How to train your cardiovascular fitness | Peter Attia

if you're really committed to developing your cardiorespiratory Fitness you know I think I talked about this on one of the podcasts maybe it was on Tim's podcast you're trying to maximize the area of a triangle right so the triangle has a base and the triangle has a peak and the goal is how big an area can I get not how wide not how tall you don't want one that's this wide and this tall and you don't want one that's this tall and this wide you want the max the base is your zone two the peak is your VO2 max from a training perspective the rule of thumb that is applicable for People Like Us I. E normal people and the best athletes in the world is roughly 80 20. 80 percent of your volume is down here twenty percent of your volume UPS here in fact some of the really really Elites are probably closer to 90 10.

so you're saying no matter if you're just an ordinary athlete or you're the best of the best it's still roughly the same tadi pogachar who's the greatest cyclist on this planet two-time winner of the Tour de France um you know absolutely mopping up the field of cyclists like their children that guy's doing 80 to 90 percent of his training at zone two and I know that for a red fact because we know who his coach is so so then let's maybe talk about that pyramid so maybe let's just step back and say I didn't answer your question by the way about VO2 max which we can come to but yeah so maybe I was just going to say maybe let's just cover the whole pyramid so what's the training of the whole pyramid if you know it's kind of 80 20 let's break out so I just start with how much time am I willing to put into this now I got to be honest with you I wish I could be putting 10 hours a week into cardio I do I mean historically I've put in 14 to 20 hours a week into cardio up until 10 years ago so like I really miss those days I miss being insanely fit you know I miss I I'd miss that terribly and I missed I missed the joy of that much training um it's simply not possible today I you know for all of the obligations that I have and there's I've done the math 10 Ways to Sunday I'd have to give up something I'm not willing to give up I heard I give up archery or give up driving or give up my kids or something like I'm just I'm not willing to give any of these things up so yeah I basically start with what's the most amount of time I can put into dedicated cardio and for me it's like four to five hours a week not including rucking I sort of keep that in its own bucket so then it's a very simple calculation eighty percent of that time is zone two and twenty percent of that time is VO2 max and how are you breaking out let's just start with zone two how many I divided into four workouts a week so for Tuesday Thursday Saturday Sunday and do you always recommend doing it over very like let's say you could do four hours in one day is there the same benefit of doing all your zone two in one day versus spreading it out no I think you know I've talked about this within you go his view is if you can get at least 30 to 45 minutes you should spread them out so again if you're only able to commit an hour to it it might be one hour once or 30 minutes twice um but I'm sort of doing 45 to 45 minutes to 60 minutes each time is what I do and are you doing zone two VO2 max on the same day one of those days so Saturday so Tuesday Thursday is just zone two uh and then two long sessions of uh stability training so it's like called an hour of zone two an hour of stability actually why don't I just walk you through the whole week that'll be easier so Monday is just strength training so that's about uh 90 minutes to two hours when you include the stability training that I do as well so movement prep stability training strength training and that's all lower body that's Monday uh Tuesday is sewn to followed by dedicated hour of stability Wednesday is uh upper body strength and stability again 90 minutes to two hours Thursday is a repeat of Tuesday Friday is a repeat of Monday Saturday is zone two in the morning upper body strength repeat of Wednesday in the afternoon Sunday is zone two followed by VO2 max and will you ever do VO2 max before you do zone two um I generally don't just because I like to have a lot of reps before I go for broke so even when I was like a cyclist and doing two Zone VO2 max workouts a week they were always preceded by a long the metric we would use um on a bike was kilojoules so is how many kilojoules of work would you do before you would do the super hard sets and it had to be at least a thousand kilojoules which would translate to at least a thousand calories of work and for zone two I know you said you kind of like to break it up is if someone is like hey you know I can do four days a week of zone two but I can only do 15 minutes a day would you said I'd compress it I would say do two thirties so so in your zone two sessions you like to do at least 30. at a minimum yeah and now when you're in those Zone twos are you like when you hit the bike and the clock starts no I take 10 minutes I'm on I do it all mine on a bike um sometimes on a treadmill but what I do is there's a like a little it's a it's it's the the computer is programming to the Wahoo kicker which is the device I'm sitting on so it's it's taking 10 minutes to ramp me up and maybe just walk through what modalities can people do zone two on treadmill bike anything that is steady state so you know swimming is a great way to do it because you can really swim in a pool at a steady state um running is a great way to do it because you can pretty much run at a steady state cycling Outdoors