- Morning, MoTTIVators.
Just got back from a one-hour trail run.
I didn't even know that these trails existed,
and they're like a mile from my house.
So new endurance athletes who want to go
on endurance adventures might be seeing headlines
that are starting to come out in mainstream publications,
or even videos that I'm putting out,
talking about how the damage caused
by endurance training and the traditional method
of endurance training, the culture
that we've been wrapped up in for so long,
really isn't good for our health,
let alone our performance.
So today I am going to go through
my three top tips to allow you
to actually reach those endurance adventure goals,
maybe perform better, while not damaging
your long-term health, and it's flipping
what we thought we knew about how
to reach endurance goals on its head.
But it's going to make your training
so much more effective, so much more enjoyable,
and you're going to be a better version
of yourself, long-term.
Okay, so it's studies like this one here,
gets journalists and it gets people
really writing a lot, oh, my goodness,
exercise is terrible for you.
You shouldn't be exercising.
And that's just, it's not the case.
Exercise is better than no exercise.
But what we really need to take
from studies like this is that proper exercise is
far, far better than improper exercise.
And everyone's gonna say, "Well, I exercise properly,"
but yeah, if that's the case, why are there so many people
that are suffering negative health consequences?
It's because they're not really,
really respecting what proper exercise is,
and in the endurance sports world,
it's way less than we expect.
So let's give the three-step process
for how to do what we feel, with the MoTTIV Method,
is proper exercise, a proper endurance training plan.
Also go ahead and turn off the golf.
So this study here is done by Evan and James O'Keefe.
They're kinda the main people that are pushing
this heart health way of exercise,
and really what they say is that current studies suggest
that two to five hours a week of moderate
or vigorous physical activity will confer maximal benefits
and that more than ten hours a week may
actually reduce these health benefits.
If we go to another paper that they've got,
called "The Goldilocks Zone", and James and Evan O'Keefe,
as you go down here, you'll see studies
like this, where you'll see that a sedentary person,
somebody who is completely non-exercising,
actually has a lower all-cause mortality
than people who are strenuous joggers,
and that the likelihood
of coronary heart disease starts going
up when you start jogging daily.
But when you dig into more studies like this,
you end up uncovering that, in a lotta cases,
this strenuous, this high level of exercise
that ruins the health benefits
that we would otherwise get from exercise,
is largely that moderate or intense exercise,
and it's doing too much of that moderate,
grinding, pretty tough exercise,
past the nine to ten hours a week,
and anything more than that tends
to be very questionable if it's
actually helping your health.
So the first step in the MoTTIV Method
that we look at is getting the training load right
for overall health.
What we suggest is that, if you aren't
in a race-training, planned phase,
which might be as short as eight weeks
for a five K that you really wanna smash
into your personal best, all the way
to a slow build of six months for an Ironman,
but that's like the longest build out there.
Most are around three months.
Outside of those training plans,
max out at around nine hours a week of training
and do the vast majority of your endurance training
in that nine hours at a very low intensity.
Short little pops of intensity
to make sure that your neuromuscular power,
your VO2 max, your FTP, your top-end speed,
is all staying nice and sharp,
but you aren't going past that ten hours a week
and you aren't doing a lot of strenuous activity.
This is going to get you to the training plan being
really healthy, really strong,
really aerobically fit, and you'll
still have that nice top-end without beating
yourself down year-round.
The second piece in the MoTTIV Method
about how to design your overall training
to enhance your physical health can be summed up
really well by a podcast that we did
with Dylan Johnson, who wrote our cycling training plans
in our app.
- If I had to give a rough estimate
for what the percentage of studies
that come to a positive conclusion
on weight training and cycling performance,
it's probably 95%.
It's rare that I come across a study that showed
that weight training didn't improve cycling performance.
And they've done it in so many different,
they've tested it so many different ways.
I mean they've tested it for sprint performance.
They've tested it for five-minute power output.
They've tested it for 40-kilometer time trial,
which is gonna take most people an hour, if they're fit.
They've tested it, they've tested lactate threshold.
They've tested so many different variables
that affect cycling performance,
and it always seems to come out positive,
that weight training is improving cycling performance,
mainly because of the neuromuscular adaptation.
- So strength is a really big component
of enhancing your performance,
and if you look at long-term data
of what causes a poor quality of life
in the last 20 or 30 years in most people's lives,
it's a major illness or injury,
an injury often caused by a fall,
and the biggest cause of those falls is a lack
of mobility and strength.
So by including strength training,
you're not just improving your performance.
You're improving your long-term health.
Your muscle density is gonna be higher.
Your bone density is gonna be higher.
Your hormones will be better-balanced.
A well-designed strength training plan will
also keep you more mobile,
but people still, only about half
of endurance athletes even do any sort
of strength training, let alone
really good strength training.
The reason that Kate Baldwin and other podcast guests
that will be coming up in December found out
in a study that she did was that,
the reason that most people aren't doing strength training
with their endurance training is because of time.
I have excellent news for you.
This study right here showed that,
by actually replacing your training volume,
19% of your training volume,
with explosive strength training,
so not adding it on, but actually saying,
hey, if you wanna train that ten hours, fine.
Let's not add on more hours.
Let's replace some of it with strength training.
So you're not training that much more.
It's not any harder to get in that time
because it's the same time that you're spending,
but replacing it with strength training.
That's what we do with the MoTTIV training app.
During that maxed out nine to ten hours of training,
outside of training plans, we load up
on strength training, because while
I get that we can justify, hey,
we're not giving you as many hours,
so you've got more time for strength training,
I also get that, when you get into a training plan,
you don't wanna feel beat down by strength training.
So when a training plan comes around,
we back off of the large amount of strength training
to just 30 to 60 minutes a week
and keep it very light, just muscle activation,
so that your muscles are still nice
and toned and know how to fire,
but we're not beating you down more.
And then this final study here is just
one of an entire library of studies
that are showing the same thing
over and over and over, and it's
that polarized training has a greater impact
on key endurance variables than threshold,
high-intensity, or high-volume training.
So all of the suffering, hard training
that people associate with endurance sports,
spending tons of hours doing really hard sessions,
doing long intervals that are really hard,
they aren't actually the variables
that are going to result in good performance.
And go back to that J-curve study,
that high-intensity training at a high level is
actually going to be the stuff
that undoes your overall health.
So the third part is to have a
very big proportion of your training
at a very low intensity, and when I say a low intensity,
I mean a sometimes walking intensity
that some people have to start with.
Sometimes it's a hike.
Sometimes it's a low-intensity bike ride,
where you're letting people that
you could smash on a race course
or in a sprint go away from you,
because it should feel so easy
that you feel guilty more than 90% of the time.
The whole 80-20 principle is like 80%
of your workout should be low-intensity
with 20% of your workouts being high-intensity.
But when you actually look at the amount
of time spent at high-intensity,
it's more like 3% is actually high-intensity.
So the vast majority of your training should be really easy.
So we've built our training plans
around these principles.
It's a lot to put together,
but if you want the training plans done for you,
you can go to app.mymottiv.com
and cycling training plans, triathlon training plans,
run training plans, duathlon plans,
swim-run plans, trail running plans.
All of these are in the app with
all of these principles, and all
you have to do is say how much
you wanna train per week, what your goals are,
and what dates your races are,
and it all ends up getting presented
for you so you're never over-training
for your race or under-training for a race.
You're gonna come to your start lines feeling
really confident and you're gonna get
across your finish lines feeling strong.
So you can check that out at app.mymottiv.com.
Try it for free for 14 days,
and if you like it, we'd love to have you stick around.
Later, MoTTIVators.