Ep. #1159: Dr. Stephen Seiler on the Right (and Wrong) Ways to Improve Endurance

Stephen: That slow evolution towards, really focusing and really optimizing and maximizing what you’re good for within that endurance domain. And then saying, right now, strength is on the back burner. I have to have enough strength in order for it to be functional. I have to have optimal strength for.

Mike: Hello and thank you for joining me, Mike Matthews, for another episode of Muscle for Life, where I chat with Dr. Steven Seiler, who is an exercise physiologist renowned for his work on endurance training, particularly with elite athletes, about why you should be working to improve your cardiovascular endurance.

In addition to your strength training, what the additional benefits are of doing that, and then how to go about doing that, the right ways, as well as some of the wrong ways. And there are many wrong ways to program and do endurance exercise, just as there are many wrong ways to program and do strength training.

And in this episode, you’re going to learn how to do it correctly, how to incorporate endurance training into your existing regimen correctly, how to avoid common mistakes and pitfalls that cause people to fail and quit in their endurance training, and how to work towards specific endurance goals, like running a 5k, or a 10k, or even more ambitious goals, like a half marathon or a full marathon.

If you would like to learn about things like the three zone model of cardiovascular training and how to use it to optimize your programming, the best way to balance frequency, duration, and intensity in your cardiovascular training, how to incorporate rest into your regimen, what’s enough rest, What’s not enough rest?

What’s too much rest? As well as how to set yourself up for long term success with endurance training, how to ensure that you don’t burn out, how to ensure that you don’t get hurt and have to quit because of that, then this episode’s for you. But first, If you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, then you will probably like my award winning fitness books for men and women of all ages and abilities, which have sold over 2 million copies, have received over 15, 000 four and five star reviews on Amazon, and which have helped tens of thousands of people build their best body ever.

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And, gain eye catching amounts of muscle definition and strength, and even better, you will learn how to do those things without having to live in the gym, give up all of the foods or drinks that you love, or do long, grueling workouts that you hate. And with my books and programs, you will do that. You will transform your physique.

faster than you probably think is possible, or I will give you your money back if you are unsatisfied with any of my books or programs, the results. Anything for whatever reason just let me know and you will get a full refund on the spot Now I do have several books and programs including bigger leaner stronger thinner leaner stronger and muscle for life And to help you understand which one is right for you.

It’s pretty simple If you are a guy aged 18 to let’s say 40 to 45 Bigger leaner stronger is the book and program for you. If you are a gal, same age range, thinner or stronger is going to be for you. And if you are a guy or gal 40 to maybe 45 plus muscle for life is for you. Hey, Stephen, thank you for taking the time to come on my podcast.

Stephen: Thanks for the invitation. I’m on vacation here in Norway, so it worked out well. 

Mike: Oh, nice. Never been that far North. Have I been that far East? I don’t know. I’d have to look at a map, but I’d like to, for good things. I’d like to visit someday. So we’re here to talk about endurance training and many people listening are into being fit.

They’re into being healthy, but they’re not necessarily looking to Set up your in a triathlon. So for those people and also add a little bit more context and just for people listening, if you are somebody who’s spending a few hours per week on your fitness and your focus is strength training, I think that makes a lot of sense.

And if you’ve been following me in my work for any time now, you know that Over the last year or two, I’ve been putting more emphasis, I’ve been trying to sell more people on including cardiovascular training in their regimen. Something a bit more difficult than just walking. I think walking is great, it’s fine, but it’s not the same as what we’re going to be talking about today.

And the benefits are not the same. There are certainly benefits to adding walking to your routine if you’re not doing much walking, but you can get a lot more out of cardiovascular training. If you do some higher intensity work, so for people who they may be looking at endurance training more as exercise, meaning they haven’t been very regimented about maybe tracking workouts and planning out training blocks and so forth.

I’m one of those people I hop on this bike and I do 30 to 45 minutes several times per week and I just try to stay in zone 2, which I know you’re going to talk about. And that’s it. That’s my cardio routine. Now, of course, it could be more involved than that. But for people who are again maybe they’re doing some walking.

Maybe they’re doing a little bit of cardio here and there. Why should they care about endurance training, cardiovascular training? What benefits are there beyond doing cardio? Maybe just your 10, 000 steps per day. 

Stephen: I think look I was a strength guy. I was a American football and track and field athlete and wanted to get stronger.

And I went to the Soviet union back when it was still the Soviet union. Learned how to do the Olympic lifts and I taught them and heck, my claim to fame is I used to coach Scotty Pippen in the weight room when I was a youngster. So I have a bit of a background in, in string training, but I got hurt. I injured my knee, had an avulsion of my patellar tendon.

And in the process of rehabilitation, I got on a bike and six weeks later, I was in a bike race and got third and. Discovered, Oh I guess I’ve got a bit of a talent for this thing called endurance. And that’s how it started for me. But I, the point of all that is I’ve been both on both sides of this.

And now I try to, I do both, but the balance has shifted towards endurance for me. Now, if. And I’m pushing 60. So my needs at 60 are probably different than my needs were at 30. And that’s, I think, a useful starting point is for younger people and people maybe in their 40s, early 50s, the cardiovascular part can be pretty important just from a health point of view.

Unfortunately, a lot of us have some issues with maybe high blood pressure or other health issues. risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and then the endurance exercise is a prophylactic measure. It’s a preventative measure. It’s not a guarantee, fortunately, but it helps. And then as we get older, I do think that the string training becomes more and more important.

As you, at my age, I feel like I really need to get in the weight room twice a week just to maintain as much muscle mass, mobility functional balance and mobilization ability, just different aspects of all that. So I try to put them both together, the endurance part and the strength and mobilization part.

So I, I think both are important. They shift and but as humans, I gotta say. We have a remarkable capacity to improve our endurance and that alone is fun is to be able to be a, at down at the baseline, you’re just above sofa sitting if you’re just doing strength training, you’re not going to have a whole lot of endurance working for you if you’re just doing squats and bench and so forth.

But it doesn’t take long before you can do quite a lot because it’s our genetics to be to have endurance. It’s a genetic latent capacity that’s waiting on us to explore and to exploit if we choose to. And so I’ve had I used to have a former a master student that. He was a chubby dude, and then he got into serious strength training.

He got really strong, he was benching 200 kilos, which in pounds is about what 440, not bad. And and then he decides I’m going to see if I can still do that and run a marathon. And he pulls it off. And so he starts getting into this idea of how, how fit can I be in both at the same time?

So there’s, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of interest in that is just seeing how can I push my body in different ways over time and exploit the capacity I have. So I guess that’s part of it, for your crowd, your string training oriented people, is. Hey, you may choose to do a one year experiment on your body and see what you can do and whether you can run a pretty strong 10 K at the end of that year 

Mike: and then experience the same type of wins you experience in the weight room when you hit a PR or achieve some sort of body composition goal.

