Does Weight Training Count As Cardio?

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And with me today is the author of the book body by science, Dr. Doug McGuff, who is an MD and I believe now works in emergency medicine. But he also has a very big background in exercise and fitness. As I just mentioned, he's written a book and he has created a workout program, which I actually happened to do yesterday. And I have to admit, I'm a little sore. So, Dr. McGuff, thanks for the soreness. Thanks for coming on the call.

My pleasure. Happy to be here.

So you're an emergency doc. How'd you go about getting the opportunity to write a book about fitness? Was it just something you decided to do?

No, actually it was an interest in fitness that led me into medical school in the first place. And that's always been an interest all the way through high school, college, medical school residency, and onward. I knew that I had always wanted to own a gym or an exercise facility at some point. In 1997, I opened a personal training center conducting high intensity exercise. And I always thought that the value of high intensity exercise was pretty severely underrated. And that's what ultimately led me to write the book. I wrote the book to have something that I wanted to read. So many times when I go into the bookstore looking for something interesting, I walk out frustrated. And that's largely what motivated me and my co author, John Little, to write this book, was actually to produce something that was a good intellectual defense of high intensity exercise and to give someone an understanding of the reason why it is a good way to exercise as a vehicle towards demonstrating or instructing in that sort of exercise.

Gotcha. And your co author, John Little, he isn't on the call today, but he is well respected in the field of fitness. So I've certainly seen articles he's written all over the place.

He had published books through McGraw Hill and he. I had some self published books prior to that and he actually approached me to go in with him to make a published book through McGraw Hill, and he did that as a partnership together.

Now, later on in this call, we're going to get down into the nitty gritty details of the type of training protocols that you recommend in your book, which I'll be sure to link to in the show notes for folks. But you know, I think a really, really good place to start is clarify kind of where you're coming from. When you look at metabolic training and specifically in your book, you start off by referring to something called the amplification cascade. So what exactly is the amplification cascade. And how is it kind of relevant to the type of exercise that you recommend?

Well, what I'm referring to in the amplification cascade is actually an evolutionary adaptation that all animals have. And basically it's the mechanism by which we can turn our metabolism on a dime. If you look when you watch the Nature channel, you see when most animals are going to undergo some sort of attack that they have to escape from, it generally will occur when they're feeding. So you have an animal that is in the process of anabolic metabolism. It's intaking energy and storing energy. And in an instant, that animal has to be able to turn its metabolism from an energy storing to a rapidly energy burning metabolism very quickly. And it does so through this amplification cascade. Now, high intensity muscular work requires that you take stored glycogen out of the muscle where it is stored on site for emergency usage, and be able to tap into that to produce glucose to drive the metabolic process of high intensity exercise, fight or flight escape. That's done through an amplification cascade. What that means is it is a series of enzymes that when triggered by adrenaline and glucagon and other hormones of stress, initiate the first enzyme, in this case glycogen phosphorylase A, which then initiates hundreds or thousands of secondary enzymes. And each of those secondary enzymes in turn activates hundreds or thousands of tertiary enzymes. So from a single molecule of adrenaline, you get a massive download of glycogen being released to glucose for immediate energy utilization. The same thing.

And that glycogen, just to clarify for folks who are listening in, you know when whatever you're eating, you put your head up, you see a lion, and you get this amplification cascade from where is the body getting that glycogen?

Well, the glycogen is stored in. Glycogen in your body is stored in two places and for two different purposes. In your liver, you're going to store maybe 70 grams of glycogen. And that's largely used for blood sugar homeostasis because your brain likes to see a fairly steady level of glucose between 60 and 100 milligrams per deciliter. And muscle is cleaved out of your liver to maintain that at a stable rate. Now you have between 200, 250 grams of glycogen stored in your skeletal muscle. That's like coal in the train engine. It is actually stored in the muscle for on site usage immediately right there. So you have a fairly large store of glucose molecules Linked together like a tinker toy in a large three dimensional structure within the muscle cell. And when you need high output energy usage on site, adrenaline activates the breakdown of glycogen to glucose, so it can be put through an enzymatic process to produce the energy that drives the muscle contraction and all the metabolic processes that support it.

