Your CrossFit ENDURANCE Questions Answered! | EP. 136

yeah they're out there doing a metcon they feel like their endurance is lacking either their legs are burning or you know their heart is is pumping so hard and people love to like sweat and breathe and feel like they've gone really hard and so everyone's always looking for that next step and like how can I get better in that feeling and so they always go into kind of the endurance mindset when in reality what we've seen in the past is most people probably need because it's entirely possible that the limitation that you feel is not the same limitation that you actually have the challenge is most people feel really good when they add in those second sessions and they maybe do them for two or three weeks but then all of a sudden they're like completely trashed and then they hit this plateau and it takes a long time to dig out of that and if you only have two hours five days a week using up two and a half or three hours of that for low intensity endurance work when it could be spent doing do you have your microphone uh can you hear me he always has his microphone Chris he's got the bike we're back we're back again we did an episode that took off a lot more than our other episodes I think right now it's at 17K and over 140 questions and it was about upgrading your endurance and we promised this episode where we'd answer a lot of the questions down in the comments boys no pressure we've got we've got a lot of questions to go through but the one thing that I think Kyle and I were just talking about this before we started the the interaction that we got from the endurance podcast was much more than let's say we've done like uh movement efficiency podcast in the past and why is that well because most people that are in the sport of CrossFit especially feel like endurance is always lacking and people love to like sweat and breathe and feel like they've gone really hard and so everyone's always looking for that next step and like how can I get better in that feeling and so they always go into kind of the endurance mindset when in reality what we've seen in the past is most people probably need to kind of at least figure out a hierarchy of needs and we want to explain that first like as we get started today talk about zone two training that's the whole podcast but if you're someone that's listening to this and you think you need an endurance base we want to kind of talk about a process you can go through to make sure that you're getting that while still getting better at the other things in the sport well I think part of the reason that people really gravitate towards endurance is because that's the limitation that they feel right so when they're out there doing a metcon they feel like their endurance is lacking either their legs are burning or you you know their heart is is pumping so hard or the Suffocation we talked about no wrapping Ad nauseam last time the problem is that the underlying cause of that feeling is not necessarily that you lack the endurance Machinery that's going to be improved by zone two so I think that we have to qualify all of this by saying that like your underlying limiter or the thing that's holding you back from feeling better in those endurance met cons is not necessarily your cardiovascular system or your local muscular endurance the most basic thing is movement efficiency and if we post a movement efficiency episode we would have got 1K views and no one was interested because people don't feel their movement quality correct affecting their netcon performance in the same way that they feel their heart rate or the burning totally but those things your heart rate and your burning can be dramatically affected by your movement quality yeah right the way that you perform a Thruster you know if you imagine the following scenario you do a Thruster and you shift your knees way over your toes you rock forward onto your toes you have a really crappy front rack where the bar is not actually resting on your shoulders off your shoulders it's floating in your hands off your shoulders now your wrists are hurting your elbows hurt because you're off your shoulders do a Max a Max rep set of that where you know the bars six inches in front of your midline and your shifted way over your toes like your quads are going to be exploding with fatigue because you're shifted so far under your toes you're not recruiting any posterior chain at all to help you through that movement then in your triceps and shoulders are going to be completely blown up and so it's going to feel like this local muscular limitation in the quads and shoulders but in reality it's because you have a crappy front rack and you're actually not sitting back in a decent squat position so that image you just painted of the person on their toes and the bars in the front rack out in front of them and they're fighting through a rep I imagine that you know if ever any of us made it to the fiery Gates of Hell we'd open those Gates and that would be the first thing we see everyone is doing thrusters poor movement thrusters your job here in hell is to fix all of the movement no yeah I mean I think that that is the first step and we've talked about in the past we're not going to spend a lot of time on it but I do think with all of the responses all the questions that we we've received over the last week we just want to make sure that people understand that even though you may be endurance limited you may have a delivery limitation your heart is not doing what it's supposed to do there are other low hanging fruit or things that maybe are more important on the hierarchy of needs that you should address either first or at least at the same time to get better at the sport of CrossFit so a perfect yes I was gonna say can we qualify that a little bit if we know that we always a lot of us uh instinctively look at the top athletes right the people who are at the games who already have lots of things squared away maybe we shouldn't follow them we should look at back what they did totally to get there right so where for the average person that you guys coach um where on that hierarchy like is the endurance like if I if I clicked on that episode and I think it's really important you know and hold your hands up so the people watching can see what I'm doing oh yeah and then where is it actually I I think we should have you answer this first spring because you and I you coach a much wider range of people because of your involvement in the TTT compete program right I tend to coach people that are you know either at the bubble semi-final level or the semi-final level or at the bubble games level or Masters competitors that are at the bubble games level so I want to let you address that first because your answer is going to be more broadly applicable for everyone listening to this podcast and then I can chime in yeah some of the high levels the easy answer that Chris is everyone still should be doing endurance work and we believe this is why we talked about zone two work that it's extremely important we're going to talk about I think we'll dive in maybe a little bit of the science today about why it's important and what it can do for you so it's not that it's not important it's that it is only one piece of the puzzle when you're talking about a performance-based sport so if we're just saying like Health and Longevity people need to be doing a lot of zone two work because there's some very clear signs the data backs that up that's going to help with Health and Longevity but if I'm in a sport that requires me to do muscle ups and thrusters and handstand push-ups do Sprint type workouts run outside then do a long workout you have to be very well balanced in all of those things which means you have to have good movement efficiency which Kyle already alluded to you have to have really good strength and strength endurance and you have to have really good gymnastic skills now all of those things you have to have with a big endurance base but even if you have a big endurance base if you can't do muscle ups it doesn't really matter in the sport like you're just bottlenecked by that movement and what we see excuse me what we see in compete because we have a big online group is the level of athlete that comes in most of them cannot do one or two of the skills and almost all of the athletes that come in either in one-on-one coaching or those that are in our online program have at least one or two movements that they are quote unquote weak in compared to the the Norms that we see at the games or semifinal level and so if your goal is to reach the semi-final level and let's say the average snatch at for a male is now 270 plus pounds but you can only snatch 185 pounds that is a need that is like the lowest hanging fruit we have to get you stronger if you want to reach those goals or get as close to those goals as possible even if your endurance is lacking because again you can build your endurance all year round but if your snatch stays at 185 that's going to be the thing on the leaderboard that holds you back the most whereas your endurance can lack but if you get stronger you actually move up the leaderboard faster so all we're talking about here is make sure that you're looking at these needs look at what's most reasonable with your training program and then look at the things that will move you up the leaderboard the fastest and we want to make sure that we're taking care of those as well now sorry go ahead to your point Brandon if you if someone had an infinite amount of training time then you would say all right we can build in this endurance space but most people have you know 60 Minutes to two hours to train and if you only have two hours five days a week so you have this you know kind of 10 hours of of training block using up two and a half or three hours of that for low intensity endurance work when it could be spent doing technical development on your lowest hanging fruit you know components that makes a lot more sense if what you're trying to do is get better at the sport of CrossFit side note there's like some people with real let's just call it real jobs real life going on and they just heard that and they're like you know there's some go-getters out there who are going to be like well I can add that in and they can but what they forget is that when you add that in now you something else in your life slipped away and that stress will catch up with you at some point like oh I put this off and that and then when you rather them less stress just out over time than adding the especially 40 minutes of zone two less stressed out especially if they're trying to get stronger because and we'll do a strength podcast at some point and talk about like what are the most basic things that you need to do for strength but if you want to get stronger people that are listening like I I said this