Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Is Zone 2 Cardio OVERRATED for Strength Training Over 40?

Transcript

Is Zone 2 Cardio OVERRATED for Strength Training Over 40? · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: If you lift weights and you've been told you also need three to four hours of zone two cardio every week to protect your cardiovascular health, your mitochondria, your longevity, this episode is for you.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: Today I'm evaluating those zone two claims for those of us who lift weights, who want to prioritize body composition and living longer.
• 0:19
  Philip Pape: You'll learn why the experts who even defined zone two wrote that the evidence for it is somewhat lacking, why heart rate zone and your wearable may not be as reliable as you think, and how much cardio you need when you're already lifting three or four days a week.
• 0:38
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits& Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 0:47
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pate, and I want to talk about zone two cardio and cardio in general today.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: Zone 2 is a trending topic, but it's there are good and bad reasons that we care about it.
• 1:00
  Philip Pape: I really want to break those apart.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: Zone 2 is what I'd call easy, steady cardio where you can still hold a conversation.
• 1:07
  Philip Pape: And there's a lot of promises or claims that if you do it for a few hours a week, it's going to build your mitochondria, it's going to teach your body to burn fat, it's gonna add years to your life.
• 1:17
  Philip Pape: Peter Atia, the famous Peter Atia, he did a lot to popularize zone two cardio.
• 1:22
  Philip Pape: And he has said that about three hours a week is the minimum for most people.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: Now, if you are lifting three days a week or four days, and you have a job, maybe kids or aging parents, you have a lot going on, like I do.
• 1:35
  Philip Pape: And that's a lot of hours on top of your training.
• 1:38
  Philip Pape: So I always like to get practical and say, what do we need?
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: What do we want?
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: What can we fit in, and how do we optimize our schedule to make, you know, the right things work for us from a fitness perspective?
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: So the question is that we're trying to answer is hey, do I need to add three hours of zone two or some sort of cardio to my lifting?
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: Do I need to do cardio at all?
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: Do I need to do more cardio?
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: How intense is the cardio?
• 2:00
  Philip Pape: We're gonna cover some of those today, or most of those today.
• 2:03
  Philip Pape: Now, two weeks ago in episode 511, I talked about a trial where postmenopausal women who walked brisky, briskly for a little over three hours a week lost the most deep belly fat.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: Go check out 511.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: We talked about belly fat and cortisol.
• 2:19
  Philip Pape: And if you if you take that on its face, you're you might be thinking, okay, now I have to do three hours of that.
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: And now we're gonna talk about today is three hours too much.
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: We're gonna tease apart walking from moderate and vigorous cardio because there's different categories we can put these in.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: And some of them are more, let's say, sustainable than others to include in your life.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: So what's what's the biggest bang for your buck?
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: Stick around to the end because then I'm gonna share a simple way to split up your walking if you care about your blood sugar and some potential other benefits when it comes to, hey, how do we actually structure our walking as we get older?
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: So, first we're gonna look at where zone two came from in the first place.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: Then we're gonna get into whether it's it's more important than harder or more intense cardio or more beneficial, whether cardio interferes with your lifting.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: We've covered that topic before, but we'll touch on it again.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: And then I will give you a practical, uh minimum viable cardio plan that gives you the the biggest benefit for the least amount of time if you are also lifting weights, which you should be lifting weights, roughly probably three or four days a week for most of you.
• 3:22
  Philip Pape: So, where did this come from?
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: Zone two comes from elite endurance athletes, cyclists, rowers, runners, who they do a lot of their training, probably 80% of their training at an easy pace.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: Easy for them, but an easy pace.
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: Now, those athletes train a ton.
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: They train 20 hours a week or more.
• 3:40
  Philip Pape: And so when you do that, of course, a lot of it has to be easy by definition because otherwise you're going way too hard, you can't recover, you're prone to injury, uh, you're prone to just being way too stressed out.