It sounds like there’s the just the endurance equivalent of that. So it’s just another dimension of achievement that you can enjoy. 

Stephen: Yeah. And also, let’s face it. If you’re a, if you’ve been string trained for years, your bench press and your squad have probably plateaued, it’s, it just doesn’t go up into heaven.

Mike: Yeah, that’s true. Whereas you can get all the newbie gains and have a great time. If you haven’t done much endurance training, that first year or two, it’ll bring you back. You’ll have nostalgia to the weight room for the first, first year or two. 

Stephen: Yeah, so if you want to experience progress, then just switch sports every once in a while, and so that’s at least one way to, to have some freshness in the routine and it all adds up to just a good, healthy lifestyle.

Often, I think that’s the bottom line is getting out there, moving, using our bodies. And then when it comes to endurance training, we have these basic levers we can pull, which are frequency and duration and intensity. And I say them in that direction or that order, because I think that’s the appropriate order to think about is first decide on a frequency of training for that.

Discipline, if you’re going to say, all right, I’m going to start getting out the door and I’m going to do some running or I’m going to cycle. Then I’m going to say, all right how many times a week? What’s the frequency going to be? What’s the input going to be? What works for you?

And maybe you say, ah, 3 days a week. Okay, then 1st, let’s establish that habit. And so we’re going to, we’re going to really focus on just getting out the door 3 days a week. And I’m not going to be too worried about what you do. I’m going to mostly just say, can we get that habit? Does it work in your life with what you’re already doing?

The coaching you’re doing on the side with the kids, everything, it fits in and it doesn’t add more stress to your life, but it actually adds something positive. And then once we got that habit going, maybe after six weeks, then we’ll say, all right, what have you been doing? Ah, 20 minutes, three times a week.

Okay. Not bad, but let’s see if we can stretch it a bit. Let’s see if we can take at least one, maybe two of those and start lengthening that duration and maybe get to an hour, at least one of those sessions of those three sessions each week. So now I’m going to use the second lever that we have in endurance training, which is duration.

Because duration helps. If you go from 20 to 40 to 60 minutes, you get a better stimuli. You get a larger stimuli for adaptation. Just like in, bench press, you’re going to probably increase sets and reps over some period of, over a progression. It’s a bit the same. The volume, the duration matters.

So first we have frequency, then we’re going to do some, a little bit more duration. And then only then, maybe now we’re talking three months in, I haven’t even talked about intensity. I haven’t said anything about interval training or sprint training or any of these things. But after 12 weeks and you’ve got to have it and you’re already going to feel like, you know what, I’m fitter.

I, this feels, I’m already feeling better even though I’m really not trying very hard. And then we’ll add in maybe one of those workouts each week, those three we’ll do more intensity oriented, maybe heel training or find a track at the local high school, do some repeats. And let the intensity go up, think a little bit more speed, a little, let the heart rate go up, push yourself, feel the lactate, feel the burn.

And that’s the direction I would do it. Now, the temptation will be to do the opposite. 

Mike: Which is the same. The same mistake that people make with strength training. Many people make at least where they try to make up for a lack of frequency and volume, which would be the equivalent of duration with intensity.

So instead of going 3 days a week and following a well designed program, they’re going in 1 day a week and trying to destroy themselves. Every set to absolute failure and that doesn’t work for people saying that’s not a good way to go about it. It’s better than doing nothing as long as it doesn’t get you hurt, but it’s not a very it’s not a very effective way to program your training.

Stephen: Yeah. And it’s the same with endurance training. It’s, I always say the best endurance athletes think long game. So they’re in it over the long haul. They know they’re going to be doing a lot of workouts each year. They don’t get too crazy about any one workout as being the magic session or the, the epic workout or whatever, because they know that it’s not the, really the way it works and they know they need to stay healthy.

They need to stay motivated and that consistency is, The superpower, it’s a quiet superpower, in the training process or any kind of processes is being able to get out there consistently string together weeks and weeks of reasonably healthy training, man, good things happen. So that’s true for your bench press or your power clean or your 10 K those basic principles are the 

Mike: same.

Before we continue with training principles, I wanted to come back to something that you mentioned earlier, and that is the importance of cardiovascular training for younger people. And I wanted to come back to that because the general message, at least in, in the body composition community, which obviously is weighted more toward Strength training is that your cardiovascular health and capacity, maybe you could even be specific and say your VO2 max is more important when you get older.

You want to make sure you maintain that because it declines just like how your lean mass will decline with age. And if your VO2 max declines too much you can’t even do everyday activities and then eventually you die is what happens. And so the, I’ve seen this argument made by many people that you need to be doing more cardio, more endurance training as you get older, just to maintain, you don’t want to maintain, ideally you want to maintain an above average cardiovascular fitness or even beyond that.

So VO two max, but that’s more important as you get older, when you’re younger, You have age on your side. And you. Would want to focus on strength training, use that to your advantage, build a strong base of muscularity of strength that then as you get older, you can transition into just maintaining.

And of course, maintaining muscle and strength is so much easier than gaining muscle and strength. You could easily maintain. A very muscular, strong body on just two workouts a week for you to just do an upper workout and a lower workout per week, maybe an hour per session, you have some intensity in there and you can stay jacked actually, but you’re not going to, you’re probably not going to get jacked with just training two days per week.

What are your thoughts on. That perspective and what it might be missing in terms of specifically what you mentioned about cardiovascular health and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and how you if you start that earlier, as you get older, you’re probably going to be glad you did. 

Stephen: I’m thinking of it as a pure.

Epidemiological, what we know is that, a lot of us have had parents or a father that died at 48 of a heart attack or, because of a genetic predisposition. And generally, cardiovascular disease will hit early. If it’s there, if there’s a genetic predisposition it’ll take people out and I’m now I’m being, just to use a harsh way of the, it take takes me about way too early and it takes them out in their 40s and 50s.

And so that’s why I say, and that’s in that young, it’s still young. And once you get my age, you start feeling like that’s still young. If you get past 60 and you’re still cooking probably you don’t have a genetic predisposition for heart disease. You with me? So what’s going to kill you? Of course we have things like cancer and so forth, but the other thing that’s going to end up killing you is you’re too weak strength wise to resist a slippery surface.

You fall and you break your hip at 78 years old, 80 years old, and it’s a downward spiral from there. All right. Now, I’m not trying to be doomsday, but this is the reality. If we go to the hospitals in Norway, they’ll just say, yeah, if it’s an icy day, then we’re going to have 10 hip fractures that day.

