 Let's talk about cardio. Or just look at the photo, whichever you'd like to do. There we go. We're going to call it cardiorespiratory training, sustained heart rate, elevation through formal exercise, typically to increase VO2 max, lactate threshold, lactic acid threshold, lactate, ha, ha, ha, or increase endurance. And does not increase muscular strength hypertrophy. It eats up muscle like you wouldn't believe. It's wonderful at that. It's just nom, nom, nom, on all that wonderful muscle tissue. It is not aerobics. Aerobics is an energy system. Because cardio can and does include anaerobic work. Think about sprinters. Think about the Usain bolts of the world. 10 seconds is a long run. They're never really getting into the anaerobic system. Not directly. It's going to, or the aerobic system, excuse me, not directly, it's going to deal with substrate that comes down from the anaerobic system, but you're not living in it like a distance runner. And so with that in mind, we talk about cardiorespiratory training. We have to define health. According to the World Health Organization, you can go ahead and read that, state of complete mental, physical, and social wellbeing. And it's not just the absence of disease. And the reason why I'm preceding with this is because you talk to people about strength training and they go, ah, but what about your heart? And then you go, okay, well strength training does this for your heart. And they start moving the goalposts. They say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about your blood lipids? Okay, well strength training affects that. I'll show you that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about blood pressure? Yeah, yeah, it does that too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about VO2 max and actual cardiac output performance? Yeah, it does that too. It doesn't mean it's gonna make you run a marathon or be ready to run a marathon, but it's gonna improve the base to the point that you can launch off and be better than anybody else. Cardiometabolic health should coincidentally be considered. And because you are more than your cardiorespiratory system when we talk about this, and here's what I mean. I showed you earlier, metabolic syndrome, the gyno, the boobs on the man, the heart attack belly, that's also called syndrome X. And it comes with all these other components, atherogenic dyslabedemia, abnormal cholesterol profile, hypertension and impaired glucose control. If you can train this musculoskeletal system, lift weights, strength train, it regulates metabolism and reduces these factors without ever directly affecting the cardiovascular disease through formal training. You're not trying to train that, but it's a nice side benefit through controlling all of this, which is what muscle does so well. Blood lipids, atherogenic dyslabedemia, these very loosely correlate. If you've heard Doug talk a couple of years ago on the internet, he went into that just a little bit touched on it. Mark Sisson touched on it a great deal in his talk from a couple of years ago, but it's still something that people tend to focus on, and especially if you've got a cardio bunny, they'll harp on this again and again and again. So it's assumed that resistance training is inferior in my graduate program, all the people who are American colleges of sports medicine, they love their cardio, and they say, ah, resistance training does nothing for that. And all the NSCA guys who are all resistance training goes, of course it does, those cardio guys that know what they're talking about, and they just don't, they don't sit down and talk and actually share this information apparently. So as I said, this is not the case. So this particular meta-analysis had 82 studies in 53 randomized controlled trials, found that mart cardio doesn't influence lipid profile independent of exercise volume. It doesn't do anything by itself until you get up to a very high level like you're training as an athlete. High intensity cardio respiratory training, your sprints, your more anaerobic type bursts, improves HDL, but doesn't seem to affect anything else. And these positive effects of resistance training actually turn out to be the reduction of LDL. So the problem with these studies, if there is a problem that's at most of the resistance training they use is, you know, you get untrained people and they're not able to actually heavily tax their, their aerobic, their cardio respiratory system through strength training, as Keith will tell you, as Doug will tell you, as I will tell you, if you are good at what you do as a strength athlete, you will be heavily out of breath when you are done. And so I don't have data. Don't have, don't have data or evidence for this, but I think you'll see with, with more advanced individuals, a reduction in the LDL and an increase in the HDL because of how hard they can work themselves and pull those two ends of the spectrum together. And in fact, there's, there are genotypic expressions as we start to talk about, we'll talk about that later. The differences to cardio respiratory training, I mean, it's the same thing with, with anything. You got a buddy who barely works out, walks through a gym, blows up with muscle. There are some that jog a little bit and they have just rock bottom, their cholesterol just drops like a rock. And so in this particular study, they found a genotype called the apolipoprotein E type that doesn't matter what it is, but the point is that they were hyper responders. Two or three times more reduction in cholesterol from the same amount of