last time like don't do zone two running if you want to get stronger but also like reduce your stress and get more sleep and if you're gonna wake up early in the morning and you know wake up at 5 30 a.m to do your zone two to get that extra volume in that's going to take away from your ability to adapt to the strength work that you're doing sorry that was a huge tangent Brandon from from where you're going but I think it all ties in right so the whole point of this is this kind of a huge caveat we wanted to put at the beginning of this and we're going to do podcasts on all the other things that we think are important in sport so Kyle just talked about strength we'll talk about skill development and how to acquire new skills because that is so important especially with Bosman doing handstand pirouettes or now weighted vest uh muscle up complexes and all of the other things that are coming out in the sport they'll probably come Downstream right so you'll see those trickle down and they'll be in the open and they'll be in quarterfinals and so if you want to be good at the sport you also have to have those things developed well and again it takes time to learn how to move well in a muscle up or a handstand push-up or to do the Olympic lifts and so we just want to make sure that people understand you can't forget about those things just because you feel like your engine is lacking now you could do those things together and we'll talk about how you can do that well there's some good questions in here about how to do that but I just want to make sure that people understand you need to do a true assessment and if you're in our program or you have a training Think Tank coach they're doing that process for you and that's probably why you're not doing two hours of zone two work but two hours every couple of days of strength work instead because that would be your lowest hanging fruit yeah I think so so you know that's kind of the the broad overview of where the I don't know if I would call it the average crossfitter but yeah I mean everyone that comes in is much more they're they're above average their top 10 or 15 but it's not a games level athlete yeah so then talking about the athletes that are in that semi-final level that are trying to break into the games level or games level that are trying to break into the top 10. I think the conversation is very different because those athletes are 8 to 12 years you know maybe maybe even more than that maybe even you know eight to 13 or 14 years into competitive CrossFit and likely have gone through years of skill progressions of handstand walking and ring muscle ups and snatches and have probably snatched way over the average right so if we say the average semi-final competitors snatching 270 these guys might be snatching 295 or 300 right so they're beyond the bell curve so if we're talking about those athletes now we're talking about what is the lowest hanging fruit for them and then it does become endurance work if you have 10 or 12 or 14 years of CrossFit specific experience doing more CrossFit is going to reap a limited reward right you're going to get limited adaptations from that on the flip side what have you probably not done you've probably not done four or five hours of zone two low intensity endurance work to build you know the highest levels of mitochondrial and capillary density in the muscle that you haven't likely done that and so now you have this thing that you can start to attack but to keep in mind we're talking about two completely different populations and in that last podcast I did mention that you know I thought for an elite crossfitter that two and a half hours was kind of like the Baseline level of zone two per week but keep in mind that I mentioned that that was for the elite right crossfitter and I think a lot of people took the two and a half hour recommendation they're like oh this is a blanket recommendation no that was for the population that you know I tend to work with right and those people are doing it full time so they have the time you know Chris talked about this if you have a full-time job it's very challenging to do two long sessions but you know Travis out there this is his job so he has eight or ten hours in a day and he's trying to figure out okay where are my sessions you know how am I fitting them in and it's easy for him to fit in a long session yeah 90 minutes of zone two is just part of his daily routine correct so essentially what you're saying is the games level athlete he's they he or she can raise their ceiling more by doing the longer aerobic work which we'll talk about why in a second as opposed to just continuing to do hard Crossfit because most likely they have every single skill they already have all the strength metrics that are new needed and the only other thing I would say that may be missing is movement speed but if you've been doing it for 12 years they've probably figured out how to move as fast as possible on each of those movements and they're likely adaptable in it as well so if they see someone using a technique that's slightly faster than what they're doing they can watch it and replicate it really quickly and we see that on site like Alexis has done that so well over the last couple years she's modified you know wall walk technique or muscle up technique based on what she's seen other people do and now she's just as efficient as everyone else yeah I think this is obviously not on the topic of endurance but it's related the some of the best athletes that I've worked with are just the best thiefs they basically watch other people move and steal what works well totally and adopt that movement and then because they have already built an elite an engine they can express their you know endurance capacity through that New Movement technique which makes them better and better and better and better so okay all right some questions yeah we've got a bunch of questions the first one is kind of the overarching question which a lot of people just wanted us to to better to Define what zone 2 training is and what it's actually good for so I think let's start there and then we'll dive into some of the specific questions after that okay so zone two is based on a I mentioned this last time but I think this is important to reiterate because it was definitely missed based on some of the questions it's based on a five Zone heart rate model yeah all right to determine your zone two you have to know what your max heart rate is and I think it's also critically important to point out that your max heart rate is going to be movement dependent and what I mean by that this is super important so listen to this piece your max heart rate running is going to be different than your max heart rate on a bike all right and there's a whole bunch of physiological reasons for that the the most important one is the amount of muscle mass that's required to complete the movement the more muscle mass that's required likely the higher your heart rate is going to be in each of those movements so with a bike where you're seated right you don't have as much postural stability especially on like a uh you know a concept two byte right where your arms are almost completely uninvolved and you're Seated on a static seat and you don't have to balance then it's just your legs doing the work well your heart rate is not going to be able to get as high there because you're not using as much muscle mass and likely your limiter is going to be entirely local fatigue in the legs right if you go do a max heart rate test on a concept 2 bike you're gonna crap out because your legs are burning so bad not because you've actually reached a true max heart rate but if you do it running most people are going to be able to reach closer to a max heart rate so that should illustrate that like your max heart rate running is different than your max heart rate rowing is different than your max heart rate on the skierg is different than your max heart rate cycling is different than your max heart rate swimming which actually swimming elicits fairly low max heart rates relative to running things like that because it's powerful than Fran and way different in France and for a whole different reason that I don't know if we'll actually address but as soon as you add external loads then your heart is pushing against blood pressure so every time we talk about that that Thruster example from the beginning of the podcast even if you have great Thruster mechanics holding that load in front rack increase increases blood pressure right there's tension that's created anytime you tense a muscle it's increasing the pressure that the heart's pushing against and so then you have the heart pushing against increased pressure which changes heart rate so yeah it'll make it increase rapidly and then you're not actually filling your heart correctly the basic here is that you're going to need to know if you're going to do zone two work running you're going to need to know what your max heart rate is running if you're going to do it on the concept 2 bike you're going to need to know what your max heart rate is on the bike right then the zones are based on a percentage of your max heart rate and the easiest way to define zone two is that it's 60 to 70 percent of your heart rate Max so to keep this simple if your heart rate Max is 200 beats per minute so that would be someone that's probably like in their early 20s would likely be around 200 beats per minute then then they're going to be looking anywhere between 120 to 140 beats per minute for their their zone two right now you can make this more accurate right so those zones that that 60 to 70 zone two that's an average right it's like based on most people it's going to be 60 to 70 percent but you can make that more accurate if you use a nears device like a Moxie Evan has talked about that you can actually create zones based on when your muscles start to desaturate right so that's going to be most accurate most people don't have access to that so we're not going to worry about that then you could go get VO2 max testing and using VO2 max testing you can determine a heart rate that correlates to specific zones and it might be higher or lower than that 60 60 to 70 percent of your heart rate Max but then the one that's most accessible to people is heart rate right so that's kind of where an act where you know you meet accessibility and accuracy that's where they kind of intersect the best is is using heart rate but then below that you have you know most people who have practiced nose breathing during exercise could likely perform relaxed nose breathing I don't even know if it would be relaxed but nose breathing exercise and you know run while just breathing through their nose and that would likely be around their Zone too and if you get to the point that you have to open your mouth and start breathing then you've likely