And nine of them are going to be older people, okay? Senior citizens slip on the ice, break a hip. And then they, it happened to my grandfather. And my mother called me from the emergency room, said, Son, you need to talk to your grandfather because it may be the last time you get to talk to him.

What had happened, he’d just fallen and broken his hip. And he was an old man. And she knew, she had been a nurse. And and she was right. And so the point is that muscular strength becomes equal to health almost at very advanced age. You have to have, it’s not your VO2 max, it’ll get you, it’s your inability to stay upright.

Under various duress, under various challenges, it’s your inability to walk two flights of stairs with a bag of groceries in your hand. So these become the limiting factors for us in a long term, healthy life where we use our potential through many decades, which I think all of us have that goal.

So let me tell you, the vanity will go away after eventually, and then you get down to the bottom line, which is function. And you can feel the differences that I’m still functioning at 60, I can still take do 20 dips and I’m watching those teenagers and I can beat most of them. I’m more into that to be honest with you.

I’m not, I don’t need to strip down my shirt and have a pose off with them, but I want to function. And I want to still be able to play that, still be able to do things that I could when I was 20 at 60, and that’s going to require strength training. 

Mike: And if you were speaking to, let’s say, some 30 somethings who are doing strength training and they’re doing well there, they’re not doing much cardiovascular training under the assumption that I’m 30, whatever, I don’t need to do cardio.

I’ll do that when I’m older. What would you say to them? 

Stephen: It’s their life. I’m not going to, I’m not a life coach, but I’m going to say, give it a try. Maybe because you’ve got a long life, you’ve got this body that’s full of capacity. Do an experiment for a year. And see where it takes you.

That’s what I ended up doing is I did an experiment. I realized, my goodness, this is interesting. And then I fine tuned my sport and ended up being a rower, which was a nice combo because it was a combination of strength and endurance, a very important combination you had to have the strength.

So we were in the weight room a lot, but then we were doing a lot of endurance training and it was like, if you want, if you see world class rowers, they’re pretty jacked to be honest, if, to use your term. And so it was I liked looking like a rower way more than I would have liked looking like a marathon runner, to be honest with you.

Yeah, I, there’s differences. There are differences even within the endurance world, as far as, Kind of what physique and what aptitudes favor you. If you’re a very slight and lean naturally, then running may be your thing. But if you’re a big athlete, anyway, you’re, you were a basketball player on the high school team.

You may say, look, this running thing is not for me. Man, I weigh a hundred kilos and running just hurts. All right let me introduce you to some other sports like rowing or swimming or even cycling, can be a better alternative. So that’s another issue is running is not going to be for everybody.

Mike: I’m one of those people. I never enjoyed running and I played, I got into ice hockey. I played some baseball and I got into ice hockey, which I loved. And I always had good endurance, but running for me, I just never came to like it. I liked. Running if it was in the context of a sport if I were even just playing football, like pickup football, sure.

Great. But just going for a run, I can remember one time. I still remember this when I ran to a point where I got past the point of hating it. But I felt really good. And so I under if it were like that regularly and I didn’t have to like, go through what felt like at the time, an inordinate amount Pain to then somehow break through it and be like, Ooh, I feel good.

Now I would understand running and I’d be, I would go out for a run every day but for me, for whatever reason, it’s, it might just be psychological. I don’t know. I’ll hop on the bike. I don’t mind that. 

Stephen: Yeah, so there are alternatives and I know everybody’s relationship to running is not positive.

There are, running suits a lot of us well, and I was, I was a pretty decent track athlete, but I didn’t like distance running either. And then it, After I found out I had a clotting disorder and I got a blood clot in my leg and I had to rehabilitate, I got up to two and a half hours running in the forest, and got pretty fit at running, but then I ended up hurting myself again and running.

I kept extending until I pushed it too far. And then I said, okay, this is ridiculous. I’m going to start cycling, and that’s my thing these days. So I would just say to your listeners. Yeah, if you say, ah, I want to do some cardiovascular, but man, the running just doesn’t work.

Okay, that’s fine. There are rowing machines, there are ski ergometers, there are swimming, there’s cycling, there are alternatives, roller ski, you name it lots of possibilities. 

Mike: Can you talk about now getting back to some more of the technical components of endurance training, could you talk about before we go back to the frequency and the duration, the intensity, can you talk about the three zone model?

A lot of people are hearing about this now, more so than any point that I can remember in the last 10 years or so that I’ve been doing this type of work and what these zones mean. 

Stephen: Sure. I’m a simple guy, so I usually use colors as a first approximation to help people get their eyes around it. Get it in their head.

Green, yellow, red. So green zone is low intensity. It is an intensity that Often will be called talking pace, which means that, you can chat up with the guy or girl beside you and talk about whatever happened at the game yesterday. You may not want to talk all run, but, it’s, you can do it.

That’s 1 issue you will, if you’re wearing a heart rate monitor. After say 10, 12, 15 minutes, you will flatten out on heart rate and it should stay pretty flat. It shouldn’t just be going up up. It should come into this nice kind of steady state that can last for, if you’re reasonably fit for at least an hour.

Okay. And for the super fit, It can go for hours and hours, but let’s say regular folks who haven’t been doing much of this, a good goal would be to be able to do something for an hour and have heart rate stay pretty flat. All right, that’s another indicator of being in that so called green zone.

Another issue or another indicator of being in the green zone is you can just be distracted. You can be mentally thinking about other stuff. You can be externally. Oriented looking at things going on around you and maintain that pace and kind of forget time. Okay, and then the 4th thing would be that as soon as you’re done with it, you take a deep breath and you go, huh, when’s dinner?

You’re hungry and you may think what’s that have to do with anything? Green zone, we’re at an intensity where we do not activate what we might call a big sympathetic stress response. We don’t have to turn on the big cortisol release, the stimuli that says fight or flight which does turn on once we pass this 1st threshold that we talk about, which is if we were using blood lactate, or if we were using ventilation measurements, we’d be able to see a kind of a break point where we’d see a non linear, break Jumping in lactate and breathing as we move into that yellow zone and that yellow zone.

It’s not a yellow point. It’s a zone. We talk about it being the threshold zone. Okay. And what happens there? There, you’re going to start feeling like, okay, I got to start thinking about this. I got to, you’ll start scanning your body. You’re trying to hold that pace. And it’s doable. If you’re fit, you may be able to stay in that yellow zone, super fit.

You may be able to stay there for two hours, but reasonably fit. You may be able, you should be able to stay there for 40 minutes to an hour. And the heart rate is going to go up and it will slide up during, if you’re in these yellow zone workouts, but lactate will go up and then flatten out.

