 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 to time so there we go 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 familiar with some of the Kind of thoughts in the area, 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 gonna 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 It 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 it 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 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 That 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 And 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 like 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 that 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. 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 website on 21 convention when the video is posted up and for those of you here It's James steel II dot blog spot dot com 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 When we started to plan out the paper I suggested, you know, what why don't we if we're you know You're gonna spend all this time reviewing all the research and looking at what you know The actual research findings suggest why don't we take this idea of you know resistance trains effect on cardio and add it in and James and mother the other authors on the paper who are my PhD supervisors and 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 pub med 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 Well, one of the important things that came from taking both Papers was in our evidence-based resistance training recommendations paper we Try 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 miss define Exercise intensity. They often use everyone know what one repetition max is Hands up everyone know what that is. Yeah, okay So the most weight you can lift in 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 a hundred repetitions at 50% of their one repetition max the numbers don't really add up there but But the assumption would be that if we were using percentage of repetition max as a definition of intensity The person doing a hundred repetitions with 50% of their one rep max would be working at a lower intensity than the person Who did one repetition at 80% of their one repetition max louder So We felt that that most authors were you know misusing this term and so we tried to more appropriately define it as being Intensity in exercise is 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 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 was 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 You know 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 Measurement of in or 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 realize that there was a trend in the In the results of those studies when you differentiate it between the two And that's what I'm going to go through today and talk to you about where you know what what affects Controlling for intensity and and the fact that intensity is really the most important aspect of it so, you know traditionally and for the last 30 years or so The concept of aerobic exercise, you know came about in the 70s when Ken Cooper came up with his aerobics idea with the the notion that one form of exercise could isolate Aerobic metabolism and then and that would be beneficial for cardiovascular health and cardiovascular fitness and over the years It's really hard to pinpoint how it's kind of actually evolved But somehow aerobics has turned into, you know cardio and most people think of what was traditionally Nailed 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 they have to do your cardio training to improve your cardiovascular fitness And if you want to improve your strength power, etc You had to do resistance training and you had to do two separate programs But as I'm going to show you that's not the case. So we A couple of weeks ago. We finally had this paper published. So we've root we myself James Fisher, Stuart Bruce Lowe and Dave Smith my two PhD colleagues and Doug McGuff who Robby's 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 and you know producing research 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 put in the Paper I'm not going to go through all the individual studies that I've reviewed because there's a hundred and fifty odd Papers referenced in there And if you want to go through and actually look through my discussion of the 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 conceptualize these ideas for you and allow you to think about it So if I go back quickly Well, 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 via to max running economy Lactate threshold when intensity is properly controlled for and then what actual physiological Adap, you know 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 At the acute responses, can everyone see the diagram that well the writing might be quite hard to read I'll talk you for it for it anyway. Okay, so to start off with We thought about muscular contraction and we appropriately applied The definition of intensity that we propose them 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 and We then broke down the responses we looked at into the metabolic responses the Molecular responses and the the actual cardiovascular responses as a whole when we think of the cardiovascular system The measurements of cardiovascular fitness that we get are a product of all these different things But the cardiovascular system is inherently the heart and the vascular system itself So we broke down what was happening at the muscular level ie the metabolic and the molecular components and the cardiovascular components which were the vascular and the Myocardial or the heart responses so the first thing we started to look at was what is the oxygen cost of resistance training to to momentary muscular failure, so Traditional recommendations are if an exercise is going to improve your