017 Work capacity

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley, I'm here with my co-host Rob Mauseri, and we're going to talk about work capacity in the context of powerlifting today. So to get this episode to work in the best way, we decided to change the format slightly. So I'm not going to talk about the physiology first. We're actually going to kind of hash it out together the problem as we see it, or more accurately as Rob sees it, and then he sends me videos to look at people that are saying strange things. But basically we're going to try and hash out what we see as the problem of how work capacity is being talked about in the powerlifting community at the moment, and why the assumptions that unpin that kind of idea that it has had about work capacity are actually not correct. So very quickly before we do jump into that, I'm just going to clarify that work capacity is poorly defined also in the strengthen conditioning literature and also in the exercise science literature. So it's not really kind of fair really to sort of target powerlifting communities being people that don't understand it and everybody else does. That's not true at all. This is a kind of worldwide kind of problem in the sense that nobody in exercise science has really kind of sat down and gone, at least to my knowledge, has sat down and gone. This is how work capacity should be defined. Typically speaking, if you were to ask an exercise scientist, they would actually have to do what I did when I was asked about it, which is literally trying to build up a definition from scratch and sort of say, well, this is what I think you mean. But of course generally speaking, that isn't what most people mean. So Rob, let's kind of just start talking about this. You've obviously seen a lot of powerlifting community using the concept work capacity. Can you just kind of break down a little bit for us what you're seeing and how you're seeing people use that terminology? Yeah, Chris. So I think one of the biggest things I see in regards to like improving work capacity is people trying to improve their ability to tolerate more volume for future training sessions. And you know, just kind of like some arbitrary amount, just kind of using a program where they're increasing sets over time, things like that. No talk about, you know, rep range, oxidative failure or any of those things, just kind of increasing like tonal volume load essentially over time as a means of increasing the amount of work that they can do overall and recover from. And that's not, I would say that's kind of the first big one. Okay. Cool. So basically what's happening there then is we're talking about two separate things. We're talking about the desired outcome, which is the ability to recover from a specific number of sets. Say, I mean, we can simplify it a little bit and just say, imagine we were talking about it more of a bodybuilding context because that's much kind of much more straightforward. Imagine that we're just saying, well, you know, this person is doing this number of sets per workout per week. And the desired outcome is to be able to do, you know, two or three more sets per workout per week. So instead of being doing three sets to failure, three times a week, maybe the goal is to be able to do five sets to failure three times a week. So the, the stated goal is to kind of change the amount of sets that we can do. And of course, that would then lead to better adaptions in the future because technically we would be doing a bigger stimulus in each workout, assuming that the recovery in both cases was exactly the same. So essentially what people are looking at here, if we phrase or capacity in that way, as in the ability to do a certain number of sets in a workout and recover from it by the next workout, what we're actually saying is that they're trying to change the magnitude of the repeat about effect. So in other words, we're doing a workout we create a repeat about effect. And ultimately, the idea is that you can continue creating more repeat about effects as you continue doing more and more work. And essentially that leads to being able to do a kind of higher number of sets per workout and still recover from it. The problem with that is that exercise science has studied the repeat about effect. And also what we could casually call the multiple repeat about effect and has shown that pretty much all the effect that you're going to get, almost all the effect you're going to get is from workout one to workout two. So you do a workout and you kind of sort of apply calcium ions to the moss fibers that you just used. And they then respond by various different adaptions and that underpins a reduction in the amount of heat that you get next time. You're going to come back to do the same kind of exercise again next time. And you don't really get a subsequently kind of a similar reduction in post-workup to after that work. Okay, just kind of you get a little bit of reduction and maybe again after the third workout, give a little bit more and after that kind of tapers off. So there isn't really any way to do what people think they are doing by kind of throwing more volume at a kind of training session. It isn't actually going to change the recovery capacity of that person to the type of workout, the type of exercise that they're doing. So fundamentally, I don't think that that is an achievable goal, at least in the exercise literature, is pretty clear that you can't really continue creating bigger and bigger repeat about effects just by throwing more and more volume at the problem. Otherwise, fatigue accumulation