#95 - The Hybrid Athlete Blueprint: A Step-by-Step Guide to Strength & Running

This episode of the Choose Hard Podcast is going to be your definitive guide for everything hybrid training. I'm going to give you the step-by-step blueprint to understanding what it means to be a hybrid athlete, how to blend both endurance and strength training together, how to fuel your body for both energy systems, and do it all in a way where you avoid injuries and can improve both your body composition, your strength, as well as your aerobic capabilities. This episode has become like a monstrous guide, a monstrous piece of content. And I say that because I'm looking at my notes for it. What started as just me putting down some bullet points and trying to link some research and such just to make sure that I had something to refer back to became two different documents. So I have like basically a full article already written. I'm going to turn it into a guide. So you're going to be able to have a guide. By the end of this podcast, I'm going to show you where you can find it. But it is so detailed because there was just so much more that I needed to get into as I started taking notes, reflecting on my own experience over the last probably 12 months or so of really pushing the hybrid training model as well as the research that's out there. And so then I ended up creating a second document with just what the research shows on some of the topics that I wanted to cover. So this again, this is a monster podcast and I'm talking it up, but I think it's going to be a really good one. And I'm excited to dive into this because hybrid training has become really, I've adopted it personally and I've really enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to. And I think there's so much value in it. I also think it can be very destructive because it can push your body really hard if you're not careful about how you program it. But also it can take people further away from their goals if they're not very clear on what it is they want. I think a lot of people listen to this podcast. That's what they want. They want to be healthy. They want to perform well. They want to look good. They want to be strong. But they want to look athletic functional too. This is perfect for you. For the person who is just bodybuilding, it's not perfect for you. For the person who has a very specific sport goal, it's probably not perfect for you. You can blend aspects of it into there. And I think there's going to be a lot of things that I touch on today that you learn that you can apply to basically any type of training no matter what your goal is. But I think that my goal with this is to really define what hybrid training is. Go over the potential problems and a lot of what has been issues people find with it and what the research actually says with those things, things such as concurrent training. Can you really get results doing both? You lose muscle if you're also running a ton. What about the recovery demands and so on and so forth. I'm going to get into actually what some of the research shows on topics of hybrid training, which is going to be really fascinating. And then I'm going to break down a step by step phased approach of how to integrate hybrid training into your journey, your finished journey. So first what I wanted to do is I wanted to define it in a couple different terms. So hybrid athlete is become a buzzword. It has become something that is very popular and people just kind of say, but there is a way of defining this. And I think different people are going to define it differently, of course. But there's two main people that I want to give credit to when it comes to the hybrid athlete or hybrid training. And then I'm going to share my own definition because it's my podcast. So I'm going to give credit to Nick Bear and Alex Viotta because those are two, I would say pioneers in the hybrid world, the hybrid athlete, the hybrid training space. First I'm going to go with Alex Viotta's definition and Alex Viotta, if you're not familiar with him, he is a coach, he's an author. He is truly the OG pioneer of hybrid training. So he literally created, I have a book that I purchased from him called the hybrid athlete. And I want to say it was written in like, it must have been 2012, 2013, 14, like I mean, just so long ago, I got it from the juggernaut training site, so long ago. So he's been talking about this for longer than anybody I'm aware of. And he's been doing it for longer. He's been competing in powerlifting and endurance sport for longer than anybody. So he is like truly the guy. He just came out with another book that is phenomenal. I already got it. I've already been reading it called the ultimate guide to a hybrid athlete or something or the ultimate hybrid athlete or something like that. Really really really good. And he is the guy to go to when it comes to science behind hybrid training. And so his definition is much more on the science side. It's very short to the point. And this is I quote Alex Viotta, although it's largely popularized as lifting and running simultaneously, it really encompasses training for any two sports or activities that don't inherently support one another. So his definition of hybrid training goes much more beyond what most of us consider, which is I'm going to go run and I'm going to lift every week. For him, it's talking about sports. And if you really think about the origins of what hybrid training is, that's where it started. It started with football players, soccer players, baseball players, any kind of athletic endeavor, also lifting weights, a track athlete who runs for a sport, but he's also in the weight room lifting. They do concurrent training. They run and they lift any sport. They lift weights and they do conditioning and then they do their sports. So they're basically doing both of these things in order to improve their aerobic abilities and their anaerobic sprint power, stuff like that, as well as their strength from muscular to tendon ligament, all these things. That's hybrid training. It's just that nobody looked at them and go, they're a hybrid athlete. They go, they're an athlete because the reality is, in any sport you play, you got to build muscle, you got to get strong, you got to be explosive and you got to run far. Any sport, even if you don't have to run 10 miles, you should be able to have good endurance and good aerobic capacity for most, really most sports and most positions in most sports. Okay. Now Nick Bear, if you are unfamiliar with Nick Bear, which is, I would say probably somewhat unlikely, he's blown up and gotten really, really popular. I think his, everything he does is great. I'm a huge fan of him. I think his company is awesome. We are not affiliated with BPN, but it is a high quality company. It's great. I've used their products in the past for different endurance reasons because I'm with Jocco Fuel. Jocco Fuel is my go-to supplement. But there is a couple endurance-based products that BPN makes that I have tried and really enjoyed using for my endurance aspect of my training. But it's a supplement company and he puts a lot of content out. And he's just really one of the OG YouTubers that became a pioneer in just content creation and building a business and a life off of fitness content, which I respect the hell out of him for that. I also really, really have a lot of respect and admiration for him because he is somebody who has really been vocal and outspoken about his faith and how much his faith has influenced his life and his success. And I think that's really, for me personally, that's something I value a lot and it's really important. It's something that I was speaking out about and discussing publicly shortly before he went through a big transformation, completely unrelated because we don't even know each other. But it was really cool and reassuring to see that after I began doing so because it's not the easiest thing in today's world. But so a lot of respect for him for that. But he has become like the poster boy for hybrid athletes or hybrid training because that's what he does. I would say he has leaned more so on the endurance side more than anything. Most of his content is all about running, but he still has a background on powerlifting, bodybuilding and stuff like that. But his definition is a little bit more thorough and I would say all encompassing and welcoming. Nick Bair's quote definition of hybrid training is a fitness philosophy combining strength training and endurance work like running to create well-rounded versatile athletes improving body composition performance and longevity by building both muscle and strength as well as cardiovascular fitness, challenging the old idea that you can't get strong and run simultaneously. I love his definition. I think Alex is more of a science-based, literal guy so the definition I found from him is pretty cut and dry. However, he did a podcast recently with Tim Riley on the coaching about podcasts that would highly recommend its great episode. He's done a few since his new book came out and he has a lot more to say than just that. So I would go check that stuff out. Now, my definition is very similar, but like it's just my take on it. So what I would define as hybrid training is that hybrid training is a methodology to become a more capable human being, being a human who can survive anything and hold their own physically. It instills more confidence internally as a byproduct too. In my opinion, it's a magnificent tool for eliminating ego and adopting the choose hard mentality because there is no shortcuts or cheat reps. You just finish the race or you don't. Very similar to those guys and I think the things that I would just kind of echo based on the definition I wrote when I was putting together a lot of my notes is that number one, hybrid training is a methodology that helps people become more capable. And I think that's the most important thing when we're working with everyday people or even more advanced gym pop like myself. I'm not competing necessarily when I am because I do random competitions, but I'm not a high-rocks athlete. I did high rocks now moving on. I'm not a marathon runner. I did have a marathon and now I'm doing ultra trail runs. So I'm going to be a trail runner. And I've done a physique competition, but I wasn't a bodybuilder. I like to compete in fitness, right? But I'm still just a normal guy and what I care about most is being capable. I want to be capable of being mobile enough to play with my daughter. I want to be capable enough to be strong and carry whatever I need to carry around my house. I want to be able to be in positions like mobile functional positions while being strong when I'm doing yard work or when I'm working on my truck or when I'm building something with my wife. Whatever it may be, I want to be