cardiovascular fitness You need to achieve a certain percentage of your vo2 max during it So if we got you doing on a treadmill running at 80% of your vo2 max and Measured the oxygen that you were using it should be roughly about 80% of what your measured vo2 max is and recommendations are usually anywhere from sort of 70 to 80 percent in most physiology textbooks and review papers that you'll look at On the contrary though more recent review has shown that actually the actual relative percentage of vo2 max is is not important and One of the problems with that is if you look at the paper is that most people measure whole-body vo2 max instead of looking at the Oxygen cost of the actual muscles that are working. So what we did was we tried to Take the studies that have looked at resistance training to failure and those that have not controlled for it properly And one of the problems with the oxygen cost responses are is that most of the studies are all over the place So what we found was that most studies Didn't or included rest periods and all these other things and gave false impressions of a really low oxygen cost percentage During resistance training even when it was taken to fatigue because they hadn't controlled their methods properly So just eyeballing the research in that area You would get the impression that oh well if you take the assumption that you need a high Percentage of your vo2 max to improve your cardiovascular fitness then resistance training provides a really poor stimulus to that But again, that's that's a huge assumption So what we started to look at instead was to try and break it down into all what's actually happening metabolically when we train the muscle really intensely and The reason I got Doug involved on the paper is because although I had kind of you know had these ideas brewing in my mind for a number of years and You know, I kind of had a basis for conceptualizing them Doug's book body by science really kind of pinpointed it and Gave me a kind of framework to think about it in especially with regards to the actual metabolic responses that go on So most of the time when we think of metabolism during exercise You can roughly break it down into you've got your anaerobic metabolism, which is Energy production in the absence of oxygen and you've got your aerobic metabolism, which is any energy production in the presence of oxygen Now most exercise recommendations will again draw this kind of false dichotomy between the two they'll say there's a kind of Spectrum that if you're working at a very low intensity, you're working aerobically if you're working at a high intensity You're working anaerobically So if you're working anaerobically you can't improve your aerobic or your cardiovascular fitness And if you're working somewhere in between then you might be able to get the best of both worlds but what that does is it avoids the fact that anaerobic metabolism actually feeds in to Just broke my pointer feeds into the anaerobic processes, so I would recommend actually Purchasing a copy of body by science and going through the diagrams in there because it presents it very well and the the paper It goes into a lot more detail in terms of the biochemistry and or having a look at Doug's presentation next year but basically the by the end products of anaerobic metabolism have to enter the mitochondria Which is the part of the cell that does aerobic metabolism? And that's how aerobic metabolism works anaerobic metabolism feeds into it So even at this other end when you're working predominantly aerobically as they say you've still got anaerobic processes going on At the other end of the spectrum when you're working maximally anaerobically your aerobic system will be running maximally as well The only difference is the proportion of energy that each is providing so at the end of the spectrum both anaerobic and aerobic metabolism will be working maximally but Anaerobic metabolism can ramp up and increase the amount of energy it provides exponentially compared to aerobic metabolism Aerobic metabolism has a limiter on it basically There's an enzyme that limits the amount of this end product from aerobic anaerobic metabolism the rate at which it can enter the mitochondria and therefore the rate at which you can aerobically metabolize and produce energy so what you have is working at maximal intensity you have a maximal stimulus to your anaerobic metabolism and a maximal stimulus to your aerobic metabolism and That seems to be limited by this enzyme. So as long as you're working the local muscles maximally, so let's take for example You're performing a leg extension exercise exercise physiologists love leg extension exercises in research just because it's really easy to control and most labs have a leg extension machine So let's say you perform repetitions to failure Your if we were to measure your VO2 max, i.e. the amount of oxygen you're taking in and using for aerobic metabolism it would appear to be relatively low if we compared it to Your whole body VO2 max as let's say for example, we did a VO2 max test on a treadmill We'll get you to run Until you pretty much collapsed and measured the maximum amount of oxygen you could take in Problem is you're comparing apples and oranges because in the leg extension exercise You're measuring the maximal aerobic metabolism of the maximal oxygen consumption Being used by the muscles in that exercise and you're then comparing it to the maximal amount of oxygen that you can take in and utilize When you're using loads of other muscles as well So what's actually happening is although relatively if you compare it to your VO2 max on say treadmill or a bike It would appear using a very low percentage of oxygen You're actually working those muscles maximally in terms of their oxygen consumption So that provides a really strong stimulus to the aerobic components of the muscle there What you've