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: And we've seen that with folks that have been on the episode on the on the show who talk about concurrent training, hybrid training, or elite endurance athletics, that you know, the most success that a lot of these guys have found, especially as they get older and become master's athletes, is to do less.
• 4:06
  Philip Pape: Less in terms of, you know, a lot of easier level training to maintain the fitness and then occasional bouts of the higher intense stuff.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: Now we have a researcher, a physiologist, his name is Inigo San Milan, and he works with Tour de France cyclists.
• 4:23
  Philip Pape: And he showed that pro-cyclists burn more fat and clear lactate better than regular people, which, come on, of course, they're they're pro-cyclists, they're in a class of their own.
• 4:34
  Philip Pape: So, of course, fit people tend to have better machinery in their body, you know, better metabolisms, let's say, more efficient machinery.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: And we can't necessarily apply that one-to-one to the rest of us.
• 4:45
  Philip Pape: Now, the reason I mention San Melan is he went on Peter Atia's podcast.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: And that whole idea of zone two, based on looking at procyclists, kind of took off as this prescription for everybody, for you know, the 50-year-old Joe Schmoe who lifts on Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: So just kind of keep that in back in the back of your head.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: Now, what is zone two?
• 5:07
  Philip Pape: Well, this is where it gets a little bit messy.
• 5:09
  Philip Pape: Last year, a panel of experts, mostly in the world of procycling, it was basically like 12 men, I think, in procycling.
• 5:17
  Philip Pape: No, they weren't focused on older adults.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: It was specifically on these types of athletes.
• 5:22
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 5:23
  Philip Pape: And they defined zone two as just below your first lactate threshold.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I know we're all going out and we're like, I'm gonna measure my lactate threshold now.
• 5:32
  Philip Pape: Uh kind of like continuous glucose monitors, we're gonna measure that.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: No, don't do that.
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: But that is roughly 70 to 80% of your max heart rate.
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: And they prefer sessions longer than two hours.
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: So this isn't us.
• 5:42
  Philip Pape: I mean, unless you're going to sign up for two-hour sessions of cardio, God help you, you know, that's not for us.
• 5:49
  Philip Pape: Now, when we think of time, that is a huge factor for us, dear listener, you and me, probably in our 40s, 50s, 60s, trying to fit in cardio around lifting instead of the other way around, in my opinion.
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: That is what we're trying to do.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: Now, real quick pitch here.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: I have an app.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: I have an app called Fitness Lab that is based on this philosophy because I've run into this problem myself personally and with clients and members for many, many years.
• 6:16
  Philip Pape: How do we, as regular people with chaotic lives, make it all fit where you don't have a personal coach trying to like play Tetris with your schedule for you?
• 6:26
  Philip Pape: So I tried to solve that problem where you look at things like, okay, how many days can I train?
• 6:32
  Philip Pape: How long are my sessions?
• 6:34
  Philip Pape: What is my balance between lifting and cardio?
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: And how do I get the most out of that?
• 6:40
  Philip Pape: I mean, I personally, right now, am training three days a week because I'm just so busy and I want to prioritize sleep and other things that I need to figure out how do I do that, but still get enough volume over the week and still have enough time for other forms of cardio, keeping in mind that your lifting itself checks part of the box of quote unquote cardio, though maybe not all of it, but quite a bit of it along with your walking.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: We're gonna get into those details in a second.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: But you know, going back to the problem I was trying to solve with my app, and I only mention that because it's the same problem we're trying to solve when we discuss this topic, is okay, if you're able to look at your morning energy, your sleep quality, your sleep quantity, your recovery ability, whether you're run down or not, how's your immune system?
• 7:25
  Philip Pape: Like, how are you feeling?
• 7:26
  Philip Pape: And kind of take all that data.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: Hey, you could plop it into AI and try to do that yourself.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: Or, you know, we did that for you with our app Fitness Lab, which you can check out at witsandweights.com/ app.
• 7:36
  Philip Pape: It is pretty cool.
• 7:37
  Philip Pape: What it does is on train days, it lets you figure out how you should train based on all those factors.