able to go on a hike if somebody invites me and not worry about how long the hike is or how high the hike is. I'm going to do it because I know I'm capable. I want to be able to do all these things and I think a hybrid training model really does lend itself to become the most capable version of yourself possible. You could be the strongest version of yourself by sticking strictly to powerlifting, but you're also going to have more aches and pains. You're also going to have more injury risk with your tendons, ligaments and joints. You're also going to be really strong, but you might not have that great of endurance. There's a lot of things that take a back seat when you commit everything to one specific path or modality, which if that specific path or modality is your goal then that's great. But I would consider focusing on something that is more well-rounded that really lifts you up on all fronts and gets you prepared for life. And that's what I think hybrid training does. And I also think that there is this mental aspect that really, really benefits you because you get to push yourself both in the gym and on the track if you're running or streets, trails, wherever you're running. And although you can have cheat reps and technically you can stop short on in your lifting workouts, I think you're more likely to form the good habit of not stopping short, not stopping a rep short, not quitting your workout early or, you know, really just going half-ass at it. If you add running into the mix because when you run, you got to get back home. So when I go run, I got to make it back to my starting spot, which means that I can't stop short. There's also no cheat reps. It's like if the run calls for blank miles, you either did those miles or you didn't, you know what I mean? And to me, that is just such a powerful thing. So I love, I really do love hybrid training. I think for a while I was like resistant around the idea of saying it's my training model or like my training method, all of you are, then I love it. But the truth is, when I started in this industry, I was doing strength conditioning, like I was an athlete for a sport, I lifted and I conditioned and I was a strength in conditioning training. I was a trainer who practiced strength and conditioning. That's essentially what hybrid training is. And I think that it's so much more complex than just running and lifting. And if you're just going on some runs and doing some lifting, you're not going to get the best results. And my hope today is to teach you how to do it with a much more complex strategy that's not complicated. That's not overwhelming. But it is more complex, right? Complexity can be good if you learn how to streamline it so that it feels simple as you're acting and going through it. So the first part of this podcast, I just gave the definition of what hybrid training is and why I think it's very valuable. Now I'm going to go into the science that justifies the hybrid training model. And I'm going to break down a few different myths as well as what the science actually says. So this is where I'm going to actually pull to my notes and get through some research and kind of geek out a little bit. And then we'll go into the phase by phase approach of how to assess where you're at. Develop a plan for lifting, integrate running, monitor your recovery, tweak your nutrition and all the details between. So first, let's get into the science. We're going to cover the myth of the interference effect, which I'll get into here in a sec. And then we'll go from there to aerobic adaptations that support strength and muscle. And how aerobic training can actually help you build more muscle and strength. The longevity improvements and benefits of a hybrid training model, stacking the psychological benefits. So there's actually a lot of psychological benefits that research has shown for both strength training and endurance. But when we combine them to, we're just stacking the mental health benefits that we get from this. And then last but not least, just a few things around power development. I think a lot of people do the hybrid model. They'll go do a bro session and lift weights and they go run and they forget how important power development is. And how the most likely spot to see conflict and really just fade away and negatively regress is the power development. If you're doing a hybrid model, so you have to pay attention to it. So getting into the science, let's start with the interference effect. So concurrent training does not inherently cause muscle loss. So the interference effect originally came from early concurrent training studies. And what the interference effect is is endurance endeavors or performance interfering with strength development and muscle growth. So the idea is that if we are doing too much endurance or aerobic training, it is going to negatively impact the results. We can see and achieve with regards to building muscle and getting stronger. Now, there's like most things, some truth layered into this. But this is where a lot of people will talk about, I can't do too much cardio, either way muscle. That's not going to happen. Like you're going to be fine. Because the reality is that I actually personally think that even though I'm not a fan of CrossFit necessarily, I think CrossFit has a sport to watch is great. I think it's super impressive, but it's not my training method. I think there's a lot of flaws with it. But I bring this up to say like they did a lot for the fitness industry. I mean, they empowered women to lift heavy more than any other fitness, fat or trend or style ever did. And it was one of the best things that CrossFit ever did for the fitness space and for women around the world to lift weights. I loved it. And it helped us a ton because that's what we encourage women to do. Now, what it also did is prove to a lot of people that if you do aerobic training like running or rowing or swimming or biking or high gear or any type of cardio, even for long distances, you're not going to lose muscle because here come all these guys and gals stepping into the CrossFit Games jacked as hell. They're just yoked. They're buffed. Tons of muscle really strong too. They can deadlift heavy. They can clean and press all this stuff. Yet they're running and doing all this conditioning and aerobic stuff, right? So they were like just proof literally on the screen because they were on TV doing the CrossFit Games. It's like this proves that you can do aerobic training and still maintain muscle. Now, can you build muscle? Maybe, maybe not. We'll get into that. But what I pulled from some of the research on this specifically is number one, there's some like literal mechanisms that are occurring. Zoom out of this real quick. There is some like literal mechanisms with MTOR and AMPK pathways that we'll get into briefly. I don't want to geek out too much on some of the hormonal signaling and stuff from muscle growth. But I do think it's important to touch on because it explains why people got confused by this. So first and foremost, the reason that the cardio kills your muscle gains myth exists is because this interference effect came from early on research saying that if you have both of these modalities in place, you are going to lose muscle. Now, the problem with this is that most of, and this is called concurrent, right? So concurrent training is hybrid training. Hybrid training is concurrent. Concurrent means two conflicting performance, measure metrics or styles going on at the same time. If technically, if you were a power building, which is powerlifting and bodybuilding, that's concurrent. The West Side Conjume method is technically concurrent because they use elements of both. Hybrid training, if you're running and doing lifting, that's concurrent, right? Anything that is concurrent is just you're doing two different things, the type of it, right? So early concurrent training studies, most of them had endurance that was really, really high. Nutrition was never controlled very, very rarely. Training often involved daily long duration running. So not only are they doing high volumes, but they're literally doing it every day. So it's high frequency. They're not controlling the nutrition. In most subjects, we're not lifting with high-perchview optimized programming. They were just go, here's the leg press and the lap pull down and just go do some weights, right? Very uncontrolled. And it's just like, let's throw it at the wall and see what sticks. In other words, the cardio wasn't really the problem. It was the dose, the recovery and the energy availability through the diet. And really just the structure of what they were doing. There was no good structure inside their plans. So what actually determines muscle retention and muscle growth is a few things. One, we obviously have to create a stimulus. That's not what we're going to get into today as much because I've been into death. But volume is how much training you're doing in the gym or how much running you're in whatever. But when we're looking at volume from the gym, we're looking at mechanical tension, right? You have to place mechanical tension on a muscle to create a stimulus, which causes the body to recover and adapt. So this adaptation we're after, muscle growth only occurs if we initiate a stress, which is the mechanical tension. Now, the thing that we're looking at, we look at research to say whether or not somebody's in a anabolic state, a state where they can build muscle, catabond being they break it down, is we're looking at muscle protein census and muscle protein breakdown, MPS and MPP. And so what we need is to make sure that ratio is good. We want to make sure that we need to regulate those two ratios, the ratio between muscle protein census and breakdown in order to have a good net muscle protein balance is what they call it. And when we have that, we're in a state where we can build muscle. The problem with a lot of the concurrent training research back in the day was that it showed that it put you in a negative muscle protein balance, which means that it sent muscle protein census down and breakdown up. We're breaking down too much tissue and we're not synthesizing enough. And part of the problem with this is that again, the studies were designed to just combine stuff and see what happens. They weren't done in a way that is combining training modalities intelligently to a a muscle protein census and muscle protein breakdown, while still improving the adaptations of both of those things. Because concurrent training doesn't shut off MPS because at the end of the day resistance training, this is where we get into some of the signaling of muscle growth and hormones. So bear with me, this is where we geek out a little bit. But concurrent training doesn't shut off muscle protein census completely. The act of training