7 Reasons Why High Intensity Strength Training Can Improve Your Performance

Ameer Rosic Wednesday April 23th 2014

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High Intensity Strength Training can help you optimize your workouts, so you can work smarter, not harder!

High intensity strength training is the most effective way to increase both muscle size and strength
High Intensity Training (H.I.T.) refers to the one set to failure type training program promoted as the most effective and scientifically based strength training program by such research scientists as Arthur Jones, Ellington Darden, and Matt Brzycki and by famous bodybuilder Mike Mentzer. In addition to recommending that the smallest possible number of sets be performed, another essential tenet of this training philosophy is that repetitions should all be performed in a slow, controlled fashion.

In today Podcast, Dr Doug McGuff and I discuss the extreme importance of HIT and why should you really care about it.

Transcript (Listen to the Full Podcast Here)

Ameer: Hey Doug, how you doing brother? Doug: Im doing great. How are you? Ameer: Im good. First of all, I just want to thank you so much for coming on the Optimal Health Show. I know were pretty much halfway across the world from each other, so the time zone fluctuation is a little bit different. In fact, Im actually sitting here in my [inaudible-00:00:21] in my condo because my internet went all funky, so hopefully we stay stable during this. The reason I have you on this show is you wrote a fantastic book called Body By Science which breaks down how to become strong, how to become your best version through optimizing your workouts. My question to you is what kind of made you write that book in the first place? Doug: The book, it actually been percolating in my head for many years. I originally got in the high intensity strength training as an athlete. When I was a teenager, I was a professional BMX racer, and this was kind of during the heyday of Nautilus and Arthur Jones, and actually bartered janitorial services for a membership at this gym and high-intensity abbreviated training made a very big difference in my athletic career, and always stuck through and all the way through college, med school and throughout my career. I had a military scholarship that I had to pay back. When I finally got out of the military and came here to South Carolina to work, I knew I wanted to set up my own gym for my own training. So I had to buy the equipment that I thought was best and I ended up getting that equipment but putting it in a space and actually opening a personal training center, and then from there things just evolved. It became much busier and more successful that I actually expected. My motivation was just to have the equipment. But I applied this on myself and on my clients, I started to see a pattern of the technology raising the intensity to a level where the volume and the frequency was out of necessity going downward and downward and this was very much out of sync with the rest of fitness industry, and I just have this sense that I was on to something. I wrote a lot about it and most of it was theorizing but over the course of time, the scientific community kind of grabbed a hold of it and started to test a lot of these theories which ended up bearing fruit. Around 2008, I was approached by John Little, my co-author, with the idea of writing a book. I offered to do so with the idea that we could do this based on this new scientific literature coming out because there was enough of it accumulating to really build a case for high intensity exercise. That couldnt have been done until about that time because there literally wasnt enough of that kind of research out there, but it was starting to reach a crest of the volume of that kind of research, and thats what we tapped to write a book. Ameer: Now, whats your take on the whole aspect of some people saying that aerobic exercise such as like running is good for cardiovascular healthy, versus for example high intensity training. What would you tell those individuals? Doug: Well, if you read the book, you know thats a complicated topic. The thing is that assumption is built on a whole cascade of false premises, and these false premises started in the 1970s in the exercise physiology literature because at that time, their only measuring tool was VO2 max testing, and when