• 7:43
  Philip Pape: And on rest days, you could just take a rest, or you can do some sort of uh walking, mobility, breathwork type of routine for recovery.
• 7:53
  Philip Pape: It tracks daily steps, it tracks your strength, all that other stuff, strategic cardio, all of it.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: So if you're looking for like a coach in your pocket to do all this, learn about it at witsandweights.com/slash app.
• 8:02
  Philip Pape: But then you, dear listener, have a special link for 20% off in the show notes.
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: It's not on the website.
• 8:08
  Philip Pape: So use that if you decide it's right for you.
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: All right, now I wanted to make that, I wanted to put that out of the way because this whole discussion about zone two is really going to be based around schedule, preference, and recovery.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: Okay, how do we get the most out of this?
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: Well, the panel that wrote about zone two that I mentioned earlier also said that the evidence is still lacking, that a little above or a little below zone two probably gets you the same thing, meaning it's kind of fuzzy, right?
• 8:33
  Philip Pape: It's kind of fuzzy, like the actual zone two itself is kind of an artificial construct.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: And then when you have your watch, let's say your Apple Watch or your wearable, many of us, it'll either tell us that we're in zone two or it'll use a heart rate formula like 180 minus your age.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: The problem is, again, when researchers actually measured people's real thresholds, they found it could be anywhere from 60 to 90% of your max heart rate.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: So there's this huge range where it might even be difficult to tell you that you're in zone two, let alone if you're taking medication like a beta blocker or what have you.
• 9:05
  Philip Pape: So I would actually not even try to use gadgets for zone two.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: I would use the talk test.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: If you can talk in full sentences, but wouldn't want to sing, you're close enough.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: You're close enough.
• 9:15
  Philip Pape: A strap wearable isn't really going to make that any more precise for you.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: So zone two is fuzzy, fine.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: The bigger question is does it do what it claims compared to other forms of cardio or more intense cardio?
• 9:27
  Philip Pape: So we have Martin Gabbala, who's probably done more research on interval training than anyone, review the evidence with his colleagues last year in a paper called Much Ado About Zone Two.
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: Okay, I love titles like that.
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: And they found the evidence doesn't show zone two is the best intensity for your mitochondria or for fat burning.
• 9:47
  Philip Pape: Now, to be fair, they also admitted that very few studies have tested zone two the way that we describe it in popular media, the literature, or not the literature, uh social media, et cetera.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: So it hasn't been shown to be better, which is different from being shown to be worse.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: So absident, again, absence of evidence is an evidence of absence.
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: And then you have to look at who has a horse in this race.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 10:09
  Philip Pape: Gabbala, he's built his whole career in intervals.
• 10:11
  Philip Pape: Sam Milan has a business tied to lactate testing, blah, blah, blah.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: So we look at the data.
• 10:15
  Philip Pape: We try to look at the data.
• 10:16
  Philip Pape: So I want to talk about mitochondria, fat burning, fitness, and longevity.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: For mitochondria, the research is mixed.
• 10:24
  Philip Pape: Some data says total volume builds more mitochondria.
• 10:28
  Philip Pape: And by that argument, the easier cardio is probably a good way to go.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: It's sustainable and you can do a lot of it.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: I think that's fair.
• 10:34
  Philip Pape: If you have a lot of hours a week, time's not an issue.
• 10:36
  Philip Pape: That's a totally great approach.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: But if you're lifting three, three or four days a week, you have a job, time is short, you're busy.
• 10:42
  Philip Pape: Well, maybe intensity is more something we should look at because it gets you more per minute.
• 10:47
  Philip Pape: And when I say intensity, that could be as simple as walking faster, walking uphill, putting on a rucksack.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: It doesn't have to be doing more intense or even hit type cardio.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: Just put keep that in mind.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: Now, what about fat burning?
• 10:59
  Philip Pape: Well, zone two in the literature helps untrained people burn more fat during exercise.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: But so does intervals.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: And so does really anything where you're doing more than doing less.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: Guess what?