and running and not recovering adequately and not having fueling properly done and spacing workouts out all this stuff, that's what doesn't shut off muscle protein census, but it doesn't let muscle protein census take over and take place long enough while muscle protein breakdowns up, therefore muscle protein breakdown outweighs muscle protein census. And so resistance training, lifting weights, it still activates MTOR signaling, mechanical tension in the gym, and then satellite cell activation. So satellite cell activation is like cell swelling, this is the pump, right? We wanna activate these satellite cells that triggers muscle growth, that's going to mostly happen from mechanical tension, but mechanical tension can happen without a pump too. And then MTOR signaling is a hormonal cascade or process that actually triggers some of this pathway to build muscle. So as long as weekly training volume is high enough, we're progressively overloading our training in some way, shape or form on a consistent basis. We're eating enough protein day to day, and calories are not in a huge deficit. Muscle will be maintained and grown with or without aerobic training, because those are the things that activate muscle protein census and manage muscle protein breakdown. And when we do those two things properly, we are going to have a good muscle protein balance. The ratio is going to be favorable. So where this can actually begin to step into the world of the interference effect and where this can be mechanistically an issue, or what they see in this is that endurance training activates what's called AMPK. And AMPK is a cellular energy sensing pathway to put it in scientific terms. It's not bad. This is not a bad thing. But for example, one thing to look at is the, we all have probably not all, but maybe you haven't. If you haven't, go look this up. It's a cow that has no AMPK signaling, I believe. AMPK cow. Let's just look at this. Shh, see what we find. Is it m-tool? Of cow. Maybe it's a bowl. Yeah. So this cow is a Belgian blue. Look at this cow. It's born without myostatin. Let's see if I can get some information on this. Approaching the inhibits muscle growth that's causing an extremely muscular bowl. It's a pretty crazy looking bowl. It's honestly magnificent. But I believe this is related to partially related to the AMPK pathways. So point being is like, there's, that's, I'm going on a tangent with this. Look up the Belgian blue cow. It's pretty crazy that it's jacked. It's a bowl, not a cow. But AMPK is not bad. We need it. But it responds to low cellular energy, increases mitochondrial biogenesis. It improves fat oxidation, which is the process of actually losing fat. And it enhances glucose uptake, which we need to be able to sufficiently supply of muscles with carbohydrates and glycogen. But the issue is occur when AMPK activation is chronic and excessive. So if we just have it up all the time, it's combined with high training stress. And it doesn't, it happens without enough recovery or fuel. So in that case, AMPK can temporarily dampen mTOR signaling, not eliminated, but dampen it. And so the main thing here is that it's really about the timing and the dosage, not in incompatibility. The science behind AMPK and mTOR and all these things are less important than it is to just understand that you should run or do your endurance sport recover and then go lift and then recover. And you should have sufficient protein between. You should have sufficient time between. And when you do that, concurrent training has no issue. And research shows that you will not lose muscle by running. And you will continue to build your aerobic capacity still, even if you're lifting and training for muscle insides, as long as you are actually recovering fully and you're letting the processes take place, it needed to take place. If you are lifting and then going out and running miles right afterwards, it's not going to help you. It's going to hurt you. If you are doing an excessive amount of running volume and lifting volume, or one and a moderate amount, the other, any too much volume in either direction that you can't recover from because you're not adequately sleeping, supplying your body with the right calories and macros, so on and so forth, you are going to lose muscle for sure. You're going to put yourself in a catabolic state where that muscle protein balance is negative. So as long as we know this, we're going to be good. A good example that I wrote down, because this is similar to me, a hybrid athlete who lifts four times a week and runs three times a week. Exactly what I do. Eats at maintenance or in a slicer plus, I do except right now I'm in a cut, six week short cut. Lifts with sufficient volume and keeps most running in zone two, which zone two is aerobic. You're always going to maintain muscle. You'll even build some muscle if you're in a slicer plus. And you're going to improve your endurance simultaneously. Now, if I was going to say go run a full marathon, I would have to ramp up my-- I'm running an ultra trail run, but it's not until September. It was supposed to be in April. I switched it. My daughter's spring break told you space in the days. But I have like six plus months, more than six months. I think I have eight months. Knowing that, I don't have to run more than three times a week. Now, when I am a few months away from it, maybe I'm running four times a week, and I'm lifting three times a week. So I flipped the script, and I'm recovering adequately still. Now, I'm not going to build muscle, even if I'm in a slicer plus, because I'm just not doing enough volume for me as an advanced lifter to build muscle. Much like I can maintain my running on two to three times a week. But to progress it, I need three to four times a week on average. So you just have to shift your volume to where it makes most sense. Now, the second part of what the research shows that I wanted to dig into is how a rubber training can improve your strength and hypertrophy capacity. Because I think this is where a lot of people underestimate how beneficial cardio is outside of even wanting to be a hybrid athlete. Because maybe you're listening to this, and you're like, I don't even care about being a hybrid athlete. And I don't want to go run a 50K trail run with you, Cody. I just-- I like lifting. Do I need to do cardio? You do, because it's good for your health and longevity. But also, it can benefit your muscle and strength gains as well. And I think this is one of the most understood, but powerful aspects of hybrid training that people forget about. Number one, mitochondrial health and oxidative capacity increases when we are doing any kind of cardio. So just performing aerobic energy system-based training in general. I don't care if you're running or biking or swimming or hiking or doing like sled work in a mixed modal circuit. Like it doesn't matter. The reality is, is that mitochondrial health improves the most from doing cardiovascular training. That is extremely beneficial. So is your oxidative capacity, your ability to pull in oxygen to the blood cells, is going to improve faster from doing some kind of cardiovascular training. So some quick facts on this. Number one, mitochondria, they're not just like energy factories. They actually produce ATP, which is a dentistsine trifosophate, via oxidative phosphorylation. So ATP is where we get creatine from. It's where we generate energy to perform anaerobic capacity. So our ability to be anaerobic, which is power, strength, low rep, heavy weight, high volume lifting, that is anaerobic lifting. That is anaerobic system. That's ATP that we need to generate to provide energy to ourselves. Mitochondria helps produce that. So we need healthy mitochondria to build muscle and strengthen regardless. It helps regulate fatigue, resistance. So we're going to be more resistant to fatigue and be able to recover better if we have healthy mitochondria. It controls metabolic byproducts. So when we have metabolic waste from lifting, this is where you get beta-alene is a common product that's used because it helps buffer lactate. So we have lactic acid is what people call it. Lactate accumulation in your muscle tissue is what it is. And you get that pump, that nasty burn we are on a cell bike, are you doing 20 rep-like extensions or anything like that. That's lactate that fills you up. The faster that goes away so that you can walk normal, the better you are at buffering and controlling and getting rid of metabolic waste or metabolic byproducts. Your mitochondria health has a role in that. It influences recovery between contractions. So this is literally between every rep, how well do you recover, which means if you have better and healthier mitochondrial function, guess what? You can do more volume per set, literally. Now, if we improve our mitochondria health going over those things, we are going to be able to generate ATP faster. That's good for energy. We're going to be less reliant on anaerobic glycolysis, which basically just means our energy systems are going to be more efficient. We're going to reduce metabolic accumulation. So that's what I just got done talking about buffering in your muscle that feels like it's just about to explode. And then we're going to have a slower onset of fatigue. So we're going to be able to manage fatigue better. This is all huge. And part of this is your oxidative capacity. So look at this as when you do cardio, you are able to recover between reps, between sets, between days of the week inside the gym. Your recovery just goes up period. So if you want to be able to do more volume to build more muscle and you're just failing to do any cardio whatsoever, you're actually shooting yourself in the foot. Because you're not going to recover as well or as fast from what you're already doing. And you're not going to be able to do more to build more muscle, which is part of how you build more muscle. It's volume, which means I have to be able to go to the gym. create mechanical tension more often with more reps and more sets and more load throughout the week. How can I do that if I'm already doing a lot? You got to improve your mitochondria health and your oxidative capacity. So we want to do training because it's going to increase the mitochondrial numbers, which means it's biogenesis. So it's like literally generating new mitochondria. It improves mitochondrial efficiency. So how efficient and while they work. And it enhances enzymes active in fat and carb oxidation, which basically means how well does our body and our energy systems take fat and carbohydrates and oxidize them to use them as fuel in the muscle. So and there's a lot of things behind the scenes going on that I don't think are important, but this is why we should be lifting and doing some kind of cardio. So this is all based on research