July 21, 2012

Audio Interview from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2012/07/does-weight-training-count-as-cardio/

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Ben:                Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield and with me today is the author of the book Body by Science, Dr. Doug McGuff, who is an MD and I believe now works in emergency medicine but he also has a very big background in exercise and fitness. As I just mentioned he has written a book and he has great day work out program so actually I happen to do it yesterday and I have to admit, am a little sore.   So, Dr. McGuff, thanks for the soreness. Thanks for coming on my call.

Doug:             My pleasure! Happy to be here.

Ben:              So you’re an emergency doc.  How would you go back to getting the opportunity to write a book about fitness? Was it just something you said and do?

Doug:          No, actually it was an interesting fitness that led me in the medical school on the first place and that’s always been an interest you know all the way through high school, college, medical school, residency and onwards.  I knew that I’ve always wanted to own a gym or an exercise facility at some point and in 1997, I opened a personal training center conducting high intensity exercise and I always thought that the value of high intensity exercise was pretty severely under rated and that’s what ultimately led me to write a book. I wrote a book to have something that I wanted to read.  So many times when I go on a bookstore looking for something interesting, I walk out frustrated and that’s largely what motivated me and my co author John Little to write this book.  It was actually to produce something that was a good intellectual defense on high intensity exercise and to give someone an understanding of the reason why it is a good way to exercise as a vehicle towards demonstrating or instructing in that sort of exercise.

Ben:             I  got you, and your co-author John Little is on call today but he is well respected in the field of fitness so I have certainly seen articles he’s written all over the place.

Doug:             Right, he has almost books here and abroad and he and I  were inspired with that and he actually approached me to go in with him to make a published  book through McGraw-Hill and did that as a partnership together.

Ben:                Later on this call, we’re gonna get down into the nitty gritty details of the type of  training protocols that you recommend in your book which I will surely link to show notes for folks.  But, you know I think a really  good place to start is to clarify where you are coming from, when you look at metabolic training and specifically in your book you started up by referring to something called the amplification cascade. Where does that place the amplification cascade and how is it relevant to the type of exercise that you recommend?

Doug:             Well, what I am referring to an amplification cascade is actually an evolutionary adaptation that all animals have and basically it’s the mechanism by which we can turn our metabolism on a dime.  If you look when you watch the nature, or you can see when most animals are gonna undergo some sort of attack that they have to escape from, it generally will occur when you are feeding, so you have an animal that is in the process of anabolic metabolism, it’s in taking energy and storing energy and in an instant that animal has to be able to turn its metabolic metabolism energy storing to rapidly energy burning metabolism very quickly and it does so through this amplification cascade.  Now, high intensity muscular work requires that you take stored glycogen out of the muscle where it is stored on site for emergency usage and be able to tap into that to produce glucose to drive the metabolic process  to high intensity exercise, fighter flight escape and it’s done through amplification cascade.  What that means is it is a series of enzymes that when triggered by adrenalin and glucagon and other hormones of stress initiate the first enzyme. In this case glycogen  phosphorylates  which can initiates hundreds or thousands of secondary enzyme and each of those secondary enzyme in turn activates hundreds or thousands of tertiary enzymes so from a single molecule of adrenalin you get a massive download of glycogen being released to glucose for immediate energy utilization.

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Ben:                For glycogen, just to clarify for folks who are listening in.  You know when whatever you are   eating, you got a busy line and you get this amplification cascade, from where is the body getting that glycogen?

Doug:             Glycogen is stored in your body in two places and for two different purposes.  In your liver you gonna store maybe 70 grams 0f glycogen and that’s largely used for blood sugar homeostasis because your brain likes to see a fairly steady level of glucose between 60-100 mgs/deciliter and muscle is freed out of your liver to maintain that stable rate.  Now you have between 200-250 grams of glycogen stored in skeletal muscle and that’s like coal in the training.  It is actually stored in the muscle for on site usage immediately right there so you have a fairly large store of glucose molecules link together like a tinker toy in a large three dimensional structure with in the muscle cell and when you need high output energy usage on site, adrenalin activates the breakdown of glycogen to glucose so it can be put through an enzymatic process to produce the energy that drives the muscle contraction and all the metabolic processes that support it.