gone outside of your Zone too now that's not going to be exact and some people have blockages and deviated septums and there's all that individual you know individual variability there but then the other one is to be able to have a conversation 10 to 20 word conversation without feeling out of breath and that's another way to talk test to kind of determine your your Zone too so those are like from a most basic perspective zone two is going to be that heart rate 60 to 70 percent based on that five zone model of your max heart rate but there's other ways to to determine it and that is the heart rate is probably the best from an accessibility and accuracy it's super easy if you have a Polar heart rate monitor you can wear one of the wearables on your wrist too those are a little less accurate but Garvin does a really good job with some of their watches that is accurate enough I love just the the breath test and Kyle already talked about that another way even when most people are in zone two I think that there's actually some pretty good research on this I was just reading something before the podcast essentially when you get into that zone two before you start to get almost like spill over to where now there's uh you know too much CO2 that's when you're at your respiration rate actually increases right where it's balanced and that's where zone two is it's deeper breathing when you're running or biking or skiing wherever you're at yeah but it's not an elevated respiration rate so that's a really good way to know that I'm still staying in this but as soon as you feel like you're because you're trying to expel as much CO2 as possible you probably spilled over into zone three now that's not as accurate again as some of the other things Kyle talked about but that's a really good way if you don't like at home sometimes I forget my heart rate monitor here or I don't have it on I'll use that as kind of my testing body to make sure I'm staying within that zone too from an experienced perspective it feels comfortable you're definitely working but it feels comfortable yeah and you know everyone is going to start at a different place I think this is also really important to talk about we touched on this last time in the podcast and that is that people can start walking like there is definitely a subset of the group that's listening to this podcast now that could go out and do a very brisk walk and likely get into their zone two uh heart rate range but there's also another group that used to do marathons or I've seen Ryan this is so Ryan you know TTT coach who uh runs marathons I've seen him running on the true form with his heart rate at a hundred beats per minute running nine and a half minute pace right and like he was having like 30 word in-depth intellectual conversations with me while I was walking on the treadmill next to him yeah yeah he's both trained for that and most people can't do that with running and to Kyle's Point earlier this is another question that we had about you know what's the problem with running in strength training the challenge with doing zone two run work is there's more chance of there being a bunch of uh waste byproduct in the lakes that uh will challenge the or interfere with a lot of the strength training that you want to do and it's really hard to regulate that in a in a zone two session so you got to be really careful with that I think the other thing too well I just lost my what was on on the topic of running I think one of the big problems that people run into especially if they're running on the road is impact yeah okay eccentric loading is what I was going to say yeah so just the fact that the that the legs are constantly taking on this you know like mini bounding I talked about last time part of the reason I chose zone two uh running was to get some of that bounding adaptation but that is also the thing that can potentially prevent some leg strength adaptation so if you're doing a heavy squat cycle and you are also doing zone two running on the road like you're potentially introducing two interfering training adaptations and if you really need to get stronger that's a really bad choice for your zone two so the benefit of doing zone two work can be to improve the pre-loading of the heart to actually create some elasticity in the heart to get more blood volume into the heart so that when you do some of the higher intensity intervals that we've talked about in the past or you're doing CrossFit style work or weight lifting powerlifting then you can work on the kind of contraction of the heart so you're getting both the preload and the afterload which is obviously getting more blood in so that you can pump more Blood Out efficiently but with that said zone two work then needs to focus on making sure that you're getting blood into the heart as opposed to it being local stamina so that this is the kind of the last caveat here most people jump into zone two and then they go too hard where if I'm running my legs are burning the entire time I'm beating myself up I'm not doing the same thing as I think that I'm doing in that endurance session yeah if your legs are feeling that kind of local Tegan burning then there's tension in the legs and I touched on this before but to clarify this point any time that you've increased muscular tension in the body Beyond not like full relaxation but beyond like what you would expect from relaxed running like zone two kind of you know comfortable running once there's there starts to be this extra tension then the heart's pushing against more pressure and that pushing against more pressure also means that the heart is filling less there's less you know return to the blood so you're getting less stretch with each this is a a good analogy that I heard it would be like pumping up your bike tire right you know everyone's done this before and you know like you're just joking around you're like oh and the bike tires not really pumping up because you're going really fast with the pump you're not actually getting any blood through or air through the tire yeah so we want to actually get those long aggressive pumps if that sound makes any sense but that's actually going to get that tire full and then obviously now you can ride your bike same thing here we want to improve the efficiency of the heart and if you're always going a little too hard you may be improving the the ability to contract the heart well but you're not actually learning how to fill the heart appropriately well this actually Brandon you better not do anything bad to me ever because I'll find that clip and use it against it yeah sorry that was bad Brandon's Point here actually explained there's there was a question about you know why can't and I'm going to butcher the the question a little bit but it's basically like why can't I do 30 minutes of wall ball well obviously you can't do 30 minutes straight of wall ball that would be impossible why can't I do 30 minutes of intermittent wall ball and keep my heart rate in zone two and let me ask you that question yeah go ahead so with 30 minutes of wall balls in very small sets with a large work to rest ratio work for training this Zone that way you'd be training the skill as well okay so the reason I wanted to address this question right here where Brandon was just talking about cardiac preload afterload and cardiac filling is that okay you have this external load you're holding a wall ball out in front of you and one of the things that adding load is going to do like I was just talking about is increases tension and by increasing tension you know you're increasing the the resistance to to blood flow you're increasing the resistance for on the heart and by doing that you're changing the types of adaptations that are occurring from your training so with Zone with you know low intensity zone two work what we're trying to accomplish is we're trying to build capillary density in the tissues mitochondrial density in the muscles and we're trying to increase the amount of blood that the heart fills with and pumps out each time so the cardiac efficiency is essentially so like that's what we're trying to accomplish with our with our low intensity Zone too that can really only be done with continuous kind of low load right low resistance uh exercise it can't be done with externally loaded essentially you have to let that to go back to that analogy you have to let the pump fill with air so that I can get air back into the tire that's what I have to be able to do with my heart and if I'm always creating load then it's only filling up halfway and then trying to pump out to get to the local areas of your body so essentially you have to be able to do continuous and your goal is to be able to eventually do way more than 30 minutes of continuous exercise and doing you know five wall ball resting 20 seconds five wall ball resting 20 seconds that's not continuous exercise even though you are you know in this work rest environment you're never going to get to the point that you could do unbroken wall ball for an hour so that would be a really poor choice of exercise if your goal is to get these very specific types of adaptations that build your aerobic base now with that where could it be good for with that being said 30 minutes of intermittent wall ball like that is actually a great way to build wall ball efficiency so if you did something like 10 wall ball on the minute for 30 minutes now granted that's a lot of wall ball right I mean you're you're looking at 300 wall ball but there have been plenty of Crossfit workouts I've had that that would be a great way to build mechanics efficiency to build some specific adaptations to wall ball and if you jumped on the bike between it and maintained your heart rate around that zone too is kind of like a recovery thing then you're looking at creating some but that's a good piece for creating you know wall ball specific adaptations or sport specific adaptations that would be in my mind we talked about the bridge last time where you're doing your low intensity Zone 2 aerobic work and then you have the sport over here which would be like 150 wall ball for time in the middle of that might be something like every minute on the minute for maybe 20 minutes I might not go for 30 minutes but you know depending on the level of athletes maybe you would um where you do 10 wall ball and then hop on the Echo Bike or hop on the concept two bike between them and kind of spin as an active recovery and then over the course of a couple weeks increase the intensity of that spin or increase the weight of the wall ball or go to 11 feet or whatever it is so I'm not saying in any way shape or form that that's bad training for CrossFit I'm just saying that that isn't going to achieve the type of adaptation that we're talking about that you're going to achieve with low intensity zone two type continues your heart rate