But it flattens out at a higher level, okay? If one, one and a half millimolar, just to use a number, the audience doesn’t necessarily have to have a big understanding of it, but let’s say 1. 5 becomes 3 or 4, but it flattens out at 3 or 4, all right? Millimolar, that’s just a concentration of lactate, all right?

Now, so that’s yellow zone. It’s tougher, it feels purposeful and pretty tough, but it’s, you can stay there for a long time. Many minutes and then we move to red and when we pass from yellow into red zone now, basically the time that you can accumulate there is down to minutes and every minute feels like a freaking long nightmare.

If you want to know just how long a 

Mike: minute 

Stephen: can 

Mike: be, do this. 

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Time stretches, time warps in the red zone. Let me tell you. So you go from, Oh, wow. A half hour passed around in it to going like 60 seconds left. I still got 60 seconds. Jesus. Am I going to get through this? So time really changes your brain’s perception.

You’re working and you’re counting for sure minutes. And towards the end of Intervals, it can be your counting seconds, to be honest, it’s purposeful, very tough, very, you’re out of, you’re out of breath. You’re sure as heck not talking to anybody. You feel poisoned by the so called, all the hydrogen ions that we call it the lactate, but it’s really not the lactate that’s poisoning you.

It gets higher. So we talked about one and a half in the green zone and three or four millimolar in the yellow zone. And now we’re at eight or nine or ten or even twelve in that red zone. Okay. So it’s way higher. And these workouts are tough. They’re useful, but you sure as heck can’t do them every day.

Or if you do, you’re going to get stagnated and burned out in a pretty quick hurry. 

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Use the coupon code muscle when you check out and you will save 20 percent or get 6 percent cash back and try Phoenix risk free and see what you think. And that’s a good segue back to this three pointed model of programming, this frequency, duration, and intensity. So obviously you’re talking about intensity here.

And this is also a good segue to the, to one of the questions I want to ask you about, which is this concept of polarized training, which is related to what you just said, right? I’ll let you explain. 

Stephen: Endurance athletes train regularly. That’s one of their biggest superpowers is they get the, get out the door pretty much every day.

So that frequency is pretty high on the endurance side. They train regularly, pretty much daily. And at the elite level, though, a lot of them are training twice a day. So that’s one issue. And what that means is they’re not going to be able to train with that kind of frequency if they’re also trying to train with very high intensity, each of those workouts.

So over decades of just experimentation, coaches and athletes in swimming and running and rowing and cross country skiing and so forth, cycling seem to have Just independent of each other come to the same kind of basic breakdown and they say something like 80 percent of my workouts are low and long and about 20 percent are shorter and harder.

Mike: What are these universal constants? So these you can almost just default to it within a lot of domains. You can assume there’s probably some sort of 80, 20 relationship here. 

Stephen: Yeah, it’s some kind of, it’s a self organizing issue. Now we’re actually learning quite a bit about why this is true.

Looking at molecular signaling, looking at stress responses. We. We the coaches and athletes figured it out before the scientists were able to tell them why, and that’s often the case, that the athletes figure things out, either technically they invent new techniques, like the butterfly and swimming or the V style and cross country in a ski jump, or, lots of just pretty much every technical innovation has come from the athletes.

All right. The Fosbury flop from Dick’s Fosbury, just a change in technique that revolutionized high jump that comes from the athletes doing the daily training, figuring stuff out. And they’re figuring it out because they’re not good enough. They’re getting beat usually. So it’s not the ones that are on top that are innovative.

It’s the ones that are under just under and are trying to figure out a way to climb up and they’re innovative. Okay, so that’s where innovation happens. That’s where they figure things out. And then the scientists come up behind them and tell them, okay this is why that works and they have to figure that out.

That isn’t it. That’s why I’ve studied athletes is because that’s where the innovation is happening. All right. That’s where they’re the ones that have had through trial and error have come to understand, you know what, we can’t train at the threshold every day. It sounds good, sounds like a smart idea, but it doesn’t work.

And so that’s what I try to help us regular folks that are trying to do endurance work. Our default will tend to be exactly that. We’ll fall into this so called intensity black hole, which will be that every workout will end up being in that middle zone. It will tend to go yellow every day. Or yellow red ish, starts yellow ends up pretty red and green is not even in our color coordination system.

Mike: That’s our, that’s the warmup. 

Stephen: Yeah heck, they don’t warm up. What are you talking about? I ain’t got no time for warming up. I got to get moving. And so that’s, time is of the essence and people think that they’re just going to get out the door and just. Yeah. 

Mike: All right. Then you got it.

You just had to get past the green to get to the yellow and red. Then that’s all. That’s all it is. It’s just like a hurdle. You have to get over. 

Stephen: I don’t need no green. So that will be the most common mistake that people will make. And then it. They get the first, they stagnate and then worse, they’ll often burn out because it’s just not very fun, right?

And even elite athletes that I talked to people that are making a living doing this stuff, they’re saying, look, there needs to be some joy in all of this. There needs to be some enjoyment. You can’t suffer every day. The whole idea of no pain, no gain is just not right. It doesn’t actually work that way in the longterm.

Yes, sometimes you need some pain and there is an association, you, but it’s not an everyday deal, even for the best athletes in the world. 

Mike: And that, that applies to anything difficult. I think that applies. You think about in your work, I think about in my work, I would say it’s very much the same where you need to make sure that you are spending a lot of your time on stuff that you genuinely enjoy.

And sometimes you got to do stuff you don’t enjoy. And sometimes you don’t even enjoy the stuff that you typically enjoy. But I can just speak personally that I think. Made some I guess the outcomes were good, so fine. But I’ve learned this lesson that more on the business side of things, cause I like creating content.

I like doing creative type of work. That’s the type of work I like to do the most. A lot of the operations type of work that goes into business. I just don’t really like. And so I have a couple of businesses that I’ve spent extended time in doing things that I. Don’t enjoy that needed to get done.

That’s fine. But I just think of periods where if that goes on for too long, I think it takes a bit of a, an emotional toll or a psychological toll on you, even if you are just the grinder type and yeah, you’re going to show up and do it. There’s no question of whether you’re going to do it or not. But anyway, I just I’ve just experienced that I’ve experienced that in training, but I’ve experienced that in, again, in, in other arenas that just involve Effort and discipline and so forth.

Stephen: Yeah, no, I think it is. There’s a bit of a universality to this. And if we’re lucky enough to be able to be in jobs that give us creative spark or give us autonomy and, an independence, then we’re willing to work hard. But that work feels like a flow state where we’re doing something that.

Where we’re in that area where it’s sufficiently challenging. And, but at the same time, there’s a sense of mastery in all, most fields. I’m a professor at a university and I can assure you that we have our 20 percent that’s crappy, the grading of exams and administrative stuff. We all have to deal with that but we almost take it as like, all right, I get this done and then I get to do what I really love, which I just love research.