Ben:                Just so when we put the amplification cascade switch the body’s mobilizing storage energy from the liver and the muscles.

Doug:             Correct, but predominantly in this circumstance, from the muscles.

Ben:                Okay, got you.  All right, so what happens next?

Doug:      Well then, the glucose is liberated, goes through the process of glycolysis and that is a mechanism where glycolysis in the cell, the cell is divided basically into two parts. One is a liquid containing cytosol and the other is the mitochondria and this process initially goes through about a twenty step chemical process called glycolysis where glucose goes through a series of enzymatic reaction that ends up in a chemical called pyruvate and in the process of doing that, the energy released from those chemical reactions produce adenosine triphosphate or ATP which is basically the gasoline that drives the muscle contraction process.  Now, glycolysis because of this amplification cascade is a cycle that does not produce a whole lot of energy but can cycle very very quickly and pyruvate starts to stock up and it can be mobilized into the mitochondria. Pyruvate is a substrate for the mitochondria and the mitochondria goes through a round of enzymatic processes that produce very large amount of ATP but it produces a larger amount of ATP but it cycles more slowly than glycolysis so, if the exercise is a truly high intensity, that pyruvate will stock up and get acted on by an enzyme in the cytosol called lactate dehydrogenase and pretty slack later lactic acid which is what you experience as a lot of gas that burn during high intensity exercise.  But, ultimately with high intensity exercise it stops that lactate, gets converted back to pyruvate and can settle through the mitochondria to pay back any sort of oxygen that will occur during a high intensity exercise or it can also go backwards to glycolysis, back to glucose through the process called gluconeogenesis. But, the brilliant important thing to understand is that the high intensity exercise allows you to tap fairly deeply in the largest glucose reservoir on your body and that means that glucose has to be replenished and that is done by increasing insulin sensitivity on the muscle cell and that’s one of the major things that kind of keep starts a reversal of all the metabolic diseases that we are seeing in modern times so this is a sort of a kick start of the whole process of reversing metabolic syndrome. It is the antithesis of it.

Ben:          Got you, and when we are talking about this amplification cascade occurring, of course I know you started  off by mentioning this but we should remind folks that we are not talking about like heading up for the door and going for a jog, right?

Doug:             Correct. Now, this is a very high intensity muscular work.  The higher the quality of the muscular work being performed, the more you’re going to activate this type of metabolic response and it is not really done by low or moderate intensity activity.  This is something of a very high intensity if you are talking doing it with you know, a traditional , what most people think of is  free hand or aerobic type activity.  This will be your high intensity interval training like protocol where you have a maximal output for short durations 20-30 seconds and then a brief rest but in the maximal output again.

Ben:                Right.

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Doug:             Key is really the maximal output in whatever protocol that you’re doing.

Ben:                So, you’re tapping into the storage sugars and amplifying that cascade of energy that’s going to use those and also produce a lot of these pyruvates that gives you the lactic acid that can be used for energy integrate more glucose in general just setting up this system within your body for rapid energy utilization with the amplification cascade now then you go on and talk about this concept of global metabolic conditioning.  I thought that was really interesting.  How does the amplification cascade relate to that concept of global metabolic conditioning?

