My latest on PJ: Strength Training vs. Running in the MSM

[Patrick Devine]

My favorite line: "Rodents do not like to lift weights."

[Mark E. Hurling]

It always amuses me when I see those phrases. Exactly what constitutes 'balance' and 'moderation?' 99% of the time, when someone says this, it means they don't have any real answers and they don't want to be called out on it later. "But it didn't work for me!" "Well, your training clearly wasn't balanced enough."

The next time someone tells me I shouldn't squat 3 times a week because I should have a 'balanced' training program...

For much of my adult life I juggled way too many sets and reps and lifting sessions a week "balanced" with 5-7 days a week of running 3 miles or more a day. Unsurprisingly I did too much of both and didn't do particularly well in either in terms performance. Just a lot of going through the motions and a lot of fatigue. And wasting time.

In my late 50's I figgered out how much cardio was really necessary for that level of cardiovascular fitness because I couldn't keep putting in all the time, pounding, and effort on my previous regimen. I actually thought that balance was indicated by minutes per week spent at cardio and lifting. Not so.

[DonkeyLips]

DonkeyLips? Quickly now.

Sorry - work/gym. I know im commiting suicide here, but: exercise science is a narrow field. How much is left to figure out now that we have a model for optimum training?

Of course, people will still need to study exercise science in the future to master this knowledge. But all the big stuff is taken care of.

[Frankie]

Excellent article. Shared it in my workplace's health blog

A while back some dude was proudly announcing how he was representing our company at a corporate marathon. As I said to him at the time, what the hell was the point of this? "Why?"
They had to get up at 5 in the morning on their Saturday, and mince around all sweaty and emaciated looking.
Dude wound up crashing into someone and broke his femur. I hear he's out for about 6 months paid leave, work is no doubt covering his medical bills.
I'm still lifting and working my ass off at the office. That brittle femur fund should be going towards my raise.

[CJ Gotcher]

My favorite line: "Rodents do not like to lift weights."

Not that they haven't tried:

Sorry - work/gym. I know im commiting suicide here, but: exercise science is a narrow field. How much is left to figure out now that we have a model for optimum training?

Of course, people will still need to study exercise science in the future to master this knowledge. But all the big stuff is taken care of.

Rip will surely have his opinion on this, but I see the Moment Model as a framework to talk about strength training. It's a beginning, not an end. If SSBT were the "Final Answer," there wouldn't be 3 editions of the book. By talking in terms of joint angles in 2 and 3 dimensions, moment arms, centers of mass, and the like, we can at least argue with clear points on falsifiable grounds... as we seem to do pretty regularly. We're not necessarily the only ones talking in these terms, either. There just aren't nearly enough.

Besides, SS is primarily focused on the development of strength (hell, it's in the name). There's still a vast field of sports and movement that we don't really deal with that should be studied. Lots of work needs to be done on the interaction of different training methods and health, and more scientific rigor should be applied to the SS model itself to identify what's really optimal (that was a blatant plug for Jordan's registry project, BTW).

[snezhnika]

Good article. Hopefully, it will continue the trend of more people lifting weights and/or questioning the prevailing wisdom so that more PHDs will lift weights and undertake studies with real value. The pendulum has already started to swing, in no small part due to your writing Rip.

Yes, I think this is so true. I just want to share my experience because I think this article is about people like me: average gym goers who just don't know what they're doing and run because they think they're supposed to.

Some people just don't have the right information, and once they're exposed to it, it will resonate sooner or later. I literally tried everything else in fitness (from zumba to pilates to running 20 minutes a day) for years. I realized cardio wasn't working for me, but I didn't know how to do strength training. When I finally ran across SS on some online forums and blogs, I realized it was the one thing I had never tried in all my years of going to the gym. And something inside me said, if what you're doing isn't working then try something else.

I think that until people get to a point where they realize what they're doing isn't working for them, they might not get it. If cardio stuff like running is keeping them thin and that's their primary goal, they don't have the incentive or motivation to change. For me, that kind of exercise made me lose weight, but didn't make me stronger, and yet I had no idea why I was unsatisfied. When I was finally exposed to SS and read the book, it just resonated with me because it matched my own experience, just like this article does.

[sbhikes]

Anecdote for you.