could actually stay within that quote unquote zone two but it's not eliciting the same adaptation that Kyle's talking about with with actual Zone 2 training on a bike or running but to his point it can help with the skill like if I I may give people imams or intervals of let's say wall balls and something else and the focus is do this with your feet practice squatting to a lower depth whatever it may be right or catching the ball on the bottom of a squat like there are all kinds of skill adaptations that you can create there and then again it is a really good Bridge as you go from kind of That Base building time into the performance side of the sport as you get closer to the season let's dig into some questions yeah I think the first one is the how do you distinguish between if you're endurance limited and locally or stamina Limited at a local level and we we started with that last time but obviously we didn't make that as clear as we should have so I think let's start there and then we'll get to some of the specific ones yeah I think the the first and and easiest way to address this is that regardless of what type of endurance adaptation you have whether it's stamina-based or you know more cardiovascular base or delivery limited how whatever language you want to use to communicate those things the first thing you have to do is address movement quality because it's entirely possible that the limitation that you feel is not the same limitation that you actually have like if my Thruster example from the beginning of the podcast so once we've addressed that like I I have to give that caveat to begin once we've addressed that then I think the next step is to really pay attention to how you feel in the workouts that you do on a daily basis and what is the most common thing that you experience there's going to be plenty of people that are listening to this podcast that fall into the gray area where both are a limitation and it turns out if that's the case follow a balanced program yeah right but if you're like Brandon was where like he said he never felt out of breath no matter what he did it was not like he just couldn't work hard enough quote unquote yeah I would just get bottlenecked by lat fatigue biceps fatigue leg fatigue whatever it may be or someone who always feels like they're out of breath seven minutes in five minutes into the metcon I have to stop and just stare at the Implement someone even mentioned that in the podcast I really empathized with them in the comments what do I do when I just I'm staring at it and it's like well the the solution is not to just go back and do it over and over it's to actually go back and build your your underlying cardiovascular system but you have to you have to know yourself and observe enough to figure out what your trend is across Crossfit workouts across sport specific workouts you're not going to be able to just do one test and be like I'm all this or I'm all that and the reality is that the majority of the people that are listening to this podcast are probably pretty balanced you and I we're on opposite ends of the spectrum as a result of the way that we've trained our genetics things like that so we ended up on opposite ends not because that's normal but because of our specialization Insurance prior to this so I think that's an important starting point is you know first check movement quality second observe everything that you do and pay attention take notes take notes that's what I was going to say I think that's just so important in sport every other sport people are always taking notes after a practice or after a game you know like I remember playing football and we had cameras every single practice so that we could come back and we would review even in a practice and in the same way we should be doing that with our sport where even if it's a fun workout with friends just write down you know jot down two or three sentences of how that felt and then look at the trends as Kyle said over time I did the partner workout Joe with Haley this past week in the memorial workout and I had a Suffocation style limitation like I was in the third round of the Burpee box jump over double under and I felt like I was you know my respiration was getting up already and I'm like man if I if I didn't have Haley to offset some of this fatigue my limitation in this moving on to the overhead squats would be me just standing staring at the barbell breathing heavy before the overhead squats yeah but I know in the last podcast I said I had stopped doing all my zone two work after so yeah I started up I started up last week you realize okay I'm gonna I'm gonna test and I was slow like the deterioration of my Pace God it was like I've added like a minute and a half or more to my zone two Pace now we can talk about you know zone two paces and things like that because I think there's some questions in there that wouldn't get to that I think that's a good point though you you know that you felt those things in the workout because you're reviewing every single workout so I think that's just really like that's something that everyone can apply right now now write down a couple thoughts after every workout your strength training your skill work and your conditioning so that you know exactly what you need to work on and it allows you it gives you more Focus moving forward like you can set these micro goals of like oh the last week has been really I've struggled with the with these things so start working at that or talk to a coach or if you're incompete you can reach out to us and we can kind of guide that process Ben I think the other thing to discuss is the fact that regardless of what the source of limitation is regardless of whether it is a cardiovascular limitation or a stamina limitation in the end what you're trying to do is get better at a crossfit workout yes and so choosing methods that improve that regardless of the type right from uh we could get really specific we talked about nears earlier we could do nears testing and really determine whether it's a delivery or a utilization limitation we can determine that but in the end you know since most people don't have access to that what you want to do or choose methods that are going to just improve that and for most people doing some zone two is going to build some stamina in the muscle groups that are trained during your Zone 2 ERG and it's going to build cardiovascular endurance and if you are have a clear you know stamina limitation or muscular endurance limitation then doing local muscular endurance work is also going to challenge the heart in that specific movement right so if it's a Thruster limitation and you're doing High volumes of moderate load thrusters like your heart's also going to adapt to the work that you're doing so in the end our goal is to improve performance and either one is going to be moving you in that direction the last piece I would say here is going back to when we say movement efficiency Kyle said that's the first piece it could be as simple as how can I reduce my effort on a specific movement each rep and we keep using the Thruster example but that's a super simple one because it is a full body movement there's so many things that could be like the bottleneck but if it's I have a really bad front rack start to improve that we have a movement Mobility path in our online program or if you have a coach there's plenty of things online that you can find improve your front rack position and all of a sudden you'll be able to breathe better better you'll feel more efficient you'll actually be able to press it off of your shoulders almost like a push press as opposed to it just being a strict press when you're coming up up and now you're using less effort you're probably not holding your breath anymore so you'll feel more efficient at the movement which will make obviously the entire workout easier yeah and may expose a different endurance limitation exactly you mentioned that doing zone two running will ruin strength gains we kind of talk about this let's go back to what about targeting muscle endurance is it possible to address the limiter in conjunction with strength heck yeah people have been doing this if you think about like West Side uh you think about West Side barbell right so their whole thing was like they would do uh you know something super heavy they build a Max of a lift that they wouldn't use in competition I don't know how how much people know about West Side barbell and accidentally okay yeah there's basically they have a Max effort day and on top of that they'd have their repetition method right where they're doing relatively higher volumes for them six to eight reps you know six to twelve reps of a movement like you know a deep box squat or something like that as an assistant movement well their their training muscular endurance for their Sport and then they would also layer on things like heavy long sled drags more muscular endurance and they do it for the posterior chain or the anterior chain so like you have some of the strongest athletes in the world and yet they're training local muscular endurance work on top of their absolute strength work so the answer to that is absolutely and it works really well their system is awesome I use those styles of training often for athletes that need to get stronger but what I do is I also reduce the volume of basic aerobic work that they're getting down to what I would consider are kind of the bare minimum for the level that they compete at sure so I think the church yes yes and just real quick as a piece of that I think the challenge with most people is they think muscular endurance work has to be like CrossFit intervals and it does not and we'll get into that but what I mean by that is like okay I do my strength work and say I'm say I'm doing a West Side you know I'm doing a Max every day and then my muscular endurance piece to that is like I'm gonna do three sets of 21.59 of you know lunges and C2 bike and burpees then you may be interfering with the strength gains that you're trying to achieve whereas we could isolate the muscular endurance work that 8 to 12 rep range maybe longer rest break so three minutes with my intensity in the 8 to 12 reps is a little bit higher and I'm actually targeting what I'm trying to work on for the strength adaptation even some of the stuff I've seen in compete about a month ago where it would have been like you do your max effort strength work and then you would go into let's say 20 barbell back rack walking lunges directly into a 200 foot reverse sled Dragon rest equals work or rest to recovery do four sets of that like that's local muscular endurance for the legs but mostly the quads um and that's not going to interfere dramatically or even at all and may even you know augment some of the strength adaptations from your max effort so like that's I almost look at that as like it