ton is really good for your aerobic output. Now again, what's the volume, right? Like if I was to do hours a week of zone one, I would probably get a pretty good benefit from it. single session is probably worth half. of what the zone two is for somebody like me. I think we're just using those sliders again, right? The lower the intensity, the more we have to see that physiologically in the ice bath. Like you can do, you can get the exact same benefit in an ice bath that's 50 degrees if you sit in it for 15 minutes or whatever. ⁓ I'm giving an example, same idea with the sauna. And I don't recommend it, it's actually worse. Those moderate temperatures for a really long time. But so. Again, it probably depends on how you're able to do it. Now, the other place that this has specific to misfit athletics is if you wake up on, if you wake up on a day that you're supposed to do your zone two bike and it's your active recovery day and you're really in the shitter, like you don't feel good, something's going on, you know, it's the beginning of a phase, HRV is absolutely tanked. That's when you would do a zone one. And then the zone one. I mean, if you're, you know, David Goggins Jr. and you want to do what you got to fucking do and you want to be in a black room, go for it. But zone one could be like, I'm going to watch a shitty two hour movie and just pedal and every once in a while, look down like that's something that you can do again to really like dampen. speaker-1: of a recovery bias for zone 1. ⁓ speaker-0: Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't, I don't want to part of me wants to do it, but I'm not going to do it to you guys. I'm not going to read all of these. I'm going to go down and read every single one. If you are a misfit athletics athlete, you're not going to notice some massive difference to these things. Like for instance, eighth gear used to be eight times a minute 30 with four minutes rest. Now the quote unquote benchmark of it is seven times one 30 with three 30 rest. It's very similar, but I saw too much of a jump in power output in that. want to keep an athlete in that place where they're, you know, kind of having to fight to get to that place. like little sort of nuanced things here, third gear and fourth gear are separated by an entire minute of rest in terms of round to round. Again, to designate the idea of aerobic threshold work is still a bit longer and a bit slower. We get into the anaerobic, you get a little bit more. you get to push harder. I mean, yeah, it's really just volume is the lowest in eighth gear and the highest in first gear. And that's inverse in terms of rest. So you get one minute of rest and three and a half minutes of rest. And those would be the differences ⁓ first and eighth gear. A lot of the workouts that you're going to see this year at Misfit Athletics ⁓ another iteration of me realizing what it takes for an athlete to improve. And giving you guys credit for your maturity. We were way, we were really bad back in the day at trying to, workouts and the way that we wrote stuff in hopes that you guys would think it was fun and do more of it. Like a lot of what we wrote, like we used to write zone two where you got to like jump off and do a metcon because you were bored, that sort of thing. And used to really ⁓ like and Haw over, okay, this week it's an AMRAB, this week it's rounds for time. It's distance, it's calories, it's, we're still doing distance and calories, but they're all fucking AMRAPs. Every one of them is an AMRAP because I am trying to get a particular stimulus for multiple athletes, right? Like if I know your pacing and I want to throw you a bone and say, Hey, we're going to run eight hundreds. can figure out exactly where that goes into this. But I mean, we've got athletes doing vastly different workouts. If we give them it's this many calories or it's this much distance. Right. It's just so much different. And I switched to certain athletes, AMRAPs only so that I could really convince them. It's another linear progression thing. Hey, you held this pace for four minutes. Now let's see if you can hold it for five or six or seven, whatever. It just, ⁓ was easier for this whole system to work. So, so much of what you guys are going to see in the programming this year is going to be AMRAP this much times this much. And then it's also a lot easier to compare scores workout to workout. Like. significantly easier. speaker-1: In terms of how... just a thought, I wonder if it would be useful for you to plug in the... that pace derivatives you know, where the little sliding graph that shows what like a two minute per 500 meter pace equates to in cals per hour in wattage. Yeah, I'll... I had to have seen that. speaker-0: So one really cool thing here nerd side note, I have made all of those in Excel and since had chat GPT do them and make them look better. I had the amount of things I could export for people like, so I can actually add that as well. That would be one thing that you could add there. I do recommend having like slashes in your gears chart showing like, okay, I held this and then I held this and then I held this. and so if you're starting from scratch, here's, here's how to think about it. You have none of this ⁓ thing filled out. You show up day one and I'll pull up a workout here real