How to Build the PERFECT Weekly Workout Plan for Strength, Muscle, Cardio & Athleticism | #115

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I want you to just conceptualize what a good, comprehensive training protein is. What I just laid out for you twice a week is going to carry 80% of the benefit of double that volume. It really is because that is the point where the volume starts to taper off. If somebody came to me and they did that, I could would guarantee you they'd be in really good shape. How's it going today? I'm going to dedicate the hour to what you would do if you wanted to optimize your fitness. Let's say hypothetically, you don't really have any biases. You don't have a lean towards loving endurance training and you don't want to optimize just like your ability to go further faster or ride a bike farther or swim further, run further, or you don't have a bias towards high-purchase training. You don't want to optimize just that because you can't optimize all things all the time. You can't be the strongest and the biggest and have the most endurance. You just can't. You can get pretty good at all that stuff. You can't optimize each of those. Let's say you really don't really have a strong bias towards strength training. You want to use your training to just have the best overall health and athletic performance outcome that you can based on normal human time constraints and recovery abilities. Let's assume you're not on a bunch of steroids and you don't have $10,000 a month to spend on peptides and growth hormone and you don't have 30 hours a week to train and recover. Like have a family, have a job, not rich, maybe you're on TRT or maybe not, but you're not on a bunch of antibiotics and not on peptides just normal dude. Based on science more or less, I would say science equitation works because I'm not a scientist, I'm a trainer. Read a bunch of stuff but there are other people out there that will give pretty much similar advice. My advice might be just a little different but it's pretty close. To do that, we're going to assume that you're not periodizing and what that means is you take certain times of the year and I would actually suggest or encourage you to explore this possibility because I prefer it. Certain times of the year where you focus on one or the other and you kind of divide your training into two parts. There's the structural neural bias part which is like muscle size, strength, power, speed right? Then there's the metabolic part which is like aerobic base, capillary density, VO2 max, lactate, threshold. Yeah, exercise, physiologist, there's any that listen to this will be like, well, they're related, you have course to relate it. They are dependent on one another but we got to basically categorize stuff, right? Those are the two ones that have generally the different pathways. I think it's a AMPK and then MTOR and they kind of conflict with each other and it's hard to kind of develop both sides of that coin to a high level at the same time. It's best to kind of decide what you want and do a minimal effect of dose of one while you focus more of your energy on the other at a bare minimum for a brief amount of time. That's the best way but let's assume that you don't like to do that. You like pretty much every week to look the same and you like to know what you're going to do and you don't want to keep track of stuff in your mind and you're just like, what do I need to do to just have the best health outcomes, live the best life and be kind of athletic, what do I need to do? What's the protocol? Because we love our protocols now. Today I'm going to spend an hour trying to give you guys a basic protocol. We're going to divide this up into categories. Let's start with strength. That's the best way bang for buck. We're always going to go for bang for buck. All these aren't necessarily the minimal effect of dose but it's kind of pushing closer to the optimal dose and what I mean by optimal dose is best bang for your buck. To where more after that will carry more benefits but it's not like a one to one ratio. You got to do start doing more to get less benefits. The point of diminishing returns. Just one of the reasons for periodization going back to that and argument is there might be times when you want to do more than just the optimal dose, effective dose to break through plat toes and to do that, that means that other areas you have to do minimal effective dose. Even less. That's why I would encourage because if you want to optimize your strength gains, you might need a little bit more volume than this depending on where you are. Every one of these is going to go by that point where you get the best bang for your buck. Just assuming we're busy and everything like that. Strength training. Let's keep this simple. Four to six sets per week, per body part or movement pattern. Kind of different but they're kind of the same. Four to six sets per week above 80% of your one-brut max. What does that mean? That's 80% of your one-brut max. A lot of us don't know. The way to kind of estimate your one-brut max is you pick a weight that you can do no more than 10 times. The closer you are to more like five times the better the more accurate it's going to be. It'll say eight times. No more than 10 definitely. Get somebody to spot you. Be safe. You go until the next rep, you feel like you're going to reach a volitional failure. You won't be able to complete it. We'll take it to one rep of failure. What you do is you take that, you add one rep to it, assuming that you could probably get one more. Let's say you do a set of squats and you stop at six and you're pretty sure you could have gotten seven. Go ahead and add that one in there. You take that weight times the reps that you did plus that one rep. Seven times 0.0333 and then you add the weight you did back into that. That will give you a number. That number will be close enough to your one-brut max where you can do some pretty fair calculations and be fairly confident that you're in the ballpark there. It doesn't have to be exact. That's how you find your one-brut max. That I actually have to do your one-brut max. You can get some percentages. Four to six sets per week above 80% of your one-brut max and most people can do their one, 80% of their one-brut max somewhere between four and eight reps. There's a big variation there. That should give you the idea about how heavy it needs to be. If it's between four and eight, that means most people out there are doing 80% of their one-brut max five or five to six, five to seven times, something like that. Need four to six sets per week per pattern. You need to take at least a two to three minute break in between those. Ideally, you're going to divide that up into two doses. I would recommend that novices do that, but once you become more advanced, you don't have to do that anymore. We're going to go into some of the details here. For instance, I'm going to go on