too. This is based on the fact that doing cardio improves all mitochondrial function. And it also improves like I mentioned before, oxygen delivery and capitalization into the blood cells, which is the oxidative capacity. What this does is it helps deliver oxygen throughout the body into the limbs and to the muscles. It helps deliver nutrients glucose amino acids. Like don't forget blood flow, good blood flow means that you're sending glucose fuel and amino acids proteins to the muscle to actually build. If you can't deliver nutrients to the muscle, how are you supposed to build it? Literally. And then remove metabolic waste. How are you supposed to do another set if you can't get rid of the burn and the fatigue from the last set? You got to be able to recover from it. Blood flow and oxygen getting delivered at a more effective and efficient rate is the way to do that. Your oxidative capacity is how you get better with this. Okay. And this happens through a robotic training because it actually improves blood flow efficiency, oxygen extraction. So getting oxygen in and out of the muscle and then also capillary density around muscle fibers. So your blood vessels and such. But like if you if we really just think about it, like it's pretty obvious. You get good circulation, get a good pump. You're going to have more blood flow. You're going to have more oxygen. You're going to get more nutrients. All of these things are going to help your training. And people forget that it's not just training. Like if I get a good pump and this is the hard part to understand, if I get a good pump, I assume that the pump is what is improving that. But that's not necessarily the case. Improving your oxidative capacity and your circulation will improve that pump next time you get a pump. We have to be able to improve this system. Okay. And this is all going to improve our ability to actually recover between sets, reps and sessions, like I said before. Okay. Then we have number three. What the science says on long term health and why strength or cardio alone is incomplete. I've always been the type that's like as long as you're strength training and you're just getting your steps and you're probably going to be fine. I have taken that back probably the last couple of years and I'm doubling down on it. And I think it's more and more people and more and more research is just coming out showing how important aerobic training is really. So we just can't ignore it. But here's like the the the easy cliff notes on this resistance training, strength training is really important. There's a lot of really positive adaptations that lead to better health and longevity. It's going to help increase lean mass, which has a host of benefits to our lifespan and the life that we do have here while we're living. It improves your insulin sensitivity more than most types of activity. And it helps you build muscle and loose fat, which both increase your insulin sensitivity. It preserves your bone density way more. So when we're talking about things like later on in life, getting osteoporosis or anything like that, our bone density or even just being frail and fragile and avoiding breaking your bones. This is how you do it. It maintains neuromuscular function better than most things. And that's actually really important because your nervous system is something that kind of fades away as we get older. And if we're able to train our nervous system and our neuromuscular system so that we can respond, react easily quickly, we're going to save ourselves from falling, getting hurt, injured, so on and so forth. But the problem with strength training itself is it does not maximally stimulate or improve your VO2 max, which is an important marker for aerobic capacity and health. It doesn't fully optimize the vascular system and health, which goes back to the oxygen delivery, blood delivery, your cardiovascular system. Everything I was just talking about with delivering nutrients throughout the body, preventing blood clots, things like that. And it does not train sustained cardiac output, which is extremely, extremely important for your heart, your rhythm, your HRV, heart health in general. Aerobic training does all of those things. Aerobic training itself, and this is again, and I'll touch on this briefly when we're going through the setup of how to set up a program for this. This doesn't just mean you have to go run. This means in general doing aerobic training, you're getting your heart rate up, you're breathing and you're doing aerobic energy system training. I don't care what you're using. You're on a liptical, you're going to Zumba, whatever it is. Are you getting your heart rate into a zone to a aerobic zone and are you keeping it there and maintaining it there for a longer duration of time. Aerobic training is what is going to really excel at improving cardio, stroke volume, enhancing endothelial, very hard for me to say that function. Increasing mitochondrial density, improving autonomic balance. So our ability to literally balance and balancing from an autonomic nervous system, which is going to be like, there's different roles that our nervous system plays and there's actually almost like an on/off switch is kind of how I describe it to clients at times, but there's different parts of our nervous system that are in charge of different things and we need to be able to switch back and forth. But all of these things I've already covered in the previous studies to be honest, but aerobic training does not preserve muscle mass very well. It does not max my strength and it does not protect against a sarcopenial alone and things like osteoporosis and such. So we need strength training for all the things that cardio will not help us with ever. And I would even venture to say that a person who's strength trained is going to be much more resilient and less likely to fall hurt themselves, get injured, grow frail, have indirect negative impacts from disease or illness, but a person who just listen doesn't run is going to be more likely to have underlying health issues like a heart attack or a stroke or anything like that. So osteoporosis and things like that. So like, I'm sorry, not on osteoporosis, but issues with their mitochondria and actual health internally. So to me, I'm looking at it and I go, if I'm going to make sure that internally I'm in a healthy place and I live a long life, I got to do cardio. If I'm going to also be in a place where I need to be resilient and strong and avoid being frail or feeble ever and keep my hormones in a good place, I need to strength training. We can't just do one and expect it to really decrease mortality risk and just make sure that we're living a long life, right? So that being said, all cosmore mortality risk drops most when cardio respiratory fitness is high and muscle mass and strength are preserved. The only way we can maintain muscle mass, build muscle mass and maintain strength and build strength is strength training. The only way we can make sure our cardio respiratory fitness level is high is with cardio. So all cosmore mortality comes from a combination of those and the reality is that hybrid training addresses both of those major predictors of longevity better than anything at all. Things such as cardiovascular disease risk or functional decline with aging, which can be because muscle protein synthesis drops as we age. Osteoprocess goes up, our bone frailty increases and we can break our bones or our hip and that can lead to death. I mean, there's just the list is endless, even hormonal drops from testosterone and such as with men. All these things can improve but you got to have both. You got to have both. Number four, psychological benefits. These are just some I think really cool points that I found in the research I wasn't expecting to put in here, but it does reinforce a lot of what I've talked about with mental health being improved with hybrid training. Resistance training psychology. So strength training based on research, it does build competency. Now some of this is correlation based I would just say, but what they find is people that go to the gym, experience these things and I've seen these things with myself and with others and there was some things on here that I didn't put on the list because it just is kind of out there and I don't think it's justified with enough research to support direct research to support it. But strength training will build competency. It's going to reinforce agency. I can do hard things. So agency is this idea of I don't need somebody else or like I'm confident in my own. It's agency is also a willing to lean on somebody else, but it's it's confidence in your own capabilities. It's confidence in your own decision making more than anything. I'm willing to decide. I'm confident enough in myself to like this person, but also disagree with not everything and still not hate them because I disagree with them. Right. I think this shows a lot about a person's character, do you know what I'm saying? Agency and their success improves body confidence. I think that's a given and it strengthens identity, which is something that I have seen a lot inside of our coaching more than anything and it's just physical transformation in general. But neurologically, strength training is going to improve dopamine signaling via mastery. So as you the best way to improve dopamine signaling typically comes from long duration process oriented outcome focused adventures or endeavors, journeys, goals, things you're chasing. So the fact that you have to consistently improve yourself, you get these mini micro doses of winning and progressions, but you're not seeing these huge leaps and bounds. This is why for example, video games can be harmful at times for the dopamine system. porn is very bad for anyone's dopamine system. There's a lot of things that triggers such a huge like drugs, a huge dopamine response that can negatively impact your dopamine system long term because there's nothing in real life that creates a dopamine response like those instant gratifications that you're getting these dopamine fixes from. But strength training improves your dopamine signaling so much more than anything else. Reinforces, effort, reward loops, again going back to that process oriented focus and it builds stress tolerance more than anything. Because you're literally micro-dosing your body with stress. You're applying stress to your body day after day, week after week and just seeing how much it can handle and then progressing a little bit. by a little bit, by a little bit in order to then apply more stress to your body. And this is why lifting off and improve yourself, steam, your confidence, your assertiveness, your agency, as I said before, there's even ties to success rate, work ethic, discipline, all kinds of things. Now, when we look at the psychology