quick, or actually, I just read one of the ones off this. So fourth gear, AMRAP six minutes times three, you would do. Roke row calories, rest two and a half minutes. You have your brain and your personal history, and you probably have some rough idea ⁓ of you should do for this workout. We find. that athletes are very wrong when they show up at our programming for what these things are. But the good thing is all of your machines or your watch or your phone will give you the average pace that you end up doing. We don't typically see people go too slow and then get faster. We almost always see people go way too fucking fast and then get significantly slower. But in either scenario, it's going to spit out an average. And that is what you put into your gears matrix to start. Now, If you range all the way from a 145 to a 155 in a workout and you put the 150 in there, it's probably close, but like the next time you do it, figure out whether, you you started at 150 and again, you can project it, go a little bit faster. You're like, I actually still might be like a 150, 152. and then that is, that is how you update the matrix. We find that are two to three seconds. ⁓ per 500 meter or 1000 meter, if it's a C2 bike split on a machine between gears, two to three seconds. So if your third gear is a 145, you can estimate your fourth gear being a 143, something to that effect. That's typically what we see for jumps and the fitter you are, the closer those things are going to be together. Basically like the distance from first gear to eighth gear, if you are aerobically inclined should be shorter. Essentially, you should be able to just kind of keep getting after it. That sort of thing. And when it comes to running, it's about 15 seconds per mile, roughly per gear. So if your first gear is a seven minute mile, your second gear might be a 645 and then a 630 and a 615. ⁓ that's just kind of historical data. And then the echo bike this pretty easy. It's usually about one RPM. Sometimes it's two, but like again, the fitter you are and the harder you can go in those aerobic ones, it's, kind of just jump in an RPM. Every single time you go there. You know, on the women's end, we see low 60s roughly on the first gear and we see 70 to like low to mid 70s, depending on the size all the way up to eighth gear. And we fill these things in, we project based on the ideas that I just gave you. And then we use it as linear progression. You continue to show up, hey, this is what I got the last time. I've been feeling really good lately. I'm going to fucking, you know, try to chop a second off. I still think negative splits are the best way to do that. So you can figure out whether your idea was actually a good idea or not. And you just over time, try to get faster in each block on here. And it's simple, boring, good old fashioned. If you want to get better at the thing, do the thing mixed with constantly varied functional machines performed at high intensity, different speeds. We'll clean that up. We'll clean that up a little bit. speaker-1: variable intensive. speaker-0: So yeah, it works really fucking well. And if you lean into it and you lean into the test, retest model, you're going to get better at stuff. speaker-1: I think my only additional note on that when just when you were talking about like, I'm going to go up one RPM in you were saying like one RPM ish per gear on a, on the eco bike. Okay. Well, I mean, this still applies because just understand this is more just like a kind of tip here when, unless you are using the exact same concept, and this is concept to specific, unless you're using the literal exact same concept to machine. I don't mean like it's a rower. speaker-0: on the ECOBike, yes. speaker-1: And it's literally the the the model down to the serial number like that that your damper a four damper on machine a is going to be slightly different than a four damper on machine B. If you want to like I mean we're talking about optimizing to the second of pace here so might as well go the full the full Monte and like understand that's where the drag factor feature. speaker-0: No, literally. speaker-1: in those concept two machines plays a role your goal would be to match the drag factor more so than the than the damper setting because it might be like four on one machine yields a specific drag factor and then it's like on the other machine it's like four and a quarter it's really small it might be it might be more than that but like speaker-0: Sometimes it's like, sometimes it's over a damper. speaker-1: Yeah, full damper. I've had some crazy zone two sessions where I'm like, I am the fittest man alive. And then you go down and use the other brand new C2 bike and you're like, you are the slowest man alive. speaker-0: So here's how I deal with that personally. I have to have, again, we all the way back at the beginning here, I talked about my dad bod and I get wrapped around the axle way too much, but I have a way to deal with this. So let's say I'm doing third gear and that is a two, we'll use round numbers. It's a two minute pace for me. I will go onto the bike and I will move the damper until two minutes gets yielded from 85 RPMs. And then I know. speaker-1: Yeah, you're doing the exact same thing. speaker-0: that I'm probably, go look at, I'll, you know, ride up to 90 RPMs and be