Gotcha. So when we flip this amplification cascade switch, the body's mobilizing storage energy from the liver and the muscles.

Correct, but predominantly in this circumstance, from the muscles.

Okay, gotcha. All right, so what happens next?

Well, then the glucose that's liberated goes through the process of glycolysis. And that is a mechanism where glycolysis in the cell, the cell is divided basically into two parts. One is a liquid containing cytosol, and the other is the mitochondria. And this process initially goes through about a 20 step chemical process called glycolysis, where glucose goes through a series of enzymatic reactions that ends up in a chemical called pyruvate. And in the process of doing that, the energy released from those chemical reactions is used to produce adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which is basically the gasoline that drives the muscle contraction process. Now, glycolysis, because of this amplification cascade, is a cycle that doesn't produce a whole lot of energy, but can cycle very, very quickly. And pyruvate starts to stack up and it can be mobilized into the mitochondria. Pyruvate is a substrate for the mitochondria, and the mitochondria goes through a round of enzymatic processes that produce very large amounts of ATP, but it produces a larger amount of ATP, but it cycles more slowly than glycolysis. So if the exercise is of truly high intensity, that pyruvate will stack up and get acted on by an enzyme in the cytosol called lactate dehydrogenase and produce lactate, or lactic acid, which is what you experience as a lactic acid burn during high intensity exercise. But ultimately, when the high intensity exercise stops, that lactate gets converted back to pyruvate and can shuttle through the mitochondria to pay back any sort of oxygen debt that occurred during the high intensity exercise. Or it can also go backwards up through glycolysis, back to glucose, through a process called gluconeogenesis. But the really important thing to understand is that that high intensity exercise allows you to tap fairly deeply into the largest glucose reservoir in your body. And that means that glucose has to be replenished and that is done by increasing insulin sensitivity on the muscle cell. And that is one of the major things that kind of kickstarts a reversal of all the metabolic diseases that we're seeing in modern times. So this is sort of a kickstart of the whole process of reversing the metabolic syndrome. It is the antithesis of it.

Gotcha. And when we're talking about this amplification cascade occurring, of course, I know you started off by mentioning this, but we should remind folks that we're not talking about like heading out the door and going a jog. Right?

Correct. No, this is very high intensity muscular work. The higher the quality of the muscular work being performed, the more you're going to activate this type of metabolic response. And it is not really done by low or moderate intensity activity. This is something of a very high intensity. If you were talking, doing it with traditional, what most people think of as freehand or aerobic type activity, this would be your high intensity interval training, like a Tabata protocol, where you have maximal output for short durations, 20, 30 seconds and then a brief respite and then maximal output again.

Right, right.

Heat is really the maximal output in whatever protocol that you're doing.

So you're tapping into the storage sugars and amplifying that cascade of energy that's going to use those and also produce a lot of this, this pyruvate that gives you the lactic acid that can then be used for energy to create more glucose. And generally just setting up this system within your body for rapid energy utilization with the amplification cascade. Now then you go on and you talk about this concept of global metabolic conditioning, which I thought was really interesting. How does the amplification cascade relate to that concept of global metabolic conditioning?

Well, it kind of ties intrinsically into it. And I came up with the term global metabolic conditioning as an answer or an argument against the notion of aerobic conditioning being the be all end all or the ultimate goal of exercise. And what I want to demonstrate by global metabolic conditioning is you can't really isolate these metabolic pathways from each other. They are all intrinsically tied together. They are all running concurrently all the time, even when you're just sitting still. You have to run the anaerobic pathway to supply substrate for aerobic metabolism. So even you and I sitting here are running our anaerobic pathway. It's just a matter of which one ramps up relative to the other that determines what the metabolic state is. Now, this is important because the thing about mitochondria is they probably were ancient protobacteria that infected the cells of simple organisms and had a symbiotic relationship with them by eating their waste product as food. But ultimately the eating of the waste product of glycolysis pyruvate in generating large amount of energies, came to benefit the cell. And this invading bacteria that had a symbiotic relationship was actually incorporated as an organelle. So aerobic metabolism that occurs in the mitochondria is intrinsically dependent upon anaerobic metabolism for its substrate. As a consequence, the only way that you can maximally stimulate an aerobic metabolic process is, is by maximally stimulating the anaerobic process that feeds its substrate. And have to ramp things up to the extent that you're delivering substrate to the mitochondria at a rate faster than which it can use it. That is the only way that you know that you have maximally stimulated aerobic metabolic adaptations. And this is why we're seeing this current flurry of literature supporting brief high intensity interval training as a mechanism for producing the type of aerobic metabolic adaptations that we thought in the past could only occur with long slow distance steady state activity.

