Pavel Tsatsouline: Building Endurance the Right Way

Summary

Pavel Tsatsouline discusses effective strategies for building endurance by focusing on cardiovascular conditioning and muscular endurance. He emphasizes the importance of steady-state exercises like running at moderate speeds for improving heart strength, which should be complemented by interval training after a period of steady-state exercise. He warns against high heart rate exercises under heavy loads as they may not be best for heart health. Beyond cardio, Tsatsouline highlights the significance of developing mitochondria within muscles for energy efficiency, detailing methods for both slow and fast muscle fibers, advocating for maintaining workouts just below anaerobic thresholds to increase endurance without excessive acid buildup. Additionally, he explains repeat and interval training concepts crucial for enhancing fast muscle fiber endurance.

Highlights

• Endurance involves both cardio and muscular endurance discussions 🏋️‍♀️.
• Steady-state exercises help stretch the heart for better health ❤️.
• Interval training, developed by Germans, starts after steady-state 🏃‍♀️.
• Static exercises might interfere with optimal heart training 📉.
• Energy systems in muscles have different efficiencies for endurance 🚴‍♂️.
• Training mitochondria in muscles helps sustain longer energy conversion 🌱.
• Anaerobic threshold training aids in endurance by managing acid levels 🏃.
• Repeat training uses short intense bursts without exceeding thresholds 💪.
• Fast muscle fibers benefit from sprint-like repeat training sessions ⏱️.

Key Takeaways

• Steady-state exercises like moderate-speed running are excellent for heart health 🏃‍♂️.
• Interval training should follow steady-state for optimum results 🔄.
• Avoid heavy load exercises for cardio to prevent stress on heart ⚖️.
• Focus on mitochondrial development in muscles for efficient energy use 💪.
• Train just below anaerobic threshold to increase endurance without burning out 🔥.

Overview

Pavel Tsatsouline dives into the complex world of endurance training, breaking it down into cardio fitness and muscular endurance. He sheds light on the benefits of steady-state exercise — running at a controlled pace — which promotes a healthier heart by enhancing stroke volume. Once a solid foundation is established, he advocates for incorporating interval training to further push cardiovascular limits responsibly.

The discussion pivots to the less-discussed aspect of endurance: muscle-specific energy efficiency. Tsatsouline brings attention to the vital role mitochondria play in aerobic energy conversion within muscle fibers. His approach encourages training that skirts just below the anaerobic threshold to build robust endurance without overwhelming the muscles with lactic acid.

To round off, Tsatsouline explores the training subtleties for fast muscle fibers. Techniques such as repeat training, a favorite in sport science, are highlighted as means to push these fibers towards greater endurance capacity. By focusing on short bursts of effort followed by recovery, athletes can achieve sustainable improvements over time, setting a strategic pathway to endurance enhancement.