research on aerobic training, like running and such, aerobic work regulates your stress hormones, so your cortisol functioning and stuff. It improves mood acutely, acutely being it's not going to be a confidence thing forever, but this is often why a lot of people I think like running in the morning, I feel way better throughout my work day if I run in the morning. It's a hard thing that I always want to do when I do it, but after I do it, I have an enhanced mood. Enhances emotional regulation. This is really interesting to me, but I do believe it's partly because aerobic training is so repetitive. When you're strain training, there's a lot of variety, there's a lot of changes going on, which keeps your mind focused on the lifting. When you go run, it's just step, step, step, step, step. Any type of aerobic endeavor is a repetitive movement over and over again. It's almost like you're putting yourself in this static state of thought and you have to sit there for a long period of time. And I can't think of anything better than that to enhance my emotional regulation because you develop a lot of patience and stillness. The mechanism for all this, I mean, it goes from improving serotonin signaling, which is interesting because dopamine and serotonin work hand in hand, so we can have one to improve our dopamine sensitivity and signaling system. And then we can have one to improve our serotonin signaling system, which is a really good yin and yang. It can reduce your baseline anxiety. There's also a lot of research going back to like the cardiovascular, the blood brain. So the blood flow to your brain, and this is what is going to enhance productivity throughout the day and such. The rhythmic specifically, so repetitiveness of steady aerobic work, it also will encourage parasympathetic activation, whereas strength training ramps up sympathetic nervous system activation, which is fight or flight, go, go, go hard, explosive stress, inductive adrenaline. Parasympathetic is resting digest, recover, chill. Running out of state state can actually help with that. And again, this is that yin and yang, which is why hyper training is so helpful. It acts as a moving meditation, which is part of the reason why I've become a huge fan of running, and it improves your sleep quality. There's limited research there, but I do think that it's mostly just training in general if I'm being toy honest, but I thought it was worth adding in there, because there is research to support that. But at the end of the day, if you want to become more resilient, you need to lift. If you want to be able to regulate the recovery and regulate your emotions and regulate your mood and regulate your rhythms, you need cardio. There's this constant yin and yang of these systems, dopamine, serotonin, sympathetic, parasympathetic. It's very interesting, and it's why I think that as humans, we were designed to do both, not just one. And then the last research category I wanted to touch on before going into the actual step by step of how to design a plan is really just some additional concept that I think a lot of people skip by. And the main one is power and explosiveness, and the sensitivity to that, which I found was interesting. Explosive power is the most interference-sensitive quality, meaning power and explosiveness, power development, power training, explosiveness is the most likely thing to be negatively impacted from the interference effect. It is the most likely thing to be sensitive to the interference effect, which means just a little bit of the interference effect happening could negatively impact your explosiveness. And this is because power relies heavily on neural output. It's primarily a nervous system, dominant thing. It's your nervous system that is controlling your output and your power and explosiveness. Fatigue masks rate of force development. So it's very difficult to track your rate of force development, but when you are fatigued, you will see a huge slowdown in your rate of force development. If you don't have a machine where you can track this, like your explosiveness through the floor, I'm blanking on what it's called. There's a machine, Luca has one up at the gym. It's really cool. Basically, and I have these cables, for example, it's like a box and you attach this little wire cable to the bar and I can see my bar speed. If I have underlying fatigue, I might come in and feel like I'm not sore. I'm good to go. But my bar speed is super slow. It tells me that I have some neurological fatigue going on and I should probably de-load a little bit. So, point being is that's something that's going to be negatively impacted pretty easily from the interference effect if you're not careful. The massive endurance volume can blunt CNS readiness. That kind of goes back to what I was just saying. The more volume we do in endurance, the harder it is for our CNS to be able to react and be explosive and powerful, especially if it is not just like a controlled effort, but a reactive effort. The solution is to just basically keep endurance mostly easy. So, we're not trying to push the endurance beyond what we're capable of recovering from, nor are we trying to make a long run into a sprint. We're not trying to push it that hard. We need to make sure we're separating hard condition days and power days. So this is where we'll get into the program design aspect. And I'll show you how to really kind of model like a Charles, a Frances, high low model, because that's a really good way of doing it. You have high intensity days and lower intensity days. And then prioritizing power early in sessions, which I've always talked about as well as just being a huge fan of doing your power development work in the beginning to fire the nervous system before fatigue settles in. But energy availability can be a huge bottleneck as well, and that's something to bring up, which we are going to dig into here in a sec. Because if we are looking at hybrid training, we're probably having a super big output because we are training and we are running a lot. And so we need to make sure we don't under fuel, because that's going to contribute to all these negative things. And lastly, periodization makes hybrid training sustainable, and that's another thing people miss out on. So I think the main three things that I wanted to touch on that research supports that people forget about are just don't pay enough attention to is the power output and making sure that you're prioritizing power development in your training the right way to not negatively impact your power development or how explosive you are. Make sure that you are paying attention to your fueling strategy, which I don't want to talk about too much because I'm going to have a whole section on that that we're going to get into how to prioritize your fuel, because you're going to be burning fuel like crazy when you're doing a lot of runs and heavy training. And then last but not least, periodization, like you have to periodize, which is just a methodical way to plan out your training, block to block. So week to week, month to month, and even throughout the year to make sure that you are not overdoing anything and you can actually recover fully and also shift the emphasis of what your primary goal is, because there's going to be seasons and periods of time throughout the year where you want to focus more so on building muscle or getting stronger, and then sometimes where you want more so on running or endurance, like when I'm getting ready at the last few months of my race prep. So that is the science and some of the more detailed nuance of hybrid training. Now it's time to get into the guide, the actual guide of how to design a plan. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go over phase one, which is assessment and goal setting. I'll go over phase two, which is managing your stress bucket, so the recovering properly. Phase three is building the weekly split. So how to actually build a weekly split. Phase four is exercise selection and modality choice, and then phase five is nutrition and fueling for two goals, making sure that you're fueling properly for both goals, which means that you are doing this concurrently. So there's going to be times where you're fueling differently depending on the day's session but also overall how your fuel looks. And then sorry, there's one more phase, phase six is common pitfalls and how to avoid them. So just making sure we're avoiding some of the common things that people get wrong when they're trying to do this hybrid model. And I think it's why some people have a bad experience with it when they don't have to have a bad experience. It can be way better. So we are going to dive into this. I'm going to take a break. It is 47 minutes in and this is going to be a doozy. We're going to make this a long podcast. So you won't even know the difference. 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Head over to thetayletrainer.com or visit any app store and download the app right now to receive a free trial so that you can test out just how effective my training programs are before committing financially. Alright, so phase one of building out your hybrid training plan. We got to start with the assessment and the goal setting. Now, this is the foundation but it's also something that I don't feel like I can do complete justice with inside of a podcast. I feel like this is where we have to get more visual. I have to be able to like go through different aspects with the individual and I say that because an assessment is different for everybody. So I want to just give you some bullet points of what you need to consider and what you should be doing for yourself or hiring a coach to help you do for you. So the first is the audit. So just in general, you have to assess your current base in both strength and endurance. So if you don't know where you're at, go test it out. There is a lot of really easy and safe strength test you can do from relative strength to absolutely strength. So absolutely strength being something that you're probably going to perform with a safe compound, excuse me, a safe compound lift like a leg press or a trap bar deadlift or a bench press. Then you're going to do some kind of relative strength exercise like, I mean, you could do walking lunges for distance for the lower body. You could also do pull-ups, push-ups for the upper body, things like that that is more relative strength base. So you have to figure out just like where's your baseline at and you're going to do that with endurance too. So go run a mile or do a Thompson test or whatever it may be that you know you can run for 10 minutes and see how far you go at a certain pace. Get to a zone to heart and just see how long you can run for. Easiest way to do in my opinion in the most applicable to aerobic training in general is going