later, but a beginner should probably do four to six sets per week for both a horizontal and a vertical press. Think bench press and standing overhead press because they can handle that extra volume and frequency. As you get more advanced, I don't think that's necessary or even necessary the best way. I think you should do your horizontal pressing above 80% once a week and then try to do some vertical pressing once a week because there's a lot of carry over there, especially for the neural adaptations. There's a lot of muscle crossover. Another example is as a beginner, you should probably do at or above 80% of your 1-Ret max for squat/lunge twice a week and for hinge twice a week. For an advanced, I would say squat once a week, hinge once a week, maybe lunge once a week because there's so much cross over there that I don't think you need to do each one of those more than once a week. Just for the movement pattern and the body parts, they start to get skewed a little bit because you're only doing the squat pattern once a week, but if you do squats on one day and hit your do lunges on another day, you're hitting your quads and your glutes twice a week there. And then if you do hinges one day a week, you're working your glutes and your hamstrings, you're also working your hamstrings a little bit the lunges, a little bit with the squats too, especially if you throw in like an auxiliary movement, like a leg curl, which you'll get into, you're getting too stamos as a week, even though you're only working the pattern once a week. So that's kind of the difference there. Beginner, yeah, hit each pattern twice a week, advanced, just hit it once a week, should be enough because you're hitting that body part twice a week. So with strength training, it's best to hit things more than once a week. And I think you can do that either way. But all right, hopefully I'd beat that horse enough like I love to do, love to be horses. Okay, so moving on to size. To optimize things, I would add on, in addition to the four to six sets per week that you're doing for strength, even though strength is gonna improve muscle size a lot, right, it's not one or the other. I would add on an additional four to six sets per week between 60 and 80% of your wonder at max, take in to within two reps of failure. I wanna tell you about a product I use every day, element, spelled LMNT electrolytes. It's the perfect blend of sodium magnesium and potassium to optimize your hydration. They come in convenient salt sticks when you're on the go, or cans of delicious sparkling electrolyte water into tons of great flavors. Three of my favorites are citrus, watermelon, and lemonade. To receive a sample pack of their most popular flavors with the purchase go to my link, drinkelament.com/jud. That's drinklmt.com/judd. If you're ready to really optimize your performance through better hydration, try them out, you won't be disappointed. (upbeat music) So, what does that mean? So 60% of your wonder at max, most people can do that about 15 times. And then, so the sweet spot there, I say 60 to 80, but really most of that should be like 70 to 75-ish. And you can do that somewhere like eight to 12 times. So that's your traditional bodybuilding. That's why it's hypertrophy training, muscle size, right? So, the best strategy is to just have about half of your training volume should be in like the four to eight rep range, sweet spot six. And then another half of your weight training should be somewhere in that like eight to 12 rep range. There's just the, there's a ton of cross over there, but the adaptations are slightly different. And some exercises don't fit quite as well in that four rep range. They fit a little bit better in more than eight to 12 rep range. So, for example, I love to lunge heavy, but I rarely go below like six reps per leg in my walking lunges. Usually it's six to eight. Whereas like my back squats, you know, I can go as low as three reps. It just doesn't feel completely safe to him, like super heavy weight for three reps and like a single leg. You can do it, it's probably not best, you know? And then like other things like dumbbell incline bench. Great compound lift, right? I consider that more of like a base strength lift. So like I can do sets of five to eight with dumbbell incline bench, but I'm not gonna do sets probably below four with that. Whereas for like peak strength, like I can go on a bench press and I can do like a set of three 'cause it's real stable, you know, I can rack it off to like struggle, super heavy dumbbells up. So like the dumbbells, they just suit better to more, lots of strength benefits, yeah, but more like the hypertrophy. So I call those like modified lifts, you know? So about half of your strength training should be something that you can lift it, really stable and high weights for around four reps, potentially even less. If you wanna focus on just peak neural adaptations, we'll get into that in a second. And then half of your sets should be a little bit higher. All right, and we'll talk about how to divide all this up and like different ways to do that. So if you did the math there, you're looking at between eight and 12 sets a week of total strength training spread throughout the week. Ideally in about two doses. I like the sweet spot, right? For everybody, about two doses. Two to three, but two, it's great, all right. Beginners, you might wanna consider three doses. So standard for people to start and work out as three total body sessions a week, I think that's great advice for beginners. That's not so great for advanced. And the thing is the total amount of time you're gonna spend in the weight room, whether you're beginner advanced is gonna be about the same. Even though I would recommend you do less volume as advanced because the advanced person is gonna need a lot longer to kind of warm up and prep for their top sets where a beginner won't. So the total working volume for a beginner is gonna be more, but the time dedication is gonna stay about the same. It might even be a little longer for the advanced, even though you're doing fewer working sets honestly, 'cause you also gonna have to rest longer as an advanced athlete. And I know that's kind of intuitive, but I could explain it just, if you really think about it though, like you're just working harder as an advanced athlete. So you need a longer break in between like a novice athlete can probably get away with rest periods under two minutes and still get stronger. Advanced, you're looking at at least three minutes and honestly for your top sets, I take up to six minutes. If you really wanna get a good stimulus. Okay, and some people might disagree with me there, but honestly those people are, they think they're strong, but they're just not. It's gonna be honest. If you're like, oh, you only need two minutes. It's like, yeah, dude, you're squatting 200 pounds. If you're a 500 pounds quadr or plus, you can't look at me with