Doug:             Well,I capsize intrinsically into it and I came out with a term global metabolic conditioning, as an answer for an argument against the notion of aerobic conditioning being the be all and end all or the ultimate goal of exercise, and what I want to demonstrate by global metabolic conditioning is, you can not really isolate this metabolic pathways from each other.  They are all intrinsically tied together, they are all running concurrently all the time and even if you are just sitting still you have to run that anaerobic pathway to supply substrate for aerobic metabolism.  So, even you and I are sitting here we’re running our anaerobic pathway,  it’s just a matter of which one runs up relative to the other that determines what the metabolic state is.  Now, this is important cause the thing about mitochondria is they probably were ancient proto bacteria that infected the cells of simple organisms and had a symbiotic relationship with them by eating their waste products as food but ultimately the eating of the waste product of  glycolysis  pyruvate in generating more dramatic energies came to benefit the cell  and these invading bacteria that had symbiotic relationship  was actually operated as an organelle so aerobic metabolism that occurs in the mitochondria is intrinsically dependent upon anaerobic metabolism for its’ substrate. As a consequence, the only way that you can naturally stimulate an aerobic metabolic process is by maximally stimulating the anaerobic process that feeds its substrate and after rafting things up to the extent that you’re delivering substrate to the mitochondria it arrives faster than which it can use it.  That’s the only way that you know that you have maximally stimulated aerobic metabolic adaptations and this is why we are seeing this current flurry of literatures supporting brief high intensity interval training as a mechanism for producing the type of aerobic metabolic adaptations that we thought in the past could only occur with one slow distance steady state activity.

Ben:                Right. Right. So the idea here is that when we are looking at global metabolic conditioning almost like this cross over effect from the anaerobic training that you just described.  We went through the whole physiological process with what your body does with sugar and how it creates energy, how that crossing over into actual aerobic stimulation because they’re using a similar energy system as you get towards the end of that cycle.

Doug:             Not necessarily similar energy system but, the end of the anaerobic cycle provides the fuel that drives the aerobic cycle and even more important was to break the concept of the global metabolic conditioning was to break this link that we have created between the aerobic metabolic sub system and the cardiovascular system. Because of the BO2 max testing tool everyone with an exercise still came to intrinsically link an emphasis on aerobic metabolism with cardiovascular conditioning to the extent now that it’s in the common vernacular to say, Oh, I’m gonna go over to the cardio theater I’m gonna do some cardio, when much we’re referring to is a steady state low intensity activity and that is a faulty version of thinking because the cardiac and vascular system supports the metabolic activity of the cell as a whole.  There is no way that the cardiovascular system is linked only to the mitochondria.  The cardiovascular system services  the entire cell, not just a subcellular organelle, so the entire cardiovascular system supporting the work of  both anaerobic and aerobic metabolism and that was the real emphasis behind  global metabolic conditioning was to realize that you have to train the totality metabolism not just as a requirement for getting up cardiovascular system but there’s no way getting out of that, because all of these metabolic pathways are intrinsically tied together and interdependent upon one another.

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Ben:                You know, what’s really interesting and you mentioned this in your book, is when it comes to this cardiovascular concepts. The idea of pressure and blood pressure and venous return, and the extent to which the type of training using this amplification cascade that you talked about as on that system versus like low intensity steady state movement. Can you explain a little about how it is that you could get a strong cardiovascular benefit from doing something that would not in the traditional sense be considered you know, going on the treadmill on the cardio theater.

Doug:             Yes, absolutely. Remember the only way that you can get at the cardiovascular system is by performing the camp over with muscle and the higher the quality of that mechanical work the better the cardiovascular stimulus that’s it gonna be and that  is not only from the metabolic stand point but from a planning stand point so to speak. Let’s go back to what exactly when you’re trying your cardiovascular system, you are trying to improve cardiac output to make cardiac work more efficient.  If we look at what cardiac output is, cardiac output is actually the product of heart rate times stroke volume and stroke volume is the volume of blood that is subjected from the heart with a single heart beat.  Well stroke volume is largely or actually completely determined by venous return the amount of blood being returned to the right study the heart  ultimately determines the volume of  blood that enters the left ventricle  and that volume determines what your stroke volume is gonna be with each heart beat. Now, if you are doing high intensity exercise that involve high intensity muscle contraction, venous blood flows entirely passes and the only thing that really augments it, is intense muscular contraction that melt venous blood flow back towards the heart and that augments stroke volume so not only you’re having a rise in heart rate for each heart beat you’re having an increase in stroke volume so your cardiac output is actually much more enhanced with high intensity exercise which is why in the past you’ve seen these formulas for calculating heart rate is a marker for the aerobic effect of exercise but that’s a complete misunderstanding of the situation.  I’ve had subjects that you know, working out will keep track of their own heart rate. You know clients will say that my heart rate didn’t go up as much as when I am out jogging than when I am on the treadmill.  This probably does not affect my cardiovascular system as much but what she gonna say is, look, your cardiac output is what you’re after.  When you’re running your venous return is not nearly what it is with high intensity muscle contraction. So, you have to augment cardiac output largely by elevation of heart rate because you’re not getting an improvement in stroke line.  With high intensity exercise whether it’s strength training or interval protocol those intense  muscle contractions are increasing venous returning greatly augmenting stroke line so out of that product  you are getting as much bank from your back out of stroke line as you are out of heart rate.  So your cardiac output maybe significantly higher even though your heart rate reads a little bit lower than what you’re used to, but the reason is because you’ve augmented the stroke line and the thing about stroke line is you need enough inner beat interval to allow for that ventricular feeling so truly efficient cardiovascular exercise will not let you reach as high of a heart rate necessarily because you’re augmenting cardiac output by augmentation of stroke line more than heart rate.