is generally hard unless you have specific Fiesta Island was a great place to train I used to train a Fiesta Island because for people who don't know where that is in San Diego it's we're all with the time trial bike races where and it's just a seven kilometer Loop that you can ride on without lights or any like there's no traffic or anything that gets in your way but for the most part like I wouldn't be able to do zone two outside here in Austin it's just it's too hilly and there's too much traffic and it just it it's it's fits and starts I can do my VO2 max here because I go to a hill and that's my favorite way to do VO2 max is on a hill that's about a mile long and just do very hard up the hill and then easy down the hill but um a treadmill is another great way to do it just kind of a walking incline typically rowing machine if you're really a good rower um you have to be efficient enough most people are not efficient enough and they just they don't have the strength they don't have the stability to row really well for 45 minutes stair climber is another really good one um but you know depends again if you're if you're starting out brisk walking is probably good enough too yeah and we we don't have to get into all the reasons of the benefits of Zone 2 because we have so many podcasts within you go son Milan people can listen to but you kind of hinted at another thing there which is you know when you start your zone two workouts you'll ramp up but also a lot of times we get questions where you know hey I did a 90 minute workout and I was in zone two for 45 minutes of it is that am I good no I mean what I think what you mean in that question is you know like I went out for a three-hour bike ride today and um when I got back my computer told me I was in I did 44 minutes of zone two so two issues there one is that's just a zone two based on heart rate that's generally the worst approximation of zone two so zone two really is more based on lactate if we're going to be purely accurate or at a minimum rpe but even if you posit that that 45 minutes of Zone 2 from your heart rate is roughly accurate it's not the same physiologically because usually you're passing in and out of zone two in that situation and so you're not getting kind of that constant steady state churn which you're looking for we're really kind of looking for is the harnessing of mitochondrial efficiency and to do that you just you have to be able to push oxidative phosphorylation right to its limit before you trip into glycolysis and you're just you're at the limit of that glycolysis being the dominant energy source whereas if you're on that ride you're going into and out of glycolysis constantly so it's not that you're so much in zone two for 45 minutes as that you passed through zone two for a sum total of 45 minutes which again that's still there's still value in that but not for what we're talking about yeah and what about VO2 max what modalities can you do VO2 max training on uh you know here I think it's it's probably easier in a way right because it's pretty much anything that gets your heart rate up and gets you very tired um so you know look it could be a you know an air bike it could be a regular bike it could be a stationary bike stair climber treadmill running outside you know the sky is almost the limit you know it's it's hard to do it on you know it's hard it would be hard to do it I'm trying to think I mean heck you could probably do it with something like burpees is probably pretty tough once you get into something that intense like jumping because the sweet spot for VO2 max is kind of three to eight minute intervals so you don't want to be doing things that are so intense that you can't do them for at least three minutes um and and so that's why I'd kind of hold off on that stuff I mean when I was young and I was really fit I did I did a lot of it with jumping but like those I mean I can't jump for three minutes anymore like I don't have it's just that you know I'm not that fit anymore so I have to rely on easier things and so what's your what's your current VO2 max workout so you mentioned kind of three to eight minutes on is it typically I do four on four off is sort of where I spend most of my time sometimes three on three off on a rowing machine I got into that quite a bit last summer but these days um and sometimes by the way I just am in a bit of a rush and I'll just do one minute on two minute off at a much higher intensity on this air climber so I have one of those like industrial grade strength climbers and sometimes I'll just go Sprint for a minute up the stairs and then it takes me two minutes to get my heart rate back down to about a hundred and then repeat that for 20 to 30 minutes so that's kind of like my poor man's cheating VO2 max workout um but what I really like to do is four minute repeats four minutes on four minutes off and on the four minutes on are you going a hundred percent for the full like how how should someone think about yeah this is one of those things you have to you have to play with this there's a this is years and years of practice to know what that feels like um so again I'm doing this on a bike so I'm looking at wattage and my watts are so low now I'm embarrassed so I'm not going to tell you what the watts are because they're so much lower than they used to be but I know I have a sense of what I need to average my wattage over those four minutes so I might go out at 105 of that wattage and it feels pretty easy for the first minute if it doesn't I've gone too hard by three minutes I'm very uncomfortable and at a minute I'm I mean with at that in that last minute I.