like, okay, that's, that's this. And here's like my band. I'm going to start at 85 RPMs. That's going to my floor. And then knowing that I am going to try to get those, those negative splits there, but we know from the cycling community that that's kind of that sweet spot of where athletes are essentially the most efficient on the machine. And of course with the drag factor, that's probably a little bit different, but that's probably getting too far into the weeds. So I don't pay attention. I don't give a flying fuck what the damper says on that thing. I get on it and I'm like 85 RPMs, slide the damper two minutes done. Like that's the setting that I'm going to be on because my bike at home is like legitimately 10 seconds or is it 10 seconds? No, it's like 20 Watts. I think like different on a one damper than some of the bikes here. It just, it feels different too. And I would say the bike is probably the biggest culprit on that. The swings aren't as crazy, but if you are again, getting into the nitty gritty, if you are wondering why your row feels shitty for that day and you have your strokes per minute data and you're like, that's it. I'm two strokes per minute low. I was probably on the wrong damper, like that kind of thing. And that's just the kind of stuff where like that could go all the way back to talking about athletes being confident in a particular setting and not in others, like that can fuck people up. Like I don't have it anymore. And it's like, actually, no, there's just a shitload of dust in your road. speaker-1: Yeah, literally that's the... ⁓ speaker-0: has absolutely nothing to do with your fitness. You don't need to quit and become a triathlete anymore, or probably later. you do. In this instance. All right, I think that's it. You can hit us up on social media. You can email me coach at misfitathletics.com if you would like this and you're not in a telegram or sort of already on the program. It's a way to steal free programming. It has the workouts written in it. Does it tell you exactly how we do them and how often and how to test or retest? No. but it's a little sample, ⁓ know, it's, know, you go into a Sarku and you're, you're getting a couple, a couple of nuggets of that chicken. You're like, I walked by. speaker-1: I should probably go minutes later. You got to walk by in the other direction. Got a mustache on. speaker-0: Uh-huh. ⁓ we got a lot of fucking, we got a lot of window shoppers at Misfit Athletics. We always have. of the best athletes in the world have been Misfit Athletics window shoppers. Why don't you just come on in? All right. I don't know. What do I have for final thoughts? I just think that giving people actual paces to hold actual paces to be tracking how good you are over time within these workouts and they literally range from 15 seconds to an hour and a half just gives us an opportunity to help people get better in a bit more of a controlled environment where CrossFit in its original form tends to be a bit more esoteric and hard to measure and hard to take really good notes about. It gives us an opportunity to work on our conditioning, to work on our GPP, if we're rotating machines as well. speaker-1: It's kind of weird. it's the one, it's like probably the defining feature of CrossFit is that it is like, you know, it's measurable, observable, repeatable. Like you would calculate your power output on the thruster, the thruster burpee row, you know, row workout, but it's a pain in the ass and you're not going to do that. But, but you can do that much more easily with machines. I think my final thought is just like, Hey, you, you probably, you, you listener, you athlete, you probably track your lifts. Pretty maniacally, you know what you've hit for one three and five maybe or just a very very very good general idea This is the same thing you have to end It's more I was gonna say it's more important. It's a conditioning sport. You have to understand these things I think they have the potential to it also just helps you in Inform you like you don't need to necessarily think about the gears matrix as like machine specific It's like, you know their intervals, you know, the let's let me see here. Try not to speaker-0: And it's more important. speaker-1: backtrack too far, like in that that gears matrix, like you've got working windows that range from one and a half minutes to 15 minutes. Like how many metcons do you do that live in that range of, you know, probably more real realistically like the four minute metcon all the way up to the 15 minute AMRAP, you know, like gear one through five, like how valuable would it be to know what your pace is supposed to be in a 14 minute AMRAP of various speaker-0: how you feel like what is that speaker-1: And that's the point, right? That's the connection. It's like you might not be able to see a heads-up display with your burpee thruster power output and compare it to your your gears matrix, but you can certainly compare the feeling that you have like what does my heart rate feel like? What does my physical capacity feel like at this point? You know six minutes into the 14 minute AMRAP like you can use this to extrapolate things that apply even more directly to the sport, are tests. speaker-0: Can we do it? Thank you for tuning into another episode of the misfit podcast. speaker-1: We did.