also got them is as you start to work maximally The but products of anaerobic metabolism can't enter the mitochondria as quickly as they would like to they start to stack up in the cell and Something's got to be done with them So they get converted to lactate essentially for a variety of for a series of biochemical reactions and that lactate can start to interfere with Muscular performance and contraction So the body's got to try and deal with that otherwise it will start to inhibit the amount of work you can do and another thing that Can start to improve your endurance performance and your cardiovascular performance is an increase in your body's ability to deal with that Now this is one of the areas that has not actually been a great deal of research being done on so some of the stuff We suggest in the papers Speculative and does suggest that more research needs to be done with it But it does appear that you can start to improve Your lactate threshold as we call it the body's ability to take those byproducts and deal with them More efficiently through performing resistance training to momentary muscular failure again. So all of these different things That we look out on the metabolic side of things are all being maximally stimulated when we work a muscle to fatigue It doesn't matter what the mode of exercise is doesn't matter whether you're doing you're on a bike And you're doing sprints until you can't move the pedals anymore Or if you're on a leg press and you're doing repetitions until you can't move the weight anymore It's all the same at the metabolic level at that physiological level one of the other really important findings that I came across was some of the Molecular goings on at that level now This is a really interesting and recently emerging area of research In in 2005 there was a study done Which came up with an idea of what they call the am pk pk b-switch and I'll try and avoid using too much jargon But essentially What they found out was there are two different metabolic pathways that stimulate either improvements in the physiology that underpins your cardiovascular fitness or the physiology that underpins your muscular strength and performance in that respect and This study was done on rats. So great. We can extrapolate those findings to humans as we all love rat studies, especially in exercise and nutrition But one of the problems was again, it wasn't properly controlled they use really poor representations of exercise They didn't control for the intensity appropriately and they compared what they noted was cardio exercise and resistance training exercise and Suggested that there was under resistance training exercise and increase in this pathway They call the m-tor that increases protein synthesis and increases the amount of muscle you have And in the cardio exercise there was an increase in this am pk activity which is supposed to increase the or Adapt your physiology to be able to you know induce aerobic adaptations and improvements in cardiovascular fitness So this study was published in 2005 and as most organizations and prominent researchers do they jump on these new concepts and go Oh, look, this proves our preconceived notions that resistance training and cardiovascular training are dichotomized that you know resistance training doesn't do anything for cardiovascular fitness, so Predictably loads of review papers came out and they said oh look that you know this this further shows that you know You can't get the same adaptations from it Had they waited a you know few more months They would have realized that there was actually a paper done in humans that actually disprove that idea And what they found was that by performing resistance training Intensely to that point of failure where we're maximally stimulating these metabolic processes What happens is is The body uses a molecule called adenosine triphosphate or ATP As it's kind of universal currency for energy, so all the metabolic processes that go on I used to re-synthesize ATP so that we can then break it down and use it for muscular contraction and various other metabolic processes So what happens when we start to Work maximally is ATP Starts to get broken down used up quicker than we can produce it and what the body does is it breaks it down from ATP to a molecule called ADP and then a molecule called AMP And it's just try die M as it removes phosphate molecules And what you get is if you work the muscle really intensely is the ratio of ATP to AMP starts to change So what happens is is the amount of AMP goes up significantly and the amount of ATP goes down considerably So you get this change in this ratio and this is what actually stimulates this AMPK pathway, which up until this point Researchers have been saying it's only associated with cardio exercise and it's what produces cardiovascular adaptations But what these researchers found was that as long as you perform intense resistance training AMPK is actually activated Because what's happening is your AMP to ATP ratio is increasing significantly so it's stimulating that metabolic pathway, which is thought to Actually lead to changes in the physiology that will improve cardiovascular fitness now what they also found was resistance training in the first Two three hours after intense resistance training AMPK was up through the roof Comparable to cardiovascular exercise cardio exercise. I'll remember to keep using my quotation marks It went through the roof But then after about three hours it started to slowly come down and this m-tor pathway started to come up again So we saw that after a period of time both pathways were being stimulated through intense resistance training Which would suggest that actually there is the potential if we assume that these molecular pathways are actually responsible for those adaptations for resistance training to produce cardiovascular fitness improvements and strength improvements