Bonus Episode: Zone 5 Training, Maintaining Strength, Magnesium Supplements, and More!

0:01Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Hey, it's Jordan from Barbell Medicine. Now this episode preview is from exclusive content that regularly goes out to our Barbell Medicine Plus subscribers. In addition to exclusive content, Barbell Medicine Plus subscribers get early access to episodes and products, add-free listening, discounts on products and services, and the ability to ask Dr. Baraki and I questions, all for about the cost of a cup of coffee each month. And in case you were wondering, the first month is free. To join, head over to barbellmedicine.com slash plus and sign up to be a barbell medicine plus member today that's barbell medicine.com slash plus all right thanks for your consideration on to the show this is from coach on king how often should zone five cardio work be done a week is there a point that's too far okay so how much zone five what is zone five cardio and like how much should be done.

0:59All the zones are arbitrary. There is no like consensus agreement on what is zone one, zone two, zone three, zone four, zone five, whether or not we should use a five zone model versus three. There's some authors talk about an eight zone model. The best way I can describe this, if you're not familiar with this five zone model or maybe not as familiar as you want to be, is that zones one and zone two are below the sort of aerobic threshold where you are working out intensely enough where your body's creating a bunch of lactate that is above baseline. Once you get past that, we're talking like 70 to 80 % max heart rate.

1:40Now you're into zone three and zone four above that. You're creating some lactate, but the body is generally good at dealing with it for, you know, extended periods of time. Top of zone four, you can probably do for maybe up to an hour, some more trained people, a little bit longer, less trained people, a little bit shorter than that. And then above that, you're making all sorts of lactate. You're breathing so hard. Your heart rate's so high. You can't really sustain it. That's zone five. Most of the time we're talking, that's like right at your or above even your VO2 max, that threshold. and this is mostly sprint intensity training so high intensity interval training first the high intensity refers to anything that's above low and moderate intensity stuff so that'd be in this five zone model above zone two would be that's high intensity and then sprint intensity means that it's even higher than that it's probably zone four zone five you're doing actual sprints you know no joke all out and then the interval just means you're not doing them continuously You're doing them with breaks.

2:43So that sort of description in mind, how often should you be doing zone five? Assuming that somebody is doing a relatively high volume, I shouldn't even say that. Assuming that somebody is doing more than the current physical activity guideline minimums for conditioning, which is about 150 minutes per week, 20 to 30 minutes a day is the recommendation of moderate to vigorous physical activity. If you're doing more than that, then I think the distribution of your training intensity starts to matter for conditioning. And it gets more and more, like proportionally more important as you're doing more and more conditioning.

3:23So 150 minutes a week, you're thinking, wow, it's two hours and some change. That's quite a bit. Not for an endurance athlete. An endurance athlete, they laugh at that. That's a day, right? But that's their sport, right? So when you're talking about somebody who's doing, you know, three hours, four hours, 10 hours of conditioning per week, the intensity, how they distribute that, how they allocate their time is important. And 80-20 is a reasonable, you know, sort of rule of thumb. 80 % of your training volume for conditioning should be done in that zone two-ish, zone one, zone two, that sort of thing.

3:58Probably more zone two than zone one if you really wanted to get picky about it, although So it depends on the individual, the sport, you know, things like that. And then 20 percent of it should be high, higher intensity, with some of that being like tempo work, zone three, some of that being a little bit higher intensity, zone four. And some of it being, you know, all out, whether it's or close to all out sprint work, zone five, but relatively little. I mean, you know, if the sport has a lot of sprinting in it, then I don't you know, we're not really talking about just general conditioning for health here.

4:27And you're going to have to do you're going to do a lot of sprint and not only your practice, but also competition. So you might not need to do any of it or much of it outside of mechanics work and stuff like that and plyos or other high-velocity training in your regular exercise. But for most folks, if they're doing two hours, three hours a week of conditioning, I don't know that they should really be doing any Zone 5 stuff unless they want to, in which case that's fine, but probably just a little bit. But maybe 5 % of your total weekly training conditioning volume should be sprint work. I don't think that people should be doing most of their work as sprints or even high-intensity interval training unless they're doing a relatively low volume of conditioning work.

5:12I'm talking like an hour a week. But even then, most training, whether it's lifting weights, whether it's conditioning, should not be all-out maximal stuff. So yeah, we have an article on high-intensity interval training and sprint intensity training on the website We also have a three-part podcast series on conditioning And you can check that out for more in-depth explanation there Ashmu66 Hi, how would you program if the goal was just to maintain strength on the big three lifts? I'm going to level with you here I don't know that I have a great protocol for maintenance of strength because it's going to vary a lot.

5:56Like how strong is the person? Like how close are they to like peak strength? And how much time do we have, right? So, for example, I cannot maintain my peak level strength right after a powerlifting meet for very long. It just goes in waves, right? You do a lot of training for it. You peak. Boom. You have that strength for a couple of days, maybe a week if you're lucky. And you're still generally strong afterwards. There's a little decay there. And so with that caveat aside that it depends, right, the hand-wavy answer, there are actually some decent evidence on what is like a minimum effective dose for even competitive strength athletes and their maintenance of strength and even sometimes improvement of strength.

6:43And, you know, a couple of sets a week, two to three sets a week for the main lifts is probably going to get you pretty close for maintenance. Again, as long as we're not talking about like peak performance level for a trained or highly trained individual. But I think the more germane question here is how much resistance training do you really need to do for health purposes? because that's probably going to be like my bottom threshold for how much resistance training people should be regularly participating in outside of peaking for like another sport that's not related to, you know, barbells.