a straight face and say that you don't take at least three to four minutes in between your heavy sets. And that's just how strong, it's the strongest even more time. All right, let's move on. So let's get into power. So this is like a lot of people they just don't train for power. And like you can be pretty healthy and fit and feel pretty good if you just train for strength and some metabolic conditioning, but you're still leaving a little bit on the table. Because like when we really think about it, you know, rate of force development is very important. And strength training helps with that. Bodybuilding training, not so much, you know. But like you're still, you're leaving a little bit of rate of force development on the table if you don't train for power. And a lot of things in life is not just how strong you are, but it really comes down to like how fast can you produce that force, like in a fall or stumble or a catch. Rate of force development is very important for athletes, but it's also important for the general fitness population. So if you really want to optimize your fitness, you can with a very small amount of volume and effort per week, you can really increase your rate of force production. I'm going to get into like kind of how to do that. So for power, now let's go into like the weightlifting sets you've already been doing. So you don't need to add to this. So you're talking about four to eight to 12 sets per week of that strength portion. If you take, so those four to six sets of strength lifting, if you take one to three of those sets and you up the load percentage just a little bit to more like the 85% so we can only get it about three to four times. And especially if you do the lift from a dead stop and try to move the bar as fast as you can, even though it's not going to move fast, trying to move that bar as fast as it can is really going to help your power. I know it does, I know in your mind you think, well, power training needs to be applied metric or something really fast. Part of it should be, but like you can get a lot of power benefits just from starting from a dead stop and trying to move the bar as fast as you can. So think of like instead of a normal back squat, maybe do a pin squat or a box squat where you gently sit on the box and you drive it up as fast as you can for the box. Or like a dead lift where you're not like tapping and going every time you're starting the pull from a dead stop or a floor press where you're going down, your elbows are resting on the ground and you're pressing from there. Like something from a dead stop. I love to do dumbbell rows or pen lay rows. Dumbbell rows, single arm dumbbell rows where I let the dumbbell sit on the ground and I pull it off the ground from a dead stop or a pen lay, and you can Google pen lay row, I'm not going to describe it. But so you know, one, and it only takes, it doesn't take much. So one set a week from a dead stop at 85% of your max or above is enough to really help your rate of force to go on. I think about that one set a week per pattern, major pattern. All right, all right. So moving on, we're still in power though. Three to five sets per week and each set somewhere between three to five reps of like a lighter load. So something less than 60% of your one rep max, preferably with chains or bands. So it has variable resistance. So you're having to try to accelerate that load through the entire range of motion. Something, or and then if it's going to have a stretch reflex like a plyometric aspect, like a heavy plyometric it should be about 30% of your one rep max or below. So three to five sets of three to five reps per week of something like that, where you're just taking a lighter load and you're trying to move it as fast as possible. So it can either be 60% like speed strength. That's what that's called. So dynamic effort is what Lewis and this called it. It can be like a broad jump or a box jump or a stair jump that counts as body weight or a plyometric pushup. Net and or it can be like a light load, like a jump squat or a trap bar jump. And total three to five sets. So you don't need three to five sets of each of these. So like, maybe best to mix them up a little bit or one week you're doing one and one week you're doing another but a total of three to five sets a week of that, all right? Now, it sounds like a lot that we've given you so far, but it's not, and when you think about it. So I don't know how you're working on now, but you could be doing up to 20 sets a week of bodybuilding type training. And you could keep almost all of your size, if not all of your size, if you just cut that way down, you take some of those sets and you increase the load percentage and decrease your reps, you take some of those sets and you just focus on rate of force development, and then you just add a few plyometric type or ballistic type or power type exercises into that. And then the cool thing is like, I know it seems like it'd be exhausting, but it's not. Like those power exercises, they're lightweight, they're not taking a failure, long rest periods, they don't wear you down, they don't actually don't fatigue you as much as bodybuilding exercises do. And I can tell you how to structure all this stuff, but like if you really are just generally want to like feel the best and be in the best shape, this is a better strategy than just bodybuilding training, right? The thing is there when we think of power training, we think of plyometrics, and plyometrics are important, they're not necessary to help your power. But if you can do some plyometrics and plyometric is just anything with a rapid stretch shortening cycle, so you're just you're landing and you're and or even like a broad jump where you're landing and you're going to another jump. So there's a rapid stretch shortening cycle there. But power training is also that dead stop training with maximal concentric effort speed, and it's also the dynamic effort stuff. So very persistent, we're trying to move stuff. And then finally, it can be ballistic type stuff to where you're trying to throw something. So overhead medicine ball throws. Now all of the things I'm listing, three to five sets a week total. So just however you want to divide that up, be creative with it. So like, you know, literally just on one day a week, if you just take like a 12 pound medicine ball and you just throw that thing over your head as high as you can, taking a little bit of a break in between three for three sets of five reps. Right? And then later in the week, you know, after you warm up, you just do two sets of jump squats for five reps with like a light barbell. That's all the power training you need to make a huge difference in your capabilities. And then let's say, you know, on your strength training days, just one of those sets that you normally just do do from not a dead stop, you just do it from a dead stop. So let's say you're going to do barbell bent over rows. And