as well So That's kind of what goes on at the muscular level in terms of the responses What happens at the cardiovascular level though is thinking on more of a gross scale So it's what's happening in the in the vasculature in the arteries and the veins and the capillaries and whatnot during exercise And what's actually happening in the heart now Some of the research in this area in the vascular area, sorry is limited, but what we do know is that Kind of intuitively you would expect it anyway The more intensely you start to work a muscle the more progressively intensely you contract it The more blood flow increases to that area, which seems reasonable because the body wants to get more oxygen there It wants to remove waste products And it wants to you know try and support that area that's being used Intensely so what you see is there's an increase in blood flow now what happens when we increase blood flow for a Artery is that what we call the shear stress or the amount of stress that's been put on the walls of the artery increases significantly We get a huge increase in peripheral blood pressure So around the muscles that are being worked blood pressure goes through the roof because the muscles are contracting squeezing against the veins and arteries and What happens is is you've got this huge peripheral stimulus to this huge stress to the peripheral vasculature What actually happens though as the muscles start to contract intensely is although blood pressure significantly increases at The periphery at the muscles being worked We get an increase in what's called venous return So your arteries take blood away from the heart and take it to the rest of the body and the veins return it back to the heart and What happens is as the muscles intensely contract it kind of pumps and squeezes? The art of the veins and returns that blood to the heart a lot more efficiently now for years there's been a again another preconception that because of observational research where people have looked at bodybuilders and powerlifters and then looked at Endurance athletes and found that there are differences in their heart physiology There's been the assumption that it's because of their training protocols as opposed to them selecting their sports because of their differences in physiology So the idea has always been that resistance training increases the size of your heart It causes a kind of hypertrophy effect the same as it would do on your muscles to the actual heart muscle and the belief was because of the increased blood pressure that was Shown during resistance training problem is usually when we measure blood pressure We measure it at the periphery. So we'll measure it using a regular cuff on the arm In rare cases, they'll measure it using a Cuff on the leg, but usually on the arm So it doesn't really give us a representation of what's actually going on in the heart during exercise Now there have been studies done which have actually measured the pressure in the heart during intense resistance exercise and surprise surprise There's little to no change. So the heart doesn't actually Experience that much in the way of stress as compared to the peripheral vasculature during intense resistance training and partly that seems to be because of the improved Return to the heart this improved venous return through that skeletal muscle pump and this shows up as There's no change in the vascular myocardial pressure The left ventricle which pumps out blood because it gets more returned into it The heart can then more efficiently pump blood out. So the heart's efficiency actually seems to increase the harder and harder we train Using resistance exercise. This doesn't seem to be the case in traditional cardio exercise though Probably because there's a lack of this skeletal muscle pump action But what we do get is obviously we get an increase in the amount of Blood that the heart's pumping out so it pumps faster It pumps harder pumps more efficiently and we get an increase in heart rate and increase in cardiac output now When I move on in a second to the adaptations that actually occur because of all these stimuli The adaptations in the heart are relatively poorly researched and One of the things we've got is we do know that this doesn't seem to have much of an effect on Adaptations, but there may be an effect of this increase in heart rate just by raising your heart rate There may be some sort of stimulus to the heart, but as we'll see that doesn't seem to necessarily be the case so That's generally what seems to happen when we're doing resistance training the actual physiological responses that occur at the muscular level and Partly at the cave at the gross cardiovascular level Really not that much different than what happens when we do traditional cardio So the question is that may happen, you know during exercise But that doesn't necessarily imply that the adaptations will be the same because there are a host of other things that go on when you're doing resistance training compared to cardiovascular training or cardio training For example, you've got increased tension on the muscles because of the resistance you're using but we at least know that some of the responses are pretty similar and the responses that are similar are the ones that at the moment and what are predominantly evidence to induce those cardiovascular adaptations so This is the last slide I'm going to go through just going to go through the adaptations that actually occur that are shown to actually improve your cardiovascular fitness, so We've taken the graph and let's assume that we're going to Perform a training program getting people to perform high intensity resistance training and IE training to failure each time they perform an exercise What we're going to assume is happening is all those responses that we just spoke through they're going to be occurring Whilst they're doing the resistance