Right, Right. So the idea here is that when we're looking at global metabolic conditioning, almost like this crossover effect from the anaerobic training that you just described, you know, you went through the whole physiological process of what your body does with the Sjogren, how it creates energy, how that's crossing over into actual aerobic stimulation, because they're using a similar energy system as you get towards the end of that cycle.

Not necessarily a similar energy system, but the end of the anaerobic cycle provides the fuel that drives the aerobic cycle. And even more important was to break this. The concept of global metabolic conditioning was to break this link that we had created between the aerobic metabolic subsystem and the cardiovascular system. Because of the VO2 max testing tool, everyone within the exercise field came to intrinsically linked an emphasis on aerobic metabolism with cardiovascular conditioning. To the extent now that it's in the common vernacular to say, oh, I'm going to go over to the cardio theater, I'm going to go do some cardio. When what you're referring to is steady state low intensity activity. And that is a faulty version of thinking. Because the cardiac and vascular system supports the metabolic activity of the cell as a whole. There is no way that the cardiovascular system is linked only to the mitochondria. The cardiovascular system services the entire cell, not just a subcellular organelle. So the entire Cardiovascular system is supporting the work of both anaerobic and aerobic metabolism. And that was the real emphasis behind global metabolic conditioning, was to realize that you have to train the totality of metabolism not just as a requirement for getting at the cardiovascular system, but there's no way of getting out of that because all of these metabolic pathways are intrinsically tied together and interdependent upon one another.

You know what's really interesting, and you mentioned this in your book, is when it comes to this cardiovascular concept, the idea of pressure and blood pressure and venous return and the extent to which the type of training using this amplification cascade that you talk about has on that system, you know, versus, like, you know, low intensity, steady state movement. Can you explain a little bit about how it is that you could get a strong cardiovascular benefit from doing something that would not, in the traditional sense, be considered, you know, going onto the treadmill in the cardio theater?

Yeah, absolutely. Remember, the only way that you can get at the cardiovascular system is by performing mechanical work with muscle. And the higher the quality of that mechanical work, the better the cardiovascular stimulus is going to be. That is not only from a metabolic standpoint, but from a plumbing standpoint, so to speak. Let's go back to what exactly. When you're training the cardiovascular system, you're trying to improve cardiac output to make cardiac work more efficient.

Right.

If we look at what cardiac output is, cardiac output is actually the product of heart rate times stroke volume. And stroke volume is the volume of blood that is ejected from the heart with a single heartbeat. Well, stroke volume is largely or actually completely determined by venous return. The amount of blood being returned to the right side of the heart ultimately determines the volume of blood that enters the left ventricle.

Right.