you're going to do three sets that day. Do one set of that from a dead stop. And then two sets where you just do a normal, like just it's as simple as that. Just a little bit of a tweak can make a big difference, right? Okay, that's pretty much like the neural structural thing. So how would we do that in a week where you don't have 30 hours to train? How would we fit that in, right? So let's go over total volume that you're going to have to do. Let's say on the upper end, you're doing 12 sets of resistance training total, um, half of its strength, half of its hypertrophy. And you're doing five sets of power training. Okay. So divide that into two weekly doses. So let's say Monday and Thursday. You could do Tuesday, Friday, but let's say Monday, Thursday, right? You're going to start. And I'm going to get into extensive plan. Actually, let me back up because I forgot one extensive ply metrics. So what are extensive ply metrics? Those are the things with the rapid stretch shortening cycle, but they're the opposite of intensive, which, which we normally think of like box jumps and broad jumps and vertical jumps. These are like short, quick impacts. And they do a lot for like tendent stiffness, neuromuscular coordination, um, rate of force development, things like that. Um, but they, they don't take a lot out of you. So think of things like fast jump ropes, pogo hops, speed drills, um, you know, bounce ups where you're bouncing onto a low box, um, very quickly off the ground. So you can do those a lot more frequently with a lot more volume. You can, you don't have to, um, and they don't, because they don't take much out of you and they do carry benefits. So I forgot to add that. So let's add that in. All right. So let's say on Monday, you're, you're going to do your movement prep, your mobility prep. We're going to get to mobility in a second, but we're going to get to, you're doing your mobility prep. Maybe it definitely some kind of warm up. And then you're going to get into your extensive ply metrics and that kind of primes the nervous system. It doesn't take much out of you. It doesn't wear you out. So, you know, something like three sets of 20, um, pogo hops. And for the volume of extensive ply metrics per week, it's about two to three doses a week of between 80 and 150 foot contacts, um, per dose. Some, some of them. Yeah. So, you know, let's say you're doing four sets of 20. So we get to that 80. So four sets of 20 pogo hops. We're just trying to bounce off the ground as fast as you can. And then you're going to get into your power training. So when you structure your training, you kind of want to go fast to slow. And that sounds counterintuitive, but you want to do things that train power before strength and you want to do things that train strength before hypertrophy. That's kind of the universally accepted order there, ideally. Um, so you're going to want to do your power training first. So let's say. And with power, you can train your anterior chain like clap pushups and power pushups. And that's very important. But just for general health, the things that normally break us a lot of times ask to do with like posterior chain. So if you don't, if you can't just fit in both and you have to pick one, do power for posterior chain, all right. So, all right. So after the extent of prime metrics, you're going to do a couple sets of like a ballistic type activity like those overhead medicine ball throws, okay. Two sets of that. And then let's say that day, you're working your squat pattern. So you're going to go in and consider doing like two sets of jump squats, okay, for five reps with a barbell or maybe a trap bar. If you don't feel comfortable putting a barbell in your back, you can even hold a dumbbell and jump squats that way, right. Two sets of five. All right. Now we're going to get into the strength train because we already trained our power. And that didn't take hardly any time or energy in it. If anything, you just got us ready to train. Hey, thank you guys for listening. I just wanted to take a brief break to ask you guys a couple questions. First, are you happy with your current state of athleticism? Second, do you feel like you used to maybe be an athlete, but you've lost some of that athleticism and you feel like you just can't regain it due to either age or injuries. For those of you that don't know my background, for over a decade, I was a speed strength and performance coach for dozens of elite athletes. And I use that experience to build a program called mass method. It stands for movement, athleticism, strength and speed. 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Also, I have options available for people that don't have a lot of time or equipment to spend minimal equipment and limited time options. There's literally something in there for everybody. You know, some of my favorite feedback is when people tell me that they do this workout with their entire family or that they've done my workout now for a couple months and for the first time maybe in their life, they're pain free or for the first time in decades they're regaining some of their athleticism that they thought they had lost forever. It just builds me up and makes me excited to share this opportunity with you guys. And I'd love it if you just gave it a try and just see what it's all about. Try it for free for a week. Cancel if you want. I guarantee you're going to love it. And I hope you guys enjoy the rest of the show. Okay. Now we're into our strength training. So on the first set, you're going to want to do something from like a dead stop because let's say we're talking about squats here. So like a pin squat, one set of three reps. That's it. And then rack it. And then you're going to do two more sets of like five reps. Now you're going to have to kind of warm up for this a little bit. Like you're going to have to do a couple of light sets first. Get your movement pattern down. But one working set of three when a dead stop, two working sets of five traditional back squats, right? Or on that day, you could do one set of like banded back squats lighter at 60% trying to move the bar as fast as you can. You can do either or or you can do both if you feel like it. All right. Now after that, you've worked your squat pattern. Now you don't need to do that for every movement pattern. Remember, you really only need to do it for your squat. But like let's say you did want to work your anterior chain and you want to work power there. And you move on to like let's say you're going to do bench press or horizontal press that day. Like one to two sets of pile pushups. So we're just trying to get off the ground as fast you can with your pile pushup. But if you're not that strong, you can elevate your hands a little bit. One set three to five reps, one to two sets. That's it. And then then you get into your bench press and just keep it simple, right? So two sets, two to three sets of five