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Ben:                     Right. But I’m trying to keep that period of time between heart beat is just slightly longer.

Doug:             Right to allow ventricular filling. It’s really going to serve to augment your cardiac output.

Ben:                Cool, I like it.  There’s a lot of folks who I know are probably listening in and associating the type of high intensity work that you’re talking about with something like maybe a high intensity interval training protocol on a bike or maybe they do a 10 to 60 seconds full recovery or maybe going out and doing you know a run with some strides thrown in or going to the parking and  running a few hundred meter dash,  something in that nature but in your book you specifically focus quite a bit on an anaerobic kind of intensity strength training protocols specifically and now that folks have an understanding of how those actually can induce anaerobic benefit and a cardiovascular benefit, what’s getting to the protocol?  When someone is trying to get as much benefit as they can, out of the amplification cascade that you’ve discussed and the cardiovascular empathics of  strength training, what would the strength training protocol actually look like?

Doug:            Okay, you’re correct to describe I’m highly supportive of high intensity interval training  techniques  with more visual based aerobic protocols. I think they’re highly efficient.  What the strength training protocol is  to take that entire notion and extract it all the way  to its logical conclusion. To maximize every element as much as possible by increasing the muscular level so what we try to do is we select a handful of strength training exercises usually compound movements that are going to cover the entire muscular trail of the body and that can typically be accomplished anywhere between three and eight movements depending on what you have available to you and the idea is that we are going into, in a given movement, select the resistance which is going to cause complete muscular fatigue or failure under that load somewhere in 45 seconds to three minute  time range and we are going to use a very strict protocol of lifting and lowering weights slowly and under control and depending on the piece of equipment back in result in a rep cadence of anywhere from four seconds up, four seconds down to 10 seconds up 10 seconds down. But the important thing is to keep the muscle under continuous uninterrupted load in order to induce aggressive  muscle fiber recruitment and fatigue. So that without any break in the muscle being loaded that you reach complete muscular fatigue where you can no longer move the weight in a relatively short span of time and that rapid recruitment of muscle fibers and exhaustion of them dries all these processes that you’ve been talking about to their maximum extent and having done that in one movement with very little respite going to the next movement you go to your next movement and do the same thing.  And you take it completely and go to the next and it’s almost a circuit but most people think of it as circuit training type protocol.

Ben:             Right, it’s exactly what I did last night, I literally just to try this out, I went to the gym, I ran there actually so my hurry was little lie  going in which make someone uncomfortable but I did and seated on a row assisted pull up machine, a chest press, a shoulder press and a leg press and I did just five repetitions of each of those, that was it, that was my entire workout and I did about 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down and there was definitely some cardiovascular action going on there and it seemed to work pretty well when it came to the aerobic training benefit and I felt like I had you know felt like someone crucified who had just kept running.  Now, can anybody do this? I mean do you have folks who are just getting an exercise doing this or are this something that you reserve for the elite athletes who are already well trained or something like that?