And that volume determines what your stroke volume is going to be with each heartbeat. Now, if you're doing high intensity exercises that involve high intensity muscle contractions, venous blood flow is entirely passive. And the only thing that really augments it is intense muscular contractions that milk venous blood flow back towards the heart, and that augments stroke volume. So not only are you having a rise in heart rate for each heartbeat, you're having an increase in stroke volume. So your cardiac output is actually much more enhanced with high intensity exercise. Which is why in the past you've seen these formulas for calculating heart rate as a marker for the aerobic effect of exercise. But that's a complete misunderstanding of the situation. I've had subjects that, working out, will keep track of their own heart rate Clients will say, my heart rate didn't go up as much as when I'm out jogging or when I'm on the treadmill. This probably does not affect my cardiovascular system as much. But what you got to say is, look, your cardiac output is what you're after when you're running. Your venous return is not nearly what it is with high intensity muscle contractions. So you have to augment cardiac output largely by elevation in heart rates because you're not getting an improvement in stroke volume. With high intensity exercise. Whether it's strength training or an interval protocol, those intense muscle contractions are increasing venous return and greatly augmenting stroke volume. So out of that product, you're getting as much bang for your buck out of stroke volume as you are out of heart rate. So your cardiac output may be significantly higher, even though your heart rate reads a little bit lower than what you're used to. But the reason is because you've augmented stroke volume. And the thing about stroke volume is you need enough inner beat interval to allow for that ventricular filling. So truly efficient cardiovascular exercise will not let you reach as high of a heart rate, necessarily, because you're augmenting the cardiac output by augmentation of stroke volume more than heart rate.

Right. And trying to keep that period of time between heartbeats just slightly longer.

Right. To allow time for the ventricular filling that's really going to serve to augment your cardiac output. Cool.

I like it. There's a lot of folks who I know are probably listening in and associating the type of high intensity work that you're talking about with something like maybe high intensity interval training protocol on a bike where Maybe they do 1060 second efforts with full recovery, or maybe going out and doing a run with some strides thrown in, or going to the park and running a few hundred meter dashes or something of that nature. But in your book, you specifically focus quite a bit on anaerobic high intensity strength training protocols, specifically. And you know, now that folks have an understanding of how those actually can induce an aerobic benefit and a cardiovascular benefit, let's get into the protocol. When someone is trying to get as much benefit as they can out of the amplification cascade that you've discussed and the cardiovascular impetus of strength training, what would the strength training protocol actually look like?

Okay, you're correct to describe that I'm highly supportive of high intensity interval training techniques with more traditional based aerobic protocols. I think they're highly efficient. What the strength training protocol is, is to take that entire notion and extrapolate it all the way to its logical conclusion, to maximize every element as much as possible by increasing the muscular loading. So what we try to do is we select a handful of strength training exercises, usually compound movements, that are going to cover the entire musculature of the body. And that can typically be accomplished anywhere between three and eight movements, depending on what you have available to you. And the idea is that we are going to, in a given movement, select a resistance that's going to cause complete muscular fatigue or failure under that load somewhere in 45 seconds to 3 minute time range. And we're going to use a very strict protocol of lifting and lowering the weight slowly and under control, depending on the piece of equipment. That could result in a rep cadence of anywhere from 4 seconds up, 4 seconds down to 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down. But the important thing is to keep the muscle under continuous and uninterrupted load in order to induce aggressive muscle fiber recruitment and fatigue so that without any break in the muscle being loaded, that you reach complete muscular fatigue where you can no longer move the weight in a relatively short span of time. That rapid recruitment of muscle fibers and exhaustion of them drives all of these processes that we've been talking about to their maximal extent. And having done that in one movement with very little respite going to the next movement, you go to your next movement and do the same thing and you take it, complete fatigue and go to the next one. It's almost a circuit, what most people think of as circuit training type protocol.

Right? It's exactly what I did last night. I literally, just to try this out, I went to the gym, I ran there actually, so my heart rate was a little high going in, which, which made it somewhat uncomfortable. But I did a seated row, a assisted pull up machine, chest press, a shoulder press and a leg press. And I did just five repetitions of each of those. That was it, that was my entire workout. And I did about 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down and there was definitely some cardiovascular action going on there. Um, and, and you know, that it, it seemed to work pretty well when it came to, to the aerobic training benefit that I felt like I had, you know, I felt similar to, as if I'd have just kept running. Now, can anybody do this? I mean, do you, do you have folks who are just getting into exercise doing this or is this something that, that you reserve for the elite athletes who are already well trained or something like that?