wouldn't really be a thing and it's absolutely is a thing. Yeah, and I've heard that repraised as well as the same thing, but people will say it as volume tolerance. That's actually a much better terminology, isn't it? Because it gets away from the idea of work and time and all that kind of thing. It's just like, what does your volume tolerance, what's your work at volume tolerance? So I think I would be great actually, just irrespective of people listening to this and disliking what I'm saying, because I'm disagreeing with them. It would be really cool if people mean volume tolerance instead of work capacity, it'd be really cool if they would adopt that terminology because it would make it super clear that we're not talking about, you know, being able to do a certain amount of work in a certain amount of time. It literally just means, can I recover from this number of sets in a workout, or can I not recover from this number of sets in a workout? And that's obviously then very, very clearly tying to post workout, muscle damage and recovery rates and that kind of thing. So yeah, that would be really cool if terminology were changing that direction. So volume tolerance, definite, definite seal of approval from me on that terminology. Cool. So let's come back to your original kind of explanation. So you're seeing people talk about, you know, increasing volumes to be able to do more volume in the future. So that really fits very clearly into the kind of repeat about effect kind of phenomenon. But work capacity also obviously has other connotations or the meanings of people using in other ways as well. Can you kind of tap into that for us? Yeah, one of the other ones is obviously recovery, like within sessions, other between exercises with the same muscle group sets of, you know, sets of bench sets of squat, whatever it may be, or exercises for different muscle groups, generally just getting, you know, too fatigued within a session to have quality work by the end. And I've seen a lot of different programming strategies. People will use to try to address that. Circuit training is one. I've seen like barbell circuits, seen limited rest periods, so just incomplete rest. So instead of doing your three, four minutes, whatever it might be, doing a heavy squat, you do something with like more moderate or even sometimes higher reps. And then you just limit the rest, things like that. And obviously I don't find those things very useful as a strategy to improve your ability to recover through the workout. A lot of different things I would manage first, you know, like rep range, proximity to failure, things like that. Before I go, giving someone short, incomplete rest protocols and that to address. So if you want to handle that one, yeah, absolutely. There's actually two really cool things there. So on the one hand, and it actually depends on how the intervention is being structured. So there's kind of a difference between throwing a whole bunch of say, sort of single joint or even multi joint exercise, particular muscle group. And that's very different from kind of coming at things from a more circuit style point of view. One is going to train local muscular endurance. And the other one is going to train kind of cardiovascular capacity. And so they're kind of, and ultimately from, you know, maybe from the external perspective, they're kind of getting you in moving in the same direction, but they're actually doing physiologically very, very different things. Now, as you were talking, it occurred to me that many powerlifters, at least a while back, many powerlifters tended to set their work weights as a percentage of the one rep max. So they might be saying, well, this is my kind of one rep max for my last competition or my working one rep max, whatever the kind of the terminology they're using. And then they might go, I'm going to use this percentage of that and do a certain number of repetitions with that in the sessions that I have planned. And obviously, if we then take that as a template and assume that that's what's happening, you could then go, okay, so if I improve my local muscular endurance, which could be done with this kind of single joint kind of exercise type protocol that you described, that would then allow me to do a greater number of repetitions with the percentage of one rep max than I was doing previously. Because ultimately, what relative muscular endurance is doing, what local muscular endurance improvements are doing, is actually increasing the number of reps you can do with a given percentage of one rep max. I mean, I can walk through the physiology quickly, but basically that's kind of where the end result is. As a result, they will actually notice exactly if they are programming in this way, they will actually notice an improvement in what they perceive to be their work capacity as a result of doing that thing because but if you were working with if you're working with reps in reserve you would not see a difference because all that happened your actual work weights would increase so that you had to maintain the same number of kind of reps in reserve as you were doing previously. So ultimately it really depends on whether or not so local mosquito endurance impact will depend on whether somebody is programming based on percentage of warm rep max or whether they're programming based on reps in reserve. The programming based on reps in reserve they won't actually see a benefit in terms of their their perceive or it's a perceived benefit really. They would leave a benefit as a result of kind of doing this kind of training program. But basically