could be hypertrophy work in some sense of the word yeah if you know you need endurance work and you want to include two to three zone two sessions on a runner per week how would you layer those into your current training okay what I did is I just layered them on top of whatever Adam was writing for me okay so to be clear I would just kind of like pick and choose uh I know that you know my legs are going to be trashed so I don't want to do it before I'm doing my heavy strength work that is one thing I did so if I had heavy strength work in the afternoon then when I did my morning zone two stuff I would keep it on the bike instead of the runner because I found the runner created more you know fatigue going into the the strength work but really I mean it's it should be low enough intensity and there should not be very much fatigue byproduct buildup hydrogen ions whatever you want like people colloquially know it as lactic acid oh I got too much hydrogen ions cool dude it's not yeah it's not lactate or lactic acid but I don't want to dig in I don't want to dig into that conversation well what's funny is like when I got my degree what year this would have been 2011 exercise science degree they already knew then it wasn't that but do you still yeah I got mine in 2007 and we knew then I guess there's a lot of things in life where you just keep saying the lactate threshold just because it people know what it means and that is a thing right there is a lactate threat yeah yeah we're gonna move on from that um with that being said so you layered it in yes this person is actually someone that's incompete and I know many people have asked us in our online program or we've actually had people reach out that are following other programs and like hey I want to do your endurance track how would I integrate that into my training plan as is there are some challenges there and I think that my worry always as a coach I always am thinking about like I'm setting up these guard rails like I want you to be able to still take your own path and do the things that you love and enjoy your training get excited about it each day feel like you're making progress so I'm there to collaborate with anybody I'm working with but I also have to have something there on the side of the road when we're climbing up the mountain so you don't fall off the challenge is most people feel really good when they add in those second sessions and they maybe do them for two or three weeks but then all of a sudden they're like completely trashed and then they hit this plateau and it takes a long time to dig out of that so I would just be very thoughtful about how much you do ease into it maybe only add one session a week and then a second session and just make sure that you're still creating the adaptations that you want now the biggest thing and Kyle already talked about this when you're doing that zone two training you should not be creating that byproduct the the the fatigue byproduct I think is what happens when most people in the sport feel like they're working hard they feel the burn and that feels good to them and so they feel like in zone two work they need to feel the same thing right yes the challenge though is that then you're just over training or you probably will be over training if you do that two or three times a week where now you're in zone four on a run like you're doing one mile repeats basically it just probably won't work well with a good strain length program now that's not to say some I've seen Travis do that and still get better if I do that I get worse yeah me too yeah so I just think that you have to be very thoughtful and maybe some people are just better at handling the volume yeah I think to to your point zone two should not create a lot of localized fatigue or lingering localized fatigue like your legs will feel heavy if you did it on the bike or the runner but what you should have more of is just this kind of systemic fatigue where it's like you're kind of tired afterward and I don't mean like my arms are tired or my legs are tired but like you're actually like a little bit sleepy tired afterward and that's more of a central nervous system fatigue again not something that I want to dig into too much in this podcast because I want to address a lot of questions but you should expect some Central fatigue from Zone 2 work but not a lot of local metabolic fatigue right that's important because you're going to get a lot of that from the CrossFit training you're doing or just the strength training that you're doing I mean if you're targeting a back squat then you're going to get a lot of that fatigue in your legs maybe even your low back we don't want to double that up with you know hard running intervals unless again you're peaking for something would you recommend the people that are that are following compete that want to add more Zone 2 endurance work to do it on like a Thursday Sunday recovery days and be and and choose low impact modalities things like a skier or yeah I think I think the way I would look at this is I definitely wouldn't start with running unless you're like a Rhine which we already talked about who's running six minute marathons and he can you know easily run and is he has to like you were saying I definitely don't think you should start with run yeah right exactly yeah unless you have the tolerance for that and again you're not creating a bunch of byproduct in your legs or creating a bunch of soreness because that happens too um so I think a ski a C2 bike is a great option if you don't have those you have a rower you can do that it's can get a little challenging on a row because of you know either grip or low back fatigue and you know again if you're doing a bunch of grip work in your training and then onto a row that can impact it so you just need to be very thoughtful how you do the road you got to get that thing Becky has have you seen that little seat cover she has I was going to give all jellies recommendations because she she made a bunch of recommendations for me to be able to do longer rowing because that was something I needed to do so I got my gel seat that Becky recommended and then she also recommended I was always rowing with my foot pads on a three and I went down to a one and all of my low back pain during rowing was magic that I've had for 12 years of CrossFit was magically gone I mean it goes to efficiency like that's why we think movement efficiency is so important because you can alleviate a lot of that pressure or pain that you're going through especially in the sport of CrossFit where you're doing all of these Dynamic movements by learning how to move a little bit better now I feel faster when I'm on a three for like a 2k row or a 1K row but when I'm doing my long Becky 30 minute yeah row thing that she recommended that I do if I if I shift it down to a one man so comfortable and I can hold the paces and my mechanics look way better and the curve on the monitor looks way better so there's something to be said for that yeah so to wrap that one up yes I mean you can add some in I would start with personally just one session a week and then ease into a second session if you feel like you need it but my guess and especially as a master's athlete who's the one that asked that there are other things that you still should work on so just make sure you're prioritizing those things correctly uh in the Master's categories now you have to be really strong hold on can I be an like those kind of answers would drive me crazy if I was listening where you're like start with the one session and then add a second session if you need it when do I know I need it help my brother out yeah I mean I think at that point you probably need to talk to a coach I would do a full assessment to be completely honest because I don't know the person so I don't know what they need that's why I keep caveating this with I've seen everyone in compete we the cool thing about what we do in there is we actually look at the results and we adjust training based on the averages of all the results we add skill programs based on what people need in the program like we're really trying to make it where it's not just a group program but people can almost individualize it right and that's why we have an endurance option in there but most people in the sport are actually lacking a strength limit or they have a strength limitation or they have a skill and limitation like if an athlete comes to me and they can't do any of the gymnastic skills that has to be priority number one and if I'm taking time away from that to do a two-hour zone two session or you know 30 minutes on two session I would say let's re-prioritize this work on all the skills and you'll get your conditioning work in with a well balanced program which we have two options each week that are in the zone two to zone three you know we don't have a ton of just long zone two work that's intentional because again we are trying to get the averages but I just think it's really dangerous if someone just thinks that they need more of that yeah I'd agree with that cool uh what exercises and strategies can be used to enhance muscular endurance in the legs and lower body with high repetition lunges and squats within a defined range add and add weekly oh I don't know what the end of this question is sorry I think I think they're saying just basically create create some like linear progression yeah and the answer is the answer is absolutely and we we just touched on that a little bit but yeah something a circuit that I've been doing um I just did it yesterday it's 20. back squats at uh 95 20 drop lunches because I don't have space in my garage to do walking lunges and then 20 step UPS no load so it's 95 pounds for the back squat 95 pound for the lunge unloaded box step UPS I do four sets of it I rest the same amount of time that I work and that's my muscular endurance work that I kind of stack on top of my lots and lots of zone two that I've been rebuilding but the the point is you know a simple way to progress that is next week I'll do 22 then I'll do 24 then I'll do 26. as long as knees and hips and everything are staying healthy and and I'm adapting well it's a great way to address it and you could also add load to that so you can go from 95 to 105 to 115 in the sport especially with the performance side of things that you have to be in that 115 to 135 for lot of tests so that's a good way to do it one of my favorite and for those that have been in compete they saw this it's actually an old poliquin principle um who he was a bodybuilding coach but he had some great protocols the 612-24 concept so basically you would start with six reps at a heavier load and it would be usually a bilateral movement so let's say we kept with Kyle's example it'd be six moderate back squats so let's say at 60 to 75 depending on where you're at in a cycle you would rest