training when they get to failure. They're going to have an increase in maximal anaerobic aerobic metabolism decrease or increase in AMP to ATP AMPK is going to be activated all these different things that are going to be stimulating cardiovascular fitness improvements So again, what we did is we took each of the components that are thought to improve measurements of cardiovascular fitness and Had a look at what was actually happening in terms of the physiology because we had seen that all of these measurements of cardiovascular fitness were improved, but a lot of different things actually Constituted to those improvements. So if we take one measurement of say for example VO2 max, there's a whole host of different things going on Whilst we measure that that are contributing to that end result So what we wanted to do was work back a little bit and actually see what is happening in the body What physiological adaptations are happening that are improving cardiovascular fitness? So again, we looked at the wrong one So I'm gonna go back Yeah, okay, so we looked at the metabolic the molecular and the cardiovascular adaptations now Again, what we did was we took these studies that had controlled intensity and the studies that hadn't controlled intensity and compared the results of the two and consistently what we found was the Studies that had controlled intensity had their participants trained to failure as opposed to just training to some arbitrary number of reps Three sets of ten doesn't matter what weight you're using doesn't matter if you could have done ten more reps five more reps, whatever We were looking at the studies that actually had their participants perform as many repetitions as they could they trained to their maximum and what we found interestingly was in terms of the metabolic responses There was an increase in every study in terms of the mitochondrial enzymes so the mitochondria as I said earlier that's the part of the cell that performs aerobic metabolism and there are various enzymes in that part of the cell which Perform all the biochemical processes that produce ATP in the presence of oxygen And what all these studies tended to find was that these enzymes started to significantly increase in the amount that were there So assuming they're not what we call rate limiting enzymes i.e. They don't have a maximum cycling rate the more we get the more efficiently we're going to be able to actually Perform aerobic metabolism and consistently Every time a study had the participants performed to momentary muscular failure intense resistance training There was an increase in mitochondrial enzymes, which is traditionally believed to be associated with endurance activity in cardiovascular fitness In terms of the molecular things that went on We also found that Studies again that had performed resistance training to momentary muscular failure had an increase Potentially in the number of mitochondria they had now these studies had a bit of a problem in terms of methodologies again because there was You can have what's called measures of volume or measures of density when you're looking at cellular things and a lot of studies mistook density for volume and Let's say for example, you take an absolute volume and You measure the amount of stuff that's in it Well, if you look at it relative to the absolute volume, then you can say there's a density of da-da-da-da If you then go to measure the density again and the absolute volumes increased But the amount of stuff inside it has stayed the same It'll give you the impression that the amount of stuff might have been reduced because the density the relative Measure of that stuff compared to the volume has decreased But what's actually happened is when you look at the resistance training studies at best or sorry at worst They have no effect on the number of mitochondria Some people suggest that resistance training reduces the number of mitochondria because they falsely interpreted this density and volume measurements But other studies actually show that mitochondria the number of mitochondria you have increased So you get what's called mitochondrial proliferation, which is something that this AMPK molecular pathway controls so and this is a big topic as well because there's a lot of stuff at the moment in terms of How important your mitochondria are to your health not only your fitness So the idea that you can increase the amount of mitochondria you have produced new mitochondria will mean that you'll be working more efficiently and potentially, you know, you're improving your health through that as well You also get a change in fiber types. So does everyone know that there are different types of muscle fibers so on a Simple scale, you've got your type one fibers and you've got your type two fibers You can go into more depth of that and say there are different types of type two fibers And you also have intermediary fibers which sit between the two, but you can go on and on and on But essentially what you've got your type one fibers are what you call your slow twitch fibers and your type two fibers Or what you call your fast twitch fibers And your slow twitch fibers your type one fibers are generally more fatigue resistant so They'll be able to go for longer as compared to your type two fibers now your type two fibers again With a kind of simplified change between them You've got what are called type 2x and type 2a fibers and your type 2a fibers kind of sit between the two So they're powerful like the type 2x fibers, but they're also more fatigue resistant So they're like fatigue resistant type 2 fibers now what happens again with resistance training to failure is as You train to failure over the course of a training program your type 2x fibers start to change to type 2a fibers so The fatigue resistance of your type 2 fibers Increases and that's predominantly because there's an increase in the