Yeah, absolutely not. I mean, we bring people in right off the street and start them out exactly in this way. And that includes clients well into their 80s and 90s, and we're not fearful for doing that. One is that I'm sure you've read some of the work of Timothy Noakes and he has postulated the idea of the central governor, which is the central nervous system pathway that sort of shuts everything down as muscular fatigue occurs with a wide, wide margin of safety. And I think that central governor can be modulated through training and volitional effort over time. So when you take a raw beginner, that central governor that protects you from overexertion or harm from exertion is operating with a very broad margin of safety. I don't worry about harming my clients through exertion. What I do worry about is harming my clients through excessive force. And that is the neat thing about this protocol, because you're performing the lifting and lowering in a very controlled fashion. So the forces are well controlled. And as a consequence of the continuous muscular loading, the muscle is rapidly fatiguing, so that the person training is every second getting weaker and weaker, so their force output is dropping exponentially. They are literally becoming too weak to hurt themselves. And when you actually enact this as a strength training protocol as opposed to an interval training protocol, what you get the unique benefit of is that the harder it gets, the safer it is. Because the closer you get to muscular fatigue, the more your force output is dropping. The more your force output drops, the greater your margin of safety. You're literally becoming too weak to harm yourself.

Do you use special, like when I did this at the workout or at the gym, I used machines just because it was a little bit easier to manage that 10 second up, 10 second down compared to free weights. Do you have people who are doing this with free weights or do you primarily use machines and kind of a follow up to that? If so, do you incorporate special machines, you know, like at your gym or your studio?

Yeah, this can operate over a whole entire spectrum. Now, in my own studio, we do use commercially available equipment, but a lot of it has been modified. Most of the equipment I have in my facility is MedX equipment.

MedX?

MedX? Yes, like MedX, Med X.

Okay. Why do you use that?

Well, for several reasons. One is the biomechanics is spot on. There are no movements that are biomechanically awkward or put a client in a vulnerable position while under load. The second is that they are infinitely adjustable, meaning you have a seat back, you have a seat and you have A weight stack that is capable of being gapped out. So when I go to fit the person in an exercise machine, rather than fitting the person in the equipment, I can fit the equipment around the person. So it has an extreme degree of adjustability. The third thing is that the equipment is very low friction. It has minimal pivot points, almost no sprockets, bands or chains. And the weight stack is actually what's called a floating weight stack. It's plumbed and balanced and rather than being pulled from above by a pulley lifting weight stack, it actually has a sort of a lever and follower device that pushes the weight stack from below and drives this floating weight stack upwards. So the friction is very low. In addition to that, we have incorporated on some pieces, modifications or cams that vary the strength curve so that the resistance output from the machine more closely matches the body's capability at any point in the range of motion. So basically all the equipment I'm using is tailor made so that when a client bites the dust from fatigue, it's because the muscle is completely spent, not because he's been entrapped in a biomechanical sticking point that he's become too weak to get over. So there are very few sticking points in the equipment. Now, having said that, this sort of protocol can be done on any equipment. Free weights or no weights at all.

Yeah, I was going to say even do something like bodyweight training.

Oh yeah. I mean I got, you know, one of the premier trainers is in this protocol is a fellow named Gus Diamantopoulos. And he likes to brag that if you get him a pair of yoga blocks and a nylon strap that he can decimate anyone just using those, using time static contraction or chest fly, hip adduction, and use the band for, you know, lateral raises, hip abduction as pre exhaust mechanisms for performing freehand exercises like freehand squats, push ups, you know, weight assisted chin ups, things of that nature. He can use those things in such a way to produce the rate and kind of fatigue that we talk about with even optimal equipment.

Yeah, sure.

I absolutely can't. I mean, I've had some of the best workouts I've ever had with free weights using this kind of protocol, or with a simple Smith machine using this type of protocol. But what I could tell, sometimes it's hard to get that concept across in a podcast, but what I can tell people if they go to the, the website for the book, which is bodybyscience.net There is a directory there. And I tell people you don't have to go to a personal training facility that specializes in this kind of training to get the benefit of this kind of training. But I would tell you is that wherever you're going to train, even if it's under your own supervision, it might benefit you to seek out one of these facilities and actually go through a properly supervised workout. Because then what happens is you develop what I call a pop up timer. Once you've experienced the rate and depth of fatigue that I'm talking about, then you have the benchmark for which you're shooting. And once you've felt that kind of workout, then you're better able to reproduce it with whatever equipment you have available to you.