a certain amount of time if we're going closer to competition the rest is going to be a little bit shorter if it's a way further away from competition the rest a little bit longer so let's say rest one minute and then you do 12 single leg movements so now it's 12 walking lunges per leg and I would lower the load obviously I'm not using the same load as my back squats I would rest another minute and then it's 24 of another bilateral movement but unloaded or with very light load so 30 or less weighted vest awaited vest yeah you could do weighted vest really light dumbbell something like that so again six back squats rest one minute 12 walking lunges with you know whatever dumbbells wrestling a minute and then 24 weighted vest squats and then the next week you could either add reps to that or like I like to do with intensity especially as you get closer it'd be six back squats and now it's 65 percent rest 30 seconds 12 walking lunges with five pounds more in each hand with dumbbells or in a front rack position for the sport or whatever movement you want to test rest 30 seconds and now 24 weighted vest lunges but now instead of a 20 pound vest I use a 30 pound vest and something like that isn't really going to detract from strength adaptations in fact for some people it may help to augment them a little bit so like who's like a Mike McGoldrick they're going to get stronger from doing that I've had great success with My Own Strength games doing some of that again you can always risk over training if you're doing it all the time but that's a really good way to build some muscular endurance that's kind of in your off season uh and the last thing here is if if you're wanting to just Target stamina like local endurance if I'm just thinking about the quads of the hamstrings you do need to be a little bit careful about what else you're adding in there if you're doing a bunch of like really hard uh you know whatever C2 bike within that now you're you're creating other limitations that may pop up so in other words I want to do those 24 air squats unbroken and fast but if I add in a Sprint on the bike before that that's a good way in performance to to build for the sport but in the off season if I want to focus on having intensity within the movement and targeting a certain muscle group I probably should eliminate the bike so there's not a lot of other like variables of fatigue and I'm only focusing on that particular movement yeah I think also if if it is the off season I'm always thinking I want to get my volume up as high as I can there you go and doing pre-fatigue work before trying to get your volume up is probably that's one of the strategies I use to lower volume in season is to do pre-fatigue work on an ERG and then do the movement so I don't have to do so much volume all right next question yep uh so my legs burn immediately on the Echo Bike and C2 bike what would be progressions for that leg burning issue kind of staying on the local endurance okay so I would say most likely this person hasn't spent enough time on those two ergs and that they would definitely need to spend time specifically on the concept 2 bike and the Echo Bike they could start yeah did that question give any context of what they were doing when it burned were they doing the long zone two work or was it like a Sprint yeah no no context exactly what I read was was listed my guess is that they don't have enough specific adaptation or specific exposure to the bike and the simplest thing for them is to literally get more exposure on the bike now someone like that I might change if I was their coach I might change the zone 2 prescription so rather than just being like get on the concept two bike put the damper at three or four and ride for 30 minutes at zone two I would have them put the damper at 10. and do zone two work so yes they're gonna their legs are gonna be on fire for the entire 30 minutes but they're still going to stay in zone two they're gonna probably build up a lot more metabolite but I'm trying to create local endurance adaptations in that 30 minutes you do a couple of weeks of that and they're going to feel much less burning on either ERG yeah uh if you are talking about like just jumping on and doing a Sprint that's going to be very normal so you definitely want to make sure that you're warming up well yeah that's uh old Joel Jameson High Resistance intervals protocol uh just to understand zone two work on any machine including the run will help with overall endurance not to include muscle endurance yeah absolutely I think that's the short answer to that doing zone two work or doing any really any heart rate zone work uh on the Earth is going to create non-specific endurance it's going to improve the cardiovascular endurance overall yes what you just said for some reason and I I think we've clarified this enough but just doing that doesn't mean you're going to get better at CrossFit so so keep that in mind it's the non-specific endurance that you're improving which will help which will bleed into the CrossFit Works you're gonna like to Kyle's point last week all of a sudden he could breathe better in metcons but you still need to make sure that you're focused on that when the season comes to to be good at wall balls and handstand push-ups and Toes bar and all the that's what's so fun and hard about CrossFit there are so many things that you have to be efficient at and be able to breathe in all these different patterns so yes you're building this wonderful base but you you have to be able to bridge it into the sport yeah to me ERG work like that is really trying to build your recovery ability to build your you know your Baseline Fitness it's it's building the ceiling it's not building you up to the ceiling if that makes sense one of the questions earlier was does Zone 2 work running in particular we talked about it maybe interfering with strength training and if you're doing too hard of zone two or too much zone two it probably could but there's a huge benefit to that as well to Kyle's point just now if you are better at creating that filling your heart with blood there are some benefits to that to recovering in between strengths sets so if you're doing heavy back squats and I actually have a efficient and efficient heart then I can recover faster between those sets which probably means more intensity within the set which means better adaptations and if we see more interval style workouts in CrossFit and fitness racing where it's like you know the 2223 intervals from the games a couple years ago and we've seen more of that uh zone two work is one of the best tools that you can have for getting people to recover better between those you're not going to improve their performance in the two minute interval but their recovery from and the speed of recovery from that two minute interval is going to improve yeah this is a good one I have a question regarding zone two I was under the impression that each Zone 2 session had to be in a specific range of time for it to be really effective so if your goal is to get at least two hours per week you would do two one-hour sessions instead of bouts of 10 to 15 minutes here or there from your perspective and regarding science is there a difference yes and this is actually an awesome question so what I talked about in the last podcast was kind of like that was how I fitted into my scheduling right I add 30 minute windows or 40 minute windows that I could I could do it I didn't have two longer windows but from an ideal from an idealistic perspective you do want to have your zone two sessions be longer like the the magic starts to happen at like 45 minutes and the real magic happens at an hour and if you can get those extended out you know to 90 minutes that's even better but I didn't have that time available and I think part of my point in that last podcast was even if you don't have these two 90 minute or two hour blocks or one you know two one hour blocks per week if you had uh for 30 minute blocks you're still going to get benefit from doing it in fact um and pycon you know TTT former TTT coach has talked about this a ton where one of the best things that you can do is put these little chunks of zone two throughout the day 10 minutes here 10 minutes there 10 minutes there and you accumulate 40 minutes in the day you accumulate an hour in the day that's still driving those Zone 2 adaptations over time and I think that's critically important for people to understand that like from an ideal perspective the longer continuous work is best right but hey I couldn't even run for an hour like continuously when I started it I pretty sure I could now in zone two there's there's no way when I started I could run in zone two for an hour pretty sure I could do that now but I also didn't have an hour available so why not switch into zone three or you get bored no I literally couldn't so there's this thing called heart rate creep all right listen and man we're getting a lot of science topics in here it's kind of cool so what happens is over time as you're continuing to exercise and you start to sweat you lose some plasma volume you get what's called heart rate creep where your heart rate at a fixed pace so say I'm running nine and a half minute miles and that's my zone two Pace well 30 or 40 minutes in my heart rate at that same pace is going to start to slowly creep up that's called heart rate creep it's just a result of you know long continuous exercises start running slower you I I could but at some point you're not really running anymore and the other thing is when you start to run this is an experience that happens to me when I start to run slower than about 10 to 10 and a half minute mile Pace then it just starts to hurt like my hip flexors start to hurt and I think it's a result of my running mechanics at slow speeds not being very good relative to my running mechanics at at higher speeds um and that's probably something that you know I should talk to Ryan about and we should work on developing but it's a common thing when people run slow enough man it starts to hurt and I've actually heard Evan talk about that they call it runners in the runner World they call it run adding strength even though it has almost nothing to do with with strength but it's the ability to run at very low intensities and not have it be it's like the damaging the endurance of Tolerance right yeah like learning how to tolerate the positions well yeah and for me it's it literally is like foot tolerance and knees and hips like I can't do an hour running without having some like General mechanical issues so most people can't do that uh they maybe could do it on a C2 bike listen we've we've worked with a lot of people and I've put I've integrated the 10 minute at the beginning 10 minute at the end multiple times throughout the week and that has worked really well there's an ideal way to do