to be a 30-minute test. Put 30 minutes on the clock, run as far as you can while trying to control your pace, meaning that you should ideally be able to be running the same pace at minute one that you did minute 30. Which if you're new to running or you haven't ran before and you're like really at like a foundational baseline that you have to create period. You have no experience with endurance stuff. You're not going to be able to do it. It's a skill to be able to control your pace that well. But that's all point. Like try to do that and assess how well did you control your pace? What was your heart rate during the run? How far did you get? Did you have to take breaks along the way? Just figure out your base. Then you're going to define your bias, meaning choosing between a strength bias and endurance bias or a maintenance split. Now there are times where you can definitely lean on both. For example, I've had seasons where I'm just trying to maintain right now is a good example. I'm maintaining my aerobic ability because I'm not ready to push hard into full-blown race prep because I don't want to overdo it and fatigue myself before I need to be fresh and ready. But I also just went through a back injury so I can't lift in a growth volume for my body from a muscular perspective. So I'm maintaining both while working on rehab. But then I'll shift into race prep where I'm going to be pushing the miles more so that I'm pushing the volume in the gym. And then after that I'm going to shift gears because I'm going to want to build some more muscle and also give my body a break from running a little bit. So you can shift back and forth what the emphasis is. But the point is is define your bias. If you want to get jacked and get strong but you just want to run enough to be healthy and live long, then your bias is going to be lifting weights. And I think that's where most people are going to land and probably should land. Smart goals. So smart goals. Looking at this from, you know, what is it? Is it simple or maybe it's smart but simple, measurable. I can't remember now. I've talked about that. I didn't put the analogy which I'm usually doing. But point is is that goals for two different worlds, right? So like example would be your hybrid goals being sub 25K or deadlifting a certain amount of weight. So for me when I do the half marathon, I set the goal of I'm going to do and that was my first like endurance event. I'm going to run the half marathon in less than two hours because I just googled what's an impressive half marathon time for a male in his 30s. And everything I read was like if you get below two hours you crushed it for your first one. I was like cool. I'm going to do that. And I got an hour and 40 some minutes killed it. Hi rocks. I did the same thing. I was like what is a good time and it was actually less than an hour 45. I think it said would be like good. I got like an hour 30. I think it was an hour 31 minutes or something. Perfect. And that's a solo not a partner in high rocks. But like those were my goals, right? And then maybe I had a goal of a certain amount of pull ups are maintaining a 315 deadlift for five reps or maintaining 225 bench for eight reps, whatever like I have these strength feats I've already done. If I'm pushing the goal for the endurance side, I'm going to try to focus on maintaining my high levels of strength on the strength side and vice versa. If the goal is more for that, you can also have like more casual goals. Like I'm not pushing like the half marathon one was a push for me because I hadn't ran ever and I was going for 10 weeks until the half marathon. But if it was like, I got six months, I've done this before I can set a pretty lofty goal in both areas because I have more time. But in general, what we're trying to do here with phase one is just really assess where you're at with both of them and then just make sure that you're defining which ones most important to you. And if they're equally important, that's fine too. But usually we have a bias towards one. And if you don't have a bias of which one you like more, want more, then you need to have a bias based on what one needs more improvement or has more room to grow. And then you can base your goals off of what you assess and audit. Number two is phase two is going to be managing the stress bucket. And this is really, really important. There is more going on now. If we're doing hybrid training, we are running and we are recovering from running. We are lifting numerous times a week. We're lifting lower body. We live in everybody, full body, whatever it is, we have a lot going on and we have life stress. So lifting and dieting is one thing. But like also adding in endurance is another thing. So it really starts to increase and fill the bucket. So to speak, the stress bucket up higher and higher. So what we want to do is kind of practice this idea or theory of consolidating stressors. And this is where you look at like a high low model for the most part, which I believe is from Charles, Charlie Francis way, way, way back. And it's like basically we have hard days and easy days. You wave your intensities. I've been talking about this for years now inside my programming. I have high intensity days and lower intensity days. Days that really take it out of you. Days that really push the envelope with your nervous system, with your muscular system, everything, all of it or some of it really be hard. And some days where it's a little bit of a back off, right? We have high days and low days. So this is where we pair hard days with hard days and easy with easy, right? So if I am actually going on a hard run today or like an intensity driven run, I might actually want to do a hard session that afternoon because I'm doing some two days. I don't want to do a hard run that pushes it like an intensity based run and a hard lift tomorrow. I would rather do a hard run this morning and a hard lift this afternoon and then take a rest day tomorrow or an easy day tomorrow. And it can seem counterintuitive, but it's not. It pairs the hard high intensity nervous system dominant days together and gives you adequate rest in between whether the rest is coming from active recovery, like a slightly lowered intensity session or a complete rest day. So this is the theory of consolidating stressors together and it kind of models the high low model from Charlie Francis and it works really well. Recovery management is part of this understanding your nervous system fatigue and versus local muscular fatigue. Basically just becoming more aware. I think during hybrid training, you have to really understand. I think this is just in general having more body awareness and training awareness is really important. If you are really sore, your muscles are sore, that doesn't necessarily mean there's a lot of global fatigue. That doesn't mean you're in danger. That doesn't mean you're in pain. That doesn't mean that your nervous system is fatigued and crashed out or that you have HPA access dysfunction or a drain of fatigue as people usually call it. That doesn't mean any of those things. So understanding the difference between central nervous system fatigue, when you have brain fog, when you feel slow, when you feel lethargic, but you're not sore versus I'm really sore, but I have energy. I'm happy. I'm in a good mood. I'm just fucking sore. Two different things. Understanding these is important because you can have a low day and easy day in the gym where you're lifting weights bodybuilding style and it's not super, super hard high intensity and you're very sore from a muscular perspective, but your nervous system is totally fine. And vice versa, you can do a power day and strength day and you're not sore at all, but for some odd reason, you're fatigued and lethargic. That can be a very hard thing to identify. So it's important to start trying to assess and become aware of your nervous system fatigue as you do this stuff. And then the last of it is this like 80/20 rule of intensity during your runs. So I think that most of your aerobic training, your cardio should stay in the zone two. So 80% of what you do in the realm of running should be in the zone two area, which is aerobic, which can be quote unquote low intensity or easy. It's longer duration. So it's not easy by any means once you start running miles, miles, miles, it gets hard to trust me. But because most of your training in the gym is high intensity, it is not zone two. It is balls to the wall, high heart rate, high nervous system demand, all those things. That's more anaerobic base. We really want to stay in the aerobic capacity. And most of those health benefits from mitochondria, oxidative capacity, cardiovascular health that I talked about earlier, those come from aerobic, not anaerobic training. So we want to keep it in zone two and not push the threshold. We're not trying to do sprints all the time. That's the big key. Phase three, we need to build the weekly split. So the weekly split, and this is how we literally put it together. So the first step inside of building your weekly training split is going to be the big rocks. I'm just going to mention this real briefly. I'll remind you again at the end of this podcast. But there's a link in the description of this episode and it is going to take you to the written version of this podcast in the written version. You're going to get much more details on this. I'm going to give you literal examples of what the split looks like. And when it comes to program design, sometimes it's a little bit easier to see it on paper than it is to hear me talk about it. However, hearing me talk about it provides the context and the theory behind the methods. Having it on paper shows you the methods. So go download that. It's free. I'm literally doing it because this is such a complex topic that I want to make sure I give some kind of tangible guide that you can use. Just click the link in the description. You can literally download it really quick, really easy for free. So step one, big rocks. First, program your primary lifts and your key endurance sessions. So this is really just going, okay, first and foremost, what am I doing? Am I doing like a three day split or a four day split or a five day split? Like what am I, what days a week and my lifting? Look at your schedule and go, what days in my lifting? What are my primary lifts? Bench, squat, deadlift, over at press? Where are these placed in? Because those impact your running quite a bit. And then look at your key endurance sessions. I'm going to base this off three days a week running. I think that's the most common. If somebody wants to get in running and wants to improve their running ability, I'm going to do that. I suggest three days a week is pretty common. It's easy to recover from and it's the best split because it allows us to