number of mitochondria in them So these type 2x fibers, which typically are more fatiguing they Decrease or sorry increase their amp to ATP ratio More drastically than the other fibers do and this is what stimulates an increase in mitochondria in them and eventually it gets to the point where they've become so fatigued and fatigued over a series of Training sessions that that stimuluses induced an increase in the mitochondria in those muscle fibers So they end up looking like type 2 fibers So you end up with a more fatigue resistant muscle as a whole as well as an increase in strength Okay, you also get an increase in type 1 fire fibers as well, which has been shown in a couple of studies Now the last thing to look at again is this gross Cardiovascular improvements because most people when they think of cardiovascular They think of the heart and they think of you know your arteries and your veins and your capillaries Now as we show it doesn't seem to be that much of a stimulus to the heart and the training studies actually tend to support that There doesn't seem to be much in the way of an adaptation in the heart The problem is most of the training studies have been really poorly done really poorly controlled In fact, there are very few training studies being done. I was alerted to a recent one a Couple of weeks ago, which I hadn't had the chance to look through yet To see whether or not they have appropriately controlled intensity because it's always the first thing I look at now when I look at the study So when we wrote this paper, we weren't aware as to whether or not there were any adaptations and certainly looking at the acute responses in terms of the heart during exercise It didn't seem to be any stimulus to actually induce changes in the heart but what was happening was again more things were happening at the peripheral level so the muscles and The local support to the muscles is being improved significantly now What you've got coming from the heart are you've got main arteries which lead out to the rest of the body But as you get closer and closer to the individual cells, they get smaller and smaller into capillaries And it's these capillaries that really actually allow for transport of Oxygen and various different products into and out of the cells And what happens is is if you get more capillaries, then you've got a greater Surface area for actually that transport to occur So what seems to actually happen and again, it seems to be controlled maybe by this AMPK Molecular pathway is you get an increase in the number of contacts of capillaries So you get what's called a capillary Capilirization you get more capillaries being produced at that muscular level So not only is the muscle improving but the actual support structures to the muscle are being improved as well Which allows more oxygen to be delivered to that area So you're not only increasing your ability to utilize oxygen in the muscle But you're actually increasing the amount of oxygen that can be transported to it So you get an increase in the number of capillaries leading to all of these muscle fibers And you get an increase in the capillary to fiber ratio So you get more capillaries to each fiber So not only do you have say for example one fiber and one little capillary just feeding that fiber you get loads of capillaries just funneling Products into that muscle Now all of these physiological adaptations we think are what's responsible for these improvements in cardiovascular fitness so To conclude what we kind of suggested in this paper is okay. Well for years and years and years there's been this dichotomy between strength training and endurance cardio aerobics whatever you want to call it and That seems to be false most people Like Robbie said don't enjoy cardio. Most people don't enjoy going out and running miles and miles and miles and miles But they're unaware that they can produce the same effects by training once twice a week for at most 10-15 minutes Just working really hard by doing resistance training Now there are some people who enjoy running enjoy cycling enjoy swimming and that's fine They can go out and do them, but the important thing for me is to Convey the message that if the objective of you performing exercise is to improve a particular aspect to your fitness your cardiovascular fitness say for example then Would you not want to do that in the most efficient and time Time-efficient way possible and also the safest way possible because intense resistance training when it's properly conducted is safer then long slow high impact repetitive cardiovascular training as it's typically performed now That doesn't mean to say that athletes who are endurance performers should exclusively be doing this type of training and It's something that we make very clear in the paper You know if you're an athlete and you're running marathons Just doing resistance training doesn't mean you're going to be able to perform at your best in terms of that sport Because not only does all of this stuff contribute to your sport, but there are a whole host of other things the skill in terms of your efficiency of running Psychological factors various other things as well So by no means does this mean that doing this is the be all and end all in terms of sporting performance but It is the same as traditional cardio training in terms of the everyday Joe Improving his cardiovascular fitness to make him be more fatigue resistant and more Endurable to deal with his day-to-day activities or the sport he plays at the weekends or you know a couple of evenings during the week It's not going to make you an elite athlete But it's going to produce the same physiological adaptations in significantly less amount of time and improve your strength as well so That for me. I think is the most important factor It's trying to get people to stop wasting their time when they could be doing something Far