everything like if look if I were to do a strength training program for someone that's in CrossFit I'd probably pull out almost all of the CrossFit work but most people won't buy into that because they want to still do all the other things so there would be an ideal way to have these strength adaptations over let's say a summer period we know that that may be better but because people want other things you just have to find like yeah we have a strength bias path but it's like how many people are willing to buy into that so we give you the option like this is the ideal option this is what we want you to do if you need to work on your strength but we understand most people probably want to do all the skills and the CrossFit stuff which is cool it's great you can still make good progress there but if you're just worried about strength you probably should just focus on this the same way like if it's just zone two then do those longer blocks most people don't have that time in the day yeah at that point it gets to like what's going to make it fun for them and keep them consistent and that's they're going to lose to me that's doing a big deal right then go with the next best option I I think I understand that now more than ever with having a busy schedule and you know three kids at home I have to find what works best for my schedule and if I can stay focused on the time that I have in the gym it's just better off than being stressed about getting in you know that's a really good point and there was a question about you know time and time commitment I think it's applicable here one of the things that I did this was gosh this was a long time ago when my kids were much younger uh much younger than they are now I bought one of those buggies that attaches to your bike because one of the things that my hey my kids loved it they thought it was so what are you telling me about it to just like speed through the neighborhood right but really what I I think in in the end one of the things that I got out of it was I was doing a lot of zone two endurance work I say a lot it was like 30 minutes you know twice a week but my kids wanted to do something fun and it was an opportunity for me to kind of blend my my passion and totally having an opportunity to do something with kids but so I think part of this is figuring out how to integrate it into your life you take your dog for a walk every day right you walk for 30 minutes throw a weight vest on that'll probably get we were talking about this before the podcast throwing a weight vest and I'll probably get you into zone two now you're doing 30 minutes of zone two everything that's right everyone in the neighborhood stop picking up all these chicks it's funny we uh we have some of those rut questions but I've been I've started the The Ruck process before we actually jump into the program Kyle and I are writing a program and we'll we'll post that somewhere we got to figure out exactly what we're gonna do but the have we all started independently yes we have talked about basically we all talked about it and we're like okay we need to start training because otherwise we won't get through it but I've been thrown on a weight this and walking around the neighborhood and uh someone the other day came outside and they're like I thought Murph was over it was so funny like everyone knows Murph and uh he was just like he had a good laugh at it but it is uh much more challenging walking with a vest on than just like I go on walks with like our kids every night but putting that vest on is 60. uh I had well no yesterday I put on 65 pounds which was brutal but I just have a 20 pound vest and then I'll usually have like another 10 yeah I'll add a little ten pound plate I did I did a zone two with with the vest on I think it was on Friday last 20 pound vest on Friday I did 20 minute ski 20 minute assault Runner 20 minute concept two bike and lo and behold it was so much slower on the this I was over 10 and a half minute pace to stay in zone two and I had to walk at like six and a half minutes and then every two and a half to three minutes after that I'd walk for 30 seconds to bring it back down so I still hadn't found a sustainable pace and it would hurt too much like it would actually hurt my joints to run much slower than that so it's going to take some adaptation for me to really get into this and and to be able to do it with I mean we're gonna have to run with 35 someone mentioned that the military stand is 45 pounds in the comments and so it depends it depends on which selection you go to 35 is the standard and then it goes anywhere from 35 up to 55 pounds yeah now we got to do 45 yeah that's what I said well you just made this a lot harder three three mile runs with 35 pounds and uh I have my Apple watch and my my watch goes to zone six that's also another there are categories that are ones there this one goes to 11. yeah this one goes I got it okay sorry I was going to say that there are categories where you'll see six zones so if you hear that we're talking about five zones yes yeah yeah the one that I created for the original training Think Tank uh Energy Systems course had seven zones so it had the five traditional which makes a lot of sense right the it goes up to basically VO2 and then there is training beyond that I was a sprinter and there are multiple zones of sprinting Beyond you know zone five that can't be measured by heart rate like heart rate is irrelevant at correct sprinting intensities because it's either you're doing speed endurance work and it's at Max there isn't just nothing else like you're either at your max heart rate or you're not doing it correctly or there's like you know speed intervals where your heart rate and you're doing 40 meter repeats on five minutes rest your heart rate barely breaks 120 beats per minute on each but you're putting in Max effort for each of those Sprints yeah yeah so that's why in in that Energy System of course I created seven zones so that people could have some some you know something to mess with when they got to higher intensities all right a couple of training specific questions this was great I'd love to hear more examples of muscular endurance building work like the four rounds of bench press strict press and Max holds used for handstand push-ups but for other High School skill movements as such as ring muscle ups bar muscle ups toes bar Etc heck yeah so ring muscle ups great things to do would be complexes right so I would say something if you look at Mia's breakdown drills that we've got in the got none programs and compete or some of the skill programs and compete it would be things like three max effort swings three turnovers three strict ring dips three full muscle ups right so that complex right there and we're starting to see these ring complexes really well with the sport that's a great way to do it but also think about things like you do five muscle ups five ring dips uh drop down five ring pull-ups this the numbers are probably aggressive for the you know average level crossfitter but then finish with a Max rep set of tricep press Downs which is going to work on you know like the tip out portion you're not going to get very many sets of that because once you do a Max rep set of tricep press down you're just blown up any pressing that you do after that is going to be um destroyed but things like that that's how I would approach those complexes yeah you could also do that poloquin style concept with this as well and I've had good success so it would be let's just say three you'd have to reduce the Reps to Kyle's point because a lot of the upper body stuff you just blow up like with strict handstand push-ups or upper body pulling unless you're Kyle and you have lats the size of rhinos um the rhinos have lats yeah of course three weighted Pull-Ups rest a certain amount of time maybe Six Ring muscle ups or you pick the number where it's it's a well below your amrap set but something that challenges you rests a certain amount of time and then chest bar pull-ups that's just like a pulling endurance piece that's isolated you're not creating a bunch of like Global fatigue but it's going to work on let's say your your lats your biceps and then just the the ability to have that skill to do under fatigue rest to full recovery and then repeat that and then as you get closer to season that's when you can start adding the pre-fatigue work same thing you know we talked about some of the West Side progressions and using like repetition method if you have access to a lat pull down you could do neutral grip lat pull down you know that's a great tool for building kind of ring muscle up specific pulling that isn't necessarily just doing more of the gymnastics movement and it's going to let you adjust the load to build you know muscular endurance really well so doing that and then non-specific stuff to build I think most people could do banded pull-ups too yes even if you don't need it that I actually did there's like an ego thing it's just you get better activation in some of those small I don't know what the I'm talking about by the way but the smaller muscles like you just feel a difference even if you could do tons of strict pull-ups you throw like a light green band on there and you just get better activation I mean it's a great way to it's kind of like a concept of over speed training in sprinting you could do that with a band as well so that their foot assist versions and things like that yeah yeah and we've used those in our online program we actually had a full cycle a six-week block where we did banded pull-ups each week to help improve that in our off season so that when we got back to Chester bars and other more Dynamic movements they built that tolerance level that was needed to do that well without getting completely just Trashed by doing you know 50 or 60 chest more pull-ups yeah McGoldrick loves his banded pull-ups first pullers I gotta I gotta work on those pullers toes to Bar um a couple good ones that I really like doing movements that are replicated in the sport or practicing body lines that are in support So a perfect example this is maybe like some kind of hollow position hold and then rest so many seconds and then do an l-sit variation rest so many seconds and then maybe it's 15 toes a bar for time uh come down and then ten for time so 15 unbroken is the goal and then you'd rest five seconds and now you have to do 10 more for time so that we're creating some volume but it's specific to the total bar yeah I think to that point we've now seen CrossFit start to move in that direction with that ghd via row where it's like all trunk flexion you know combo movements but I've been seeing that kind of stuff in compete forever where it's like a one time you know I cherry pick Matt cons from there to give to my athletes or to do myself and I saw one that I swear it was 21 maybe 27 21 15 9 toes