do multiple things. We can do a easy recovery day. This is where we're getting out there. We're training the aerobic system, but we're not pushing the envelope. We have an intensity driven day, which is usually 1,000 meter repeats. It is tempo runs, a progressive run, a hotspot run where you have four miles, but on mile two and a half, you gotta push the tempo hard on a half of the mile. Right? Now, I know this seems like I'm getting out of this zone to aerobic, but I'm not. I'm staying 80% of the time in that aerobic zone. A hundred 1,000 meter sprints might be just two or three intervals of 1,000 meter sprints with a longer run on the front and end as a warm up and a cool down. You're still overall in that aerobic zone. But we gotta make sure we're looking at it or we can go on what days? Am I training? When am I lifting? When am I running? How am I differentiating those days? Step two is sequencing the days. This is where we have morning versus evening sessions. I recommend running in the morning and lifting in the evening. You can do it vice versa if you want. I have yet to meet anybody who prefers to lift in the morning and run in the evening. For most research, running in the morning on less food or none, depending on how far you're running, has no downside to it. It's really not negatively impacting anybody. I've ever talked to Nora, I've seen any research that supports it being a negative. However, there is a lot of people I've talked to that don't like lifting in the morning. I've talked to a lot of clients who like lifting in the morning and then when I have them lift in the afternoon with food in their stomach, they lift way better and they realize how much better it is to lift in afternoon. And there's also a lot of research to show. People form better in the afternoon with lifting weights and they build more muscle and strength in the gym in the afternoon. So I would suggest that, but the point is you have a six to eight hour rule. When we look at the concurrent research, it suggests that we have a six to eight hour period of time between lifting and running and when we do that, we don't see an interference effect happen. So it's important to separate those out. The low stress mid week buffer, this is important to have a low stress day. For example, today is Wednesday. It is 5.02 PM. I have not lifted day. I normally am finishing my lift right now and going home. I don't really lift on Wednesdays unless my schedule gets crazy. Why? Because I have a mid week buffer. This is a day where I can just low stress. I walked and typed and, you know, I'm going to go on a walk tonight before bed. I get my steps in, but I'm not running in the morning. I'm not lifting in the evening. I'm just taking a full day of rest Wednesday and Sunday. And what did I yesterday? I ran and I lifted going back to the high low model, but a mid week low stress buffer is really helpful for a lot of people. Waving intensities is the last thing for sequencing days. The high low model. I've already talked about it. So I'm not going to beat its death, but having high days and low days. Go hard, go light, go hard, go light. Wave your intensities throughout the week. And sometimes it's like moderate high low rest, moderate high low rest. That's fine too. But the point is that you're waving intensities throughout the week. And the recommended splits I have is, you know, if you're a busy professional or busy adult that just doesn't have much time, I would suggest three days of lifting and then three days of running if you can. And, or if you are training for like an iron man, are you training for an ultra and you need more running than you do lifting, then I would still lift three days a week and run probably four days a week. If you are a, I would say like the, you know, a more serious lifter, you really want to get into hybrid training. I would suggest lifting four days a week and running three days a week. But either way, I would recommend a three or four days split. I think advanced lifters and advanced hybrid athletes maybe could get away with doing a five day split. I just don't see it being beneficial. It's a lot to recover from and most people do better with a little bit less. Now, phase four is exercise selection and modality choice. There is so much I could say about exercise selection and I've done a lot of different content and podcast, YouTube videos, all kinds of stuff on exercise selection. But the main things I want to mention are that when you're selecting your exercises, I would highly suggest choosing your compound lifts first and then going down the weeds from there. I have a lot of content on program design, so I'm not going to get into all the semantics because at the end of the day, I mean, shoot, I think I could talk for, I mean, I did. I have three modules in my course that we're developing on program design and either each an hour plus, I get, I dive deep into it. And that's part of my mentorship. We have a whole course on it in there too. That's like nine different modules on top of those three that I just mentioned. So it's a lengthy topic that I can get into. But the reality is is I would suggest going with your compound lift. So if you have a three day split, you have a squat bench deadlift day. If you are doing, and that's not necessarily not, actually, I'll save this. You have a squat bench deadlift day. If you have an upper lower split four days a week, which is another really good split for a hybrid model, even if you do a four days a week of full body, you still do this. You have a squat bench deadlift overhead press day. So you're basing your days on the compound lift itself. Now what I would suggest, even though these movement patterns are non-negotiable, those exercises are not non-negotiable, meaning you don't have to do a barbell over a press. You don't have to do a barbell deadlift or a barbell back squat. I actually believe that alternative variations to the compounds that still practice the movement pattern we're after are better for most people. If you're not competing in the barbell sport, I guarantee there is a variation of that movement pattern, like a split squat instead of a regular squat, or a safety bar instead of a regular barbell, that is going to be more joint friendly. It's going to lead to better recovery, and it's going to be less likely to pose a risk of injury on you, which is really important when you're doing running or any kind of conditioning on top of lifting on a regular basis. So I think that's a really useful tip for people to have. Now the other aspects of this is I would highly suggest doing a lot of unilateral work because it complements the hybrid athlete way more than a bilateral. When we're running or doing hybrid sports, we're in a split stance. We're doing one leg at a time, right? And it puts more stress on the muscle and less stress on the joints because we can lower the load and still maximize tension on the muscle itself. And it's the most applicable way to still get stronger while improving your hybrid athlete endeavors. Low rep sets, I don't recommend too much of because they can be too fatiguing, and your overall global fatigue might push you to burnout. So making sure you're avoiding like one or a maxis, three of maxis things like that can be helpful because if you go too close to that heavy load, maximal strength-based threshold, you are going to be posing a risk of fatigue on the overall system more than anything else. But you also can do some of those lower upsets and use things like cluster sets and different intensification methods that help you push the intensity get stronger while also managing fatigue really well. Because it keeps that training effort and intensity really high still. And then when it comes to endurance selection, I kind of already talked about this, but the big thing is that you're making sure that you're choosing your running based on this high low model. And number one, we got to choose what we want to do as far as the aerobic actual modality. Now, higher impact is going to be running because it's a lot of joint impact. Lower impact is going to be cycling, swimming, or rowing because those are going to manage joint health and muscle damage better because there's no eccentric load. When I'm swimming or I'm biking, there's just concentric, which is the positive. E-centric being the negative, like the downward phase on the squat. That's what really places the most stress on a joint as well, especially when it's traumatic based or it's reactive. Like we're absorbing force into the floor every time we take a step. That's eccentric load at force, peak force. And we're repetitive as hell. And the muscle damage is the muscle tissue actually breaking and having to repair, which isn't a bad thing. But if we're trying to recover, like we're not doing running for muscle growth, so we don't want to cause too much of that unless our goal is to run. Now, I just like running, so that's what I do and it is higher impact. But you can really build your aerobic system and get all those benefits I talked about by doing any form of aerobic training. I have trained people for marathons without running at all until the last little bit because they had an Achilles issue. We did a lot of sled, a lot of rower, the assault bike. It's programming for energy system improvement. And that's just no matter what, it's gonna build your engine. So if you need to save your joints, maybe you're not doing three runs, but you're still doing three aerobic sessions. That's totally doable. And as long as you're waving your intensities throughout the week, alongside your training and the same high-low model, you're gonna be golden from a recovery perspective. And that means basically doing, you know, you have an easy run, I would say an intensity run and a long run if you're doing three days a week. If you're doing two days a week, what you might wanna do is a long run every week because the main goal of aerobic development is endurance. It's to pursue longer. So you always kinda need that long run to push the endurance threshold and your aerobic capacity, capacity being how much can you do. And then you can alternate weeks between easy run and an intensity run. So maybe week one, you have an intensity run which could be a tempo run or intervals or whatever it may be. And then a long run and then week two, you have an easy run, which is a low pace, shorter duration, it's just greasing the groove. You're getting out there and you're turning the wheels and a long run every week, right? So you can alternate between those two. And then for exercise selection, there's like the gap fillers and that's, you know, for running specifically, core stability and I already mentioned unilateral work. Those two things are gonna be really important as well as hamstring training. Training your hamstring is gonna create