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Doug:            Absolutely not, I mean we bring people in, wide off the street and start them out  exactly in this way and that includes clients you know well in their 80’s and 90’s and we are not fearful for doing that. One is that am sure you’ve read some of the work of Timothy Notes and he has postulate the idea of the simple governor which is the central nervous system half way that  sort of shuts everything down as muscular fatigue occurs with a wide wide margin of safety and I think  that simple governor can be modulated through training and volitional effort over time so when you take a raw beginner, that simple governor that protects you from over exertion or harm from exertion is operating with a very broad margin of safety.  I don’t worry about harming my clients through exertion. What I do worry about is harming my clients through excessive force and that is the neat thing about this protocol because you’re performing lifting and lowering in a very controlled fashion so the forces are well controlled and as a consequence of the continuous muscular loading, the muscle is rapidly fatigue so that the person training is every second getting weaker and weaker so they’re forced out dropping out exponentially.  They are literally becoming too weak to hurt themselves and when you actually enact this as a straight training protocol it’s supposed to, an interval training protocol where you get the unique benefit of, the harder it gets the safer it is, because the closer you get to muscular fatigue the more you’re forced out to this dropping, the more you’re forced out to drops, the greater your marginal safety you’re literally becoming too weak to harm yourself.

Ben:                So do you use special, like, when I did this at the work out at the gym, I used machines just because it was a little bit easier to manage that 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down compared to free weights. Do you have people who are doing this with free weights or do you primarily use machines? I kind of follow up to that and so if so, do you incorporate special machines like you know in your general studio?

Doug:             Yea, this can operate over a whole entire spectrum now in my own studio we do use commercially available equipment but in a while it has been modified.  Most of the equipment I have in my facility is med-x equipment.

Ben:                Med- X?

Doug:             Med -X, yes.

Ben:                Why do you use that?

Doug:            Well, for several reasons.  One is the bio-mechanics is pad on, there are no movements, they’re biomechanically offered or put the client in a vulnerable position while under load.  The second is that they are intimately adjustable meaning you have a seat back, you have a seat, you have a weight stock that is capable of being gapped out so when I go to fit the person in an exercise machine, rather than fitting the person in the equipment I can fit the equipment around the person so it has an extreme degree of adjustability.  The third thing is that the equipment has a very low friction.   It has minimal pivot points almost no sprochets, bands or chains and the weight stock is actually what’s called the floating weight stock.  It’s planned and balanced and rather than being pulled from above by a pulley with the weight stock it actually has a sort of a leader and follower device that pushes the weight stock from below and drives this floating weight stock upwards so that the friction is very well. In addition to that we have incorporated on, some pieces modifications or cams that vary with distinct curve so that the resistance outlet from the machine more closely matches the body’s capability of any point arranged motion. So basically all the equipment I’m using is tailored made so that when a client bites the dust from fatigue it’s because the muscle is completely extent not because he’s been entrapped in a biomechanically sticking point that he’s become too weak to get over.  So they are very few sticking points in the equipment.  Now having said that, this sort of protocol can be done on any equipment, free weights or no weights at all.

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Ben:                Yes, I was going to say that there’s a point for a body well trained?

Doug:            Oh yes, I mean, I got one of the premier trainers in these protocols is a fellow named Gus Diamantopoulos. He likes to brag that if you give him a pair of yoga blocks and a nylon strap that he can desolate anyone. Just using time static contraction for chest fly hip  abduction and use the band for you know lateral raises, hip abduction as pre-exhaust mechanism for performing a free hand exercise like free hand slots, push-ups, you know, weight assisted things of that nature.  He can use those things in such a way to produce the rate and kind of fatigue that we talked about and would even add more equipment.

Ben:                Yes, sure.

