 So the next speaker I want to introduce is a gentleman I met yesterday his name's James Steele and The title of his speech is there's no such thing as cardio I met James yesterday. We shared a cocktail together awesome dude Really down to earth and I've been really looking forward to his talk. So I'm I'm excited. I I hate cardio So I can't wait to hear that. There's no such thing He's returning speaker to the 21 convention He's also an exercise scientist from South Hampton, Solent University He's getting his PhD and he's an associate lecturer specializing in exercise Physiology and biomechanics He's also a published author with another excellent speaker here at the 21 convention You guys may have heard his talk online Doug McGuff. So he's a published speaker with Doug and some of his other colleagues In various peer-reviewed journals, so I'm really excited to hear what James has to say welcome them up I'm gonna set my stopwatch so I can try to stick the time so there we go Okay Okay, guys What I'm gonna talk to you about today is a an unconventional topic Maybe not for some of you who have seen Doug's talk and are familiar with some of the Kind of thoughts in the area and but certainly for me In my sphere the academic world. This is a very unconventional topic And it's really exciting for me to come to talks like this where I'm used to talking at you know Academic conferences lecturing to PhDs and MDs and whatnot and lots of scientists in the room going oh, yes That's very interesting. That's very interesting But it's good for me to come to these talks because I actually get to speak to the people who are going to take these ideas and Apply them and actually use them in practice Rather than just thinking about the theory and thinking yes, it's very interesting So what I want to do to start off with is just give you a bit of background as to how the idea Developed a bit of what I've done over the years that has brought me into the production of a This unconventional paper That I'll talk you through for the remainder of the talk. So I started off How many years ago now five years ago doing an undergraduate degree in sport and exercise science? at Southampton Southern University where I am now and about around that time I started to get introduced to the concepts of High-intensity resistance training up until that point I was a typical gym rat in the gym sort of five six days a week three-hour sessions at the time, you know Was in there for so long that I couldn't train hard I was just training with a really high volume and I wasn't really Thinking about it in a logical or a scientific manner I was kind of going with what the muscle magazines told me to do You know, I was doing lifting loads of weights loads of sets loads of reps Doing my cardio, which we're going to talk through today And it wasn't until I actually came to the university that I started to think about these ideas What? Little bit louder All right It wasn't until I started to come to university and to study this Sports science and exercise science degree that I started to think about things in this way and around that time I got introduced to Arthur Jones's works and his ideas that resistance training was just as effective for improving your cardiovascular fitness as traditional cardio exercises are and So for you know, the last five years I've been chewing the fat on that idea and his idea kind of made sense to me, you know Intuitively, but I hadn't really seen any of the kind of hard evidence of peer-reviewed research To support the idea. It just kind of kind of made sense So throughout my degree, I You know, I can't kept that idea in mind and had the opportunity to work with various different athletes and try to apply the Idea and at the same time start to look at some of the research that had been done And actually either did or did not support the idea to see whether or you know I was actually applying an evidence-based practice to these athletes So during my second and third years of my degree. I got the chance to work with an Ironman triathlete An international athlete if those you don't know what the Ironman is. It's a it's a ultra endurance event It's kind of one of those pinnacle events for endurance athletes And I got to work with him and start to apply these principles and it was a foreign concept to him You know minimal high-intensity resistance training training once or twice a week single sets Taken to momentary muscular failure really intense stuff, but really low volume really low frequency And while I was doing that I had to write up reports and whatnot to hand into my lecturers to evidence what I was doing and You know show that I had an understanding of the research and that what I was doing was actually supported So I started looking for the research in the area and getting you know little bits here and there starting to piece them together Looking at different measurements that we take of cardiovascular fitness things like VO2 max and which is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can Uptake and utilize during exercise Things like economy of movement, which is you know how efficiently you actually perform Exercise and absolute workload and things I lactate threshold Which is how well your body deals with the production of lactate and it's removal and I started looking at studies and finding that You know some of them showed that these things improved with resistance training and some of them didn't And it was really hard to kind of like gather You know what the consensus was there were various reviews Done by you know prominent exercise physiologists in the area Which kind of you know made the suggestion that you know Strength training resistance training. It's good for cardiovascular fitness or measurements of cardiovascular fitness And it's useful for some athletes, but it's never going to be as good as traditional cardio training And so I kind of went through and finished my degree with that in mind thinking you know Maybe the evidence is just lacking, you know There's contradictory bits here and there and it's hard to kind of tease out what the real conclusion is So I kind of went along with that It wasn't until last year or the year before actually and that my colleague who was going to be here today But unfortunately he's not around James Fisher came to me and suggested that we start to put together a academic paper on resistance training recommendations so For any of you or any of you heard of the American College of Sports Medicine It's one of the kind of big sports medicine and exercise medicine exercise science organizations And they publish a position stand on resistance training, which is supposed to be a unbiased review of all the evidence in the area and give recommendations to athletes and the general public to apply Unfortunately that position stand over the years is it's come through various different Reviews and additions so to speak and it's received a lot of heavy criticism for falsifying information Misciting evidence citing evidence that doesn't support their beliefs etc etc and We had a look over all the evidence and Tended to agree with the criticisms. So we said to ourselves Well, why don't we write a paper that acts as a position stand because At that point all the criticisms didn't really nail everything down and give people a set of recommendations to actually take and apply So we thought why don't we write our own kind of position stand on it? So last year we published this paper evidence-based resistance training recommendations, which You can get a hold of on my blog or which I'm sure Anthony will put the link on the Web on 21 convention when the video is posted up and for those of you here It's James steel II dot blog spot calm and I just write about all sorts of stuff on there when I've got the time to it's not Just exercise and While we were writing this paper I Or when we started to plan out the paper I suggested, you know What why don't we if we're you know gonna spend all this time reviewing all the research and looking at what? You know the actual research findings suggest