Peak Performance Without Suffering (Breather Episode with Brad)

Start HIRTing instead of HIITing - this show will transform your approach to training. Let’s call this a long Breather show to honor the message that you should take longer breathers during your high intensity training sessions. This show is appropriate for all fitness enthusiasts, because we have widespread training protocols that are fatiguing and destructive at the cellular level. Thanks to Craig Marker at StrongFirst.com for the inspiration and detailed quotable material that formed the foundation of this show. 

It’s time to evolve from the dated and misappropriated HIIT training (High Intensity Interval Training) concept to HIRT (High Intensity Repeat Training.) Essentially, you want to focus on shorter sprints that will stimulate maximum fitness benefits before generating too much cellular damage and ammonia toxicity that can compromise your fat reduction goals. You also want to allow 

I talk about a recent breakthrough in my fitness performance and recovery where I do fewer sprints, rest longer between efforts, and have better results. I also tone down my ambitious high intensity workouts that last too long and overstimulate stress hormones in favor of what Dr. Phil Maffetone calls “slow weights.” Here, I do spontaneous efforts of only a single set of a single exercise. For example, I invested in a hexagonal deadlift bar, which sits in my backyard and gets some action several times a day to the tune of 6 reps and I drop the bar and go about my business. I also have StretchCordz hanging from a pullup bar in my recording studio, which I will hit a couple/few times per day for single set efforts. If you add this up over a year’s time, I will obtain fabulous strength benefits but avoid the overstress consequnces of heavy duty workouts as I exist here in the 50+ age group. 

The conversation gets a little sciency, as I wanted to attempt to explain the cellular damage that occurs when you try to sprint for longer than 10 seconds. This stuff was detailed beautifully in Craig Marker’s HIIT vs HIRT article. Another insight from Marker is that, "Your feelings don’t matter! That is, your subjective feeling of the effectiveness of a workout is not as important as what science tells us is important to building an impressive base of endurance and changing your body composition.” Marker explains that people love to do exhausting HIIT workouts, end lying in a pool of sweat on the floor and bathe in the cocktail of endorphin hormones that deliver that drug-line painkilling sensation. The problem is we tend to eat more food and become lazier throughout the day as a consequence of our high stress workouts.

Please enjoy this show and don’t learn the hard way like I did that you should not feel sore and tired after hard workouts over and over for years and years. Go harder, go shorter, rest longer, and forget the grueling ethos that many group workouts promote. 

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