The Key Steps to Efficient Training Routines | Mark Sisson

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0:30Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:41Why is sleep important for you? I mean, sleep is when the body renews and regenerates, repairs itself. It's when a lot of the neural networking happens. To overlook sleep and to think, well, you know, I can sleep when I'm dead. Well, you know, that just is such faulty logic. Yeah. It's so critical and so important. I try to get eight hours a night myself. You talk about stress and rest balance. What does that mean? There are certain stresses in your life that are unavoidable. Work stress, commuting stress, and some of them are imagined, even though your brain thinks they're real. They don't exist.

1:11Our stress mechanisms in the body, they evolve to handle true life or death situations. A tiger bearing down upon you, an infection that's going to kill you, not am I going to miss my kid's rehearsal or am I going to be late for work or whatever. Those cause stress, but they're not life-threatening. And yet the brain sees them as life-threatening. So the message here is that you sort of have to identify stresses and then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery. Meditation is a form of rest and recovery. But just taking maybe if you need a nap, you can do that. That goes back to the whole sleep thing being critical.

1:45But the other part of rest is recognizing, if you're an athlete, recognizing when it's just inappropriate to go out and train just because your schedule says, I have to go do six miles today. If you wake up that day and you feel like crap, then you're better off taking that day off than plowing through it and being able to write in your logbook, yeah, I got through the workout, felt like crap, but I got through the workout. I was just rested. Just rested. In primal endurance, we go back to that philosophy that the body is in temperamental states back and forth. Sometimes you're in a state of energy and health and sometimes you're not.

2:18And you can't really plan on when those states are going to be. So you have to be willing to listen to the cues. For that reason, we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing if you're an athlete. When you feel good, you can go hard. When you don't feel good, back off. Take time off. We use the term periodicity so you can periodize your training so that there's tranches of training days a week at a time where you're really going deep, deep, hard, hard, and then you might take a week off or take it real easy and back off. You can break those further up into quarterly, annual segments, always with the idea that some days are going to be good, some days are going to be bad.

2:50You're going to trend toward wanting to build to ratchet up over time, but you're okay kind of not doing stuff as hard. It doesn't become this linear progress. It becomes more of a fractal thing that trends toward improvement. The next thing you talk about is aerobic emphasis. Train slow to race fast. What does that mean? Yeah, so this is the toughest one for current endurance athletes to really grok. A lot of athletes, and I was certainly one for 20 years, you basically go out and you train to hurt. So you run or you ride or you swim at a heart rate that's 75 % to 90 % of your max heart rate.

3:24And you see how long you can hold that, right? And it hurts. It hurts you. It does hurt you, but you feel tough as a result of it. But the problem is you're not really training the body to become more efficient. You're just training yourself to hurt. So when we talk about efficiency in racing, we go back to the original premise about glucose and glycogen being sort of this determining factor in muscle tissue. When you run out of glycogen, you sort of hit the wall. So how do you manage glycogen? Well, one way would be to eat a lot of carbohydrates and drink a lot of gels during the race. The other would be to become so good at burning fat that you never really tap into that glycogen.

3:54Interesting. So we train you to become so good at burning fat. But the other part of that for the endurance athlete is if you train at a low enough heart rate, typically it's 180 minus your age. So let's just say you're 40 years old. So 180 minus 40 is 140. So that's going to be your maximum heart rate. You're never in your training. You're not going to go above that. You set your watch, you set your heart monitor to give you a signal as soon as you get above 140. You start out at that 140, maybe you could only run 13-minute miles. Even though you're capable of running 7-minute miles at 175 beats a minute, what we're doing is we're measuring how good you are at burning fat.

4:29And we know that at that number, 180 minus your age, that's the highest rate that you could put oxygen through your system and know that you're burning mostly fat. Really? We know that because that's the pace at which you could close your mouth and breathe through your nose and get plenty of oxygen. or that's the pace at which you could be with a training partner and talk without losing your breath. Once you start having to catch up or having to get winded, you're building up lactic acid. You're not burning fat. You're not burning fat or you're burning less fat and starting to burn more sugar.

4:54We want you to be at the highest end of your fat burning without tapping into your glycolytic abilities. The idea is you go out and you train and the first day you go out, you're in 13-minute miles and that's as fast as you can go without the heart rate bumping up over 140. But over time, if you stay at that maximum heart rate, which is low, much lower than you're used to, You find yourself running 12-minute miles, and then 11-minute miles, and then 10.30s and 10, and 9.30s. Even though the heart rate hasn't changed, you're still putting the same amount of oxygen through. Now you're burning more fat.

5:21So you're becoming more efficient at burning fat. So that when you do decide to ramp up and throw in the interval training and the weight stuff that we have you do in the gym, you're starting from a baseline of being a much better fat burner than everyone else around you. What happens is you become more efficient with the materials that the heart gives you. So if the heart is pumping oxygen, X amount of oxygen, and you're not good at burning fat, you can't do anything with that oxygen. But the better you are at burning fat, the more you can use that oxygen and burn the fat in the mitochondria and avoid having to go into that glycogen storage situation.

5:54Structured intensity. What does this mean? Partly means you've got to go into the gym and do some heavy lifting. Yes. But not a lot. One thing that athletes used to avoid, like the plague, was the gym. In any long endurance contest, in addition to running out of fuel, your power decreases because you haven't trained the power. An example would be you've got three hills to climb in a bike race. The first one, you go up with 100 % of your power. The second one, even though you have energy, your muscle fibers are exhausted and they haven't trained to sustain your power. So now you go up the second hill at 82 % of your max power.

6:27And you might go up the third hill at 65 % of your max power. Well, if we could train those muscle fibers deeper and deeper to sustain power for those efforts that require actual power, we can maybe go up that first hill at 100, go up that second hill at 100, and that third hill at 95. So we do this work in the gym where you load muscle fibers up with fairly heavy weights, typically 80 % of your one rep max, and we do sequential repetitions with sequential rest in between. So it's not like you do three sets of five and you stop. It's like you do three repetitions, rest 10 seconds, three repetitions, rest 10 seconds, two repetitions, rest 10 seconds, rest 20 seconds, until you can't finish one good rep.

7:08And then the workout's over. So you just did one set, and it might have comprised 200 repetitions. Right, right. But that maximally loaded the fibers deeper and deeper and gave you this ability to sustain power. And the next thing you talk about is lifestyle practices. It's all of the other things that make life enjoyable that as an endurance athlete, I know I used to go, well, I can't afford to do that. I might get injured. Like I can't go skiing because I might twist a knee. Well, if you do the training right and you spend that time in the gym, you're less likely to twist a knee skiing than if you were just going to the slopes without having done any training at all.

7:44We want people to have a full life because training for endurance contests should be preparation for an undertaking that you would not want to encounter on a daily basis. You know, you want to wake up in the morning and go, I got that 10K today. I got to go clean out my GI tract. I'm so nervous, you know. But you want to be that nervous because you want to put it all on the line that day. What we're saying is don't put it all on the line every day in your training. Have fun. Do the right sort of training that builds this beast that when you get to the race, you're going to enjoy it. You're going to have fun.

8:16you're going to perform probably better than if you'd done the old paradigm of training. Right. But you'll have lived a life in the interim.

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9:06Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description that will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts. right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

9:57Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

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