• 11:09
  Philip Pape: You're burning more calories, you tend to burn a few more calories because you're moving faster or more.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: So that's not really a shocker.
• 11:16
  Philip Pape: And remember, we talked about this on episode 507.
• 11:18
  Philip Pape: Burning more fat in a certain period of time from your activity or workout is not the same as losing body fat.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: That still comes down to your net energy balance.
• 11:26
  Philip Pape: There are many, many of you out there who might burn more fat because you're, I don't know, fasted training or, you know, doing an exercise session, but then you eat more later in the day.
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: And so it doesn't matter.
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: Like, and also if you eat a bunch of carbs before you work out, you're gonna you're gonna actually use the glucose and burn less fat, but you're still gonna burn the same amount of calories.
• 11:45
  Philip Pape: In fact, you might burn more calories based on some research, you know, a tiny bit more, maybe.
• 11:50
  Philip Pape: Now, what about fitness, like VO2 Max, which is kind of a fuzzy.
• 11:53
  Philip Pape: I think VO2 Max is a good proxy for fitness in terms of comparing totally sedentary, unhealthy people to everyone else, but not as much when you get higher and higher, right?
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: I think there's other things we can measure that are more direct, like speed and power and uh recovery and all this heart rate stuff.
• 12:11
  Philip Pape: It's a lot easier to measure in terms of fitness, but we do know there's a high correlation between very low VO2 max and like moderate or higher VO2 max, with you know, healthy people versus bigger or more obese people that have harder metabolic problems.
• 12:28
  Philip Pape: And of course, then that's linked to how long you live.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: So, speaking of that, speaking of longevity, the best long-term trial we have looked at people in their 70s for five years.
• 12:37
  Philip Pape: So nice longitudinal trial.
• 12:39
  Philip Pape: The interval group had half as many deaths as the moderate cardio group, but the difference wasn't what they call statistically significant.
• 12:47
  Philip Pape: So maybe it leans toward the higher intense exercise, maybe, but again, it's hard to tell.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: Now, the next finding is the one I want you to take away from this whole episode.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: If you remember nothing else.
• 12:58
  Philip Pape: And this was a Harvard study that followed a ton of people, more than 100,000 adults for 30 years.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: And moderate exercise got people the same longevity benefit as vigorous exercise.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: It just took a little more volume.
• 13:13
  Philip Pape: And if you want to be specific, it's 75 to 150 minutes a week vigorous or 150 to 300 moderate.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: Now, that 150 is probably something you've heard about, the 150 minutes a week, because it's like right between the two, which means you have a lot of flexibility.
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: So if you think about that, easy cardio clearly works.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: The question is how efficient are you with your time?
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: How intense are you able to go?
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: What's sustainable, etc.?
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: And this is where we can get into things like sprinting and maybe even hit.
• 13:40
  Philip Pape: Like I'm not totally against hit, but we're gonna talk about practical takeaways in a bit.
• 13:45
  Philip Pape: So the popular narrative is zone two is like the optimal intensity.
• 13:49
  Philip Pape: You gotta get, you know, three hours a week, and the the evidence says, hey, zone two is just one good tool among several.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: It's just a way to kind of know how intense you're going.
• 13:59
  Philip Pape: I don't even think it's that valuable, to be honest.
• 14:01
  Philip Pape: You know, I really don't.
• 14:03
  Philip Pape: Having some level of cardio in your week at some level of volume is gonna be better than none at all.
• 14:10
  Philip Pape: And probably having a lot more than that isn't gonna help you either.
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: So guess what?
• 14:14
  Philip Pape: Moderation is key yet again.
• 14:16
  Philip Pape: So now let's get to the worry I hear from a lot of you all the time, which is okay, if I add a certain amount of cardio, can I add too much where I'm gonna affect my muscle or strength, my recovery, my lifting?
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 14:26
  Philip Pape: So when we look at pooled studies, meta-analysis, the the general consensus from what I've seen is that adding cardio to lifting is not gonna really have any negative effect on strength or muscle growth.
