Tag Archives: longevity

Why You Are Overcomplicating Training Load

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Following on from Monday’s blog on How Much To Exercise…

With the hype around

You could be forgiven for feeling a little confused.

I’m going to make it simple for you.

What matters?

Well, that depends on your goals.

  • Longevity
  • Metabolic Health & Fat Loss
  • Mood Management

Lock in a Basic Week and repeat.

The Basic Week Approach is what I call low-standard deviation training.

It works for champion athletes

and

It works when I had a house filled with little ones

  • Something every morning
  • Mix our mornings between cardio and strength
  • Do a little more when our schedule permits

With a young family, exercise was for stress reduction, not performance.

++

Health & Longevity – I am always amazed at how much health benefit we get from a bit of cardio and strength.

A bit of working out combined with frequent ‘moving around.’

If you want a deeper dive then read Howard’s book on Longevity, link is to Dr Luks’ site.

Metabolic Health & Fat Loss – don’t trap yourself on the hamster wheel of chasing volume so you can eat more. Even experienced athletes make this error, I did this summer.

It’s a game we NEVER win.

Keep stress down and focus on your core nutrition.

++

Mood Management – My mood responds best when I stop before I’m tired.

As I wrote on Monday, we want a small disruption we can repeat over time.

If I feel “disrupted” during a workout… I blew it and recovery is going to take a while.

++

Suppose you have ambitious athletic goals.

What then?

You will need to figure out how to manage larger “disruptions.”

Before you add training load, reduce life stress. I had to wait for the pandemic to end, and my kids to grow up.

There are seasons to what we can handle – these cycles are based on invisible rhythms and total life stress.

Three month view, below, to illustrate

  • The grey bars are daily disruptions
  • The calm blue “sea” is long term load – 7 weeks
  • The red “waves” are short term load – weekly peaks

Spring and Summer are a time for bigger waves of load.

Fall is a time for slowing down, and long-term projects.

***Keep it simple and persist***

If you are interested in how I’ve been managing my “waves” then I pulled together a thread of resources for you (below).

Where to start?

Heart Rate Variability – tracking my HRV showed me how much fatigue I was carrying around. Here’s an FAQ and here’s the app I use.

The graphic above is from hrv4t.com and is another representation of daily loading.

The color represents how my metrics looked that morning.

What I like about this chart: even when things are going well, there’s a lot of recovery required.

Depending on how you slice it, 2-4 recovery days per week.

Loading is the easy part, what’s your Recovery Strategy?

++

Let’s end with a favorite quote about humility

When different protocols produce similar results, the mechanism isn’t the protocol

The process you enjoy is the one you’ll be able to sustain.

Consistency is the mechanism underlying all progress.

Linked In This Article

  1. How Much Should I Train?
  2. Optimized Training Protocols for Doctors, and other busy professionals
  3. Dead-Simple Nutrition
  4. Eliminating Weight-Gain While Exercising
  5. The Dynamic Loading Thread
  6. FAQ on Heart Rate Variability

Q2 2022 Top Twitter Threads by Engagement

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  1. Building the capacity for One Big Slow Day
  2. Review of Longevity… Simplified
  3. Training Zone Lingo
  4. Effective Nutrition
  5. Remove One Thing
  6. Before Swimming Harder Try This
  7. Getting Mentors Interested 
  8. My Home Gym
  9. Late-Season Peaking & The Need To Do
  10. Zone 2 is Light
  11. Training Nutrition Thread
  12. Where to Spend
  13. Sub-max Benchmarking with Power

Chronic Endurance

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A friend’s question gave me a nudge to flesh this out.

My pal asked, “am I damaging my health by pursing my endurance dreams?”

The science seems clear => you are very, very unlikely to screw up your health by exercising. Most everyone could benefit from exercising a little more often.

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However…

My demographic is different than the general public.

Call us the “screw the limit” exercisers.

What about us?

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I’m fortunate to have a group of endurance mentors that are moving through their 60s, 70s and 80s with many, many, many (!) years of chronic endurance training under their belts. Some of their hearts, and joints, are coming off the rails.

It’s tempting to “blame” exercise for their issues but that ignores the problems they avoided through exercise (high blood pressure not received, depressions not experienced, diabetes not developed, harmful addictions successfully managed).

+++

That said, whenever I find myself asking a question about excess, the fact that I’m asking is, in itself, part of the answer.

If you’re already exercising daily then you’re not going to find any doctor to advise you that you need to ramp that up by a factor of 2-5x.

…and you may find yourself reaching out to someone like me to get comfort that it’s OK to do a little less.

In doing a little less, but continuing to exercise daily, you will reduce your risk of ruin.

“Ruin” being the loss of the benefits from daily exercise.

Risk of ruin is what encouraged me to do less.

Immune system failure, bike crashes, lower leg injuries, death by avalanche/car accident… each is extremely inconvenient.

In doing less, I discovered unexpected benefits of eliminating chronic endurance => improved sex drive, better cognitive ability, happier joints, less cravings and additional muscle mass.

If you’re under 50, or pre-menopausal, then my benefits list will make more sense in a few years!

+++

What about that Tour de France study about longevity? (abstract linked)

While extreme, I’m not writing about Tour athletes.

Chronic endurance is about chasing podiums for decades after your elite career.

It’s not surprising TdF athletes live longer than their peers. The constitution required to get to the start line creates a special cohort.

A better cohort to review is “masters age-group champions” across 10, 20, 30, 40 years and compare them to “daily exercisers”.

There’s not much money to be made studying healthy people so I wouldn’t hold your breath on seeing my alternative study!

Frankly, I wouldn’t expect there to be much difference in longevity. You’d be studying two healthy populations.

Our findings underpin the importance of exercising without the fear that becoming exhausted might be bad for one’s health.

Lifespan isn’t the point.

Being exhausted is horrible for our relationships.

Look around and you will see that relationships are what we lack in later life, particularly if our favorite hobbies involve being alone… 😉

Quality of life and keeping a lid on my risk of ruin… that’s what interests me these days.

None of these benefit from chronic endurance.