Nice. You know, I know that I'm going to get some comments and some feedback from people who are suspicious of the ability of this type of program to do something like increase explosive power or vertical jump or maximum strength and things of that nature. And if I'm. If I'm not mistaken, Doug, you're not necessarily claiming that this type of training is ideal for those parameters as much as it is extremely beneficial for giving someone that aerobic benefit from anaerobic style training. Am I correct?

Yes and no. This sort of training in terms of increasing explosiveness, vertical jump, explosiveness out of a start for sprints, explosiveness for football, basketball, fill in the blank, is ideal. But what happens is a lot of times when people are considering this, they confuse skill conditioning with physical conditioning. This type of protocol can produce an ideal physical conditioning for those sort of elements. But if you want to demonstrate an improved performance in vertical jump or an improved performance in a particular explosive lift or fill in the blank, you actually have to rehearse the skill of that particular explosive movement in order to demonstrate best results. But in terms of increasing explosive capability, this is a superior protocol to plyometrics or anything of that nature that you could envision. And what happens is that sort of explosiveness is a component of two things. One is capability and the other is intent. Capability is determined by how much muscle power you have at that given instant. And intent has to do with your neurological efficiency. And that is the neurological efficiency has two components. One is just what you're born with, and two is skill rehearsal. If you marry all those three things together, then you're going to have maximal explosiveness. Now, during performance of the type of exercise we advocate, we actually start off kind of controlling the cadence. You're going slower than you could. But by the time you get to the third or fourth repetition done in this fashion, if you've done it right. You have created a level of fatigue where you barely have any gap between your capability and the resistance that you're using. And at that point, you are now weak enough where we start to instruct the client, okay, go as fast as you can now. And more times than not, the client never goes too fast. They're pushing as hard and as fast as they can. And they're lucky if they can complete the movement in 12 seconds, much less 10 or 5 or whatever. But make no mistake, they're being as maximally explosive as they can possibly be. But that has a margin of safety introduced by the fatigue that we've accumulated up to that point. But if you marry that intent, that capability to be explosive, when you no longer are capable of being explosive, if you marry that intent with the muscular adaptation and strengthening that occurs in a specific skill set, then you will have a superior outcome that you can measure. Does that make sense?

Got it. It does. It does. So you're basically just kind of like maximizing muscle stimulation, to put it kind of simplistically correct.

But we're training the explosiveness after significant fatigue has occurred and the forces are not too high.

Right?

Doing a plyometric box jump, you take the weight of your body dropping three or four feet off a box, hitting the ground. You know, if you weigh 200 pounds and you're dropping 4ft, and that's 4 times 800, that's 800 times the acceleration force of gravity at 9.32ft per second squared, you know, you're looking at 4,000 foot pounds of force being transmitted onto your joints. And while that does have some training effect and it will bear fruit in terms of explosive capability and vertical jump, you're doing it at an exquisite risk of injury. Whereas if you were to train that sort of explosiveness after you've had significant fatigue and can't really demonstrate what that explosiveness is capable of, you're still training it, but you're doing so in a safe fashion. So later, when you actually want to demonstrate through vertical jump or whatever, those two things can be married together. So instead of trying to do a training protocol that mimics the skill, you actually produce the physical conditioning that makes you better able to do the physical skill, and then you apply it with that specific skill exactly as it's done. So if you're looking to do a vertical jump, you train a vertical jump as a skill conditioning as opposed to a physical conditioning. We don't mix the two up. We keep physical conditioning and skill conditioning as Separate entities.

Gotcha.

Cool.

All right, well, I've got one more question to throw at you here, and that is that there are a lot of people, people out there, whether they are proponents of Paleo or ancestral health or anything of that nature, that kind of look at things in the light of whether or not it's something our ancestors may have done. When you take this type of training, can you actually make it relevant to something that from an evolutionary health system standpoint, makes sense in terms of lifting something extremely slow and lowering it extremely slow, or how do you kind of marry this to the whole ancestral health standpoint?

