Wrestlers are lean as heck. Go watch a wrestling practice and see how much “steady state cardio” they do. It’s a lot.
A warm-up for most wrestlers is a 2-3 mile run - a hard run.
Then some stair sprints.
Then drill after drill after drill.
No wrestlers do 20-60 seconds all out, and then take a break. It’s all “steady state.”
It just happens to be that the “steady state” is closer to 100% of MHR.
HIIT also, depending on how its done, maintains high heart rate.
Calling something steady-state because the heart rate stays high doesn’t mean it’s steady state with regard to work.
I don’t know if you were trying to claim that the wrestler’s case corresponds with the case of the long, hard aerobic exercise fan, or whether you recognized that it correlates more closely with HIIT.
Also, bodybuilders do slow, steady-state cardio for contest prep. That’s how they lose their fat.
Is there a bodybuilding coach who has his contest prep guys doing HIIT?
If you stacked the guys up who actually train bb’ers vs. those who don’t train but write articles, you’d seen a uniform disagreement. The guys who do the actual training stick with longish sessions of steady state cardio at low intensity.
Oh, that is NOT a dig on Bill Roberts, who definitely knows his stuff. (I don’t think he’d take it that way; but I wanted to make sure he didn’t.)
It’s just that I see so many articles saying HIIT by guys who don’t train bodybuilders. How did they come up with HIIT? Especially in light of how bodybuilders actually train?
I agree with what you wrote.
My claim of wrestler was a counter-example. You can say, “Sprinters sprint and look at them. Therefore, HIIT.” I can say, “Wrestlers run. Look at them. Therefore, run.”
I don’t think either of us prove our points with those examples.
I’d love to hear more. What is your definition?
People throw “steady state” and “HIIT” around without defining terms. I do, too.
What in your view is a good definition of each?
Well, if the context is heart rate, then steady-state would logically refer to heart rate.
If the context is the type of work/exercise being performed, then steady-state would logically refer to whether the work was being done at a steady rate, e.g. typical hard long-duration aerobic work; or something very far from steady rate work, e.g. HIIT or the wrestling training you described.
On HIIT I’d prefer to see what usage has been by those considered expert at that subject, and don’t consider it too valid to offer an opinion on the term without having done that, but I interpret the “high intensity” to refer to working very hard, with the average work output also high; and “interval training” to mean that the work is alternated between very high output and modest or low output rather than being steady state work or anything like it.
However, that is still staying too broad because that would be labelling a lot of things as “high intensity interval training” that don’t fall within the prescriptions offered for how to do what the authors call HIIT.
E.g., doing squats with relatively brief rest so that the average work output remains high would fit what I descirbed above, but isn’t what authors talking about HIIT are talking about.
[quote]CaliforniaLaw wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote: I don’t know if you were trying to claim that the wrestler’s case corresponds with the case of the long, hard aerobic exercise fan, or whether you recognized that it correlates more closely with HIIT.
I agree with what you wrote.
My claim of wrestler was a counter-example. You can say, “Sprinters sprint and look at them. Therefore, HIIT.” I can say, “Wrestlers run. Look at them. Therefore, run.”
[/quote]
Wrestlers by your account do not run the way that I say not to do (unless you want to be fatter than necessary.) They do not do long duration hard aerobic work in the runs you describe.
Oh baloney. Go watch them eat. They are lean as heck because they eat next to nothing in their concern for making weight. They don’t worry about whether they lose fat or muscle, either. They just eat little and do tons of cardio to keep their overall weight down.
If they ate to maximize performance FOR THEIR CARDIO, they would be fatter. Like Rachel Cosgrove got fatter when she trained for a triathlon and ate solely for performance in the triathlon.
Edit: Whoops, forgot to quote the post about the wrestlers.
[quote]andersons wrote:
Oh baloney. Go watch them eat. They are lean as heck because they eat next to nothing in their concern for making weight. They don’t worry about whether they lose fat or muscle, either. They just eat little and do tons of cardio to keep their overall weight down.
If they ate to maximize performance FOR THEIR CARDIO, they would be fatter. Like Rachel Cosgrove got fatter when she trained for a triathlon and ate solely for performance in the triathlon.
Edit: Whoops, forgot to quote the post about the wrestlers.[/quote]
I take it you’ve never trained with wrestlers. Here’s a YouTube video. Looks like they have plenty of muscle to me:
Watch the related videos, too.
Lots and lots and lots of muscle there. Not much fat, either, outside of the HWs.
