 Why don't we take this idea of, you know, resistance training's effect on cardio and add it in? And James and my other, the other authors on the paper who were my PhD supervisors thought it was a great idea. And so I said, I took that task on board. So I started writing that section of the paper. So I started searching all the databases and PubMed and Google Scholar and whatnot. Finding all the evidence I could and was really starting to get kind of blown away by it. And the section grew and grew and grew and grew and grew until it was pretty much the same size as the rest of the paper on its own. So we decided to pull it out and look at publishing it as its own independent article. One of the important things that came from taking both papers was in our evidence-based resistance training recommendations paper, we tried to define exercise intensity or specifically resistance training intensity more appropriately because up until that time, most researchers and academics and practitioners in the area tended to mis-define exercise intensity. They often use, does everyone know what a one repetition max is? Hands up, everyone know what that is? Yeah, okay. So the most weight you can lift in any particular exercise movement or resistance training movement for one repetition and no more. So most of the time people recommend resistance training loads as a percentage of that amount. But often they misappropriately define intensity as being a relative percentage of this load and really all it is is load. Someone could do one repetition at 80% of their one repetition max and someone could do 100 repetitions at 50% of their one repetition max. I always don't really add up there, but the assumption would be that if we were using percentage of repetition max as a definition of intensity, the person doing 100 repetitions with 50% of their one rep max would be working at a lower intensity than the person who did 80% of their one repetition max louder. So we felt that most authors were misusing this term and so we tried to more appropriately define it as being intensity in exercise as more representative of the effort you put in. So by definition there can only be two measurements really of exercise intensity. Everything else in the middle is pretty hard to define objectively. So you've got 100% you work as high as you can. You perform as many repetitions under the same conditions as you can and that's your 100% of your intensity. And at the other end you've got nothing, which is 0%. Anything in the middle is really hard certainly at the moment to actually measure and define. And taking this idea I started to apply it to the research I was looking at in the area of resistance training and cardiovascular fitness. And it became clear to me that the reason that it was really hard to kind of pinpoint a consensus or whether or not it was or wasn't beneficial was because most research had misappropriately defined intensity. They had used load as a definition of their intensity and that was why it was really hard to actually pull this out. And the other reviews and recommendations up until that point hadn't appropriately accounted for that. So I went back over the research and said to myself right the most important thing is to make sure that I differentiate between the studies that have controlled intensity. I had their participants perform resistance training to momentary muscular failure to their maximum and those that haven't appropriately controlled for that. And after doing that I started to realise that there was a trend in the results of those studies when you differentiated between the two. And that's what I'm going to go through today and talk to you about what effects controlling for intensity and the fact that intensity is really the most important aspect of it. Traditionally, for the last 30 years or so, the concept of aerobic exercise came about in the 70s when Ken Cooper came up with his aerobics idea with the notion that one form of exercise could isolate aerobic metabolism and that would be beneficial for cardiovascular health and cardiovascular fitness. Over the years it's really hard to pinpoint how it's kind of actually evolved but somehow aerobics has turned into cardio. And most people think of what was traditionally labelled aerobic exercise, long, slow sessions on bikes, treadmills, rowing machines, whatever. All these typical cardio machines that you see in the gym. It kind of evolved into anything done on any of those machines or jogging outside, swimming, cycling, etc. That was labelled as cardio and that was what you had to do to improve your cardiovascular fitness or cardiovascular health. And there was this kind of false dichotomy that arose between cardiovascular training or cardio training and resistance training. One was for your cardio and everyone said that you have to do your cardio training to improve your cardiovascular fitness. And if you want to improve your strength, power, etc., you have to do resistance training and you have to do two separate programs. But as I'm going to show you, that's not the case. How do I move on? Do you want to skip it? The bottom one. Ah, there we go. Cool. OK, so a couple of weeks ago we finally had this paper published. So we, myself, James Fisher, Stuart Bruce Low and Dave Smith, my two PhD colleagues, and Doug McGuff, who Robbie spoke about, who presented a couple of years ago and is going to be speaking in Austin again. We started putting together all this research and writing this paper with the idea that hopefully we can introduce this idea to the academic world and start to get researchers actually properly controlling variables. Producing research that actually we can draw sensible conclusions from rather than trying to tease out all these different conclusions from really poorly controlled studies. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk you through just two of the diagrams that we've put in the paper. I'm not going to go through all the individual studies that I've reviewed because there's 150 odd papers referenced in there. And if you want to go through and actually look through my discussion of the actual research and their methodologies and whatnot, you can get the paper. It's freely accessible online. You can download a PDF and have a read through the whole thing. But what I'm going to talk through is the diagrams, which just kind of like conceptualise these ideas for you and allow you to think about it. So if I go back quickly, will I go back? There we go. So what I tried to differentiate between in this was, first of all, what effect does resistance training have on cardiovascular fitness measures, like VO2 max, running economy, lactate threshold, when intensity is properly controlled for? And then what actual physiological responses or adaptations actually produce those improvements in cardiovascular fitness? So we broke the paper down into introducing the concept, defining intensity, and then going through and looking at what happens in the body whilst we're training intensely using resistance training and what adaptations happen over a period of time if we actually employ a training program using that. So we'll start off by looking at the, wrong way, at the acute responses. Can everyone see the diagram that well? The writing might be quite hard to read. I'll talk you through it anyway. Okay, so to start off with, we thought about muscular contraction and we appropriately applied the definition of intensity that we propose in there. So by its nature, if you're going to appropriately control for intensity, you have to perform resistance training to momentary muscular failure. You have to perform as many reps as you can with whatever load it is you're using.