• 14:39
  Philip Pape: It might affect your power, like jumping.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: This is what's been researched directly, but that's usually when the cardio and lifting are in the same session.
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: Running also seems to interfere a little more than other modes like cycling, probably from the impact and the pounding.
• 14:51
  Philip Pape: So, for most of you, taking all this together, sensible cardio isn't gonna do anything to your lifting in a negative sense, other than if there's a cost on your time or your recovery or your joints.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: Okay, so I would keep cardio away from your lifting if you can by a few hours, if not a different day.
• 15:09
  Philip Pape: I would keep it away from heavy leg days.
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: Partly, let's be honest, partly so you're not running, walking around sore all the time.
• 15:15
  Philip Pape: Where, hey, if you're in your 50s or 60s, like one of the issues is you fall and you break something, you hurt something.
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: If you're strong, that mitigates most of it.
• 15:23
  Philip Pape: But also if you're recovered, that helps too, right?
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: Like we don't want to be walking around all floppy and sore, even though we're I don't know if you guys can identify with this.
• 15:31
  Philip Pape: I always think, okay, I'm this strong guy who who lifts weights.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: And sometimes I'm just so beat up, I'm like, I'm weaker than the sedentary person next to me, right in this moment, just because I'm so sore and not recovered.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: We don't want to be walking around like that.
• 15:43
  Philip Pape: Now, for those of you impairing post-menopause, I always like to mention if there's anything different.
• 15:47
  Philip Pape: Well, first, heart disease risk tends to be higher during the transition of menopause, um, independent of getting older.
• 15:53
  Philip Pape: So cardio fitness is important for for you, but it's important from everyone.
• 15:57
  Philip Pape: And and a lot of people don't talk about the fact that heart disease is the number one, you know, risk of death for women is very, very important.
• 16:03
  Philip Pape: But you know, we want to lift for our muscle and bones.
• 16:05
  Philip Pape: We want to do some cardio for our overall health.
• 16:09
  Philip Pape: But again, we're gonna talk about how to do that.
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: Okay, I don't want you going out and doing three hours of uh intense training every week.
• 16:14
  Philip Pape: You don't have to do that.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: The other thing is you've probably heard that HIIT training, okay, high intensity interval training raises cortisol and you should avoid it because of that.
• 16:22
  Philip Pape: Well, we went through cortisol in episode 511.
• 16:24
  Philip Pape: A hard session of any type of training, lifting weights, you know, fast walking, HIT, whatever, is gonna raise your cortisol for a short time.
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: The same way it raises your heart rate and your blood pressure.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: That's totally normal.
• 16:35
  Philip Pape: And it's actually a good acute stressor that leads to long-term lower stress.
• 16:40
  Philip Pape: So don't think that interval training is this terrible thing and it harms, you know, anybody, any population, including, you know, women in menopause or whatever.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: If you're sleeping terribly, if life is chaotic, well, then you have to say, okay, I need I might need to dial things back, but that's a dose issue.
• 16:55
  Philip Pape: And all of this is really a dose issue, going back to my comment of moderation.
• 16:59
  Philip Pape: So, what do you do?
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: Let's let's talk practical terms.
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: Well, if you lift three or four days a week, you have a life.
• 17:04
  Philip Pape: I hope you do.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: I hope you're enjoying life.
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: I hope you want to do all the other fun things that outside of the gym that fulfill you, and you want the health benefits of cardio, but not compete with your training.
• 17:15
  Philip Pape: Here's the plan I would use.
• 17:17
  Philip Pape: Okay, number one is aim for those guideline amounts, which I mentioned earlier: 75 to 150 minutes a week of intense or hard cardio, or 150 to 300 of moderate or a mix.
• 17:30
  Philip Pape: Now, I would count lifting weights towards some of that time as a proxy.
• 17:33
  Philip Pape: I just do.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: I do.
• 17:34
  Philip Pape: It's not all of your cardio, but it's a massive contribution.