yeah I mean ultimately if you were to say something okay well you know I'm still interested despite the fact that you're telling me it doesn't really do anything you know if they say okay how do I do that well how you would do that would be you would target you would target types of training that create a large amount of local metabolite accumulation that's what you would do. So if you wanted to trigger an increase in local muscular endurance so that you could do more reps with the same percentage of warm rep max then ultimately what you would do is you would find exercises like single joint exercises especially those with a contract to position peak effort point. So if you've got an exercise that has peak effort to the contract position or even a partial range of motion in that contract position and you do small muscle mass exercises if you do large muscle mass exercises it's not gonna work because that's going to basically rely on the cardiovascular system and you're gonna sort of send all the metabolites out to the bloodstream and it's just gonna wash away and you end up with a cardiovascular response. A bit if you're using small muscle mass exercises especially those in a contract position you need a lot of metabolite accumulation very quickly in that particular location and it's then going to stimulate resistance to that set of deep mechanisms and then you're gonna find you can do more reps with the same percentage of warm rep max. So ultimately if people do want to go down that route that is actually the correct way of doing it so it's cool to see that actually you know with the stated or at least perceived kind of goal that they have they are actually training in a way that gets them close to that but just to be clear it isn't actually going to change anything as far as it's training stimulus is concerned because ultimately you know we kind of deal with reps and reserves being the primary governing factor for you know how close we are to muscular failures being the primary governing factor for many of the adaptions that we're talking about. So that but that actually would would get them moving in the direction of an improvement in work capacity in the sense that we're doing more reps for the same percentage of warm rep max. In terms of cardiovascular side of it though which is the other side if you're like in well okay I'm not going to go down the route of doing lots of kind of you know single joint exercises for the muscle route now I want to improve the muscular endurance level of work capacity. I'm going to go down the route instead of training multiple different parts of the body all in one go and creating a really big cardiovascular effect and the idea there would be that you would increase some of your ability to recover between sets essentially of large muscle exercises as we see in powerlifting obviously. So this again it's like well you know does that work well yeah it does but does it work optimally well not really because ultimately if you imagine what you're kind of really doing with a kind of a circuit type training set up on the one hand you're you'd basically training like intervals really so essentially it's kind of like interval training because you're using a relatively high intensity of cardiovascular kind of exercise and you're doing kind of about to work and then stopping and doing another part of work and then stopping and taking rest so essentially you're doing into all training really. The problem is you're also depending on how close to failure you're going you're also probably going to start creating quite a lot of muscle damage by that particular protocol and the reality is that neither of those things are actually necessary because this is the crazy thing when we talk about this when we look at this and like why would you do that I mean because you can literally just do cardiovascular exercises to low intensity and you get more of the benefits you get better kind of improvement in your cardiovascular capacity and too you don't get the negative side of the muscle damage especially if you structure it properly but ultimately this is just crazy because you know on the one hand you could say well you know okay fine it is cardiovascular exercise and it is creating a stimulus to improve cardiovascular capacity and that is going to help me recover between sets and all of that is true but it's a very very long way away from actually being the best with yeah not just take away from getting like any real good training in well that's the other thing that's that is absolutely true because if you I mean like again coming back to some of the videos and kind of things that you sent me about this topic if we look at those what we tend to notice is that many of these people are programming blocks so the program an entire block of training dedicated to improving our work capacity which I talked about today but the problem is that that then means that during that period of time they're not working effectively or as effectively as they could be on the main lifts because they're doing this a lot they're doing this kind of dedicated amount of training they're coming into the gym and they're doing all these kind of machine exercises maybe or some barbell exercises some machine exercises and the idea being either we talked about earlier which is where they're trying to do just a ton of volume in order to be able to then tolerate greater volume in a subsequent block which is trying to manipulate the repeat about effect in a way that it won't be manipulated alternatively they're trying to push this cardiovascular kind of or more local muscular