Yeah, it's always tricky because people make the mistake in the dietary aspect of Paleo. They seem to have come to grips with the difference between Paleo reenactment and actually producing with what's available in modern times, a Paleolithic type prescription. And the people that have problems with the type of training I advocate as being Paleo, is that they are thinking about exercise in terms of Paleo reenactment. Running from the tiger, dragging the log, you know, throwing the heavy rock or whatever. But what this does is what I'm trying to do is to tap these evolutionary derived metabolic pathways to basically enact these ancient Paleolithic metabolic pathways, but in a way that uses modern technology to make it safe and to control the forces involved with doing high intensity exercise so we don't injure ourselves in the process. So many of the Paleolithic notion of exercise involves things that are of very high force nature. And, you know, if you tear your labrum or screw up your rotator cuff or get a meniscus tear as a consequence of trying to perform Paleo and reenactment type exercise, you're going to get laid up where you can't do any exercise at all. And what we're trying to do is activate these ancient metabolic pathways, but in a way that leverages modern technology to make it safe so that you don't harm yourself first, do no harm. And that is what my approach is with this gotcha.

You know, I always kind of had this raised eyebrow towards what would be kind of traditionally called super slow training, just because it, it seemed before I had the science explained to me, kind of like a waste of time almost compared to like, you know, lifting explosively and maybe lowering slowly. But when I look at it in this light, in terms of the venous return, the blood pressure and the amplification cascade, in terms of the aerobic training benefits derived from an anaerobic strength training protocol, makes A lot more sense, especially after having done it yesterday. So I would encourage people who are listening in to just try it out. I mean, I'll definitely put a link to Doug's book in the show notes. The name of the book is Body by Science, so you can go check it out. You can also go over to his website, bodybyscience.net and see some videos of him performing the exercises and also some good articles over there. But try it out sometime this week if you get a chance for you're listening in.

I'd just like to let your listeners know that that's part of the problem with really the type of exercise I'm advocating is it is a marketer's Nightmare. It's not CrossFit. If you videotape this, we're like the duck that's on the surface of the pond just floating along nice and beautifully. And it look, I mean it's like watching paint dry to watch a really good trainee do this type of high intensity exercise. Because you're like the duck at the pond. No one sees the legs underwater turning a thousand miles an hour. This sort of training involves slow movement, behavioral control, a large amount of stoicism. The only way you can truly appreciate it is to experience it firsthand. Because the amount of intensity that's under the visual surface there is so beyond anything that you've ever experienced. If it's properly supervised and you're going through a really hard workout done in this fashion, it will make anything that you've ever done before. Fran, CrossFit, Tabata. It all pales in comparison to this done properly. But videotaped and looking at it, you would never know it. Yeah, seeing it firsthand is key. I mean, it is beyond intense. The rate of fatigue is so bewildering that some people when they're first doing it, can't even wrap their brain around it.

Yeah, I'm definitely sore right now. I got some looks at the gym because I am usually the guy who's bouncing around, you know, going from, you know, whatever Bosu ball lunge jumps to overhead push press to squats, to cleans. And you know, all of a sudden I'm at the gym yesterday and I'm like sitting in a machine for two, three minutes at a time. And it definitely was a change up, but it's cool. I like it.

I like you. I mean this sort of protocol, the greater your capability, the more punishment you can bring to yourself. I mean some of the best conditioned athletes crossfitters, whatever when they want me to take them through a demo workout. They're the ones that get the worst carpet time because they are well conditioned. They can bring a lot of punishment to themselves in a short amount of time. So you get carpet time out of the really intense people.

And I'm all about throwing curve balls at your body. And folks, this is a good way to do it. So check it out. I'll put a link to Doug's book in the show notes, Body by Science, or head over to bodybyscience.net and Dr. McGuff, thank you so much for coming on today's call.

Ben, I appreciate it. It's been a pleasure.