reps. Okay. Then you're going to get it into let's say so you've done your squat pattern and you've done your push pattern. Let's say you're advanced. You're probably not going to want to also do like a heavy hinge pattern on that day. If you're not advanced, you can go ahead. So you need to do kind of a hinge pattern. But now's we're gonna get some volume of that hypertrophy training, but we're gonna get it for hinge. So you do like a back extension, three sets of eight to 12 reps, banded back extension. All right. So bam, bam, bam, right? So it's just an example. And then you don't have to do your overhead pressing that day or, and then you're gonna do like one kind of vertical pull. So let's say for strength, you know, three sets of five weighted chin ups. All right. So what is the majority and that whole thing took probably 45 minutes with long rest periods, okay? Very low volume. And then you're gonna get into your auxiliary work, which is like mostly single joint. So you can just do one super set of two to three sets, pick a single joint. So you can do dumbbell outer is, you can do leg curls, you can do leg extensions, you can do dumbbell curls. Just pick two isolation movements, super set them. These can be a shorter rest period. These can even go to failure, these can go up reps up to 20, but more normally eight to 12. Just do two to three sets of that and then you're done. You're done with the training, okay? Now, you know, I love my rotations early in the workout as part of your prep. That's when you can throw in some rotational work, two sets, and just consider that like movement prep and that's gonna work your core. And so that's your strength training for the day and you covered extensive plyometrics, you covered power, you covered strength, covered hypertrophy, right? Now there's obviously some stuff we didn't do. We're gonna save that for later in the week. So let's say we'll splash forward to like Thursday. You're still gonna do the same order. So pick a different extensive plios. Now you do like your speed drills, pick a different rotational movement to help prep you. So you know, Turkish get ups kind of counts as that or some of my flows, the grappler, things like that. All right, that'll prep you. And then so instead of the overhaul overhead mesoball throws, maybe banded front swings, two sets, five reps, right? Fast, right? And then you're gonna get into like, if you're advanced and you did your heavy squat earlier in the week, now's when you're gonna do like your heavy hinge. So let's just say frog stance dead lifts, two sets of five. And since you're picking it off off the ground, if you wanna work power, let's say the first set, you just do a set of three a little heavier, right? Like 85% for three. And then your last two sets, two sets of five, that's gonna work great. A force development because that's dead stop training, right? That's cool part about hinge, you know? Or if you wanna target your hamstrings more, maybe some heavy RDLs, two to three sets of five or six, you know? And then you move on to like, since we did a bilateral squat early in the week, now's when we're gonna do a lunge or a split squat. And this can be a little bit more towards the hypertrophy. So sets of six to eight and there are walking lunges. I like to do my walking lunges earlier sometimes in my workout. I've talked about this. So this is not wrong here to do maybe you're walking lunges first and then go hit your hinge. It's still okay there. And then since we did our horizontal pressing early in the week, now's when we do some vertical pressing. If you can vertical press, if you can't, then you would do like your incline dumbbell press. 'Cause remember we did our bench pressing earlier in the week heavier. Now we're gonna work more like hypertrophy, modified lifts. So three sets of six to eight reps, dumbbell incline press. And then we did like our vertical pulling earlier in the week and then now we could do our horizontal pulling. Some people like to switch it because they don't like to do their horizontal rows on the same day they do their hinging. So if you switched it, you would just do your horizontal pulling on Monday. And then now you could do your weighted chin ups with your hinging. But if you don't mind doing the rows with your hinging, you know, you could do two to three sets of seated rows for six to eight reps. And then pick your two auxiliaries and you're done. So that, what I just laid out for you twice a week is gonna carry 80% of the benefit of double that volume. So if you are focused on at a time of year where you wanna focus on your strength training, you can literally double that volume and you should be okay as long as you're doing minimal effective dose for some of the other stuff. And you'll get slightly more benefit from it. But if you're a busy person and you just wanna be generally fit, that is gonna carry so much value to you and you don't need to lift weights six days a week. Now I love bodybuilding and I love big muscles and there would be periods of time where I'm in the gym five days a week doing hypertrophy stuff. But I don't do that because I think it's what's best for me. I do that because I like big muscles. I'm not getting it twisted in my brain. I'm not lying to myself and being like, this is the best way for me to stay healthy. No, I'm making a conscious decision to prioritize muscle size over general health and athletic ability. But it's plain and simple. So if you're one of these dudes that's in your just convinced yourself that you're six days a week in the gym, doing bodybuilding stuff is the best thing for you. It's just not a hate to tell you that. It's just not the best thing for your health or your performance. It's better than not doing nothing and it carries its benefits. It's just not the best. Okay, so two days a week, I kinda laid it out and there's other ways to do it too. So some people like to do combination training where they do like a strength exercise and then that primes a power exercise. So an example of that is like you do like a set of four heavy bench press and then you go into your pli-al pushups. Or you do a set of four dead lifts, traibar dead lifts to say and then you go do a set of broad jumps. That's combination training. You can do that too. All right, so there's not there's more than one ways to do this. But all right, let's move on. So we've covered the structural neural. And that those workouts do have metabolic health benefits for you. Let's get into like what's the most bang for your buck with metabolic conditioning, all right? So the other side of the coin. All right, so let's divide this into some categories. So we have VO2 max, lactate threshold, anaerobic power, metabolic health and slash like mitochondrial health, slash capillary density, things like that. So that's the kind of heart, heart rate capacity, stroke volume, all right. So those are kind of the main categories there. All right, so let's