more stability in your knees and it's also going to prevent too much tension and volume being placed on the quads because a lot of running is hip flexor and quad dominant. So if you can train your posterior chain, you're glutes and your hamstrings more, it's gonna benefit your knee health from running but also it's gonna help you not overtrain the quads while under training the hamstrings. And that can lead to a host of issues. And then you should be doing that stuff though for performance recovery and injury prevention more than anything. And then on top of that, isolation exercise to enhance muscular adaptations on secondary body parts that are easy to recover from. Things like your delts or glutes and hip abductions any isolation bodybuilding work gets thrown in there, just to make sure that you're your cover in your bases from an isolation perspective and a muscle perspective. Because again, if we're doing hybrid training, part of our goal is to make sure that we're maintaining our muscle and/or building muscle and strength. So it's really important to have that aspect as well. Now the next phase is nutrition and fueling and then we wrap up with common pitfalls. So like the exercise selection, I'm going to kind of float over the top of nutrition because I have a whole guide on nutrition. I've talked about nutrition extensively on this podcast and this isn't a nutrition podcast. But the biggest thing to remember is that when you are looking at your nutrition, you are fueling for two goals now. You are running and performing and you are lifting and you're trying to recover from both of those things. Physically, mentally, physiologically, everything, right? So first and foremost, remind yourself of the caloric demand. And try to calculate your your hybrid training tax, if you will, on your total daily energy expenditure. I actually wrote down some examples of this just to paint a picture of what you actually burn when you run. So I ran 2.7 miles the other day and it was a shorter run. I'm on a D-load phase, but it's 1,000 meter repeats. So I had 2,000 meter sprints with a warm up and a cool down basically. It was 2.75 miles total. That burned 243 calories. That's it. That's not much. I did a 4.5 mile progressive run, which means that each mile, it just the pace increases a little bit and I'm not like top out balls the wall by the end of it, but it just slowly ramps up and then it cools down. That's a progressive run. 4.5 miles, it burned 539 calories. And then an example of a bigger run, which it's interesting because double the distance, 11.8 miles. But as you run further, you do burn more calories. Why? Because your heart rate gets up and it's more fatiguing. My 11.8 non-paced run, so it was just go for 11.8 miles, I burned 1,586 calories, which is anywhere from, you know, these calories basically are anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of my maintenance intake. So I want you to just understand that the hybrid tax adds to this a lot. And what I would suggest doing here is to make sure that you are aware of how many calories you can potentially burn. I don't like tracking calories burned too closely, but it is important to understand how many calories you burn. If you understand the tax you're putting on your body, then I would suggest being aware of this, looking at your runs to fuel for them based on how many calories you're going to burn need. Spitting up your macros into macros that are going to help you with your performance and maintaining muscle for this hybrid aspect, which means that we want a high protein, high carb low fat diet, plain and simple. Protein for repairing, carbs is the primary fuel. Fats are just there to make sure one. You fuel our health and hormones, but most research does show that only seven grams a day is going to fuel your, this is based on dietetics research. It's going to fuel your organ needs and your health needs is all you need. Seven grams, it's insane. Nobody's eating just seven grams. But what that tells me is that we don't need nearly as much as that we think and that we try to make the excuse for. Therefore, the majority of our fats benefit us from making food more palatable. Now I would say you do need more than seven grams a day to support hormones, but remember that your total calories, you can have an extremely low fat diet and have high calories, non-defsit and your hormones won't be negatively impacted, 99% of the time. If you have a lot of body fat in your body, that's going to support your hormones. You could go quite a while in a deficit and with low fats and still be totally fine hormonally. So you got to be pretty lean to really see any issues with this or go extremely low fat for a long period of time. And most of the fats are just going to make food more palatable. They can change your digestion rate, which could be good or bad depending on how we utilize that for absorption needs. And then it just allows for more flexibility regarding like socially, especially, but also a little bit of metabolic flexibility there. Protein should be set at normal muscle building levels. So 0.8 to 1 grams per pound of body weight or slightly higher, 1 to 1.2 grams per pound of body weight if you're pretty lean because the leaner you are, the more important it is to manage that muscle protein synthesis, to muscle protein breakdown balance, to prevent muscle loss. And then carbs should just take the rest of your calories and they should definitely be the majority of your calorie intake. And what I would say about intra workout fueling, which is the way that we fuel ourselves during the runs and such, we need to know what to put in our body just to avoid bonking. So you have to first understand that if we're doing a hybrid athlete model, we are not running and performing like a hybrid athlete with these aerobic endeavors for the aspect of burning fat and losing weight. We are doing it to improve our endurance. That is a really, really important thing, which means that we want to fuel for them. If we fuel for them, it might take us out of a deficit, technically, depending on how we fuel for them. But there's a way to avoid that. So knowing this, number one, understand that an endurance athlete can burn anywhere from 1 to 5 grams of carbs per minute while running. Intensity, body fat levels, your experience running and your energy system efficiency based on your mitochondrial health, cardiovascular health, oxidative capacity, all these things, it'll alter the exact amount of fuel burned by that endurance athlete. So depending on those things, depends on how much calories carbs you actually burn per minute. One gram is the best place to start. Most people are not going to be towards that 5 grams until they get to a pro level. Focus on 1 gram per pound, which means that if you are running for 30 to 60 minutes, 60 grams of carbs is going to be plenty for that, especially because you got to understand you have a pre-workout meal, you have carbs circulating, your bloodstream, you're not shredded to the gills. So the leaner you get and the less you eat pre, the more you need intra. Basically, at about the 45 to 60 minute mark, if you have 25% or more of the distance left to run, I would suggest adding 20 to 40 grams of carbs as an interval because it can be helpful. You get used to this, I know what mile mark for me, like around 3.5 to 4 miles is when I start to feel like I'm going to bonk soon and I just have to have a little bit of carbs. 20 to 30 grams, I'm good for another 3 to 4 miles. But a strategy to better control body composition, if you're trying to be a hybrid athlete and look like one, two, is to keep your daily intake the same and then separate your pre and intra fuel from that. So basically, I have my intake to support muscle and fat loss and I'm in a deficit to lose weight or I'm at maintenance to maintain my body fat levels and muscle. When I have a long run, I add carbs, pre-workout and intra workout and I do not count those towards my deficit. So I am fueling my performance, which means I'm not burning extra calories necessarily in the extra calories. I am burning on those runs. I might actually be replacing with carbs that I can try to guesstimate my best or calculate the best of my ability and it doesn't take me out of that deficit. Now, if we're trying to maintain, it's a lot easier because your metabolism is so flexible, it's not going to be perfect and it doesn't have to be. So you can kind of alter and be within range. But when you're in a calorie deficit, trying to lose fat and you're still running a decent amount, the best way to do this is to completely separate how you're counting and count your macros and calories for fat loss and then add additional carbohydrates, only carbohydrates for your pre and intra fuel for your long runs. Now the last little section I have here is just the common pitfalls and I'm just going to like, this is just a really brief thing. My recommendation is don't do too much too soon. Start slow, focus on slow and steady progression. Like 5 to 10 percent volume increases per week, deloting when you need to, trying to taper back every four weeks or so. Choose specialty bars, you know, a lot of exercises, things that don't fry your nervous system as much like I talked about. Do all those things. Doing too much too soon is a bad trap to fall into and you will regret it and you might not come back from it because you get injured. Don't ignore the taper. You've got to delot every once in a while, especially if you're adding in running. And don't let your ego take control because knowing when to dial back is important. What your ego wants can differ from what your body actually needs in that day, session, week, whatever it is. Don't let your ego take over. It is not allowed in the hybrid training world. Focus on what your body needs. Listen to your body. Listen to the plan. Stick to the plan. Be consistent and focus on recovery. And if you take these six phases and you understand the science behind everything I talked about in the beginning, you will know exactly how to follow a hybrid training plan and not just something that you throw against the wall and see if it sticks where you're just running and lifting and hoping that you get jacked and can also run a marathon. But using an intelligent approach, science back methodology and literal strategies that I just gave you to make sure that you're doing it the right way. And if you want that written on paper, which I would highly recommend because it compliments this podcast so well and it makes it ten times more applicable, download the hybrid guide that I will link in the description of this podcast. And if you want to try out one of my hybrid programs itself, go to the tailortrainer.com, try a seven day free trial of my app and you can try out one of my own hybrid plans today. , thank you.