your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. All of the exercise testing, the only metric they have to measure efficacy was VO2 max or maximal oxygen uptake, and the only way they could administer exercise using that technology was on steady state pieces, generally either bicycle ergometer, treadmills, something that hold still, in order to be able to use the apparatus. So they started to build a bit of literature showing the beneficial effects of steady state exercise in terms of adaptation for VO2 max. What ended up happening is they started to make a correlation between this aerobic metabolic adaptation and cardiovascular healthy, and over time it just became a default assumption that things that emphasize the aerobic component of metabolism were also beneficial to the cardiovascular system in a unique way. So it eventually evolved to where aerobic exercise, the term even got dropped altogether and now people just call it cardio. But the real truth of the matter is aerobic exercise occurs in one tiny part of the cell called the mitochondria, but there is much more to metabolism than just that subsegment of metabolism, and in fact, that segment, the aerobic segment of metabolism cannot even run unless it receives substrate from the anaerobic portion of metabolism. People have this false notion that somehow the mitochondria was magically connected to the hardened blood vessels, but the rest of the cell wasnt, and what we tried to show through the literature and in the book is that the entirety of the cell and the entirety of its metabolism services the cardiovascular system, and the cardiovascular system services it. So to the extent that you can stress and train all of metabolism is the extent to which you can really have appropriate adaptations in the cardiovascular system. Doing a high intensity, and this is whats born out with all these literature on high intensity interval training, is that you can get an equal or better aerobic adaptation by raising the intensity so that you deliver anaerobic substrate to the mitochondria as fast as possible, forcing the mitochondria to also adapt. By raising the intensity of the exercise, you get not only conditioning that was lacking during steady state exercise, but you were getting all the benefit you were getting in steady state exercise and then some. Ameer: Theres also a connection with like hypoxia too, lack of oxygen, right? Doug: Yeah. The component that is there are a lot of metabolic adaptations to exertion, and what happens with hypoxia is that in your anaerobic portion of metabolism, youre delivering the insubstrate, the pyruvate to the mitochondria at a rate faster than which it can be used. So that pyruvate stacks up and as it stacks up, it cant get into the mitochondria so its acted on by another enzyme called lactate dehydrogenase which makes lactic acid. Most people think of that as occurring in the absence of oxygen, but really whats happening is youre just delivering the substrate from the rest of the cell from anaerobic metabolism, to the aerobic metabolism faster than it can use it. It gets acted upon by another enzyme that turns it into lactic acid, and a lot of the metabolic adaptations that come from exercise are mechanisms for dealing with that acidosis. Blood buffering systems, improvements in respiratory volume and rate so you blow off carbon dioxide to offset that acidosis. And theres also good evidence. Youll see a lot of these in the literature that talks about vascular occlusion during weightlifting producing better results. There is some evidence that the accumulation of these metabolic fatigue products also enhances the hormonal and mechanical response of muscle to exercise. All these metabolic byproducts actually are important part of the adaptive process. Ameer: Then whats your take on combining, say people who do strength trainings such as like power lifters and Olympic lifters combining that with high intensity. Do you see great potential doing that? Dough: Yes, but when you do that, you have to realize. On one side, youre talking about a mechanism of physical conditional, and on the other side, youre talking about a sport-specific skill and activity. If

you practice high intensity strength training that is fast-paced, you are going to create a mechanism whereby you generate great strength adaptations as well as metabolic adaptations. But in order for those adaptations to apply well to the sport of power lifting, you actually have to carve out some time where you practice the skill and the sport specifically, and there is some overlap there because youre lifting weights in both scenarios, so you have to account for that in the bodys recovery equation, and you have to keep very separate the notion of your physical training versus your skill training. In other words, you cant just do a power lifting routine with very little rest between sets for the metabolic effect and think that thats going to work. You have to do a high intensity strength training protocol for your physical conditioning, but then to apply the adaptations of strength from that, you actually still have to practice power lifting as it is in your sport. Does that make sense? Ameer: Of course it makes sense. Its just you have different tools on your toolbelt and you got to use them appropriately and figure out what works for you right? Doug: Yeah. But its more than just tools on the toolbelt, it is being able to make a very clear distinction between physical training and skill training. Because physical training is done with the intent of producing a stimulus that the body will adapt too, and that stimulus almost universally is a rapid accumulation of deep fatigue. Thats whats going to trigger these adaptations in the body. As opposed to skill conditioning, the skill of performing a maximal single attempt lift requires you to use a certain specific form, and to be fully rested without accumulated products of fatigue, and performing that specific skill in that specific environment. So while you can have strength adaptations from preparing for power lifting and performing power lifting, that is still also a very sports-specific skill. So within the paradigm of trying to use the type of workout I talked about in the book, the workout is a separate thing entirely for the purpose of producing physical adaptations. And you take those physical adaptations and you apply them to the specific sport skill, whether that is power lifting, BMX racing, football, fill in the blank. The sports skill specific training and the physical training you have to separate in your mind on order to allow one not to pollute the other. Ameer: You have to find a fine balance in between each other. Doug: Correct, because both of those consume some recovery resources, but in the end if youre an athlete, your goal is to show the best possible performance, and one of the ways to really be fine in your performance, is to try to combine your skill conditioning and your physical conditioning. On other words, trying to do a specific activity of your sport with greater stressor applied. Whether youre trying to combine metabolic conditioning with your sport skill or if youre trying to improve strength to your sport skill by, I dont know, using a heavier soccer ball or swinging a bat with a weight on it. All of those things will only confound and confuse the very specific neuromotor pathways for that skill. An athlete should be very cognizant of separating their physical training from their skill training. You want to do your skill training exactly as you do it in your sport in a well-rested state, so youre not producing two different neuromotor pathways for that skill to cause confusion during competition. Ameer: Can you talk about a little bit more for how high intensity training actually improves flexibility. Doug: Sure. First we got to define what we mean by flexibility. Some people think that flexibility is just trying to achieve a maximal range motion for a given joint, and that is not necessarily the case. We dont want to always increase flexibility. We want to optimize flexibility, and a lot of what people think of is stretching is really just placing the muscle in a mechanically inefficient position where it is too stretched to contract, and that is called passive insufficiency. Basically the muscle is so elongated that the actin and myosin filament cant engage with each other, and you usually will feel that sensation by that tagging, tearing sensation. For instance, if you do a hurdlers stretch, all youre really doing with your