And I actually like teaching. So I think every almost. Most people have jobs if they’re lucky that we’ll have a lot of enjoyment or at least a lot of challenge that feels good. And then some work that doesn’t feel so great. And training is like that too, whether it’s, I don’t like stretching, for example but I got to do it.

And so I think we all have to find that balance and in the endurance world, the top athletes have figured out that balance. And. It ends up being that they exchange intensity for duration, so they do a lot more duration because they can stay under the stress radar and they recover better from a low intensity longer session than they do from a high intensity session, so they recover faster.

And so when you’re training every day, that ends up being pretty darn important. So that’s why this green, this 80, 20 relationship and mostly green. So if you’re. Listeners are only training three days a week, then yeah, they could get away with pretty much going out and going yellow every time if they’re, they’re training 45 minutes, three times a week, and they’ll come up to a certain level, and they’re going to kind of plateau.

But if they’re satisfied with that’s okay. However, if they say, I want more, I want to see where I can get on my 5k or my 10k, then I’m going to start tweaking things a bit. 

Mike: And what would that look like? Just because I could imagine that many people listening, they like that goal orientation.

So getting out there a few days a week, getting into the yellow, nothing wrong with that. And I would label that exercise, which is great. And if you want to turn it into training, though, of course, you need to have something now that you’re working toward you to have a bit of a system there, there needs to be A methodical approach to it often, at least in running that often is okay.

I want to run a five K or I want to run a 10 K or one day I want to run a marathon. So for people who maybe have done the never done the five K or the 10 K. How would you think about approaching that? What does that require? And what does that programming look like? 

Stephen: I would start like we began where I would say let’s just first get a habit going because as we’re getting that habit going, we’re also training some 10, some, getting some tendon strength, getting used to that eccentric concentric loading, getting that initial soreness out of the way.

So we’re doing some physiology as we’re also just getting the habit in place because even getting out 20, 30 minutes, 3 times a week, we’ll have. Pretty profound effects because the first week they do that, they’re going to be sore. They’re going to be sore just from that. Even though they’ve been in the weight room, they’ll be like, what the heck?

I shouldn’t be sore. Yeah, sorry. You will be, because this is a different load on your muscles than what you’ve been doing. We’re going to get past that. We’re going to get into a kind of a groove three days a week. And they’re going to start feeling like, yeah, things are starting to flatten out.

All right. So now I want to stretch maybe one of those three sessions a week. I want to have that be the kind of the duration day, the long day. And I’m going to use duration as a lever because duration has some effects at the cellular level in terms of turning on mitochondrial synthesis, capillary synthesis, and so forth.

That’s very useful. And so we want to use that, those signaling effects. And then on another day, we’re going to let that be the Neutral day, just a basic day. That’s pretty much green zone. Not too long. Not too hard. Just feels like status quo. And then we’ll have that 3rd day will be an intensity oriented day.

Okay, so I’m going to given 3 days a week, I’m going to basically just have a. A regular day, a long day and a hard day. If that makes sense, at least that way, I can start to differentiate a bit and start. Thinking in terms of what’s going to be my race pace, if I’m going to try to do a 5k, what’s a, after a while, you’re going to start getting a feeling for what might be a reasonable goal.

Is it 30 minutes? Is it 25 minutes? Is it 22 minutes? You with me? And then you can start to figure out what the pace needs to be to achieve that goal. And now I can start to say, all right, 5 kilometers, a 5k, 3. 1 miles. Is, this many laps so I can start breaking it down into some kind of an interval session, maybe 5 times 1000 meters, and I can start to think, or maybe at first I have to only go 3 or 4 times 1000 meters and that’s enough.

And I’m going to start thinking about goal pace for that longer that 5k or that 10k as an intensity that I’m going to. Stringing together more and more repetitions, three times, one K, four times, one K, five times, one K. And if you can do five times, one K at your race pace on just a regular day, all by yourself on the track alone, you’re going to be pretty close to being able to do that for five K in the heat of the moment, best effort with lots of people around you clapping.

So it’s a reasonable kind of test, a goal test 10, except it’ll be something like five times two K. 

Mike: And those intervals would those be your red sessions or your yellow sessions until eventually they’re, 

Stephen: yeah, they’re going to start up or yellow and then go red because remember the thing about this is when you start getting into that higher intensity range, it is feeling tough for every.

Every rep. Okay. It’s just like the bench press doing a set of 10 starts out smacking it, and then towards the end, you’re the velocity of the bar is going down. Same deal with the intervals on the track or he’ll repeats is you have to mobilize more and more to achieve the same pace.

So you don’t want to start out. I started to say balls to the wall. You know what I’m saying? You don’t want to start out. Too hard because then you fail. So you want to have a, to understand that ideally you’re going to be. You find a pace that feels hard but pretty okay the first rep, and then by the time you get to the last rep, you’re, it’s feeling really tough, but you manage it.

What you want to avoid is a failure kind of scenario where you went out too fast, and then you just slowly fall apart. Cause that’s not good for the brain and it doesn’t particularly help the training 

Mike: either. And so then these intervals, if I’m hearing you as you’re working toward, let’s say this 5k this, if you’re training three days a week, you’re maybe doing these, it sounds like probably one day a week is your interval day.

That’s going to be enough, 

Stephen: Given your base and that you don’t want to do more than that. And it’ll give you a good effect. You’ll get a night, and so that’s a reasonable way to do a 3 day a week program. If you say what about 4, then I would just have 2 normal days probably. And then.

A long day and a hard day. And then once you get to maybe five days a week, you might start thinking a little extra intensity, might start approaching two harder days, so it really depends on the individual and how it all fits together for them that 80, 20 is not going to mathematically work if you’re training three days a week, but that’s okay.

Cause you have all these rest days. 

Mike: Yep. Yep. That makes sense. And then for people who. Let’s say they do the three day a week program. They get up to their 5k goal and now they have found some enjoyment in this and they’re thinking with this maybe one year experiment. They’re like, how far could I take this?

What would progression look like for that person? 

Stephen: Yeah, if they find out that they’re a bit of a running phenom and they love it, and it’s, they want to extend to a 10 or a half marathon, probably I’m going to have to say I got to tell you, if it’s going to be a good experience for you, we’re going to have to up the frequency.

All right, we may have to intrude on one of your strength days and do a double session. To get the 4 days a week or, so you’re gonna have to make now you’re gonna have to start doing some trade offs here and decide maybe you’re going to put the strength training on a maintenance level so that you can shift some emphasis over to your endurance training in order to achieve, stretch yourself and achieve your goals.