I don’t follow. Let’s say they are doing three 6 minute miles. That’s 18 minutes. Done 5-6 times a week, that’s two hours of cardio from running alone.
That doesn’t count the 30-60 minutes of non-stop drills done during practice.
So wrestlers are doing a lot of “steady state cardio.”
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Well, if the context is heart rate, then steady-state would logically refer to heart rate.
If the context is the type of work/exercise being performed, then steady-state would logically refer to whether the work was being done at a steady rate, e.g. typical hard long-duration aerobic work; or something very far from steady rate work, e.g. HIIT or the wrestling training you described.[/quote]
I agree. By that defintion, if I go for a run, even if I’m at 90-100% MHR, I’m still doing steady state.
Every article I’ve seen on HIIT involves intervals under 60 seconds. If you took a poll, I would gather that most people see “HIIT” and think, “short all out effort followed by rest.”
I am say, most emphatically and based on hundreds of hours of experience, that wrestlers do not train in “intervals.” Unless we stretch “interval” to mean long bouts of sustained performance. Wrestlers go for long rounds. One after another. There is very little inactivity, and very few rest periods.
At practice last night, after warm-ups and drills, they went for 5, five-minute rounds of hard sparring. Their only break was the time it took to switch partners.
That’s not “HIIT” by any definition I’ve seen anyone here use.
Yet wrestlers carry around a lot of muscle mass and not a lot of fat.
Now, I’m not suggesting that this proves anything. There could be other things going on. I am simply suggesting that correlation (sprinters sprint and are lean and muscular) does not mean causation (sprinting causes them to be lean and muscular).
I’m a bit confused now about the intensity vs the steady state of it. If I run 5k at 90% MHR, reaching 95% at times, is it really the same as SS? I mean, it is a somewhat constant effort, but is that the factor? (when I give percentages, they are guesses because I’m still not certain where my MHR lies)
Does it make any difference how intense the SS is if it’s constant? If it’s about heart rate well I often exceed the heart rate I see doing sprints doing 5k.
There’s major difference at the cellular level.
Sustained work can be done at a rate no greater than what can be done with the ATP produced form the Krebs cycle operating at its maximum rate (combined with the much smaller amount resulting from glycolysis limited to the same rate.) Temporarily one can exceed this rate of energy production, but cannot exceed it on an ongoing lengthy basis.
In contrast, sprinting is done with ATP being produced at a rate far greater than this via glycolysis. Such a rate of energy production cannot be sustained over time.
So even though heart rate may average the same between a sustained aerobic training protocol versus a HIIT protocol, what’s happening at the cellular level is quite different.
I see. Is this because of lactate threshold?
Do longer periods of work at as close to lactate threshold as possible have any of the same benefits as the HIIT?
Or do you just eventually push the threshold and revert back to the aerobic process?
Does sprinting actually improve VO2 max, and if it does, doesn’t that make it more difficult to maintain a pace that puts you in an anaerobic state?
(last question, I promise!) When sprints are 400m as opposed to 100m, are you then moving into aerobic territory?
The first part in metabolism of glucose (including glucose derived from those amino acids that are capable of conversion to glucose) is the glycolytic pathway, which can generate ATP extremely rapidly but does not completely burn the glucose. Instead the end product is pyruvate, which is interconvertible with lactate.
As a side note, fats cannot be used in the above process.
The second part is the Kreb’s cycle, which completes the burning and leaves no problematic residues. The end products are just CO2 and water. This metabolism however is limited in its maximum rate. It cannot produce energy at anywhere near the maximum rate of work output that a muscle is capable of.
Now if the rate of glycolytic metabolism is no faster than the Kreb’s cycle is running at – because demand for work rate is within the capacity of those two processes working within the maximum speed of the Kreb’s cycle – then there is no ongoing buildup of lactate. Work can be conducted at such a rate for a long time.
However, if the work rate exceeds this, as for example in sprinting, unavoidably levels build up as the Kreb’s cycle cannot keep up.
That’s doable for brief periods only, till levels become as much as tolerable.
There is a slight oversimplification in the above as a given muscle can lose lactate to the bloodstream and it can be taken up and used elsewhere in the body, but the general principle still applies.
That is a means of allowing a moderate over-run of the glycolytic pathway vs the Kreb’s cycle within a given cell but still doesn’t support lengthy work output at energy output levels such as the glycolytic pathway can support when going all-out.
Long periods of work at the lactate threshold are in the category of long hard aerobic work. Not the way to be lean and preserve muscle.