hamstring is putting it in a position of passive insufficiency. It cannot contract because youve lengthened it so much that those filaments cant engage with each other. What that means for the opposing muscle group, your quadriceps, is it is in active insufficiency, meaning it is fully shortened and can shorten no further. That really has nothing to do with flexibility. Flexibility is the ability to have a good degree of strength throughout a muscles natural, normal full range of motion. All that is required to do that is to have a biomechanically correct exercise that has resistance through its full range of motion. If youre loaded at full flexion and loaded at full exte nsion and everywhere in between, then youre going to have enhanced the strength of that muscle such that it has some functional capacity at all point of its range of motion. As opposed to some peoples notion of just stretching any given joint as possible, some joints are less functional and less stable with improved flexibility. The shoulder joint being an example of that. The shoulder joint by its very nature has a small articular surface and a very large ball, the humeral head, on that articular surface. So it actually has an excessive range of motion. Its already inherently unstable which is why it is so injury-prone. If you do exercise this to even further enhance the range of motion or flexibility of that joint, you can actually make it more unstable and more prone to injury. This is why you see so many pitchers become injured. An optimal shoulder joint, if all of its superficial and deep muscles are appropriately conditioned and strengthened, will actually have somewhat less of a range of motion than an untrained jointed. It will actually be a little bit tighter but its also more functional and more stable. What you want with flexibility is actually to strengthen the surrounding supporting musculature so flexibility is enhanced, and by enhanced, some joints may have slightly less range of motion, other joints will have improved range of motion or mobility. Ameer: Im happy you said that because there are so many people out there talking about, for example, you got to be super flexible, you got to go yoga and do all these magic splits and everything, but in reality there may also be a danger of being too hyperflexible. You actually have to have a foundation in your body and have strong ligaments and tendons. Doug: Thats correct. And a lot of people confuse flexibility and mobility. People talk about mobility exercises and theres lots of little mobility exercises, the ones where youre walking up, you set up a bar on a rack and you step over it, step under it, that kind of thing. People view those as mobility exercises. I view them more as test mobility. But people confuse joint flexibility and joint mobility. Sometimes having optimal mobility actually requires a little bit less joint flexibility in order to have the stability to get in those vulnerable positions. Ameer: Doug, can you just turn off your video right now quickly. I think were getting some bad internet connections. Just make the audio quality better. Doug: Okay, lets see. Ameer: Cool, much better. Youre totally right. A lot of people try to categorize things when there may be actually a mixture of those mobility or in fact how you mentioned is the mobility exercises that youre actually doing is not an exercise for mobility for more or less a test to test your mobility. Doug: Correct. I think the real thing is that when were talking about these concepts, we just need to be precise in our definitions. We cant assume that flexibility and mobility are the same thing and more flexibility equals more mobility. Sometimes, less flexibility equals more joint stability, which means more mobility in the extremes of range of motion.