And so that would be 1 issue is to 1st thing I would do is think frequency because. You need a reason, a higher frequency of than three days a week. If you’re gonna, I would say if you’re gonna have a really good experience in those longer types of events, okay, you can survive 

Mike: them. Sorry.

I was just going to ask if that’s be, is that because of the amount of just training volume that you have to rack up every week and it just becomes unfeasible to try to do that in three sessions. 

Stephen: If you’re going to run a half marathon, or goodness gracious, a marathon, you need the, you need some miles in your legs.

Cause it does do some wear and tear on your body in the course of such a race. You hit the wall. There are some issues that the only way to get past those issues is to get a bigger base of miles in your legs. And pretty much the only way to do that is to increase frequency. You can’t just keep making.

Every workout longer and longer in a three day a week program, it’s going to get too tough. So that’s why athletes will start. Running more often and then they’ll reach some point where they’ll start splitting up the day into two workouts when we’re talking, high performance endurance athletes, they’ll say instead of one to our work, and I’m doing 2 times 1 hour and that’s more sustainable, so They also have to manage this stress relative to the training effect of the work they’re doing.

So if you’re going to do the long, I’d say from half marathon up, you’re going to need to be at a higher frequency than three, if it’s going to feel like a good, an effective program, that’s 

Mike: my feeling. And what do you feel is the sweet spot? Would that be five a week? I’ve heard from people over the years, they try to go six or seven a week.

Stephen: Yeah, it really, six or seven is tough and that’s, now you’re an endurance athlete, you have become an endurance athlete. If you’re training six or seven days a week, six days a week, endurance, I don’t know what you used to be, but you’re an endurance athlete now. And those six day a weekers, they will have a strength or two session or two, in their built into all that.

And they’ll probably have a couple of, at least a couple of days of those six that they’re doing two workouts in order to be able to do both. So that’s that slow. Evolution towards, really focusing and really optimizing and maximizing what you’re good for within that endurance domain.

And then saying, right now, strength is on the back burner. I have to have enough strength in order for it to be functional. I have to have optimal strength for cycling or for running the half marathon. Okay. If they go that direction but. The sweet spot, I think, from a, just a, trying to do a bit of both probably is five days a week.

And then I’m going to say to folks, you need a rest day. It’s somewhere in that mix. 

Mike: And that doesn’t mean go lift weights. I didn’t go run. That was an endurance rest day. 

Stephen: Yeah. So that’s tricky because if they’re doing tough, they’re trying to do pretty tough strength sessions. Then they’re getting a pretty tough load on the musculature.

They’re getting a lot of eccentric loading and so forth. So that can, I know for myself, if I do a tough jump session, where I’m doing quite a bit of explosive work, it’s going to affect, My workout the next day, especially if I’m activating those type two fibers, I can do a easy session, no worries.

But an interval session the next day after a hard weight room session, I may find that man, as soon as I go up to those higher powers, the legs are just not there. I’ve done something the day before that really wasn’t, I’m still recovering. 

Mike: I noticed, I don’t know if it’s just me no seaboeing myself, but I feel like my perception of the effort is also, is just higher if my lower body, like to your point, if I train lower body pretty hard, and then I try to do something more difficult back on the bike here that I do on a regular basis, my perception of how hard.

It is. It’s not just my legs. Yes, physically, my legs are not doing so great, but there seems to be a psychological component where that workout just feels a lot harder. And it’s not just localized to my leg muscles. You know what I mean? 

Stephen: Yeah. And it’s and the brain and the body are connected. So perception of effort.

Hopefully, it normally is connected to the realities in the periphery. And so if there is some delayed onset muscular soreness, some fatigue, so forth, that will manifest as a different perception of effort. They are connected, and I think that I’m a physiologist, so I tend to think from the neck down, but as we get older and as we work in physiology long enough, we become hobby psychologists because of the deep connection between your perceptions And what’s actually happening in the body and all of that and your perception of effort as you can also be affected by stuff, things that have nothing to do with the weight room or the training, it can be the job.

It can be the marriage. It can be things with the kids. It can be many different things because it’s all that kind of going into that same stress bucket, right? And I’m sure you’ve talked about that. So I think the stress bucket model is a useful, all models are wrong, but some are useful and the stress bucket model is a useful kind of metaphor or way of thinking about this and that we have to give ourselves a break.

So when you start trying to squeeze more into the day, which a lot of your listeners almost certainly do their high performance they’re going to get stuff done. You’re going to have to understand that. There will be times when your stress bucket flows over and you have to give yourself a break in one way or another, and you have to decide what is the, what are the fixed costs that I can’t get away from these stress sources, and what are the variable costs that I can and that’s, sometimes it means you got to take a day off from training.

That’s okay. That’s okay. Get the kids to soccer, get the bills paid, do the stuff on the internet. You got to do give yourself cause often a rest day, not only is good for your body, but it actually, it frees up a block of time. Which then reduces your stress level on other stuff. So don’t underestimate the value of a rest day.

And it’s not going to, you’re not going to lose your fitness. 

Mike: What are your thoughts on this point of just talking about your stress bucket and stress from the different sources? Yeah, sure. There’s training stress, but there are other sources of stress. So you have this concept of a rest day but also maybe a lower stress day.

Because let’s say we just think about it in terms of exercise rest day. All right, fine. We’re not doing any workout. We’ll be active. Maybe we’re going to walk around and stuff, whatever, but no workout. However, it’s otherwise, let’s say a stressful day because it’s hectic and there are all these different things you have to get done.

And that I can just speak personally that I do seem to notice a physiological difference between the low stress rest day and the high stress. Rest day. If I think about afterward and how I feel, even though I did take my, I did, I was a good boy. I didn’t do a workout, even though maybe I wanted to, but I didn’t.

And, but because that training stress, it seems like was just replaced by other stress. I didn’t feel as recuperated as a true lower stress day. Does that make 

Stephen: sense? And that’s, again, I guess we all have to go inside ourselves and look at what we’re saying yes to every day and decide whether or not all of those yeses need to be yeses every day.

And so maybe that, like you said I took a rest day, but I didn’t really, I didn’t rest. All I did was jacked up that day with more stuff. That’s on you then because you’re replacing one source of stress with another. So I think that’s important. And coming upon us to evaluate all the things we say yes to.

And I know, trust me, I’m past my daughter’s 26. She’s getting married in a couple of weeks. That’s where I’m at now is marriage and, and kids moving off to college and doing stuff like that. And that’s a different kind of thing than it was when they were eight and nine and 10, and I’m the coach of the soccer team and I’m the coach of this and I, and I’m doing all this extra stuff.

So often. For those, for your listeners that are in their mid thirties to early forties, they are at peak stress. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. I’m 40 with two kids. So I understand 11, 11 and six. 