• 17:39
  Philip Pape: And we know that a combination of lifting and cardio is tremendously beneficial for longevity.
• 17:44
  Philip Pape: And you don't necessarily have to have that like 300 minutes of cardio on top of your lifting.
• 17:49
  Philip Pape: So it's there's kind of an overlap, is my point.
• 17:52
  Philip Pape: But if you're trying to make maximize your time, having some harder cardio in there, and that's up to you what that means.
• 17:58
  Philip Pape: It's a sliding scale.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: That could be, you know, just walking briskly or putting on a rucksack more often now than you did in the past, walking on an incline.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: It could be a little bit of a medium intensity cardio on a bike, right?
• 18:12
  Philip Pape: Or stair climber or rower, or I like things like uh prowler or sled pushes or pulls as well.
• 18:18
  Philip Pape: Really nice.
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: Great for your health if you can fit it in if you have the equipment, if you have the access.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: So that's number one.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: Number two is fit in one uh sprint session a week.
• 18:28
  Philip Pape: Now I was gonna say intervals, it's kind of ambiguous.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: I'm not a big fan of certain hit protocols like Tabata and whatnot.
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: I did a lot of those back in the CrossFit days.
• 18:37
  Philip Pape: You just want to be careful, and there's there's joint issues and things you gotta watch out for, form and stuff like that.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: I would just say, hey, warm up for five or 10 minutes and then do the sprint protocol we talk about all the time, which I completely stole from Brad Kearns.
• 18:49
  Philip Pape: Okay, four to eight sets or rounds of all-out 10 to 20 second sprints, where the recovery time is six times as long as the uh work time.
• 18:57
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 18:58
  Philip Pape: And that takes about 15, 20 minutes total.
• 19:00
  Philip Pape: You can do that once or twice a week.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: If you do it twice a week, that adds up to 40 really, really intense minutes of cardio and gets you like that plus lifting honestly probably gets you there if you're getting enough steps.
• 19:13
  Philip Pape: Like if you're getting enough steps, because to me, the steps count toward the moderate cardio as well.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: And then number three is if you've got the time, if you have the inclination, if you want to maybe burn some more calories and increase your health just a little bit more, add one or two easy sessions.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: Now, when I say that, you you might be thinking this is like the grinded out cardio.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: Doesn't have to be.
• 19:32
  Philip Pape: This could be just more walks, more brisk walks, like I mentioned before, that gets you into zone two.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: But I don't think you need to gadget for the zone two.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: I think, look, for me, if I walk four miles an hour, I'm like really walking fast where I just, you know, can barely hold a conversation.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: I know I'm there in that realm.
• 19:49
  Philip Pape: And if you don't like that, there's a million other ways to fit in cardio.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: A lot of you play sports too, do things for fun.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: You know, if you love walking, if you have the time, three hours of walking, four hours of walking a week is great.
• 20:00
  Philip Pape: You figure a mile takes about 20 minutes, it's about 2,000 steps.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: So you maybe get five or 6,000 steps in an hour of walking.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: So even if you walked, so if you walked an hour a day total, that's you know, a good chunk of your steps, and that's deliberate walking, right?
• 20:15
  Philip Pape: Hopefully, many of you are taking the stairs, you're parking away from the store and your workplace, you're pacing around the house, and it all starts to add up to the other several thousands of steps every day.
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: Number four is I would pick cycling on a like an air bike or a rowing machine, like uh what do you call that?
• 20:31
  Philip Pape: The the C2, uh man, I'm is that the C2?
• 20:34
  Philip Pape: Man, my mind is going blank, but you know what I'm saying.
• 20:36
  Philip Pape: Uh stair climber, elliptical, incline walking on a hill or treadmill.
• 20:41
  Philip Pape: I'd pick any of that over running if recovery and longevity are you know your most important thing.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: So lifting weights, you know, you protecting your joints, recovery, stress, all that stuff.