cardiovascular activity. And so with that in mind, there's no evidence for this again, but I would not be surprised if there's a similar genotype for strength trainees. Huge improvements with the same amount of volume. Hemodynamics, this is where people start to talk about the heart, not just things floating in the blood. Hypertension, it's a persistent resting increase in blood pressure. By the age of 60 to 70, you're talking about 50% of everybody. But by the time of 85, this risk drops off. It doesn't matter the blood pressure. It doesn't increase your risk of death. You still wanna control it so it doesn't kill you before you get to 85. So here's how that might look. You've seen it in people. They're really red, they're puffy. He's also got metabolic syndrome going on here. And you can just see it in the people. You can see the veins kind of bursting in their nose. That's always one of the signs of high blood pressure. These smaller arterials bursting. It has a respectful track record in this regard, that resistance training. So these two guys found that 3.2 tour, that's what the millimeters per mercury of mercury changes. That's your systolic blood pressure. That's your heart pumping blood out to the rest of your body. 3.5 tour decrease in diastolic blood pressure. There are some blood pressure medications that would be happy for you to get that. That sort of improvement. So you got further positive results in this regard, including reducing resting blood pressure in 65 to 73 year olds with high normal blood pressure. Strength training doesn't seem to work on the people with really, really bad hypertension or at least not enough to bring them into a safer range. And that's also a reason why I talk about doing this before it's an intervention, doing this when you're healthy. So you can keep yourself exactly as you are. But as a matter of fact, aerobics cardiovascular training doesn't have that much of a track record in that regard either. That's why they bring out the big guns, the big drugs typically. So one of the things that you got to understand that as a trainer, if you're trying to work on your health, you have to think about, we're kind of like swim coaches in this sense, right? Trainers, nutritionists, guys like Dave, Doug, Keith, in that we're trying to teach you how to swim. We are trying to teach you how to thrive, swim faster, swim better. Doctors, they are lifeguards. They're pulling your head up from under the water, but they can't teach you how to paddle, right? So I have a client who's a cardiologist and I'll start talking about these things and we're on opposite ends of this curve. And he goes, you got to understand when people get to me, they don't have a pulse most of the time. Or they've already had multiple heart attacks. And so all he studies is pathology. And so what tends to happen is the things you might see in pathological conditions might show up in healthy individuals, but it poses no problem whatsoever. It's a different ball game, but doctors will get concerned. I get it, they only see nearly dead people. So in this case, arterial compliance is just like it sounds. It's like the Austinian, that's the tallest building in Austin. When an artery is compliant, changes in blood pressure do not make it burst or rupture, it bends rather than breaks, buildings are meant to sway in the wind. If they were stiff, they would crack, they would fail. Arterial compliance is what you want in that regard. And so that when you strength train, you actually have slightly reduced arterial compliance. I'll get to why that's not always the case, but it shows up pretty regularly. And it's not associated with impaired vasoreactivity, which is how quickly your vascular system adjusts to the man's. If you're sick and you have arterial stiffening, you don't react quickly, but if you're well, you do continue to react quickly when you are exposed to some sort of sympathetic stimulus. This is something that's gonna raise your heart rate, raise your blood pressure, think of a caffeine, is a sympathetic stimulus. Or endophilia function is not adversely affected. And this increase in arterial stiffening also comes with an increase in vasodilatory capacity. So your vascular system is a closed hydraulic system. You're not really adding much in the way of fluid coming or going. You can get a little bit of water changing on a regular basis, but not much. So if you can dilate that system just a little bit, blood pressure drops like a rock. And high, high intensity exercise dilates that like nobody's business. Whereas the guy who's plotting along, hunched over on the side of the road jogging, thinking he's doing a good thing, doesn't get enough of that stimulus to dilate the vascular system. So his heart's pumping 1,000 miles an hour because he can't move as much blood per stroke. I'll get to a little bit more of that here in a second. But if you get to some cardiorespiratory training, like I said, it decreases that arterial stiffening, but it doesn't dilate like resistance training does. They both lower your blood pressure. And more recent studies have actually found that in premenopausal women, again, if it works in premenopausal women, it's probably gonna work with men because they are the giantest pain in the ass in the research world. If you can get something to work on them, you can get something to work anywhere. It's just the way it is, especially if you're in decent shape. They didn't have any arterial compliance due to weight training. So that's all confusing. It's a lot going on there. Let me try and simplify it here for you.