Most Replayed Moment: This Is The Best Exercise Protocol For Women!

Steven Bartlett (0:04)

I hear a lot about VO2 maxes, so I thought we should all be driving our cardiovascular performance up to get a high VO2 max.

Stacy Sims (0:10)

Well, that's where the intensity is. Yeah.

Mary Claire Haver (0:12)

I think it's-

Vonda Wright (0:12)

That's only once a week.

Mary Claire Haver (0:13)

I mean, and correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding after reading and watching everything is it doesn't take that much to build VO2 max.

Stacy Sims (0:19)

No, it doesn't. It's that high intensity that's a little bit uncomfortable where you're pushing at that max for about four minutes to build that VO2.

In the sports science world, it's always been the four by four, the Norwegian four by four. Four minutes on, four minutes off. Four minutes on, four minutes off.

Vonda Wright (0:38)

But that's not three days a week.

Stacy Sims (0:39)

No, not at all.

Vonda Wright (0:40)

The Norwegian protocol is once a week.

Stacy Sims (0:41)

Once a week at the most, right.

Vonda Wright (0:43)

And the other sprints, just to give you, I tend to give my examples because it makes it more real. But when I'm doing sprint intervals, I do it the 30 seconds on and then complete recovery, meaning for 30 seconds, I'm taking my heart rate as high as I can get it. And then I'll completely recover, which takes me two to three minutes.

I just happen to do it on a treadmill. But the reality is you can do it on anything. It's a heart rate function, not an apparatus function. So for me, on a treadmill, after I'm done warming up, you can't do it cold or you'll hurt something. After I'm done warming up, because I'm a really short person, I punch the treadmill up to 11, and I am just working so hard, I don't fly off the back. But that gets my heart rate up really high, about 186 Everybody's top heart rate is different. And then I completely recover. And I do that four times.

And so it doesn't take that long. And you feel so good when you're done.

Stacy Sims (1:51)

So I can't run at the moment. This morning I did explosive kettlebell swings.

Steven Bartlett (1:54)

Why can't you run at the moment?

Stacy Sims (1:56)

I've torn hamstring and meniscus, so I can't run at the moment.

Steven Bartlett (1:59)

Running is in. Run clubs have come in strong. It's back in.

Are you at all concerned with the fact that people are running all the time and doing resistance training less? Because running is cool now. It's how people date. They're not going to night clubs anymore.

Stacy Sims (2:19)

It's a sacrifice of other things. It's like we said about Pilates. If all you do is running, then that is definitely not the best way to be. It's not the healthiest for your whole body. It's not that you're unhealthy, but we're really talking about how are we optimizing your body, your hormonal health for a variety of different goals. But also if we look very micro at running, 58 percent of runners have a luteal phase defect. That means that the second half of their menstrual cycle is not going to be able to last as long as we want it to, likely due to what Stacy was talking about earlier, this relative energy deficiency coming back to the brain. The brain signals is not as strong to keep that corpus luteum, what happens after the follicle, alive. A lot of women, I still have my period, so I'm okay.

But if we're using our cycle as a vital sign, we can actually say the ratio of energy balance is not great, and it's often because we're doing it at sacrifice of other things. So if you're doing the strength training three times a week, and you're running however you're spacing out your other days, that's such a healthy balance. It's hard that you're going to be in a bad position with that. And you'll actually improve your running more so than if you're to run every day or every other day. Because if you're getting strong through full range of motion, then that feeds forward to better running economy. Then you can vary your pace without getting injured.

But for people who are running every day, and they're shuffling, and they're getting stronger in their strong muscles and weaker in their weak muscles, then it perpetuates this whole injury.

Vonda Wright (3:48)

And they're in my clinic.

Stacy Sims (3:49)

Yeah.

Steven Bartlett (3:50)

People are very keen on doing marathons and half marathons at the moment. And I've got a couple of friends that are doing a lot of marathons at the moment. And they're very, very, very skinny.