7:21So if you're going to a competition or a race or something that's not related to strength training at all, barbells at all, yeah, you're going to have a taper for a period of time. But outside of that, like short period of time, you got to be lifting weights, you know, a couple times a week, twice a week for an hour and a half total, you know, so 45 minutes per session. That's probably the minimum dose that I'd recommend from a health perspective. I think there's some benefit to doing a little bit more than that and actually getting stronger. because that just means that the program that you're doing is actually working for you and likely confers additional health benefits than if you were doing the same amount of exercise but you weren't actually getting stronger.

8:02Some evidence there. So, yeah, but a couple of sets per week with the main lifts, pretty good idea. And I would probably do some variation thereof, you know, for the other time that you would expose yourself to a squat pattern, a pressing pattern, and a hinge pattern. And that's kind of the idea there. This podcast is brought to you by ButcherBox.

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15:17Anyway, I'll ignore that. The real question you're asking is, does the bulk of the data show that there is a reliable, positive effect for people who supplement with magnesium on indices of recovery such that their performance level is improved, such that their adaptation, the fitness and or health adaptations they get from exercise such as strength, muscle mass, bone mineral density, cardiorespiratory fitness. lowered resting blood pressure, better management of blood sugar, all of these things. Is there reliable evidence that most people or many people who take this supplement, changing nothing else, have better recovery?

16:02And the answer is not really, not a lot of good evidence there in totality. Some data shows a benefit, but when you look at the totality of the evidence, it's pretty weak. And I'll tell you this, I can afford to take magnesium, but I don't. And I wouldn't take it for recovery. For sleep, the data is marginally better, but not great. So I think, you know, if people like it, it's relatively low risk, relatively, assuming that it's third-party tested, right, and the manufacturer that you're using is GMP accredited where they make it so that you make sure that you're only getting the magnesium glycinate.

16:40But, yeah, the data is not great. And, yeah, you can find a lot of papers on there. But then you look at the sample size, you look at the outcome that they're measuring, the validity of that outcome, the change in that outcome. It's not great. It's not great, generally speaking. Let's see. David Rodriguez, 168. How do mental health issues such as depression, et cetera, affect back pain and pain in general? Yeah. Effectively, any mental health condition or that would be described that way tends to make the experience of the pain that someone has, whether it's from an injury or whether or if it's not, tends to make the experience worse, meaning that the severity of the pain is worse.

17:29The subsequent disability is worse. The duration tends to be longer. There's not really a positive effect here that I can say. So it is certainly one of the what we would call like a psychological contributor to the experience that the person is having. And so I think people, their eyes tend to cross or they may have a little misunderstanding of what the biopsychosocial model is with respect to various medical conditions, in this case, pain or low back pain. If you want to get specific about it, there are certainly biological contributors here. Those can be changes to the disc, the ligaments, the actual anatomical structures, so on and so forth.

18:10There are psychological contributors there, such as, you know, mental health disorders. And there are environmental contributors, social contributors, so experiences, learned, you know, conditioning, stuff like that. And all of that gets integrated by the individual and their unique sort of background, their physiology, their upbringing, et cetera. And that helps you understand really as a as a health care professional or as a fitness professional, what they're going through. And also at some additional levers to pull with respect to management. But generally speaking, mental health conditions tend to make the experience of the pain a little more severe, last a little bit longer, and the return back from that tends to not go as smoothly.

19:01So, yeah, unfortunate because these things often co-occur. Lamar J117 asks, what's the best way to deal with a low hamstring tendon issue? So we'll just call it like tendinopathy. It's just an umbrella term, anything related to the tendon. There's no singular best way to do to like deal with this. But there are a lot of bad ways to deal with this. One would be like disuse. Just don't do anything. Just wait till you feel better. Because at that point, you have detrained significantly. And then you've not really set yourself up to return to unrestricted activity, which is really what you want because you haven't been active.

19:49So your fitness has gone down and you have not initiated the process towards returning to recovery, you know, unrestricted activity. And so it's going to take longer. And so you would ideally pick movements that directly target the area or areas that you are well, they're well tolerated. So pain doesn't really get sharp or severe or significantly worse when you're doing those movements. You'd pick not only an exercise that allows you to do that, but a rep scheme, a tempo, loading parameters, all that sort of stuff. And then you would progress from there in all of those variables. So the exercises would become more and more dynamic.

20:35So bigger range of motion, faster movement, things of that nature. The loading would become – would get heavier and heavier. The rep scheme would get lower and lower to facilitate that. And you would also pick some exercises that directly target and or isolate the area. So, you know, if somebody has a bunch of pain deadlifting from the floor, for example, you might do a lighter tempo RDL or rack pull or something like that from starting above the knees if that's something they could tolerate but they couldn't tolerate it any lower. You might do some single leg hamstring curls, some Nordic hamstring curls, some Copenhagen's, other sort of things that would isolate the general area.

21:16And then you'd progress from there slower than you think you should, such that you have less sort of regressions. And we have a number of articles about this general process on our website. So pain and training, what do, and the top three mistakes that people make during rehab, those would be good resources there.

21:43Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:All right, that is a wrap on this free sample of our bonus content that regularly goes out to our Barbell Medicine Plus subscribers. Again, to join, head over to barbellmedicine.com slash plus and sign up to be a Barbell Medicine Plus member today. That's barbellmedicine.com slash plus. Thank you so much for listening. We'll catch you guys next time.