endurance adaption on which on the local muscular endurance side only really manifests itself if you're based off percentage of on right max in your training if your training loads are based off right maxes you won't actually notice any change whatsoever that's the result of gaining local muscular endurance it will literally be completely opaque to you whereas cardiovascular endurance side that will actually have a benefit you will notice that you recover more quickly from one set to the next and that obviously then is or you don't get as gassed throughout the training session you're able to just carry on doing a little bit more work towards the end of the session which you know is is absolutely beneficial though I wouldn't know I've told this story a couple of times I'm gonna tell that again when I was doing a lot of when I was doing the most squatting that I've ever done a two-year period of time when I kind of ran Hepburn and sort of took my squat as high as it's ever gone and I'll go now at this point in my life the the same kind of period of time I was also doing a lot of road cycling lived in an area where it was very very popular to do that particular sport and so I was doing a lot of road cycling and on Saturday mornings I would typically ride for anyway between 16 and 100 miles every single weekend so my cardiovascular capacity was probably again about as good as it ever has been and will be so but even so during the Hepburn routines I was doing eight sets of two rising to three by the time I got the end of that eight sets of two rising to three I was lying on my back on the floor absolutely sucking air in and I was miserable I was really miserable this is actually the most miserable part my week was the last couple of sets of the Hepburn routine every time I switched over from eight sets of three down days of two I used to be so happy yeah now of course I wouldn't touch eight sets of anything but you know I mean it would be five sets probably but anyway so I've told that story before I'm just pointing out that even with the best cardiovascular system in the world if you are a power of 2 is able to move serious amounts of weight you're probably going to find that you are gassed because fundamentally you've got a lot of muscle mass and it really doesn't matter how good your cardiovascular system is it's not going to be able to keep up and so you are going to get that kind of post set effect especially if you're doing you know even if you're doing just a couple of reps each time so just a word of kind of caution there if you're expecting loads of cardio to have some kind of magical effect where you can do set up to set up to set up to set with only a couple minutes rest it's not going to happen but at least I just can happen it just needs to be good enough it's like if you're so out of shape that you can't get through an hour and a half to hours of training then yeah it'll make a big difference what if you're in decent enough shape already yeah like you said just don't expect some like big huge impact and certainly don't expect some you know giant benefit to your max strength or your growth over time it's tough like that it's not going to make a giant difference no I really don't think it is and I think ultimate but yeah it's absolutely worth having some cardio in your program if you don't have any but it's not worth kind of dedicating entire blocks to creating that nor is it worth really kind of trying to push it as far as I was doing crazy amounts of road cycling but that was just because I was pursuing two totally separate hobbies at the same time so yeah okay so where we've got to then is we've got these three separate aspects that are creeping into the definition of work capacity we've got the original kind of the starting point which was this kind of idea that you could train in order to reduce the amount of calcium and rate of t-gear experience and therefore the amount of post-workout t-gear experience and therefore the amount of volume you can do per workout so you've kind of given us that volume tolerance label which I think is way way better then secondly we've got local muscular endurance improvements which is kind of how I would probably define work capacity if I was starting at it from purely an exercise science point of view and not from from a kind of just observing how it's used in powerlifting context point of view. And then thirdly, we've got this code of askil capacity, which is probably the most interesting from a kind of athletic or powerlifting point of view or strength sports point of view rather. Essentially saying, you know, if you want to be able to recover within session, then this absolutely will work, you know, kind of, you'll be able to use slightly shorter rest periods. You should be able to find that you're not feeling miserable by the end of the session that you're doing in improving cardiovascular capacity probably is going to do that. Is that a fair kind of summary of what you're seeing in the powerlifting community, though? - Yeah, yeah, I think that sums it up pretty well. - And ultimately, the problem is that they're blending these three things all together and assuming that they all kind of are related to each other. - Yeah, yeah, and like you said, there's no real working definition. - So there is no working definition anywhere. So as I said, I'm not picking on these guys and saying, oh, you're the only people who don't know what it means. It's like, nobody knows what work capacity means. I mean, like sometimes when people ask me the question, I say, well, reduce it to the most absurd level and like