to Bar ghd setups yeah that's horrible that was after a bunch of progressions though yeah but the point being that that is like sport specific trunk flexion muscular endurance testing right that's like taking these Concepts and moving them into a test and we're seeing that start to show up in the actual you know testing body or the vent structure of the sport so yeah especially with the upper body movements I think we've already always had some endurance tests with the legs just like you know 15 minute am rep of of rowing and wall balls like your legs are going to blow up but now like the density of the upper body pressing and pulling is so high even even when the actual numbers aren't High the complexity with the weighted vests that semifinals made it much more challenging so you need to be good at that there's a lot of components that go into getting better at this so we just talked about some some kind of more specific things right these are stamina-based progressions but also don't forget that like high volume skierg right zone two 60-minute skier is going to build the underlying Machinery that allows you to recover faster from that right it's going to build all the capillary density mitochondrial density it lets you recover from that and then making sure that your mechanics are dialed in for the high school movements like like this rope climbs rope climbs muscle ups bar muscle ups make sure that you have those skill components like these are our tools to use to improve stamina specific to the sport but don't forget there's things that improve recovery like the zone two stuff that we're talking about and things that actually just make it so that they're easier to do and you can do more of them like technical work I started to smile because Chris and I are doing a 30-minute ski progression right now so we tested our 30 minute and we're going through these progressions yesterday we did some 1K intervals but we were both in a hurry so like let's just not warm up in the very first 1K we both looked at each other we're like I am blowing up right now and it's trying all Latin triceps yeah it's so funny yeah yeah you need to work on it you're building the endurance of the pullers very true uh since you guys have discussed High rocks a bit recently I would like to know how tdt would approach the end of the race which is mainly muscular endurance the race ends with a 100 meter walking lunge at 66 and 44 pounds and then a 1 000 meter run into 100 wall balls what kind of protocols might be helpful to finish the race out strong hell yeah that sounds awesome I know I really want to do one Kyle and I have been talking about this for like three or four months now we we need to commit to one and do it we'll do that we'll do the one in Texas at some point but cool we'll we'll see I I have I have some CrossFit goals that I've got to check off that's true yeah fair enough okay I'm pushing you away here's here's how we so 100 meter lunge 1000 meter run 100 wall balls yeah I think first and foremost the the starting point is going to be specific stuff right so I I might recommend that you work through uh that test it run it as just that chunk of the race as a test and get a time right so you know that which we measure we can improve so we're gonna we're gonna figure out how long does that take you right now what does that look like um plus it'll give you an idea of like do you have to take breaks like do you have to break the lunges can you do them unbroken obviously you're gonna have to break the wall ball well maybe not yeah you know it's like that one could do them unbroken right someone like Travis might be able to do 100 unbroken wall balls at a 20 or 30 pound does it specify I think it's 20 but I'm not sure yeah that might be someone that does high rocks let us know first and foremost I would need to know whether or not like what what does a full test look like and then we could start to break it down but I think I would start with uh doing intervals of that but like 50 half mile 50 is it half mile again it's a it's a 1K run and then 100 Balls finish yeah so rather than a half mile probably 500 600 meter run and I would run intervals of that and just accumulate volume so if that's the end of the race I would try and get three or four intervals of over 50 percent of that in right so that you're you're getting significantly more total volume and that's like build the volume up first do some volume accumulation and then I would start to bring it back down and run retests of that and then at some point before the race do a full retest I know that's not as specific as they probably want they would love to see like this written out as a progression but um I haven't tested it enough honestly that would be something where I would have to go in and have you know some athletes go and and run that full thing get a better sense of of you know what's possible there especially have someone like Travis test it get a sense of like what's the high end look like and then start to break it down yeah I think the challenge there is that you've already done it would have been 9k of running yeah and then all the other like the sled pool and and pushes and so there's a lot of pre-fatigue before you get to that point you'd have to obviously train the entire thing like you'd have to know that that's an hour and a half race Plus for many people like I know the world records in the low 50s which is just insane but most people are nowhere close to that so keep that in mind it's very long like that's a true endurance test and then if you have a lot of time you could even isolate that down more like if you have if you really struggle with let's say the lunges or the wall balls you could break those down into some of the muscular endurance progressions that we were talking about earlier where they're just isolated and then eventually go into the test retest but like Kyle's point on having something that you can measure first is so important in the sport any sport where performance is the measure so like make sure you're doing some tests do your training and then retest to know that you're actually getting better at that and it's even more important for something like high rocks because the test is consistent every time totally and so man this this would be a really in-depth conversation however in CrossFit one of the things I found is it it doesn't really help CrossFit competitors to train for the test if that makes sense so like you don't take um use the row wall ball you know 15 minute am wrap from was it 19-1 right yeah um you can train specifically for that but that isn't necessarily going to make a person better at wall ball and bring muscle up right because the Sports varied and unknown and unknowable training for a test improves that test but doesn't necessarily improve them at you know the sport of CrossFit but the variance of the sport when you have something like high rocks where it is that test that's exactly what it is then you can train for the test and improve it yeah I'm 100 agree that is a challenge with Crossfit it's always changing it makes it hard but they're all there are good protocols that you can use and that's not to say that you shouldn't test and retest workouts like if you're particularly working on wall balls and you want to do a 19-1 test free test you could do that what Kyle's saying is that may not help you with your thrusters in another workout yeah cool or even wall balls in a different format yeah for sure um that's it with the training specific questions The Ruck that was the last thing because we brought it up uh we are going to do a 12 mile Ruck but we don't have any details on that we had a bunch of people ask if they could do it Chris Kyle me will come up with a game plan for that and we'll release some information I will not come up with a game plan I will just do whatever yeah Chris Chris's job will be to release said information to he's going to make it look pretty we'll release it um I think we'll just have like a free path we'll put it out you just sign up you can download the app even if you're not a member and at least you know have some fun with us but we've got to figure all that out um over the next week or so yeah it's going to be something that people can add in like if or is it something you should follow by itself you could add it in uh but that you know if you get to 12 miles that's just there's a lot of training you probably want to reduce volume elsewhere but I think it'll be a function people in our program who jump in maybe in the water cooler you help them tell how to like take things out or whatever my guess is we'll have a couple of sessions per week probably three ish maybe four sessions per week and one of those is going to be a long session and whatever whatever day you do the long session on you should replace all the other training that you've got for the day and then plan on having a recovery day after so with the compete structure it's likely to be your Wednesday or your Saturday session that you'd replace with it but that's just you know me spitballing and I mean yes we've been doing this for a long time sounds like he wants to take over right in the program do it let's go all right that is uh that's it that was all the questions okay so then I know y'all already went into those there was what I think last time I checked over 140 something comments yeah I know y'all already went in and answered a lot but uh anything we missed y'all jump in and help answer some of those too so yeah people like yeah my question was not answered yeah we'll go back in and answer those questions if you have questions on this one then obviously drop them down below and I also I've created uh some stuff to help make the training zones the you know the five zone model to make that a little bit more clear I created a little thing that we're going to release at some point on just zone two it's real short just like a quick educational piece on zone two and then the same thing for the kind of hierarchy of training yeah I think this gave us a lot of ideas on stuff we can make that will be separate one-off videos that you'll see starting to come out over time so cool Pimpin Ain't Easy hey no it ain't it ain't someone's got to do it it's you Brandon no it's not me all right so you guys thanks thanks for listening

Channel: Training Think Tank

Views: 25,619

Keywords: training think tank, ttt, crossfit, max el-hag, crossfit games, TTT CrossFit, zone 2 training, cardio, endurance, endurance training, ruck, fitness podcast, crossfit athletes, training tips, crossfit competition, workout strategies, performance improvement, training zones, crossfit community, exercise variations, High-intensity interval training, HIIT, fitness advice, ctp, ctpcam, brannen dorman, kyle ruth

Id: QuqON5fk21w

Length: 74min 17sec (4457 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023