Stephen: Yeah. You’re burning the candle from both ends. You get the kids in the bed and you’re just like, 

Mike: you mean you fight to get them to bed.

Stephen: Yeah, you try every trick in the book and then you got to go to work in your office after you get them to bed. I’ve been there and I we, so I know that peak stress is in that area, 35 to 45 often. Okay. And that’s when you’re just a super overachiever as an exercising goal oriented.

Entrepreneur with two kids who wants their kids, you decide I’ll have to raise my hand when they ask for volunteers to coach and you’re the taxi driver, you’re the coach, all these things, all I can say to you, guys, gals, it gets better. Okay. It will, you’ll, and you’ll almost miss it a little bit because pretty soon your kids are going to be off to college or they’re going to be off on their own.

You’re going to like. Man, they don’t seem to need me anymore, but it does free up some time. And then as your body’s decaying, at least you have more time to try to fight it, and you have, so I train more now than I did in that peak stress period. I can train 10 hours a week now, but I didn’t have time for that anywhere near at 40.

So give yourself a break, don’t be hard on yourself. Take the small victories that you can, man, I used to work out while watching my son do soccer practice, and so I would do, try to do a Murph, if you know what a Murph, I had the vest on, so I was always trying to just optimize stuff, and it was stressful. Heck, I developed arrhythmias, I developed atrial fibrillation in that period when I just had work stress, I had life stress, I had divorce stress, I had it all. I have a very keen understanding of the stress bucket, and I, if I can say to your listeners, just give yourself a break.

Pat yourself on the back. If you’re in that, Period in your life when you’re responsible for a lot of different things, exercise needs to be, or your training process, your training goals need to be positive, not more stress. 

Mike: I think that’s, yeah, I think that’s great advice. And coming back, I have one more training related question for you.

So we have somebody who wants to go from doing very little cardiovascular training. Again, maybe they get their 10, 000 steps in, maybe they do a workout here or there, and they want to work up to one of these goals, 5k, 10k or beyond. What time frames should they be thinking with? And the reason I want to ask this is a mistake that I’ve seen over the years.

Many people make endurance exercise and strength training is trying to do too much too quickly. And so maybe not the intensity point, but just trying to think that you can go from kind of baseline cardiovascular fitness to your goal in inordinately short amount of time. And you had mentioned this point of then what happens is you go up, and then you go down.

And then you quit. 

Stephen: Putting numbers to this is a little bit, any number I say somebody’s going to go against me on it, but often we’ll try to do something in 12 weeks, eight to 12 weeks, right? We’re going to in two months, we’re going to run a 5k and it’s a tough go cause you’re the first weeks are sore and tough.

And then you’re, you’ve got an adaptive phase and you’re trying to squeeze everything in. So it can, it’s going to be on the edge. You’ll be able to run the 5k. But it won’t necessarily be a great experience. So I would double that. I would say, think in terms of six months for a 5k, if you’re going to, and probably that’s reasonable for a 10 K, but once you get beyond that, then I’m, if I’m talking half marathon, I want to give myself a year, let it be a nice, smooth progression and not because otherwise if you get hurt, which is going to be the likely scenario, because running will tend to hurt you if you’ve got weak spots.

If you’ve got Achilles issues, if you’ve got knee issues, if you’re not balanced, you’ll get a niggle that turns into a long term injury, and then you’re not running for weeks. And now that six months is cut to four, and now it’s a vicious cycle. So go to slower instead of faster, let the, let things develop and double the time you think is necessary if we want to give it a rule of thumb, if you think you can do it in 8 weeks, double that or 8 to 12, double that, and that’ll probably be a better experience for you.

Mike: Yeah, I think that’s great advice. I think of in business, a good. Thought exercise to go through if you’re considering a project taking on a project is assume that it’s going to take twice the effort, right? So twice the time, twice the cost, whatever the pain is going to be double that and then assume that is so well, let me back up first, make what you think is a conservative estimate, like really think about it.

Try not to engage in magical thinking to determine how much pain is this going to take. Okay, double that and then try to make a conservative as effort of the pleasure. What’s the reward going to be ROI, whatever we’re talking about. And then have that cut that in half. And then ask yourself under those conditions, do you still want to do the thing?

If not don’t do the thing find something that meets those qualifications, 

Stephen: that’s a I like that rule if double the pain estimate and then and have the pleasure estimate And you’ll be about ballpark 

Mike: Yeah that I actually go through that exercise if i’m especially if i’m working through If we’re talking about some sort of project that is going to Entail a significant investment of resources that actually is like part of the thing that the people I work with that we go through.

And do we still want to do it? If not, maybe we shouldn’t do that. Then 

Stephen: I’m probably going to steal that from you. That’s a good, basic rule of thumb. 

Mike: Please do. I stole it from, I think I stole it from, so it was a book ready fire aim by Michael Masterson. If I remember. Ready for a, 

Stephen: yeah, and a guy, I interviewed a speed skater named Niels van der Pol from Sweden.

He’s got a Dutch ish name, but he’s a Swedish athlete that broke the world record in the 5, meter on speed skating. And he was a junior, he was a junior world champion. And he says, you know what, I became junior world champion and that was really great for about 10 seconds. And then he corrected himself and said maybe the whole day.

And then he said, and then I started thinking, man, all the things I gave up, all the teenage fun stuff I gave up for this. I don’t think it was worth it. And he quit. And then he ended up coming back and setting these world records, but he had to change the way he viewed his training. He had to change the parameters so that it was sustainable for him mentally.

And that’s the outer edge of what you’re talking about is a lot of times, man we commit so much effort and we achieve these goals. And then we go, was that. I thought it was going to be more, so enjoy the process. That’s the bottom line. Training. You need to enjoy the process. There will be a product.

It will be nice to set a PR, but PRs are never going to be satisfying forever. So make sure just doing this stuff is fun. Because of the people you’re with, because of the way it makes you feel inside all these different sources of some kind of a 

Mike: reward. I totally agree. Finding that intrinsic motivation is it’s makes me think of of money, right?

The lesson that, that everyone just insists on learning themselves in that reaching certain levels of income is about is satisfying for, maybe a day, 10 seconds to a day. And then you just. You immediately adapt to wherever you’re at and then sometimes you reflect back on, was it worth it?

All the things that I gave up, which also I think is a useful exercise before committing yourself to any sort of serious undertaking is make sure that you have. Thought about what you are giving up thought about all the other things that you can go and do. And if you consciously are aware of these things and you consciously say, I don’t want to do it.

I’m willing to give up all of those things to go do this thing. Okay. Then, maybe you should go do the thing and it may or may not. Work out the way that you hoped, even if you accomplished the thing, but at least you thought about it. However, I think it is definitely a mistake to not even think about wait a minute, if I’m going to be committing several thousand hours to this big goal over the course of who knows how many years.

