You are looking at real human hearts and these amazing muscular organs pump blood
to trillions of cells in your body through an incredible network of blood vessels. And
if these blood vessels were stacked end to end, they would stretch about 60,000 miles.
That's roughly three times the circumference of the earth. So clearly this pump, the heart,
has quite an important job, so we should probably do our best to take care of it.
And there are multiple ways for us to take care of the heart and therefore promote heart health,
reducing chronic stress, eating a healthy diet to help mitigate the build-up of
plaque in these coronary arteries and therefore reducing the risk of a heart
attack and of course, exercise but what type of exercise is best for the heart?
Well, it's difficult to say there's just one best type of exercise. However,
it is definitely known that cardio or aerobic exercise stimulates some
incredible physiological adaptations in the heart. But even then, are we talking mild to
moderate cardio or higher intensity aerobic training like interval or VO2 Max training?
Well, ideally, we would incorporate both moderate and high-intensity cardio into our routines,
but today we are going to focus on the higher-intensity VO2 Max training and I
would argue that no matter your fitness goals, whether you're a bodybuilder,
a strength trainer, you play team sports or maybe you're into running or cycling,
if you are concerned about optimizing your heart health, you should probably
incorporate this type of training into your routine somehow and fair warning,
this type of exercise can be quite intense and is not for the faint of... heart. So, let's do this.
[Intro]
So why would you really want to do this type of exercise? Or why might only doing something like
moderate steady-state cardio not be enough? Well, when I've talked about this in the past, I've
often used the example of let's say you wanted to increase the strength of your quads and you are
going to do this by doing squats. If you really wanted to increase the strength of your quads,
you wouldn't pick a light weight that you could do 15 to 20 reps of. You would get some adaptations
from the stimulus, more of a muscular endurance type of an adaptation but you wouldn't increase
your overall strength as well as you could if you increase the intensity by increasing
the load or the weight to the point where you could only lift it maybe four to six times.
Now, apply this idea to the heart. If all you did was moderate steady-state cardio and only
got up to about 70 to 80% of your max heart rate, you would be leaving strength adaptations on the
table. So, we want to do a type of exercise that maxes out the heart, pushing to that
level of intensity that stimulates the heart to adapt even further. So then, the myocardium,
the heart muscle itself is stronger and every single beat becomes more efficient.
Someone who has a normal functioning heart but
isn't too fit can pump about 13 to 15 liters of blood per minute,
but someone who trains very consistently can push that up to 30 liters of blood per minute,
with elite endurance athletes getting as high as 40 liters per minute. So, that means you
can more than double your cardiac output with cardiovascular training. And this high-intensity
training that we're talking about today can help contribute to some of these adaptations.
So, how do we do this type of exercise? One, we just briefly mention this, you want to hit your
max heart rate or at least get very close to it, and two, and this is a very important part, not
only do you want to hit your max heart rate but you also want to maximize your oxygen consumption.
Earlier, you've heard me refer to this type of training as VO2 Max training. VO2 Max is
a measure of the maximum amount of oxygen that your body can consume during exercise
and to hit your VO2 Max, you pretty much have to be going all out during that bout
of exercise. This is influenced by how much oxygen your lungs can bring in,
how much your heart and cardiovascular system can deliver to your working skeletal muscles, and even
how much of that oxygen those skeletal muscles can extract from the bloodstream and utilize.
The reason why I'm stressing these two points, maximizing heart rate plus maximizing VO2 Max
is that there are certain activities or exercises that you could hit your
max heart rate without fully tapping into your VO2 Max or maximizing your oxygen consumption.
For example, maybe if you did very short, high-intensity intervals that you could
only do for like 20 to 30 seconds and you did like eight to twelve rounds,
when you got to those later rounds, you'd likely hit your max heart rate but you might
not fully tap into your VO2 Max or again, maximize your oxygen consumption because
you'd mostly be utilizing the anaerobic systems rather than the aerobic system.
Yes, hitting max heart rate would definitely have benefits for strengthening your heart but again,
if you don't fully tap into that maximum oxygen consumption,
you'd be leaving additional cardiovascular benefits on the table. Plus, there are some
awesome correlations with VO2 Max and longevity and we'll get to those additional adaptations
and longevity in just a second but we actually need to get into the training
protocol on how to properly hit max heart rate as well as maximize your oxygen consumption.
Now, the proper way to set up a VO2 Max training session is to do high-intensity
intervals that last anywhere from three to five minutes. Some will broaden that
window from two to six minutes but that sweet spot is really in that 3 to 5-minute range
and I like to start with four-minute intervals and with whatever you pick,
whether it's three minutes, 4 minutes, or 5 minutes,
you'll want to do four rounds of that with a 1:1 work to rest ratio. So, if you pick 4 minutes,
you'd rest for four minutes and then go into the next round until you complete that four times.