more effective or far more efficient and just as effective and improve other aspects of their fitness as well Thank you all for listening I'll take any questions Now I think we've got a I think I finished a few minutes early. So I've got a little bit of time for questions if anyone's got any I think we need a mic Hi, I've come across high endurance training with sorry just speak up a little bit I've come across high endurance training with boxing with like conditioning coach So I think I've read about it similar before so in terms of how I apply that in my training routine Are you saying that we just need to train to failure? For example? I think you gave an You mentioned something about leg extinctions. Can you just go over that again very quickly? Okay, so are you a boxer then? Yeah, I do boxing at the moment. Okay Well typically when I when I work with athletes So I tend to actually avoid working with athletes nowadays because I worked with a lot of professional athletes and it's quite difficult Recondition them when they've been so indoctrinated by various coaching folklore but Typically what I the first thing I try to get people to do is recognize that there's a difference between skill conditioning and physical conditioning or improving your body improving your physiology and Improving your ability to perform certain movements that are associated with your sport. So what I typically tend to tend to do is as an example, I've not actually worked with boxers per se. I've worked with Tike eight boxes before But I always try and get them to plan their training around their skill training their sports training around their Physical training. So instead of trying to do all this kind of like cross training stuff whereby you'll You'll go into a session doing boxing movements But the intention of the session is to improve your fitness improve your physiological fitness And you know improve will increase induce these adaptations that are then going to transfer into your sport There's a safer a more efficient way to do that. So what I try and get athletes to do is to differentiate between the two so once twice a week depending upon their individual recovery and what other activities they're doing that are involved with their sport is Go in and do a session that is specifically Dedicated to improving their physiological fitness. So doing it in the most efficient way possible doing it in a way that's measurable as well because That's one of the real benefits of doing simple high intensity training single sets to failure is it's very easy to control and Measure your progress as you go through it. So you know if you're getting stronger and Then you know add in the specific sports conditioning you need to do So if there are specific skills that you need to work on then you have a session for that Ideally if you're going to be doing skill conditioning and kind of you know this idea of sports specific kind of physical conditioning Because let's face it that going 10 rounds in boxing or whatever, you know, that's You can be as fit as you like, but you may not be able to go 10 rounds You know with my Tyson or whatever Because your movements are inefficient because your skills very poor. So you're wasting energy Psychologically, you're not with it. So you will need to do those sorts of things in your training as well To improve the other variables. It just so happens that they also, you know induce a fitness effect as well but you're not doing them with the Explicit objective of improving that it just happens to be a byproduct Which allows you to then go into other training sessions and which are specifically dedicated to improving your physiological fitness And then at the end result is you've not tried to amalgamate the two and got a poor result from Eva You've done a program which is effective and efficient for this aspect you've done a program which is effective and efficient for this aspect and then When you come to actually Perform your sport you take the best of both worlds and apply it then instead of trying to amalgamate them in a second Yeah, that's kind of the approach. I'm taking at the moment like going to the gym I'd say maybe twice a week. Yeah, and also doing start circuit training boxing Probably about once or twice a week Yeah, perhaps I wouldn't necessarily a lot of the kind of boxing circuit training is is In my opinion a little bit of a waste of time anyway, because it's kind of trying to amalgamate the two I would you know boxing is a difficult thing to train anyway because the The most specific you can get in terms of training boxing skill is getting in the ring and fighting someone You know sparring is is not the same as as fighting with someone So it's difficult to kind of fit that in when I was working with them I was working with a coach and I would do the physical conditioning and Try to get him to kind of avoid going in with the idea of okay I'm gonna do a circuit training session, you know get them to do some punches and kicks here They're a little rotating round things instead. I would say right, you know, try and get them working on, you know Whatever it is, you know a specific movement a specific skill You know in this session and don't try and mix things up because it only confuses the athletes Does that answer your question? Yep. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hi I have more question of lower back questions a bit off-topic. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's fine You're the one to ask. Yeah. Yeah Well, I'm doing the high-intensity resistance training. Yeah, and I'm not a moment when I do a leg press The weights I'm pushing away are twice and half my body weight. Okay Kind of asking what what what doesn't mean for the injury of my lower back of the risk of injury to the lower back On a leg press. Yes. Okay. Well depending upon which leg press you're using and How it's set up and how you're actually performing it on there? You should in theory be pushing the load or the load should be going through your your hips and not actually being put through your back So as opposed to for example, if you're doing a squat where you've got the load Atop your spine, which which means that there is a load being transmitted through there there will inevitably be some tension across the lower back because the The what we have called the ferraca lumbar fascia, which runs from the kind of hips up through the lower back Any tension in the hamstrings or in the glutes from performing the leg press will induce attention in there But there shouldn't be any direct load on there. So I Mean, do you get back pain when you're doing the leg press at all or you're just concerned about whether or not there is any risk so it's not well doing the leg press but I Do have like pain but not and I don't think it's a pain of injury but more Muscle stress after the training, you know So it feels like there's been some tension and work work. Yes. Yeah If I always whenever I'm working with Clients because obviously my research at the moment is I'm working with people with chronic lower back pain and I I try to get them to differentiate between The feelings of discomfort during and after exercise domes, which we could call it delayed onset of muscular soreness And whether or not there is actually any pain because most people's pain that they experience if they've got low back pain It feels distinctly different to What they experienced during exercise? so if What I would try to do is differentiate between the two also what you've got to consider is Some of the aches that you get during or after exercise may not be muscular build this amones stuff on Moment on exercise and congruent exercise is really good on emphasizing Loading the muscles as opposed to loading the passive ligaments or the bones and the tendons and What not so sometimes what can happen is and a lot of people Complain of you know aching the back during deadlifts or You know good mornings or other kind of lower back exercises Well, the research actually shows that that any of those exercises are pretty poor loading and increasing the strength of the lower back muscles specifically So it's partly speculative But but my belief is it's probably more of a tension and an ache that you can feel across the the fascia the Fracolumbar fascia across that area Which it potentially could in the long term turn into a kind of wear and tear injury But as there's no direct heavy loading going through it I wouldn't I wouldn't be concerned with you know a severe injury going on. Well, that doesn't mean that it can't happen But the more most important thing is looking at your setup on the leg press and making sure that the load is being transmitted through Your hips as opposed to be going going through your back And then you can be sure that any tension you feel in your lower back is most likely due to the contractions from the hamstrings and the glutes I Got time Hey, what are your views on training with your own body weight versus training with using weights? What are my views on body weight training versus say resistance machines or barbells, etc. Any any other methods? Yeah My views at the moment are the the tool you use is Far less important than what you do with it So you I mean you can train effectively and produce essentially the same adaptations as you could do Using the most high-tech tool tool available, which I'm led to believe by Anthony is the arcs fit at the moment I've yet to try it and Say but the adaptations that you produce the benefits you get from it as in produced from a trip as a training effect are largely No different between methods as long as they you follow the right recommendations and apply those methods to whatever tool that is you're using and that's something that we Highlight in our earlier paper from last year and the evidence-based resistance training recommendations is comparisons for example between free weights and machines show that there's no real difference in strength adaptations and as long as you use The right sort of measures to look at that But there are obviously benefits from using there's benefits to using body weight exercises I you don't need to go anywhere to do them special You don't need to pay for a gym membership or have any high-tech equipment So they're perfect for using you know if you're traveling or whatever in fact Chris Icox Blogger from conditioning research. It's got a really good book Hill fit which incorporates, you know simple exercises and the importance is you know how you apply those exercises But There are also benefits, you know from using resistance machines in terms of time efficiency as compared to free weights for example and the greater ability to apply progressive protocol i.e. to increase the resistance you're using as you improve in strength and Also to more accurately measure your progress And then you know that goes all the way to the other end of using, you know Medex medical testing equipment where you can you know very accurately measure your strength of an isolated musculature to you know The real-time feedback you get during an ox fit session But my my belief is it doesn't matter if you don't have access to you know the most high-tech equipment The most important thing is what you how you use it if you've got access to really high-tech equipment that then You know use it. It's more a little bit for the novelty as well because I'm a bit of a geek And I like playing with new toys Just to kind of see what what they're like, but that's less important than what you actually do with it No, right I Think that's everything if anyone else has got any questions then I'm going to be around for the rest of the day Probably till five or six o'clock, so I'm happy to chat with anyone Throughout the rest of the day. Thanks for listening guys