Why am I doing this if it’s related to money or status? I would say you should probably think more about that because I can guarantee you it’s not going to be as great even if you get there as you think it’s going to be. So do you have these intrinsic motivations? Do you just enjoy generally enjoy it for its own sake?

Are there things that are pulling you into it again that are not money related, not status related? And have you given thought to what else you could do with thousands of hours of time? Are you okay with sacrificing those things? Are you okay? Basically, in a way, you have to. You’re going to have to become a terminal procrastinator in everything, but this one thing here’s the one thing that you never procrastinate in, but you’re going to have to put off all these other things and you’re going to, and there are going to be more things too, along the way that are going to pop up, that are going to look really attractive and you’re going to have to say no.

Stephen: You’re making me think of my time as a Ph. D. student when I was also a competitive rower and getting up every morning at 5 o’clock train on the water at 535 days a week. And then on Saturday and Sunday, we got to only start at 7 a. m. And so when you have that kind of schedule, and you’re a Ph. D. student, you’re poured.

I just remember I was a Spartan. I was like, it was straight out of, a thousand years ago and I just was living, sleep, eat, train, work. And, but at that time I was willing to make those sacrifices and give up certain things. And I gave up dates. I gave up a lot of those social.

Things because it’s pretty darn hard to be much of a entertaining date when you’re waking up, you got to say I got to be up at 5. Sorry, I got to go. So I think those are choices we make for periods of our life and then we have to reevaluate and reflect on. But I do think that. Going through periods where you say, I’m going to train for that triathlon, or I’m going to train for this or whatever.

I do think they have value. I think they have, it’s an experiential thing that helps us to understand our brains, our bodies and makes life interesting. So I do encourage people to choose something interesting that they haven’t done before, like that 10 K or whatever. Go through that process because it’s a wonderful process to be able to, it’s one of the few endurance is one of those few things where you can really see the results as they go.

And it’s quite rewarding. It’s not always as easy in our business life, our family life and so forth to see that clear progress. So I’ll throw in a advertisement for endurance as someone that also loves and has a long background in these other kinds of training. If you’re. Curious, give it a whirl, give it a go, but double the time you think it’ll take, like you said and think first frequency, then duration, then intensity.

Those are my two big kind of recommendations. The third would be don’t be afraid of rest days. 

Mike: Awesome. This was a great interview. That’s everything that I wanted to touch on. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that’s bouncing around in your head? Anything that you wanted to say that I didn’t ask about or have we covered it sufficiently?

Stephen: I think we’ve done. Yeah, I think you, you pulled out what I know. No, I, I just, Joy is I go I’ll end with that. I was at a meeting a few, a couple of months ago, lecturing to some of the tops cross country skiers in the world and their coaches and the sciences around it and the word that, that came up most often talking about successes and failures and athletes at one world had world, one world championships, and then it fell apart.

They all said when it went wrong, it was because I’d lost the joy in the training. J O Y joy. 

Mike: That’s interesting that they would, because from the outside looking in, it sounds counterintuitive because you could assume that such things are just mechanical, you just show up, you do the thing, you’re good at the thing and you stay good at the thing and you go home.

Who cares how you feel about it? 

Stephen: It’s, that’s the thing, I’ve had the luxury or the good fortune to talk to a lot of really great athletes and man, that’s what I hear from all of them, killing joy now, or Tim to cleric on this bike, and they’ll talk about, man, it’s about your mates, your friends that you’re cycling with, and you’re on a long six hour ride and you stop after three and have an espresso up in the mountains looking out.

He says it’s. You can’t beat that, and he’s talking about the joy of camaraderie, just doing stuff together, and it’s not all about pain, and it can’t be, and that’s what I hear independently from all these great athletes. So I, if I, Just remind people that if that’s true for the people that you look up to that can run the fastest you’ve ever seen, and they still say joy is important, then trust me, it’s important for you to 

Mike: great advice.

And I’ve spoken about that regularly, just in the context of making sure that you’re enjoying your training program, your strength training program, you’re not going to enjoy every workout you’re going to always have enjoyed. The workout once it’s done, like having worked out is always enjoyable, but on the whole, I think you should generally look forward to your workouts.

You should generally enjoy the process of doing your workouts. And if you’re not, then I would recommend that, that somebody take a look at what they’re doing and specifically, what are they not liking about it and how can they change things, even if it makes their training less scientifically optimal, even if they have very specific goals, but if they can greatly.

Increase the joy quotient in their training, that’s worth it. Coming back to consistency. And so that’s a good advice. 

Stephen: Yeah. And if you’re getting it right, even those hard sessions, you’re, you’ll look forward to them because you see a challenge, you’re ready to face the challenge, so it doesn’t necessarily, it’s not joy, but there is A satisfaction.

There’s a match between your readiness to take on the challenge and what’s being asked of you or what you’re asking of yourself. And when that’s in balance, then good things tend to happen when you’re hoping that it rains and there’s lightning so that you don’t have to do that workout. That’s not a good sign.

Mike: Hoping for divine intervention of some kind to just get you out of. 

Stephen: Yeah, I’m hoping, is it, can there be like a flood so I don’t have to do this workout on the river today? 

Mike: This was a great discussion. And if people want to know more about, about your work where can they find you?

Anything in particular you want them to know about? 

Stephen: I’m on. X as it is now call just Steven at Steven Seiler, my name. 

Mike: I’m a, I’m an Elon Musk enjoyer, but that rebrand, I don’t quite understand. I feel like that was a mistake, at least as it stands right now. 

Stephen: I’m going to you’re the business guy, but all I know is I, my, I still have an account there and it’s verified.

And so I do quite a bit of discussion in the endurance sphere on. On X, I have a YouTube channel. It’s has quite a few videos related to training that people can tap into. And obviously it’s free. And then if people are super serious about me and want to geek out on actual research, then we have Google scholar.

They can go in and find all that stuff. Awesome. 

Mike: Thanks again for your time, Steven. This was a great discussion. You bet. Take care. How many calories should you eat to reach your fitness goals faster? What about your macros? What types of food should you eat? And how many meals should you eat every day?

I created a free 60 second diet quiz that’ll answer Those questions for you and others, including how much alcohol you should drink, whether you should eat more fatty fish to get enough omega 3 fatty acids, what supplements are worth taking and why, and more. To take the quiz and get your free personalized diet plan, go to muscleforlife.

show slash dietquiz. muscleforlife. show slash dietquiz now. Answer the questions and learn what you need to do in the kitchen to lose fat, build muscle, and get healthy. I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show, because it makes sure that you don’t miss new episodes.

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