start with the base. Like if you're going to do one thing, what's the most important thing you can do? For general health, if you had the time, I would say just aerobic base conditioning. So this is what people call zone two. And really all zone two is, it's just any work that kind of stays below your lactate threshold. And you kind of know and there's two, what your lactate threshold looks like, there's like LT1 and LT2. So it kind of stays mostly level as far as your lactate accumulation. And then it starts to rise. That's LT1. And then it kind of peaks, that's LT2. They call that oblo onset of blood, lactocassum or onset of blood lactate. So zone two is anything before that LT1. And there's different ways to do this. So when people think zone two, they think of slow steady state. And that is one way to do it. But there's actually two ways to do it. And both have their own benefits. So if you're going to pull any levers with your metabolic health at first, that are really going to just help you stay healthy. And we could argue for hit training here instead of this. But if you have the time, I would say zone two training is going to be great for your health. So what is zone two training? Then you can do for 30 minutes to an hour steadily. And some people are limited by muscular endurance, especially 30 minutes, where you can talk, have a conversation the entire time. You might be slightly out of breath, but like a weighted hike, a bike ride, something like that. And that is great. It's going to work. The mitochondrial health of your soul, twitch fibers is going to improve capillary density and just general health. It's going to improve your mood. It doesn't come with much recovery costs. It's great for your heart. Because when you stay under a certain heart rate, it gives your heart time to fully fill with blood every time. So it's really going to help your stroke volume there. That's just a huge important thing that a lot of people just don't do anymore. Because our cultural heart, if we're not going out of crushing every time, we think we're wasting our time. So if you can just do that once a week, it's going to have a huge benefit. Twice a week is probably optimal, but once a week. So now we've gone over our two weight training sessions. And we've added in one time a week of steady state zone two training. Now if you're a runner, this could be a slow jog, easy jog where you can talk with a friend while you do it. That's tempting though, because people like they let their heart rates creep on them. And then so there's also a way, there's modern intensity interval training too though that you can do to where you run at a pace, where if you stayed at that pace, you would quickly get to your LT1 and then you walk. So if you're afraid, if you're going to jog and get out of your zone two, what you can do is just run for a couple hundred meters and then walk. And that'll just kind of help be insurance against you exceeding that heart rate. As long as the runs aren't like fast runs, it's just a jog walk, jog walk. So it's just modern, intensity interval training. Now the other way to do zone two that people like Joel Jamison popularized and it's kind of been forgotten is just tempo intervals. Now when we think of interval training, we think of more high intensity stuff like high intensity interval training, speed interval training, but there's also tempo intervals. And what is this? A tempo interval is where you do something really intense, but it's only for like 10 seconds or maybe 20 seconds at most, but usually about 10 seconds, five to 10 seconds sometimes. And but then you give yourself like a minute break in between. So even though it's a short intense back, about of training, but it's a very long break. So you never reach your lactate threshold, all right. And it's it keeps your heart rate between 120 and 140 ish beats per minute the whole time. You don't need to do these for as long as the steady state. maybe 20 to 30 minutes. They don't take much out of you. You usually feel a lot better afterwards. So examples of modes of training to do this. You can use a spin bike if you want or in a salt bike. Be careful with that. Or you could do like, I like to do slam ball shoulder throws. So I'll do like six slam ball shoulder throws and then I'll rest a minute and I'll track my heart rate. Just making sure it never gets over like 140. And then I honestly go again when it gets down about 120. So I really go by my heart rate there. Just it works out to be about a minute. And then another thing is like kettlebell front swings. So, you know, Pavel, like, is an advocate for this. Like, you know, you do 10 kettlebell front swings in your rest a minute and you do that about 10 times. Another way is like, I like to do speed drills. So I'll do like a skips for about 20 seconds and then I'll rest about a minute. And then my heart rate just stays between 120 and 140 that entire time. So it's interval training, but it's interval training at zone two. And you can do one or the other because they have crossover benefits, but they the benefits also differ a little bit. So ideally you do one zone two steady state and one zone two temple interval a week. All right. So what are we up to now? So two weight workouts a week, one on one day, one on Thursday where you're working power strength and hypertrophy on each total body. Each one took about an hour and then we're doing an hour a week of like zone two steady state. So now we're at three hours a week. And we're doing another half hour once a week of the temple intervals. All right. So we're looking at three and a half hours a week. All right. Now what do we have left to work on here? Now we're not talking about minimal effective dose. Now if you're super crunch for time and like, you know, you don't have three hours a week, you can do a lot with less. And an hour and a half a week, you can do some stuff. But that's kind of a different podcast. Okay. So I'm not talking about the the minimal minimal. I'm talking about the optimal for the average person. Okay. Okay. So now we have to talk about VO2 max. VO2 max is all the rage lately. Okay. But and I think I'll talk about for let's remember what VO2 max is. VO2 max is an equation and it's how much oxygen you can use per minute based on your body weight. So there is VO2 max training protocols. But if you just control your body weight and build an aerobic base, you're going to help your VO2 max. You can in a lot largely VO2 max is also genetic. All right. Remember that. So don't get discouraged if yours isn't super high, even though you train are. It's age related. Right. So you can increase your VO2 max and never do any VO2 max specific training. You can. All right. So let's say that first. But VO2 max protocol for VO2 max, you should be about 85% of your heart rate max. And you should hold that for about 15 to 20 minutes a week. That's pretty intense. 