tell me what you think work capacity means. Like if I reduced work capacity to the most absurd level, it's like, well, you want to be able to do more work in less time or you want to be able to do more work in the same period of time or, you know, kind of whatever or the same amount of work in less time. I mean, all of those kind of things. People go, yeah, that's exactly what I mean. Well, okay, but I can instantaneously do a lot more work in less time just by changing the rep range and the proximity to failure. - Yeah. - I mean, I literally had this conversation with somebody the other day and I was like, if I want to do more work in less time, I just drop the weight right down to below 30% to one max. So I haven't got any vascular occlusion going on. Now it's cardio. Now I can do monstrous amounts of work and really kind of very short periods of time because I just kind of worked on obviously for a time of distance. I can just keep doing repetitions with this really light load and ultimately it doesn't create very much fatigue 'cause I haven't got any vascular occlusion going on. And they go, oh no, no, no, I don't mean that. I mean, you know, more work in less time but with these fixed constraints. I'm like, okay, but you just insert to another level of detail that you didn't have and certainly doesn't exist in the definition. So, you're saying that you want to talk about work capacity with fixed, kind of loading parameters or fixed repetitions ranges or fixed, kind of proximity to failure or something like that. Okay, fine. So you've set some parameters before you start and you want to change things in that context. Well, now you're back to the three sets of adaptions that we've talked about, which is, it's either going to be calcium amuletivity changes so repeat the bad effect if you're talking about one workout to the next. If you're talking about within workout, then it's got to be either be local muscular endurance changes or it's got to be cardiovascular changes. It's got to be one of those two. So, but the three are different. I mean, like there's, I noticed in one of the video clips that you sent me, I just find it funny. I was going to tell you just all these strange videos of people saying kind of weird things about work capacity. But yeah, so you sent me a video and they were talking about basically that when they're trying to improve volume tolerance, when they're trying to improve this volume tolerance idea, this ability to do more work in less, sorry, the ability to recover from a workout and then do the same workout again, a short period of time later, a couple of days later. They were actually assuming that that was related to the within session fatigue as indicated, say by cardiovascular capacity. So the idea was that, you know, you would, if you were able to recover better within session, so like if your cardio was better, so like if you knew my eight sets of two, rising to three without lying on the floor at the end of the eight, five, seven, three, eight set, then somehow that would mean that my post workout fatigue would also be improved. - Yeah, yeah, they're trying to tie it together. - They're tying together. And that's absolutely 100% not true. That's absolutely not valid. The post workout fatigue has zero to do with cardiovascular capacity, absolutely zero. Now, at some point, I think I'm probably going to end up getting kind of argued against by some of the cardiovascular people, but I promise you that post workout cardio, post workout fatigue from a cardiovascular session is mainly going to fall into the neuromuscular model that I've already presented, which is calcium ions from causing muscle damage. It's got nothing to do with the autonomic nervous system or stress or anything like that. Not that exercise is a stressor, but we can have that conversation. - And yeah, I was going to say we can do that one, just that's what we're talking about. - Yeah, otherwise we'll be just talking forever. - So yeah, but just to kind of repeat what I'm saying here and just clarify it, it's not true to say that if you reduce your within session fatigue by improving your cardiovascular capacity, that will somehow reduce your post workout fatigue. It won't, they are two 100% different systems. The cardiovascular system is literally on nothing to do with post workout fatigue whatsoever. You are literally dealing with what's happening inside the muscle when we're talking about post workout fatigue. And even the super spinal CFT that happens after workout is actually caused by the muscle damage and the inflammation response to that muscle damage. So it's just got absolutely nothing to do with the autonomic nervous system. Again, with the proviso that if you talk about stress, you can start to create problems for the inflammatory process, but that is a level of detail that we don't need to talk about right now. - Yeah, otherwise you'd have a marathon or we can just recover from almost anything through the week and having some of that does not happen. - Absolutely, it doesn't happen. So yeah, so okay, cool. So hopefully that is starting to take shape now. Is there anything else that you've seen in the kind of social media kind of at the moment that you're kind of where we haven't talked about regarding birth capacity? - Yeah, one more, very, very odd one. The idea that doing some insane amount of like warm-ups like very high rep muscle-specific warm-ups is gonna have some magical benefit, like five sets of 25 on white girl and all like extension and things like that, before your main lifts. Obviously like you're saying that would actually work