Ameer: I think it all comes down to what your goals are in life too. For example, if Im power lifting at the moment which I am, I have my set of goals, and its much different from someone whos doin g, I dont know, cross-fit or a soccer player. And I think people are trying to categorize and generalize everything too much. A soccer player needs different mobility and flexibility say, compared to a linebacker from the NFL. So its two complete different scenarios. Doug: Right. And sometimes, whether youre a soccer player or a linebacker in the NFL, its not necessarily a matter of how you train for a given degree of mobility. Sometimes its the mobility youre born with that optimizes you and selects you out for a certain sport. A lot of times its not so much what you decided to do in terms of training as it is the parents that you were given. Ameer: Yeah. Some people are gifted genetic. I know the Russians, well not now but in the former USSR, they used to do that. They actually screen genetically young students from the age of around 10 to see what theyre gifted at, from a phenotypic expression of view. Doug: Yup. You know, I think as much as anything, they were probably not so much screening genetically as they were being very good at phenotypic observation. Sort of in the same way that the wolf got turned into Dalmatians and [inaudible-00:21:37], the Russians were very good at determining what you are phenotypically best suited for. Ameer: Lets dive in to a different topic right now. A lot of people talk about cholesterol these days. High cholesterol, low cholesterol, different density of cholesterol. How does high intensity training improve your cholesterol numbers? Doug: Okay. First, we got to take a step back and first ask ourselves if the cholesterol theory of coronary artery disease is correct or not, and whether your cholesterol number matters as much as we think it does, and the answer generally is that your cholesterol numbers may or may not have meaning depending upon more upstream metabolic processes. Let me try to explain it this way. The problem with vascular disease is [inaudible-00:22:42]. The arteries in your body have an inner lining called endothelium that is very silky smooth for efficient blood flow. When you get systemic vascular inflammation which is largely driven by components of the modern western diet which are highly inflammatory, then the endothelium rough up, and when you expose the layers underneath the endothelium to the blood flow, that triggers an inflammatory response that terminates in the formation of a blood clot to close off that vessel. It is a mechanism of protecting against exsanguinating hemorrhage with vascular injury. But with systemic vascular inflammation, the body mistakes that for a potentially hemorrhagic vascular injury and start to create a cascade of events to correct that. And your body tries to patch over these rough areas of vascular inflammation to try and short circuit this inflammatory process that leads to a clot. And it youre going to patch, youre going to use some sort of mortar thats readily available, and the most [inaudible-00:24:09] fat circulating in our body is cholesterol. Cholesterol is a very important fat. It serves as the building block for all of our cell walls. It serves as the foundation for all of sex steroids and other hormones, and its always circulating, so your body just uses that to patch the systemic vascular inflammation, which is a good thing. It prevents rapid progression to a clot which could you cause you to lose blood flow to the area supplied by that artery. So, this cholesterol is always circulating in your blood stream. How it circulates in your bloodstream depends on the type of protein that it is bound to. Cholesterol is a fat and if youve ever taken olive oil and dropped it in water, youll notice that it turns into a little spherical because fat does not like water. It orients all the water-friendly components of the chemical to the outside and the water-fearing