85 to 90% actually your heart rate max. So it's a little bit higher than lactate threshold training there as far as intensity goes, right? And you know, the protocol Norwegian 4x4, that's great. Probably the best way to do it. But at the end of the day, just it's more about like the time that you spend at that heart rate, like at your VO2 max. Right. So however you can crack that nut if it's an Norwegian 4x4 or whatever it is, 15 minutes a week. You don't have to do this though. This is kind of like the cherry on the cake. I would recommend you kind of do one or the other because lactate threshold training is very similar. And lactate threshold training will carry some VO2 max benefits. VO2 max benefit training will carry some lactate threshold benefits. There's a lot of crossover. Two very different things. But there's crossover in the protocols for the training. And one protocol, you know, one technique I like is I try to do one lactate threshold session a week. And then what I do and lactate threshold is about 30 minutes at I'm trying to remember the specific heart rate I wrote it down. I go between I do intervals for my lactate. So I'll go between LT1 and LB2 and I can just kind of tell based on like my ability to talk or form that words. I kind of know the feeling now of when I'm reaching my obla. And I kind of know that heart rate associated with that. So I just try to like stay within like LT1 and LT2 the whole time going up and down and like minute on, minute off, like one minute harder, one minute slightly easier. So my heart rate kind of fluctuates, but let's not get too far into that. So lactate threshold is just 20 to 30 minutes a week like 75 to 80% of your heart rate max somewhere in there, you know, doesn't have to be precise though, right? And so what I do or what I recommend and what I do sometimes is I'll do like 20 minutes at that lactate threshold zone. And then I'll do about 10 minutes to finish at more of the VO2 max zone. And sometimes I have to break that up. So like what I'll do is like, I'll do 20 minutes of, you know, above my lactate one, LT1 threshold. And then I'll do like a four minute burst where I kind of go to my LT2 right at my VO2 max. That's the kind of correlate pretty close. And then I'll get myself a minute or two break until my heart rate get back down and then I'll do it one more time and then I'll be done. So I'll do like eight to 10 minutes total of VO2 max specific training divided into two micro doses of four minutes at the end of my lactate threshold session. Now if you're an endurance athlete, this probably isn't enough, it's not the optimal way to train it. But if you're just trying to like optimize your health, that's what I do once a week. And you know, I have a fairly high VO2 max and I'm in pretty good shape just doing that once a week because we have to remember that the zone two training that you did does benefit your VO2 max a little bit because it improves your aerobic base. It helps you maintain a body weight. And the other things we're about to talk about also help both your lactate threshold and your VO2 max as well. Maybe not quite as good, but there's a benefit there. Okay. And if one thing has to drop off, if per week, I would drop this one off. Okay. So you can do, if you have extra time, you can do a dedicated VO2 max session, one to two times a week. And you can do lactate threshold. It's not needed though. I would just combine those or one week, you can do more of a lactate threshold protocol on this day and the other week. You can do more of a VO2 max protocol on that day. And you can go back and forth because there's crossover benefit. All right. So let's look at our week so far. Monday, Thursday, we're lifting weights. Let's say Tuesday and Friday, we're doing our our zone two training. Okay. So that leaves Wednesday and Saturday. All right. Now the two things I haven't talked about here are high intensity of your training and speed interval training. Now as far as metabolic conditioning goes, like these are the biggest levers you can pull, like for bang for your butt for time. And they train the most things well. So there is an argument to be made that if you had to pick one or the other between zone two and like hit, you should pick hit. I'm not going to have that argument now. I think that each have their own benefits. It's really hard for me to pick between the two. But I can see their point on hit too. But there's so many other benefits like social with easy zone two training, getting outside, being able to have a conversation while you do it. So I don't know. But high intensity interval training is fantastic because it's like really good bang for buck. It doesn't take very long. So if you don't have a lot of time and it's better than zone two. But high intensity interval training, basically you're going close to all out, but not quite for one to two minutes at a time. And then it's separated by a work to rest ratio of one to one or two to one. So if you work hard for a minute, then you're going to take a rest of about a minute or two minutes. If you take a rest interval of one to one, it's going to push you more towards that VO2 max benefit. If you take a rest interval of two to one, so two minutes rest for every minute work, it's going to shift it more towards like anaerobic power glycolytic capacity a little bit. But it's not super important, which one you do. But and then the protocol is there is just four to 10 rounds of that after about a five minute warmup. So if you do the math and it's like one minute on, two minutes off times four, you're looking at 12 minutes plus the five minutes of workout. So it can be as little as 20 minutes. And that's going to have a huge benefit towards not just your aerobic base, but also your lactate threshold, also your VO2 max, things like that. And then the other protocol is just sit or speed interval training. Now, this is a little different because you're going all out for 10 to 20 seconds. But then you're going to give yourself a much longer break. And just that little bit of extra intensity goes a long way. So like if you kind of go sort of all out for a minute, that's really good. But if you just go completely all out for 10 to 20 seconds, it carries benefits in power, anaerobic power, glycolytic capacity. And you don't have to do as near as much volume of that. So if you twisted my arm and I had to pick one or the other high intensity interval training or speed interval training, I would pick speed interval training because it does all of the things that hit does maybe not quite as well for a couple things like VO2 max. But it works all of those things. And it also will train a little bit of speed, train some power, train anaerobic power endurance. It trains like, it has neuro benefits. It just it carries a lot of benefits in a short amount of time. amount of time. Okay, so do you have to do both? No, I would pick one or the other and I would do a one day a week. So now let's do the math. Let's