I think this is easiest to do with either running or cycling. You could pull this off with a rower,
a VersaClimber, or even potentially in a swimming pool but again, I think it's easiest with running
and cycling and I personally do running. I've done it on a track, I've even done it on a treadmill
and I'm starting to gravitate more towards the treadmill because I can just set the incline and
the speed and focus on running and I feel like that gives me the ability to track my fitness
progress a little bit more accurately because I could just make subtle adjustments on the
treadmill, but whatever you choose to do, this needs to be challenging. It needs to be hard.
By that fourth interval, those last few seconds of that fourth interval,
you should be gassed and not want to continue going. Now, admittedly,
the first interval, those first one to two minutes especially, you might be thinking,
"Huh, this isn't too bad" but as you get closer to that last minute, you'll notice it starts to
get harder and harder and for me personally, I'll get within 10 to 12 beats of my max heart
rate during that first interval and that's okay because I've still got three more to go.
The second interval, I'll hit a higher heart rate and it will be more difficult. That third
interval, same thing. Getting a higher heart rate will be more difficult and it's really
cool. I like looking at this on my fitness app that tracks my heart rate. With each interval,
I'll notice I'll hit a higher heart rate and by that fourth interval,
if I've set this up properly, I'll hit my max heart rate and will not want to continue going
because I'm pretty much gassed and there are times when I've been doing this workout that
I've noticed I've got a little more energy where I could go like 10 to 15 seconds longer
during that fourth interval and I'll just push through that if I've got the energy for that.
But if you notice that you're consistently doing that, that your fourth interval you
could go longer workout after workout, that's an indicator that you either got more fit or
you're just not pushing it hard enough and you need to increase the intensity. On a treadmill,
that's pretty straightforward. You could either increase the incline or increase the speed,
cycling you could go faster or increase the resistance or you could increase the total time.
Maybe instead of doing four-minute intervals, you did four-minute and 10
second intervals and obviously, if you can't even make it through the fourth interval,
that means you've come out too hot and you need to decrease the intensity. So, hopefully,
that gives you some useful information on how to set up this workout but how often should
you be doing this? Ideally, once a week with a minimum of about every other week.
Anything less than that probably will not provide a frequent enough of a stimulus to promote
significant adaptations. Now, this would depend on the other cardiovascular training that you
are participating in but even endurance athletes with all the cardiovascular work they put in will
do these workouts weekly or sometimes alternate them biweekly with other high-intensity sessions.
Well, let's come back to some of these other benefits with this type of training. We already
mentioned the heart will get stronger, increasing its cardiac output and being able to pump more
blood with each beat, but we also stress this idea of training at your maximal oxygen consumption.
Training at this level will stimulate the body to adapt, to be able to consume even more oxygen,
and if you remember, we mentioned that VO2 Max, your ability to consume oxygen,
is influenced by the amount of oxygen you can bring in through the lungs and diffuse
into the bloodstream, how much of that blood the heart can pump and how much blood can be
delivered through the blood vessels to those working skeletal muscles and even how efficient
those skeletal muscles are in extracting the oxygen from the blood and utilizing it.
So, this type of training (I geek out about these adaptations, I'm sorry) will stimulate
not only your heart to get stronger but will also increase the number of capillaries,
those tiny little blood vessels that are exchange vessels to the skeletal
muscles and the skeletal muscles get more efficient at extracting and utilizing.
So, if you put all those things together,
we've created multiple adaptations where the body can now consume even more oxygen, and therefore,
fitness levels will go up and if you were to do a VO2 Max test, your VO2 Max would
increase and if all of that was not enough to excite you about doing this type of exercise,
maybe this will help - VO2 Max has an incredibly strong link with longevity.
About a year ago, we did a similar video where we went over some of these studies
about VO2 Max and its links with longevity and I'll give you some compelling highlights
of one of those studies. It probably won't shock you that the study found
a strong inverse relationship between VO2 Max and 10-year risk of all-cause mortality.
So, as VO2 Max went up, the risk of dying of all-causes went down. But how big of a
risk are we talking here? Just going from the low VO2 Max group to the below average group,
there was a 50% risk reduction in all-cause mortality over a 10 year period. And going
from the low to above average group, there was about a 60 to 70% risk reduction.
Now, you might assume that having an elite VO2 Max would correlate with the greatest
overall risk reduction. And you'd be correct. But looking at the chart,
you can see that you start to get diminishing returns between the higher groups. For example,
there is much less of a difference in risk reduction between the high and elite groups
and so, I guess that leaves us with just one last question - which group are you going to belong to?
But before you fully decide which VO2 Max group you want to strive for,
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