pretty well to improve local relative muscle endurance, but terms of like recovering within the session, not gonna do anything in terms of like improving, your ability to recover within the week. Obviously it's not doing anything and do you really need to get better doing sets of 25 to be effective at powerlifting training? I would argue not. I think people tend to think there's some big benefit to the ability to recover from your sets of like three to five when you do these things. And you know, three to five is stimulating any improvement in fatigue resistance. You don't need to have fatigue resistance for three to five reps. It just doesn't make any sense. - Yeah, and wow, just doing that as part of a warm-up, that makes absolutely no sense. I mean, really the number one rule of doing a warm-up is don't get fatigued. I mean, that absolutely is the number one rule, is don't get fatigued. So yeah, don't do that, don't do that. - Of course, that was from the idea that like light loads were not fatiguing and high reps were just giving you blood flow and these things that'll help your joints and yada, yada, yada. Obviously, super high reps and light loads are not actually great for tendons and that anyway. And just not needed in my opinion. - Yeah, there's so much wrong there, isn't that? I mean, yeah, but basically, so just to kind of clarify what we're saying here, the kind of multiple sets of high rep sort of strength training will improve local muscular endurance, but if you wanna do that, put it at the end of the workout. I mean, I'm not recommending that we do do that because I don't think it helps by other conformance. But if somebody wants to do that kind of training, definitely don't do it as part of the warm up. Do it as part of the kind of post main lift part of the workout. I mean, it's like-- - Not a useful warm up. I really love my single reps, they're great. You know, they take no time. If I did five sets of 25, I'm like five different exercises before my men lifts. I mean, I'd be in the gym for four hours. I would hate it. I'd hate everybody. - And your lift should suffer so, so badly. - Yeah. - So you'd end up with a lot to accumulate to fatigue. You'd be, yeah, failing to create the adaptions that you want. It would just not really be very logical. So yeah, so definitely not a good idea to put those kind of things into a warm up. But again, if people want to create the local muscular endurance and prove to fate, they can do it by putting it at the end. But again, even then, I'd be like, "Why are you doing this in this, in my sense?" - Just go for a jab. - Well, that's it. I mean, so in terms of power lift as you're working with, if they need to put some cardio into that kind of routines, how, I mean, how very, very briefly, how are you structuring that? Just something practical to finish on today. - Yeah, just, I mean, just building like a good base of like a long, slow cardio work. If you want to go for a run or something like that, totally fine as long as it's not, you don't find it too stressful on joints or hard to recover from. I tend to prefer, you know, like an elliptical, stationary bike with all the limbs working, things like that. If you want to do it after workout, that's when I do it. Some people do not love that feeling right after training hard. And that's fine. And then, you know, you can place it on your off day, whatever it's convenient. And just, you know, you don't have to do a ton. I mean, I do myself, maybe on average at the moment, like 20, 30 minutes of my Glow Intensity cardio, like three times a week in the moment. And, you know, I've absolutely no trouble with recovering within a session, anything like that. So, you know, if you want to start there, and I always recommend for lifters, you start with an amount of cardio. cardio, see if it impacts anything, if you can recover from there, you know, what not. And then just roll that if you want to taper it up slightly, if you feel like you need more, you know, go up slowly. If you notice any negative effect, pull back a little bit. And then, you know, just keep it there and, you know, just go in a harder each time. I mean, it's not never a complicated with cardio. No, not at all. And I would just add to that and say that if you're putting 10 or 15 minutes in three times a week, and you do notice a negative effect, and you probably have a bigger problem than you thought. Yeah, some is wrong. Whole program. Well, there's a problem. So, so yeah, 10, 10 to 15 minutes, three times a week should be absolutely fine to then shouldn't. And obviously, unless this is running that people are not familiar with, they haven't done much running before, especially if it's on a hard surface. But certainly if it's elliptical or bike or something like that, it's added in three times 10 minutes, three times 15 minutes should be absolutely not even noticeable from a recovery point of view. I will probably again kind of cap it to the around the 45 minute mark. I think pushing higher than that and you kind of starting to turn yourself into an endurance athlete really. Yeah, you just don't need that. Cool. I think that's been a really useful kind of discussion of that idea. Hopefully people have also other people have found it useful, you know, and that was kind of a different format for us because normally we kind of start with me talking about physiology for ages. But maybe they will do this one again in the future if it kind of works well. So cool. So thank you to everyone for listening to us. We will be back with another episode next week talking about something completely different.