8 years ago I was more into cardio and I decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (the trail in the movie Wild, but this was before the book came out). I quit my job where I used to ride my bike to work, and spent 6 weeks doing training hikes to get ready. Then I got on the trail and hiked about 10-15 miles per day to begin with. It was really hard and I suffered and struggled a lot.

Two weeks ago after a few years of sitting on my fat ass at a desk and being too tired most of the time from lifting to do much else but watch TV when I get home from work, I hit the same trail at the Mexican border and the first day I hiked 21 miles. I kept up a steady 20 miles per day pace, some days more like 25, other days maybe a little less than 20. It was easy. Ridiculously easy. I wasn't tired at the end of the day. It didn't bother me one bit that water in the desert is 15-20 miles apart. I only ever needed 2 liters, maybe 3, because the effort seemed so minimal. My pack never felt oppressive. My cardio endurance was fine.

This shit works. But damn, you just can't convince anybody. They all believe running is the answer.

[LimieJosh]

Anecdote for you.

8 years ago I was more into cardio and I decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (the trail in the movie Wild, but this was before the book came out). I quit my job where I used to ride my bike to work, and spent 6 weeks doing training hikes to get ready. Then I got on the trail and hiked about 10-15 miles per day to begin with. It was really hard and I suffered and struggled a lot.

Two weeks ago after a few years of sitting on my fat ass at a desk and being too tired most of the time from lifting to do much else but watch TV when I get home from work, I hit the same trail at the Mexican border and the first day I hiked 21 miles. I kept up a steady 20 miles per day pace, some days more like 25, other days maybe a little less than 20. It was easy. Ridiculously easy. I wasn't tired at the end of the day. It didn't bother me one bit that water in the desert is 15-20 miles apart. I only ever needed 2 liters, maybe 3, because the effort seemed so minimal. My pack never felt oppressive. My cardio endurance was fine.

This shit works. But damn, you just can't convince anybody. They all believe running is the answer.

Getting stronger didn't improve the improve the performance of your cardiovascular system. You struggled initially because you were too weak to deal with the strength requirement of lugging around your own body weight and additional gear. When you reattempted it without that limitation you experienced that such a hike is not a real stress to your cardiovascular system.

It is common to think of the performance of the cardiovascular system in terms of the length of time one can do some mundane activity, but it really needs to be thought of in terms of the speed at which an activity can be sustained. Increasing your walk from 4 to 5 miles is rarely a reflection on the improvement of the cardiovascular system. Improving your 5k time from 30 minutes to 25 minutes is.

I wear a heart rate monitor when I lift to keep an eye on the "quality" and "value" of the cardio I am getting. Even on the more moderate loads of a 5-3-1 routine it ranges from peaks of 90% of MHR to never less than 70%. This includes the 3+ minute rest periods between sets. My log shows it. Although I have been remiss the last couple of weeks recording those figures.

Anyone who believes there is no cardio benefit from lifting has never bothered to keep an eye on what's really going on with their body when they lift.

This has been addressed before but it's difficult to get too much meaningful information from the HR response to this sort of activity. HR response is very useful when the activity is sub-maximal (relative to aerobic capacity) and relatively steady state. When you get on your cross trainer and start your cardio it will take several minutes for your HR to stop climbing and reach the level required to fuel that level of activity. When you do even a warm up set of squats you are working at an intensity far higher than can be achieved by just ramping up the aerobic system and it will be over long before HR even stops rising. Sure, your HR may remain elevated during your rest periods, but simply experiencing an elevated HR does not mean it is an adaptive stimulus like the elevated HR achieved during "cardio" is.

[petelaurie]

A marathon-runner friend tried to preach the virtues of running over strength training to me a few weeks back. I explained to him that both he and I could run a marathon. He'd beat me, sure. But we'd both start and finish. But if I took him to the gym and asked him to deadlift 405 he couldn't even start the exercise, much less finish.

He does have a nifty bumper sticker and a bunch of free shirts though.

[stef]

It is common to think of the performance of the cardiovascular system in terms of the length of time one can do some mundane activity, but it really needs to be thought of in terms of the speed at which an activity can be sustained. Increasing your walk from 4 to 5 miles is rarely a reflection on the improvement of the cardiovascular system. Improving your 5k time from 30 minutes to 25 minutes is.

And improved speed goes along with getting stronger. Maybe sb will give the rate differences between her performances to better fill out her example.