Doug:             I’ve had some of the best workouts I’ve ever had with free weights using this kind of protocol or with a simple smith machine using this type of protocol.  But what I could tell sometimes it’s hard to get that concept across in a podcast the way I could tell people to go to the web site for the book which is . There is a bodybyscience.net directory there and you don’t have to go to a personal training facility that specializes in this kind of training to get the benefit of this kind of training but I would tell you is that wherever you’re going to train, even if it’s under your own supervision, it might benefit you to seek out one of these facilities. Actually you go to a properly supervised workout just then what happens is you develop what I call a pot of timer.  I want you to experience the rate and depth of fatigue that I’m talking about, then, you have a bench mark for which you’re shooting and once you felt that kind of workout, then you’re better able to reproduce it with whatever equipment you have available to you.

Ben:              Nice, you know I know that I’m going to get some comments and some feedback from people who are suspicious of the ability of this type of program to do something like increase explosive power or vertical jump from maximum strength and things of that nature and if am not mistaken Doug, you are not necessarily claiming that this type of training is ideal for those parameters as much as it is extremely beneficial for giving someone that aerobic benefit from anaerobic style training.  Am I correct?

Doug:             Yes and no. This work of training in terms of increasing explosiveness, vertical jump explosiveness out of a start for strength, explosiveness for football, basketball , feel in the blank is ideal but what happens is a lot of times when people are considering this, they can use skill conditioning with physical conditioning.  And this type of protocol can produce an ideal physical conditioning for those who have ailments but if you want to demonstrate an improved performance in vertical job or an improved performance in a particular explosive way for feeling the blank you actually have to work  the  skill of that particular explosive movement in order to demonstrate best results, but, in terms of increasing explosive capability this is a superior protocol pyometrics or anything of that nature that you could envision and what happens is that sort of explosiveness is a component of two things, one is capability and the other is intent. Capability is determined by how much muscle power you have at that given instant. An intent has to do with your generalized efficiency and that is when you realize the efficiency has two components and one is just what you are born with and two is skill rehearsal.  If you merit all those three things together you’re gonna have much more explosiveness. Now, during performance of the type of exercise we advocate we actually start off, kind of controlling the cadence you’re going slower than you could but by the time you get to the third or fourth repetition done in this fashion if you’ve done it right you’ve created a level of fatigue where you barely have any gap between your capability and the resistance that you are using.  And at that point you are now weak enough or we start to instruct the client, okay, go as fast as you can now and more times than not, the client never goes too fast they’re pushing as hard and as fast as they can and they are lucky if they can complete the movement in 12 seconds much less 10 or five or whatever but make no mistake they’re being as maximally explosive as they can  possibly be, but that has a margin safety introduced by the fatigue that we’ve accumulated up to that point but if you marry that intent that capability to be explosive when you  no longer are capable being explosive.  If you marry that intent with the muscular adaptation and strength that occurs in a specific skill set, then you will have a superior outcome that you can measure. Does that make sense?

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Ben:                Got it, it does, it does. So you are basically maximizing muscle stimulation.  We put it simplistically.

Doug:             Correct, but we are training the explosiveness after significant fatigue has occurred and forces are not too high, doing a climb after box job you take away your body dropping for three or four feet off the box hitting the ground you know if you weigh 200 lbs. and you’re dropping four feet and that’s 4 x 800, that’s 800 times acceleration force of gravity at 9.323% squared, you know you’re looking at 4,000 foot pounds of force being transmitted on to your joints and well that does has some training effect and it will bear fruit in terms of explosive capability and vertical job.  You’re doing it at, in exquisite risk of injury.  Where is it you were trained that sort of explosiveness after you had significant fatigue and can’t really demonstrate what that explosiveness is capable of, you’re still training it but you’re doing so in the same fashion so later when you actually want to demonstrate vertical job or whatever, those two things can be married together so instead of trying to do a training protocol that mimics the skill you actually produce the physical conditioning that makes you better able to do the physical skill and then you apply with that specific skill exactly as it’s done so if you are looking to do a vertical job you train for the job as a skilled conditioning and you’re supposed to do a physical conditioning. We don’t mix the two up. We keep physical conditioning and skill conditioning as separate entities.

