Steady State vs. Interval Training: Summing Up Part 2
In Steady State vs. interval training: Summing up Part 1, I started to put together some of the information I’m blogging about by making a point about the types of problems I’m seeing in practice with the pro-interval myopia. Simply: given that a majority of trainees train more frequently than 3X/week, once they have been convinced that intervals are the only way to train, problems start. They end up trying to do intervals at every session, in addition to a heavy weight training load for the legs and they blow up.
Steady State vs. Interval Training: Summing Up Part 1
There is also the issue of how intervals integrate with training when OTHER TYPES OF TRAINING (e.g. weight training) are being done. That is, what happens if someone is training their legs heavily in the weight room twice/week. How realistic is it to then add high intensity interval training to that workload?
Metabolic Adaptations to Short-Term High-Intensity Interval Training
It’s long been felt or argued that the only way to reach the pinnacle of endurance performance is through years of grinding effort, usually involving absolute piles of low-intensity training. To a great degree, outside of the occasional period when programs based around intensification have become popular, this has been the basic approach to endurance training.
Exercise Efficiency
One of the common arguments against steady state cardio is something akin to ‘Steady state is useless because you become more efficient at it and burn less calories doing it.’
I’ve already addressed part of why this argument is stupid but want to go into a bit more detail.
How to Estimate Maintenance Caloric Intake – Q&A
First, I have read tons of your articles on the internet (I think I even found something you may have doodled on a napkin and threw away and somehow it made it to a website!) and I have only found that you mentioned multiplying a woman’s bodyweight for 14 and a man’s by 15 to calculate maintenance calories.
Steady State vs. Intervals: Explaining the Disconnect Part 2
In Steady State vs. Intervals: Explaining the Disconnect Part 1, I started to examine some other physiological explanations (outside of EPOC) to potentially explain the seeming disconnect between the total irrelevancy of EPOC and both the research and real-world fat loss results from interval training. I’m going to continue and conclude that discussion today by looking at some other mechanisms by which interval training may be affecting fat loss in both research and the real world.
Steady State vs. Intervals: Explaining the Disconnect Part 1
With any realistic amount of intervals, not only does the total calorie burn of the workout itself pale compared to longer moderate intensity steady state sessions, the EPOC simply doesn’t amount to anything. Certainly not enough to explain the rather rabid and myopic recommendation of that form of training.
Woodchop and Reverse Woodchop
The woodchop and reverse woodchop actually exist in two very distinct forms; perhaps more interestingly they do basically opposite things. This is probably some of the source of the confusion. That’s in addition to the fact that most people seem compelled on this exercise to use wayyyyy too much weight which makes their form awful.
Steady State vs. Intervals and EPOC: Practical Application
As I mentioned yesterday, and want to look at in more detail today, although 14% sounds impressively larger than 7%, this can be terribly misleading. 7% of a large number can still be more than 14% of a much smaller number even if the percentage contribution is higher in the second case. And no matter how you cut it, the majority of calories burned come during the workout, not afterwards. As you’ll see, the EPOC doesn’t amount to jack for any realistic amount of activity.
Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption and Exercise
In the last year or three, exercise programs for fat loss have been geared around the concept of using certain types of training (either interval style cardio or highish rep/short rest weight training) to cause fat loss through an ‘afterburn’ effect where calories are burned after workouts to a greater degree than following standard training styles (esp. low intensity cardio). Clearly from a real-world perspective, this type of training ‘works’.