VO2 max is mostly genetic. The trainability is not really large in any instance. Just as a personal guess I would think HIIT effective at improving it, where there’s still room for improvement, but don’t know of data on it. There must be some though.
Aerobic metabolism (using oxygen, which the Kreb’s cycle does) and anaerobic metabolism (glycolysis) occur simultaneously in any instance. However if the rate of glycolysis is no faster than that of the Kreb’s cycle then we call that aerobic overall.
The only way that a 400 meter sprint can be performed aerobically is if it’s run at a speed modest enough to be sustainable for miles. If actually sprinted then while the Kreb’s cycle is going all out, the glycolytic (anaerobic) process is going far faster yet and so it’s overall called anaerobic.
A competitive athlete running it properly most certainly can’t sustain the speed significantly longer, for the reasons above.
Thanks so much for that informative post!
[quote]CaliforniaLaw wrote:
I take it you’ve never trained with wrestlers. Here’s a YouTube video. Looks like they have plenty of muscle to me:
Watch the related videos, too.
Lots and lots and lots of muscle there. Not much fat, either, outside of the HWs.[/quote]
I was close friends with several wrestlers in college. One went on to the Olympic level. The coach was an Olympic gold medalist.
Of course they had muscle. And they lifted weights. But when they ate, and when they trained, they did not worry about preserving muscle. At least I never heard them mention it. They just focused on staying in their weight class, or making weight.
There are a lot of different weight classes in wrestling. The guys in the highest class were fat.
Wrestling is by nature more of a high-intensity, short-duration sport. Although they did ancillary conditioning and weight training, the bulk of training time was actual wrestling, with fairly short periods of all-out effort.
[quote]TheRevolver wrote:
Sorry about taking this kinda off-topic but if we are currently in a x-week bulking program, is it wise to do sprints 2-3 times a week let alone any cardio at all? I’m concerned because I don’t want to get fat.[/quote]
I suggested in your thread that you walk instead, watch your diet monitor your bf and adjust to save yourself from getting too fat during your bulk.
[quote]CaliforniaLaw wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote: The vast majority of those that do long-period cardio on the treadmill or bicycle, etc, not just those that run marathons, have quite substantially higher bodyfat than most that sprint.
How much of that is self-selection, though?
Remember when the OTC took some run times from Oly lifters. Oly lifters had greater start times than sprinters.
Does this mean oly lifting increases sprint time? Or that Oly lifters simply have a lot of type IIb fibers?
If you work with a jr. high track team, you’ll notice that most of the sprinters already have muscular physiques. They started off that way.
You’ll also notice that the young cross country kids have small physiques. Again, it’s not like they’ve been running hundreds of miles a week. It’s just what they got from the genetic lottery.
People choose sports that fit their types. It’s not the case that a sport makes someone a given type.[/quote]
Great point. Slow people do not compete as sprinters, only naturally explosive and strong people.
[quote]CaliforniaLaw wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote: Wrestlers by your account do not run the way that I say not to do (unless you want to be fatter than necessary.) They do not do long duration hard aerobic work in the runs you describe.
I don’t follow. Let’s say they are doing three 6 minute miles. That’s 18 minutes. Done 5-6 times a week, that’s two hours of cardio from running alone.
That doesn’t count the 30-60 minutes of non-stop drills done during practice.
So wrestlers are doing a lot of “steady state cardio.”[/quote]
That is the kind of running that gets you fit. Slow paced jogging sucks. A good hard 3 mile run is excellent.
I know many runners, I am from a family of runners. There are many lean well defined runners out there. They should not be compared to the out of shape Sunday joggers.
If you want to play word games, go ahead, but I’m not going to do back-and-forths on the exact same thing that is just playing with words and is precisely as if I’d never written statements already covering what you say below had.
Why should yet another restatement of it do any good when everything thus far might as well not have been written at all, judging from the below?
If you want to call your Aunt Petunia “steady-state” it’s your prerogative to do so, but it doesn’t help understanding, and there would be no good done by me going back and forth with you on it.
[quote]CaliforniaLaw wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote: Wrestlers by your account do not run the way that I say not to do (unless you want to be fatter than necessary.) They do not do long duration hard aerobic work in the runs you describe.
I don’t follow. Let’s say they are doing three 6 minute miles. That’s 18 minutes. Done 5-6 times a week, that’s two hours of cardio from running alone.
That doesn’t count the 30-60 minutes of non-stop drills done during practice.
So wrestlers are doing a lot of “steady state cardio.”[/quote]