Ben:                Got you.  One more question to throw at you here and that is, that there are a lot of people whether they are proponents of paleo, or ancestral health or anything in that nature they kind of look at things in the light of whether or not something you know our ancestors may have done.  When you take this type of training can you actually make it relevant you know, to something that evolutionary help stand point make sense in terms of lifting up something extremely slow and lowering it extremely slow or how do you kind of marry this to the whole ancestral health stand point?

Doug:             Yea, it’s always tricky because people make the mistake in the dietary aspect of paleo, they’ve  seen to come to grips with the difference between, paleo re-enactment and actually producing with what’s available in modern times, a paleolific type prescription and people that have problems with the type of training I advocate is being pro-paleo is that they are thinking about exercise in terms of paleo re-enactment running from the tiger, dragging the log, throwing the heavy rock or whatever but what this does is, what am trying to do is to tap this evolutionary derived metabolic pathways to basically enact this ancient pill metabolic pathway  but in a way that uses modern technology to make it safe and the controlling of forces involved with doing high intensity exercise so we don’t injure ourselves in the process.  So many of the paleolific notion of exercise involves things that are of very high force nature and you know if you can  carry your vibram or screw up your rotator top forget  a  meniscus tear as a consequence of trying to perform  paleo and re-enactment type exercise you gonna get laid up where you can’t do any exercise at all and what we’re trying to do is activate this ancient metabolic pathways that in a way that leverages modern technology to make it safe so that you do not harm yourself.   First, do no harm and that is what my approach is.

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Ben:                Got you.  You know I always kind of had this raised eyebrow towards what would be traditionally called super slow training just because, it seemed before I had designed to explain to be kind of like a waste of time almost compared to lifting explosively  and maybe lowering slowly .  When I look at it in this light in terms of the venous return, the blood pressure and the amplification cascade, in terms of the aerobic training benefits derived from anaerobic strength training protocol, makes it a lot of sense especially after having done it yesterday.  You know, I would encourage people who are listening in to just try it out and definitely put a week to Doug’s book and show notes.  The name of the book is Body by Science.  You can check it out and you can also go to his website bodybyscience.net and see some videos of him performing the exercises and also some good articles over there but you know try it out sometime this week if you have a chance that fits it in.

Doug:        I just would like your listeners know that this part of the problem with really the type of exercise am advocating is, it is a marker not a nightmare.  It’s not crusted. If you video tape this we’re like a duck that’s on the surface of the pond, just floating along nice and  beautifully and it look, just like am watching paint dry to watch and really good training to do this type of high intensity exercise.  You are like a duck in the pond you want to seize the legs under water turning a thousand miles an hour. This sort of training involves slow movement, behavioral control of large amount of stoicism, the only way you can truly appreciate it, is to experience it firsthand because the amount  of  intensity that is under the visual  service there, is so beyond anything that you’ve ever experienced.  If it is properly supervised and you’re going through a really hard workout done in this fashion it will make anything that you’ve ever done before Fran, Crossfit you know, Tabata, it all pales in comparison to this, done properly  but the video tape you’re looking at, you would never know.  You see it first hand, is key. I mean, it is beyond intense. The rate of fatigue is so bewildering that some people when they’re first doing it, they cannot even wrap their brain around it.

Ben:             Yeah, I am definitely sore right now.  I got it somewhat from the gym cause I am usually the guy who’s bouncing around going from whatever bosu ball, once jump, stay overhead push press, squats, the clings and you know all of a sudden am in the gym yesterday and might sit in a machine for two, three minutes at a time and it definitely was a change, it’s cool, I like it.

Doug:             I like you and it’s sort of protocol the greater your capability the more punishment that you could bring to yourself. I mean some of the best conditioned athletes and prospects or whatever when they want me to take them to a demo workout they are ones to get the worst cardio time because they are well conditioned and they can bring a lot of punishment to themselves in such a short amount of time so you get cardio time out of a really intensity heat.

Ben:              Am all about throwing curve balls at your body and folks this is it. A good way to do it. So,  check it out, I’ll put a link to Doug’s book in the  show notes and head for bodybyscience.net and Dr. McGuff thank you so much for coming on today’s call.

Doug:             Yes, appreciate it.  It’s been a pleasure.

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