components to the inside which is why it forms a little spherical globule. For a fat to be soluble in the bloodstream, it has to be bound to a protein. [inaudible-00:25:23] how it flows through the blood vessel. If you are trying to transport fat back centrally in a low pressure vessel, you want to attach it to a high density protein, because that will be of higher molecular weight and it will travel down the middle of the blood vessel during a laminar flow situation. Cholesterol that youre transporting back to the liver for metabolism, you want to attach to a high density protein, and it will therefore be a high density lipoprotein or HDL. If instead youre wanting to take cholesterol from the center of the body out to the periphery to patch systemic inflammation, you want to attach it to a low density lipoprotein, so you attach it to a low density protein. If you are to stand on a bridge over a river that was flowing fairly rapidly, if you took a heavy log and dropped it straight down, that log would float down the middle of the river. If instead you took a handful of dry leaves and drop then down there, what you would notice is those dry leaves would gradually drift out to the side and then cling to the banks of the river. That is why you have low density lipoprotein. Youre attaching cholesterol to a low density protein so it will drift out to the periphery, and attach to these areas of vascular inflammation and patch them. So in people that have a large amount of vascular inflammation, you will find that they will have a higher measurement of their LDL or low density lipoprotein cholesterol. But where people make the mistake about trying to lower their LDL is by virtue of taking that occasion to do it. Trying to make the number look better without necessarily correcting the upstream metabolic problem which is vascular inflammation. Now, to the extent that you perform exercise and your LDL goes down, exercise, particularly strength training has a very anti-inflammatory effect. Muscle releases chemicals called myokines which decrease systemic inflammation. When that happens, you have less peripheral vascular inflammation, less need for LDL, and your LDL will drop. This is as opposed to your doctor puts you on a statin. That artificially lowers your LDL without any change in the upstream systemic vascular inflammation, which actually potentially makes the situation worse because now you are less able to patch these areas of systemic vascular inflammation. The best I could say to think of LDL and taking a statin versus exercising, is if you take a helicopter and you fly around Los Angeles. If you fly over Beverly Hills, youll notice not a lot of cop cars circulating around. But if you fly over Compton, youll see all sorts of cop cars circulating around and you think Oh wow, more cop cars means more crime. So lets take all the cop cars out of Compton. Well that doesnt necessarily youve lowered crime. Thats the same thought when you just try to lower LDL which a marker, a downstream marker of the systemic vascular inflammation. If you do it through proper diet and exercise, and your LDL goes down, thats great. If you just make your LDL go down by taking a medicine, not so great. Ameer: And also, when youre doing high intensity exercise, you mentioned this as well in your book as it stimulates the production of GLUT4, so your body has a better efficiency of assimilating sugars. Doug: Exactly, and thats another driver of systemic inflammation. You got to realize that as far as your bodys ability to store glucose, skeletal muscle is the largest reservoir for glucose in the body. You store glycogen there. And that glycogen, unlike glycogen that is stored in the liver, is for on-site usage, its for emergency usage for the fight and flight mechanism. When adrenaline hits the muscle, that activates a cascade of enzymes which cleaves of massive amounts of glycogen, so youre able to empty your glucose stores in your muscle. That creates a need post-exercise for more glucose to be transported back into the muscle, hence the desensitization of the GLUT4 transport mechanism, and that increases your insulin sensitivity. You have increased insulin receptors on the cell surface, increased GLUT4 transport on the cell surface, so your systemic insulin levels drop, which is the big driver of systemic

inflammation. So, the more efficient usage of glucose as well as the more efficient mobilization of fatty acids basically is the antithesis of the metabolic syndrome. Ameer: So, to summarize everything. If you had to give one optimal health tip to somebody, what would that be? Just one. Like if you have to summarize everything youve learned through your years and years of research and experience, what would be that one massive tip that someone could really benefit from. Doug: Intermittently, work out very hard. And the rest of the time, remain reasonably active. I think if you do that, youd create a scenario where all the other things that we tried to pay attention to, tend to automatically fall in place. When you do brief intermittent high intensity exercise, then that releases myokines, chemicals from muscles. It creates a hormonal metabolic milieu where all the other behaviors in terms of our diet, our activity, our sleep patterns, all tends to occur as a matter of course spontaneously. So a lot of what we try to do through anal retentiveness and being good kind of happens automatically if you just work hard every once in a while. Ameer: Yes, I like that. Work hard. Doug: Right. Ameer: Awesome. Okay Doug, where can people find more information about you? Doug: Right now, my blog for the book is BodyByScience.net but currently, it will probably be available here within the next couple of weeks, Im working on a new website for myself. It will be DrMcGuff.com, and that will kind of be a launching point for everything that I do. I have a personal training business. We run clients to a gym doing personal training. I do consultation, I do speaking engagements. I do consultation for corporate fitness, setting up wellness centers, and that will all be accessible through that website. Ameer: Beautiful. Thank you so much. You heard it Optimal Health Warriors. Go check out Dougs website. Hes full of knowledge. Thank you once gain Doug for coming on the show, and have an amazing day. Doug: Ameer, its a pleasure. Thank you.

Ameer Rosic
Ameer Rosic is obsessed with health. A Registered Holistic Nutritionist, Functional Diagnostic Practitioner and Functional Medicine Practitioner, Ameer has spent years empowering himself with knowledge about optimal health, and now his passion is to share that with you! From interviews with top health experts to fitness and nutritional advice and more, Ameer Rosic can help you live a life of optimal health!

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