• 20:54
  Philip Pape: I'd keep that hard cardio at least two or three hours away from heavy leg training at least.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: If you love running, if it is just a joy of yours and you're doing it with the right form and footwear to minimize or eliminate injury, okay, go for it.
• 21:07
  Philip Pape: I'm not gonna stop you from doing that.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: Maybe keep it off of your squat days.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: Number five is you can sprinkle in snacks throughout the day.
• 21:15
  Philip Pape: And I don't want to talk about food snacks.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about high-intensity uh exercise snacks, like taking the stairs fast or running on the stairs.
• 21:23
  Philip Pape: You know, just a little bit of that throughout the day tends to be linked with people living longer where they don't do formal exercise.
• 21:30
  Philip Pape: Now, you do formal exercise, but so think about how you balance that in.
• 21:33
  Philip Pape: But it's a fun thing to throw in.
• 21:35
  Philip Pape: So for many of you, this is just like the pyramid we talked about a long time ago, the adaptive cardio pyramid, where in the bottom of the pyramid is get your walking in, then you have your fun cardio, then you have your intentional sessions, and then you have like a sprinter to a week at the top.
• 21:50
  Philip Pape: So you're basically lifting things, you're walking, and occasionally you are sprinting or doing more intense cardio.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 21:55
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, I promised you a way to split up your walking in a certain strategic way that could be more beneficial.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: And I'll give that to you in a second.
• 22:03
  Philip Pape: But first, I do want to say this Thursday, I have Lyle McDonald on the show.
• 22:08
  Philip Pape: Lyle has been writing about fat loss, dieting, body composition since the 90s.
• 22:12
  Philip Pape: And we're gonna be talking about intermittent modified fasting.
• 22:16
  Philip Pape: Now, this is built around trying to lose fat rapidly without losing muscle for people who train.
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: We're not talking about intermittent fasting, we're not talking about fasting in general.
• 22:26
  Philip Pape: It's a very specific, very good, in my opinion, protocol.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: And Lyle has a unique personality, he's not shy with his opinions, a fun episode.
• 22:34
  Philip Pape: If you're not following the show yet, hit follow now in your app.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: Hit follow.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: And if you know others who like like Lyle, forward this to them so that they can catch that as well.
• 22:43
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 22:44
  Philip Pape: So if you walk for your health, which every single one of you listening should be doing, you should be aiming for something like seven or eight, thousand steps or more a day.
• 22:52
  Philip Pape: How you split up that walking could give you extra benefits in addition to just how long or how many steps you get.
• 22:58
  Philip Pape: There was a small study.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: It's a small study, but it's adults in their late 60s who had borderline high blood sugar, and they split them into two groups.
• 23:05
  Philip Pape: So they walk 45 minutes a day, either all at the same time or split into three 15-minute walks, starting a half hour after each meal.
• 23:15
  Philip Pape: So, like breakfast, lunch, dinner, then half hour later go for a 15-minute walk, versus just go for one long 45-minute walk.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: Well, not surprisingly, the three short walks lowered their blood sugar across the whole day by about 10%, and it blunted the blood sugar rise after dinner.
• 23:32
  Philip Pape: Whereas the one long afternoon didn't affect those numbers the same.
• 23:36
  Philip Pape: Now, we've talked about in the past that acute blood sugar uh fluctuations are not an issue at all if you're healthy, if you're lifting weights, if you're moving, but there could be, you know, slight longevity benefits here by splitting up your walking, but there's other benefits like keeping you moving throughout the day, making this a good habit.
• 23:53
  Philip Pape: There could be benefits to your, what am I trying to say, appetite and digestion and all these other, there's all these other little side benefits I find from people who tend to walk multiple times in the day versus just trying to have like, okay, here's my lifting session, here's my walking session.
• 24:08
  Philip Pape: So just think about it.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: And remember, you don't need three hours of zone two on top of your lifting.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: For most of you, a hard cardio session a week and a lot of walking, plus your lifting covers all of your health opportunities.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits& Weights podcast.