Pavel Tsatsouline: Building Endurance the Right Way Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 the Joe Rogan experience let's talk about endurance so there are different aspects to endurance and so there's cardio and there is the local the peripheral endurance and the muscles muscular endurance so first let's discuss how do we develop cardio let's discuss how we develop endurance in the muscle the best the healthiest way to develop your cardio is
• 00:30 - 01:00 just steady-state exercise like running in a particular particular speed that's not too fast that's very simple that's so that's way to develop cardio for most people it is for most people it is and so here's what's happening what's happening is the heart is stretching when you increase your heart rate up to a certain point the heart starts stretching more and it stretches more and more so that increases the stroke volume so pretty much you get a bigger heart and that's good that works up to
• 01:00 - 01:30 not quite 90 percent of heart rate when you start redlining your heart rate when you start getting to 90% and higher the heart does not have time to relax fully so it really pretty much is twitching so you're no longer really stretching that hard so you want to be training at the metabolic intensity that's much lower something we can pretty much sustain a
• 01:30 - 02:00 conversation so like say you're running and talking to your body that's what you want to stay to develop endurance that what to develop to stretch your heart that's the basic method so that's one method hmm so the second method is interval training so and the interval training for the heart was developed by Germans decades ago and these guidelines still stand so here's what they figured out they figured out that your well we
• 02:00 - 02:30 know that this various systems and you body have inertia so for instance note is that when you're running hard and you stopped your heart still beating hard and then maybe 10 seconds after there's a sudden drop right there sir is that inertia so the Germans figured out if you get your heart rate up to about 85 to 90 percent which is it's hard but it's still not maximal and then you switch to walking or jogging so the heart is still beating and so does this extra volume of blood
• 02:30 - 03:00 is moving in the stretches the heart so it works really well so you can use the intro method as well but it's it was found it's used best after after a period of steady state training it's very demanding on the body and it's not it's just it's too easy to have problems with the heart if you start using it prematurely then there's also such a thing as high heart rate under heavy
• 03:00 - 03:30 loads so in this particular case we're talking about dynamic exercises so as dynamic exercise running bicycling skiing even light callable swings that's dynamic exercise when you start doing static exercises let's say you're trying to do squats heavy squats for you know to get your cardio so to say that's not the best idea because that interferes with the blood flow that it's something
• 03:30 - 04:00 called after load versus preload the heart gets thicker instead of the heart gets you know gets stretched and bigger so it's not the optimal way to train the heart you can again the simple way you can use dynamic exercise in interval type training or repeat training in this case to train your heart is to do an exercise that's dynamic in nature to raise your heart rate to about let's say
• 04:00 - 04:30 8090 percent which would be 80 to 90 percent it would be where you can say maybe a couple words you know you're not you're not dying yet you can still answer a question and then you just walk around and you do it again so that's a simple way of how much time walking around that depends that totally depends on who you are to bend semester how fast you know heart rate drops back down what do you wanna like is there a number do
• 04:30 - 05:00 you want to keep it in the 140s the 150s is dependent upon your age okay in this particular case you would do you would drop it down the original guidelines were done for young people those 120 hundred 30 beats are you're talking about 60 65 percent and pretty much if you're just looking at being able to pass the talk test which means you can talk you know short sentences hmm I can speak in a short something like that right so for example you do a set of 10 swings really powerful with a kettle bell walk around a little bit when you
• 05:00 - 05:30 feel that you can speak again you do it again do it again so that's a simple way of doing that but the heart is only a very small part of endurance so we definitely need to do some cardio for health and athletes definitely need to do for their performance but what we really need to focus on is needed mitochondria so mitochondria in the in the muscle cell so that's where energy is being converted aerobic Li which means efficiently so if you look at the
• 05:30 - 06:00 way your muscle uses energy so you will get this energy with food converted it goes down eventually the final currency so to say is something called ATP but it's only you know you only have it for a few seconds so it has to be reloaded so we have three main energy systems so have the creatine phosphate system it's very powerful but it's only can do you
• 06:00 - 06:30 know go for just some seconds and it's clean burning we have aerobic system that's not powerful at all but it's longer-lasting and we have the glycolytic system that's kind of in between that dumps a lot of acid and other fatigue metabolites in there so what we want to do as we want to develop this mitochondria in our muscles it's easy to do in slow fibers and it's a little more involved in fast fibers I'll tell you how we can do that but it can
• 06:30 - 07:00 be done so what we're looking for instead of trying to trash the muscle with acid we are trying to train in a way that to produce less acid and then only before the competition right before the competition couple weeks out you do a couple of kind of a smokers like that to get yourself used to that that's thing so the way we develop mitochondria which
• 07:00 - 07:30 means make your muscle oxidative make your muscle enduring and not polluting in slow fibers it's simply moving right below anaerobic threshold so anaerobic threshold it's that intensity at which you you know acid is accumulating just up to a certain point it stays at that steady state and you can keep disposing of that for a while for quite a while as soon as you go above it very rapidly you crash
• 07:30 - 08:00 so running right below that aerobic threshold is the primary training method for endurance athletes and how do you know that you ran the threshold when you fail in the TOC test that's a simple way to do that and it's very interesting that endurance athletes even though who are not necessarily well-educated they kind of tend to grab it taste or that intensity and so what happens is we are
• 08:00 - 08:30 producing just small amounts of acid and the body finally is able to you know produce less and less so that's how we train our robic I'm sorry that's how we train mitochondria in slow fibers for fast fibers has become something more interesting so the conditions the conditions for making the mitochondria be able to handle more traffic without
• 08:30 - 09:00 producing as much acid is push them just to the edge of acidosis just just to the edge and do it over and over and over so professor burka sanski back in the 80s together that's a guy who invented plyometrics and so on so he figured out so here's what we do imagine that you are sprinting lesser he's sprinting for five seven seconds and then you are just walking and you're
• 09:00 - 09:30 sprinting again and you're just walking but you're doing that you're measuring your blood lactate and it still keeps below the threshold and you sustain that for let's say 40 minutes so think of this for a second so you're sprinting very intensely but you you stop before you start burning you get to the point of just light mask you're fatigued and you do it over and over and over so if we talk about the
• 09:30 - 10:00 coaching terminology its repeat training versus interval training so what is interval training partners you'll have to take a step to the side so the three types of rest periods between your sets whether you're running lifting whatever so there's a stress period that means that you will have a harder time to do the same thing or you will not be able
• 10:00 - 10:30 to repeat it right that's interval training there is the super compensation period which means if you wait extra long time you'll perform even better like for example if you do a set of pull ups wait for 15 minutes you might be able to do more 15 minutes later and there is the ordinary period which is that you'll be able to repeat it over an hour so that's in coaching speakers called repeat training repeat verses interval so we're trying to sustain that same level of performance
• 10:30 - 11:00 for 40 minutes let's say so that's an example of how we develop mitochondria fast which fibers and the same thing we can do with kettlebell swings the same thing you can do work in a heavy bag and so on and so forth [Applause]