add all this together. So we're having two days Monday and Thursday over weight training. Tuesday we're doing our zone to steady state. Let's put this sit on Wednesday, all right? Speed interval session on Wednesday. Thursday we're doing another weight session. Friday we're doing our short tempo interval. Okay. All right. Now we have one more thing that we need to cover. There are actually two more things. But we don't necessarily need to do this on us another day. So if you've done the math, like we're working out now, most days of the week, right? So what can we do? Well, we can put our speed interval training at the end of one of those weight sessions if we want to. We can even put it our speed interval training at the end of the zone two day if we really wanted to give ourselves a day off. We could take out our VOT max day. I forgot to add that in. So you know, now, you know, if you're if you're adding the VOT max day in, you're going to have to make some tough decisions either training six days a week here or you're dropping something. So we can alternate weeks and like one week, we can do our steady state zone two the other week, we do our tempo interval. Or we can sub out one of those zone two's four VOT max or lactate threshold training. I really wouldn't drop the speed interval if you can help it. Or we can combine and we can do, you know, like the zone two on the same day that we do like in the morning and we can do like a weight workout at night or something, right? So this is like optimal. And like you can drop one or two if you don't have the days, but like if we're talking about optimal. So the other thing we kind of have to cover here is like agility training. So this stuff is good to do kind of on that speed interval day or on the tempo interval day. So you know, you can finish the agility work with the tempo interval. So like let's say that tempo interval was going to be done on Friday. That can that day can be our agility day and our tempo interval day. Okay. And tempo intervals are also good to kind of do on a recovery day because they're there 20 minutes they don't take much out of you. They leave you feeling better. So you can't actually work out seven days a week and just do a 20 minute tempo interval, right? But you know, you can combine them too. Now what is agility training? You know, agility training, you just pick, change a direction drills and things like that that are really quick and don't take a lot out of you. And you can do things like the speed ladder. I know the speed ladder gets hated on a lot, but I think it carries some real benefits there. Or you can do, you know, common agility drills. So like pro agility or 5105, you can do L drills, also knows three cone drills, you can do box drills, you can do dot drills, you can do W runs, you can do S or serpentine runs, you can do five yard stop and goes, all of these are in my program. So like that day is that's just a good day to like you get out and maybe you start that day with your tempo intervals. So like let's say 10 rounds of 10 kettlebell front swings takes about 20 minutes. And then you do about 20 minutes of, you know, pro agility runs like three each direction and maybe one serpentine run. And then you finish with like a dot drill or something. You know, so these are all the categories where it's going to figure out how to fit all this in. So so far, let's say Monday waits Tuesday, zone two, Wednesday we did our speed interval training. Thursday, or no, let's say Wednesday we did our speed interval training, Thursday we did our weight training and then now we can pick between like a threshold day or we can do our tempo intervals and our agility. Okay, we just pick pick one, right? Or you can do Monday waits Tuesday, you can do your tempo intervals threshold training instead of your your zone two. Wednesday we keep our sit Thursday waits Friday agility tempo interval, right? All right. Now, let's get into the last thing mobility. So all of your work has been done here as far as like your main work, but mobility training. First of all, I'm going to say you should get a lot of your mobility training just through doing weights through a very full range of motion. Okay, that's going to count for a lot. All right. Secondly, there's two main ways we can do this either we can establish a more of five minute mobility routine that we do every day before a workout or we can dedicate a couple days for like an hour day to something like Pilates or yoga. All right. Now is when you're going to have to make some tough decisions though if you choose to go that route. So you're going to have to drop something off. I would drop off the VO2 max threshold day if you're going to do this. And I would only do like one zone two day because it's believe it or not like the Pilates and like the yoga kind of counts as zone two in some ways for some things. All right. So like Monday you do like your weight training, Tuesday you do your yoga, Wednesday you do your speed interval training, Thursday you do another weight session, Friday you do your yoga again and then Saturday you do your agility and speed interval training. That's one you know so you so you're making compromises here you can't do everything every week right. But that that checks and because there's so much crossover the metal ball conditioning you don't have to do everything every week either you can swap things out week to week if you want. But if you decide to do the mobility training just five minutes before your workout freaking perfect too. So I know that seems but we're not I remember here I'm not talking about the minimal effective dose. Maybe that's another podcast I can do. But optimal optimize your health like that's kind of a good template. If somebody came to me and they did that I could would guarantee you they'd be in really good shape as long as everything else in their life was in line they'd be in really good shape they'd be fairly strong, fairly powerful have good metal ball conditioning and they'd be fairly athletic. So try not to be all over the place today I know I threw a lot of information but it's just I want you to conceptualize what like a good comprehensive training program is. And then I want to go back to the beginning remember I said periodization. And this is a lot to keep track of. Maybe you need to think about just focusing on metal ball conditioning for a few weeks and then focusing on structural neural for a few weeks. And you can just start to do minimal effective dose for one while you focus a little bit energy on the other one. But if you don't want to do that this is a good overall week for fitness so hope you guys got some miles podcast. I'm Jeff Lennard always be nothing. I hope you enjoyed this show. If you did please hit the subscribe button to be notified as soon as an episode drops. I greatly appreciate it if you leave a rating and review. Even share it with your friend. Thank you and see you next show.